On the drive down to the Mekong Delta, I found myself watching the countryside fly by. I was beginning to zone out when I noticed a large white box on a white platform standing in the rice fields. I was immediately struck by this. I discovered that these were tombs remembering ancestors. The idea of working the field adjacent to a dead loved one reveals a connection that the Vietnamese people have to spirituality while they are working.
Arriving in the Mekong Delta, I began to look for more expressions of spirituality in work places as we toured around the delta. I was immediately rewarded for this when we went to the brick making factory. In the factory there were altars dedicated to a spirit of fire. This once again showed a connection to powers beyond the natural. Unlike other cultures where these spiritual practices are not limited to dedicated places of worship. Instead the Vietnamese allow for spirituality to remain a pervasive presence throughout everyday life. And seemingly most presently in the working lives of the Vietnamese people.
The notion of spirituality in the workplace is not weird in Vietnam. Seemingly every profession has some sort of spiritual practice that they believe helps get better business. This extends beyond the farmers and artisans in the Mekong Delta. I have noticed vendors in the markets of Ho Chi Minh City go to Hindu temples to ask for better business. For Vietnamese people, spirituality cannot be escaped, nor do they want to escape it. Spirituality and tradition has become as common practice as taking inventory for many businesses in Vietnam.
With regards to modernization, spirituality poses several troubling factors for how these practices can be maintained. These spiritual practices seem to hinder or oppose modernizing business practices. Firstly, there is a mindset connected with having powerful beliefs that one would not be willing to change lightly. This would prevent the business owners from adopting more effective practices and hindering business and commerce as a whole in the economy. This is a primary concern if the people who are practicing the tradition refuse to use more effective practices they may get replaced and lose their livelihood and not have any means to recover. This could eventually lead to more inefficiency in a developing economy hurting its chances of becoming more relevant on the world market. Secondly, the practices that are being maintained do not coincide with the international sensibility that is trending towards a more secular world belief. With practices that seemingly contradict or question the mainstream perspective of how things work, the practices could have the side effect of alienating the practitioner of the tradition from the rest of the economy. This would ultimately hurt the economy and eliminate possible opportunities for advancement, which is not an economically practice.