The Power of the Marginal: Women’s Ritual Practice and Social Belonging in Rural Vietnamese Lineages

This article examines women’s ritual power in Ngưu Sơn Village, a rural village in the Red River Delta of Vietnam. It argues that women’s ritual power stems from the contingent and marginal social status that they hold in village life vis-à-vis male power. Through narrative performances of belonging that bypass lineage hierarchies, women forge lasting social relations among the living and between the living and the dead through an ethics of care that draws on alternative moral frameworks to the lineage, such as state-sanctioned ideas of socialist modernity and gender equality. These women demonstrate the power of narrative to repurpose marginality as the freedom to choose to act within different moral frameworks. We discuss women’s participation in two areas of spiritual life: their ritual sacrifice group (đội tế nữ) and worship of lineages’ potent female lineage ancestors (thờ tổ cô).