Dong Ho is a Vietnamese village near Hanoi where for centuries families have created bold, colorful woodblock prints portraying village scenes, folk tales and national legends. This ancient art form is now supported there by Unesco.
But when Mary Cross and Frances FitzGerald visited Dong Ho in the spring of 2000, they found only two families pursuing that endeavor. Most of the villagers devoted themselves to fashioning the paper objects that Vietnamese burn so that their ancestors may enjoy in the afterlife the material things that those objects represent. Alongside paper likenesses of age-old items like shoes, shirts and money were ingeniously constructed paper versions of distinctly modern things like motorbikes and cellphones.
That image encapsulates the story that Ms. FitzGerald tells in "Vietnam: Spirits of the Earth" (Bulfinch Press/Little, Brown), a large new volume joining her text with Ms. Cross's striking, often poignant photographs.
Author of "Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam," which won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award in 1973, Ms. FitzGerald reported from Vietnam at various times from 1966 to 1974 and began revisiting in 1993.
Now, half a century after a nationalist Communist government took power in the north and a quarter-century after it extended its sway to the whole country, what she has found is an astonishing revival of traditional religious rituals and institutions.
It is a revival that, as Ms. FitzGerald sees it, and as those paper motorbikes and cellphones suggest, is far more of a piece with modernization than in conflict with it.
At the heart of many a Vietnamese village, especially in the north, the dinh - the communal house that serves not only as a meeting place for the elders but also as a sanctuary for the village's guardian spirit - has been restored or refurbished. The annual festivals for the guardian spirits have been revived, complete with offerings, banquets and entertainment. (They make one think of Latin Roman Catholicism's feasts and processions for local patron saints.)
The Vietnamese cult of ancestors, Ms. FitzGerald reports, is no less resurgent, reflected in the care for ancestral altars, the resumption of family rituals and the construction or repair of lineage halls, which are shrines that contain ancestral tablets and clan genealogical charts.
Meanwhile, Buddhism, which in Vietnam coexists more or less harmoniously with Confucianism, Taoism and the cults of villages and ancestors, draws increasing numbers of pilgrims and supplicants to restored pagodas in search of divine favors or spiritual enlightenment.
Several weeks in Vietnam, sticking to major cities, well-known cultural sites and the better roads, provided this visitor at least superficial confirmation of Ms. FitzGerald's observations: ubiquitous family altars and renovated village temples and pagodas. (To be sure, some of the fresh paint was preparation for next month's celebration of Tet, the Lunar New Year, Vietnam's biggest holiday.)
Vietnamese who know the countryside also confirmed her thesis of religious revival. There was less agreement, however, on why it was occurring.
Among the explanations were the idea that a revival of tradition was filling a void created by the collapse of Marxism, and the cynical view that government authorities were encouraging the colorful trappings of religion as bait for tourists.
Unquestionably, the government, after decades of discouraging religious practices as wasteful and superstitious, has reversed course and blessed some of them as culturally significant. In a still-poor nation that has been almost frantically trying to build a market economy for the last decade, officials are discovering, Ms. FitzGerald believes, that religious traditions may help maintain social ties and even spur productivity in a way that collectivization failed abysmally to do.
Not that Vietnam's Communist government has been converted to genuine freedom of religion. Conditions for believers are clearly improving, but the United States State Department and the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom have amply documented the many restrictions that continue to hamper even officially recognized religious institutions, like Roman Catholicism and the Buddhist umbrella group organized by the government itself in 1981.
The government regulates their choice of leaders, limits their recruitment of clergy and keeps a tight rein on their few publications and charitable activities. Groups that are not recognized - like the Protestant "house churches" of ethnic minorities in the mountain areas or the dissident United Buddhist Church of Vietnam - face harsher forms of suppression, though often more by arbitrary local officials than by the central government.
What the Vietnamese Communist Party fears is obviously not personal or familial piety but anything that could become a rival political base or a nucleus of ethnic separatism.
Those possibilities seem distant, however, from the hopes that bring women to offer fruit and to light joss sticks at the Quan Su Pagoda in Hanoi or the devotion that packs people into Sunday Mass at nearby St. Joseph's Cathedral.
Ms. FitzGerald does not rush to judgment about any of this - how much reflects a popular religious "equivalent of insurance policies" in an unfamiliar, high-risk economy; how much reflects a need for social ballast in a turbulent time; how much reflects a profound search for spiritual meaning and transcendence.
But she does challenge the often- assumed simple opposition between religious revival and modernization.
"In Vietnam," she writes in the January issue of Smithsonian magazine, in a condensation of her text, "the revival of the rites does not mean a return to the past. People reconstruct their lineage halls and their dinh ceremonies, but they do not therefore reject public schools, agricultural machinery or the considerable improvements in the status of women."
"What we are witnessing is the traditional order reasserting itself in order to deal with what Westerners blithely call modernization," she concludes. "The Vietnamese are going back to tradition and forward at the same time. More precisely, they are reclaiming and refashioning their traditions in order to move on."
Which in fact sums up a great deal of religious history.