Stable village economies made wealth accumulation read as theft from neighbors.

Evidence

The Vietnamese pride themselves less on their conquests than on their ability to resist and to survive… . For traditional Vietnamese the sense of limitation and enclosure was as much a part of individual life as of the life of the nation… . The population of the village [the essential unit of Vietnamese society and culture] remained stable, and so to accumulate wealth meant to deprive the rest of the community of land, to fatten while one’s neighbor starved… . In this continuum of the family [in the Vietnamese religio-socio-cultural system of Confucianism linked to ancestor worship] ”private property” did not really exist… . To the Vietnamese the land itself was the sacred, constant element: the people flowed over the land like water, maintaining and fructifying it for the generations to come. — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 728

Categorization

• CANDY: The image of Vietnamese economic morality — where land is the sacred constant and people flow over it like water — is a striking, quoteable contrast to Western accumulation ethos.
• ADDENDUM: Supports the graft/trees interest only loosely; more directly it’s a vivid counterexample to the possessive-individualism assumption underneath Western property conceptual frameworks.
• XREF: connects to: Bourgeois landed property recast peasant customary rights as theft requiring punishment — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 141; Capitalism recast tolerated popular customs as criminal property theft — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 143

Broader Connections

• Capitalism recast tolerated popular customs as criminal property theft #expands (0.90) — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 143
• Bourgeois landed property recast peasant customary rights as theft requiring punishment #expands (0.80) — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 141