Traders in Motion

Kirsten W. Endres and Ann Marie Leshkowich

Description

With essays covering diverse topics, from seafood trade across the Vietnam-China border, to street traders in Hanoi, to gold shops in Ho Chi Minh City, Traders in Motion spans the fields of economic and political anthropology, geography, and sociology to illuminate how Vietnam's rapidly expanding market economy is formed and transformed by everyday interactions among traders, suppliers, customers, family members, neighbors, and officials.The contributions shed light on the micropolitics of local-level economic agency in the paradoxical context of Vietnam's socialist orientation and its contemporary neoliberal economic and social transformation. The essays examine how Vietnamese traders and officials engage in on-the-ground contestations to define space, promote or limit mobility, and establish borders, both physical and conceptual. The contributors show how trading experiences shape individuals' notions of self and personhood, not just as economic actors, but also in terms of gender, region, and ethnicity. Traders in Motion affords rich comparative insight into how markets form and transform and what those changes mean.Contributors:Lisa Barthelmes, Christine Bonnin, Gracia Clark, Annuska Derks, Kirsten W. Endres, Chris Gregory, Caroline Grillot, Erik Harms, Esther Horat, Gertrud Huwelmeier, Ann Marie Leshkowich, Hy Van Luong, Minh T. N. Nguyen, Nguyen Thi Thanh Binh, Linda J. Seligmann, Allison Truitt, Sarah Turner

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique
• Domestic market
• Vietnam
• Political economy
• History of Asia
• Viêt Nam

Informations

• Publié par: Cornell University Press
• Date de parution: 15 juin 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781501721342
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 8 Mo

Extrait

Traders in Motion

Traders in Motion

Identities and Contestations in the Vietnamese Marketplace

Edited by Kirsten W. Endres and Ann Marie Leshkowich

SƮƴƳƧƤƠƲƳ AƲƨƠ PƱƮƦƱƠƬ PƴơƫƨƢƠƳƨƮƭƲ an imprint of Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

Southeast Asia Program Publications Editorial Board Mahinder Kingra (ex oƂcio) Thak Chaloemtiarana Chiara Formichi Tamara Loos Kaja McGowan Andrew Mertha

Copyright © 2018 by Cornell University

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu.

First published 2018 by Cornell University Press

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Endres, Kirsten W., editor. | Leshkowich, Ann Marie, editor. | Container of (work): Turner, Sarah, 1970– Run and hide when you see the police. Title: Traders in motion : identities and contestations in the Vietnamese marketplace / edited by Kirsten W. Endres and Ann Marie Leshkowich. Description: Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identiîers: LCCN 2017042001 (print) | LCCN 2017045614 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501721342 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501721359 (epub/mobi) | ISBN 9781501719820 | ISBN 9781501719820 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781501719837 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Markets—Vietnam. | Merchants—Vietnam. | Street vendors—Vietnam. | Small business—Vietnam. | Business networks—Vietnam. Classiîcation: LCC HF5475.V52 (ebook) | LCC HF5475.V52 T73 2018 (print) | DDC 381/.109597—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017042001

Cover image:Street vendor in Hanoi. Credit: iStock/tonyshawphotography.

Preface

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Map of îeld site locations in Vietnam

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Introduction: Space, Mobility, Borders, and Trading Frictions A N N M A R I E L E S H K O W I C H A N D K I R S T E N W. E N D R E S

PART I. Sàcé, Plàcé, ànd Conénious Poliics of Màké Rédévélomén

Introduction: The Spatial Politics of Marketplaces L I N D A J . S E L I G M A N N

Chapter 1

Making the Marketplace: Traders, Cadres, and Bureaucratic Documents in Lào Cai City K I R S T E N W. E N D R E S

Chapter 2

“Run and Hide When You See the Police”: Livelihood Diversiîcation and the Politics of the Street Economy in Vietnam’s Northern Uplands

S A R A H T U R N E R

Chapter 3

Grand Designs? State Agendas and the Lived Realities of Market Redevelopment in Upland Northern Vietnam C H R I S T I N E B O N N I N

