FROM SACRED RITUALS TO CAPITALIST ALGORITHMS: HOW THE BANQUE DE L'INDOCHINE RESTRUCTURED VIETNAMESE SOCIAL PRACTICES (1885-1945) ?

Abstract

This paper profoundly investigates the ontological mutation of Vietnamese social practices from 1885 to 1945 under the structural impositions of the Banque de l’Indochine. Drawing upon historical archival research synthesized with critical sociology and the philosophy of religion, the study exposes how French finance capital executed a totalizing disenchantment of the indigenous cultural lifeworld. Through the mandatory institutionalization of the colonial Piastre monopoly and predatory debt mechanisms, the Banque de l'Indochine violently disrupted the traditional episteme regulated by the normative filters of Li (Ritual) and Yi (Righteousness). Sacred rituals, ancestral obligations, and communal reciprocity—which historically functioned to calibrate social hierarchies and safeguard human ecological harmony—were brutally reduced to utilitarian economic algorithms, cold geometric metrics, and mechanized liabilities. This trajectory not only fundamentally restructured the cartography of class via the marginalization of the Confucian literati and the ascension of the comprador bourgeoisie, but also manufactured a mutated modality of identity: the alienated "indebted subject," systematically dispossessed of interior tranquility and existential temporal autonomy. The findings offer an incisive theoretical contribution to the post-colonial paradigm by deconstructing the epistemological violence of colonial banking. Ultimately, it demonstrates that modern finance capital does not merely restrict its operations to the expropriation of material surplus, but aggressively colonizes the innermost spiritual and metaphysical architecture of the subaltern consciousness.