Mekong Lifeways is a collaborative project of the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology, and An Giang University. Funding support was provided by the Rockefeller Foundation.

The two-year project (2002-2004) was a training and capacity-building program for 33 staff members from 16 museums and An Giang University. It introduced new methods of conducting research and innovative approaches to developing museum exhibitions. It combined training in methods and theories with practical, hands-on experience.

Mekong Lifeways involved four group workshops, each focusing on a set of skills; video training activities in teams; independent research; and a traveling exhibition to present results of the training.

During this project we studied six communities: Trà Niên, Vĩnh Châu, Trà Sết, Long Định, Phũm Soài, and An Thuận. We tried to discover the stories these six communities could tell us about life in the Mekong Delta. While the project is not comprehensive and cannot present a complete picture of Mekong lifeways, selected villages are representative of many other villages in the Delta. We did not seek to discover "typical" examples of given traditions, but instead searched for the reality of life in these communities.

This site focuses on the third workshop, which ran from July 31 through August 15, 2002. This workshop, Ethnographic Photo Documentation, was presented by Steven L. Raymer (Indiana University), Frank Proschan (Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage), and Đoàn Bảo Châu (independent photojournalist).

During the third workshop, we investigated: history, methods, and techniques of documentary photography; composition, lighting, and visual grammar; photo editing, cropping, and sizing; design and layout; and caption writing.

The results are displayed here in our online galleries.

© 2004 Smithsonian Institution & Vietnam Museum of Ethnology
Website designed and produced by Emily S. Whitten Information about the Mekong Lifeways project at Mekong Webmaster