Chapter 4

Ghost Markets and Moving Bazaars in Hanoi’s Urban Space G E RT R U D H Ü W E L M E I E R

PART II. Cicuis of Mobiliy, Idéniiés, ànd Powé Rélàions

Introduction: Moving and Shaking E R I K H A R M S

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Contents

Chapter 5

A Mobile Trading Network from Central Coastal Vietnam: Growth, Social Network, and Gender

H Y VA N LU O N G

Chapter 6

Money, Risk Taking, and Playing: Shifting Masculinity in a Waste-Trading Community in the Red River Delta M I N H T. N . N G U Y E N

Chapter 7

“Strive to Make a Living” in the Era of Urbanization and Modernization: The Story of Petty Traders in a Hanoi Peri-urban Community N G U YỄN T HỊB Ì N H T H A N H

Chapter 8

Dealing with Uncertainty: Itinerant Street Vendors and Local OƂcials in Hanoi L I S A B A RT H E L M E S

PART III. Bodéwok

Introduction: Constructing, Maintaining, and Navigating Boundaries C H R I S G R E G O RY

Chapter 9

Regulations and Raids, or the Precarious Place of Gold Shops in Vietnam A L L I S O N T R U I T T

Chapter 10

Moralities of Commerce in a Northern Vietnamese Trading Community E S T H E R H O R AT

Chapter 11

Fuel Trade: People, Places, and Transformations along the Coal Briquetting Chain A N N U S K A D E R K S

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Chapter 12

Arbitrage over the Beilun/Kalong River: Chinese Adjustments to Border Trade Practices in Vietnam C A R O L I N E G R I L L O T

Afterword G R A C I A C L A R K

References

Contributors

Index

Contents

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In Vietnam today, people are making markets, but markets are also making peo- ple. As anthropologists, we coeditors routinely seek to make sense of complex dynam- ics that extend across vast swaths of time and space by considering how they emerge in and through the lives of particular actors who are navigating particular spatial and temporal contexts. While international and national policies may seem to be the pri- mary forces shaping the markets in which a street trader in Hanoi plies her wares, what those markets actually are, physically and conceptually, are every bit as much the product of her daily actions and the subjectivity that informs them. Trade and traders co-constitute each other. The vibrancy of trade in market socialist Vietnam drew each of us independently to the study of marketplaces. Leshkowich began research in Ho Chi Minh City’s Bến Thành market in the 1990s, where the opportunity and uncertainty posed by newly enacted market-oriented policies sparked struggles over class, property rights, social relationships, and memories of the past. These dynamics often centrally involved gen- der, as traders articulated identities as women that both worked to enhance their bottom lines and were personally meaningful ways of becoming proper, socially legiti- mate moral subjects in a palpably volatile economic and social environment (Leshko- wich 2014a). For Endres, markets moved to the center of attention when she joined the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in 2009. Her research group Traders, Mar- kets, and the State in Vietnam, generously funded by the Max Planck Society and the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale, investigated market development policies as part of complex infrastructural planning assemblages aimed at national development, with a special focus on the entangled webs of social ties, state structures and discourses, and economic forces in which the lives of small-scale traders in market socialist Vietnam are situated. The group’s researchers focused on local markets and other sites of small retail trade in diƃerent locations across contem- porary Vietnam: the capital city, Hanoi (Lisa Barthelmes); a peri-urban village in the Red River Delta (Esther Horat); the northwestern uplands (Christine Bonnin); and two trading hubs on the Vietnam-China border (Kirsten Endres, Caroline Grillot). In seeking to engage with the complexity of “market making” in a single country, Endres’s research group purposefully took a diƃerent approach from those of prior projects and edited volumes that have tended to focus on a particular aspect of trade, such as street trade, marketplaces, or a commodity type, in order to generate compara- tive case studies from diƃerent contexts around the world. Nonetheless, a compara- tive enterprise, albeit of a diƃerent kind, lies at the heart of the group’s work and also inspires the present volume. Given the ongoing central role of nation-states or regions in shaping the legal and political environment for trade, it is analytically important to examine these dynamics, their impact on small-scale traders, and their uneven eƃects across time and space within one context. Doing so shows that markets evolve in