The “sacred face”: What directs Vietnamese people in interacting with others in everyday life

Abstract

This article addresses the concept of “face” in the practices of Vietnamese deference rituals. It explores how Vietnamese people conceptualize the term “face” regarding the manner of showing respect to other people in everyday encounters. Drawing upon the qualitative dataset of my Master thesis, in this article I employ the concepts of “face” and “deference rituals” derived from Goffman’s theory of social interaction to analyze Vietnamese day-to-day social interactions. I find out that the face in the context of social interaction is often classified into two categories: the face of the subordinate and the face of the superordinate. Due to the high status of the latter in Vietnamese hierarchical system, losing face can lead to serious consequences to the latter; while for the former losing face is often belittled. There is a similarity between “face” and “deference ritual” in Vietnam with those in other countries such as Japan, China, and at the same time, a crucial difference in those terms between Vietnamese culture and Western culture