The Absent Beings in the Collective Ethos of The Vietnamese Họ

By drawing on a corpus derived from a social network platform and by analyzing discourse interactions, we demonstrate that the identity of the Vietnamese discursive being is constructed through its responsibility towards non-persons. The Vietnamese collective ethos, known as “họ”, provides the framework within which the liminal ritual of discourse interaction creates social bonding from absent beings. The discursive beings within the “họ” are thus defined as ethical entities.