Ann Marie Leshkowich
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- November 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780824839901
- eISBN:
- 9780824868918
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Hawai'i Press
- DOI:
- 10.21313/hawaii/9780824839901.003.0001
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Asian Cultural Anthropology
Over the past three decades, market socialist policies have revitalized commerce in Ho Chi Minh City. At the same time, officials and the public have expressed anxiety about the effects of a market ...
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Over the past three decades, market socialist policies have revitalized commerce in Ho Chi Minh City. At the same time, officials and the public have expressed anxiety about the effects of a market economy on Vietnamese culture and individual morality. The image of the female petty trader or tiểu thương serves as a focal point for these concerns. As the city’s most famous marketplace, Bến Thành market symbolizes both the time-honored tradition of women’s trade and its backwardness in a modernizing economy. These characterizations rest on gender essentialism that ascribes the features of women traders to their supposedly underlying, natural qualities. Rather than dismiss essentialism as inaccurate stereotype, Essential Trade argues that it undergirds a meaningful worldview that enables traders to participate in a volatile political economy of appearances. In so doing, traders become recognizable, knowable subjects who agentively engage in meaningful action and interaction in the marketplace and elsewhere.Less
Over the past three decades, market socialist policies have revitalized commerce in Ho Chi Minh City. At the same time, officials and the public have expressed anxiety about the effects of a market economy on Vietnamese culture and individual morality. The image of the female petty trader or tiểu thương serves as a focal point for these concerns. As the city’s most famous marketplace, Bến Thành market symbolizes both the time-honored tradition of women’s trade and its backwardness in a modernizing economy. These characterizations rest on gender essentialism that ascribes the features of women traders to their supposedly underlying, natural qualities. Rather than dismiss essentialism as inaccurate stereotype, Essential Trade argues that it undergirds a meaningful worldview that enables traders to participate in a volatile political economy of appearances. In so doing, traders become recognizable, knowable subjects who agentively engage in meaningful action and interaction in the marketplace and elsewhere.
Ann Marie Leshkowich
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- November 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780824839901
- eISBN:
- 9780824868918
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Hawai'i Press
- DOI:
- 10.21313/hawaii/9780824839901.003.0009
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Asian Cultural Anthropology
In the mid-1990s, city planners considered proposals for an international trade center to be constructed on the site of Bến Thành market. These plans were suspended in the wake of the 1997 Asian ...
More
In the mid-1990s, city planners considered proposals for an international trade center to be constructed on the site of Bến Thành market. These plans were suspended in the wake of the 1997 Asian financial crisis. By 2012, traders seemed more prosperous and secure in their middle-class status. Discussions of redevelopment continued, but they now praised the feminine allure of Bến Thành sellers who charmed tourists and generated enviable profits. These characterizations rested on essentialism about Vietnamese femininity, but instead of tradition, they highlighted a sophisticated, sexualized, and youthful Vietnamese femininity demanded by the spectacular political economy of appearances of the 2010s. It was also an economically foreboding femininity, for these new market women tended to be salaried clerks employed by men capitalizing on a highly speculative real estate market that threatened to price the more “traditional” female traders out of the chợ that had long seemed their natural home.Less
In the mid-1990s, city planners considered proposals for an international trade center to be constructed on the site of Bến Thành market. These plans were suspended in the wake of the 1997 Asian financial crisis. By 2012, traders seemed more prosperous and secure in their middle-class status. Discussions of redevelopment continued, but they now praised the feminine allure of Bến Thành sellers who charmed tourists and generated enviable profits. These characterizations rested on essentialism about Vietnamese femininity, but instead of tradition, they highlighted a sophisticated, sexualized, and youthful Vietnamese femininity demanded by the spectacular political economy of appearances of the 2010s. It was also an economically foreboding femininity, for these new market women tended to be salaried clerks employed by men capitalizing on a highly speculative real estate market that threatened to price the more “traditional” female traders out of the chợ that had long seemed their natural home.
Ann Marie Leshkowich
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- November 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780824839901
- eISBN:
- 9780824868918
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Hawai'i Press
- DOI:
- 10.21313/hawaii/9780824839901.001.0001
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Asian Cultural Anthropology
“My husband doesn’t have a head for business,” complained Ngọc, the owner of a children’s clothing stall in Bến Thành market. “Naturally, it’s because he’s a man.” When the women who sell in Ho Chi ...
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“My husband doesn’t have a head for business,” complained Ngọc, the owner of a children’s clothing stall in Bến Thành market. “Naturally, it’s because he’s a man.” When the women who sell in Ho Chi Minh City’s iconic marketplace speak, their language suggests that activity in the market is shaped by timeless, essential truths: Vietnamese women are naturally adept at buying and selling, while men are not; Vietnamese prefer to do business with family members or through social contacts; stallholders are by nature superstitious; marketplace trading is by definition a small-scale enterprise. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork and life history interviews, Essential Trade looks beyond the façade of essentialism to analyze traders’ performances of expected styles of gender, kinship, social networks, spirituality, and class as processes of subject formation that have helped them to navigate four decades of volatility caused by war, socialism, and market socialism. The book provides a compelling account of a “political economy of appearances” in postwar southern Vietnam as seen through the eyes of the dynamic women who have built their businesses in the stalls of Bến Thành market and joined the ranks of Vietnam’s growing urban middle class.Less
“My husband doesn’t have a head for business,” complained Ngọc, the owner of a children’s clothing stall in Bến Thành market. “Naturally, it’s because he’s a man.” When the women who sell in Ho Chi Minh City’s iconic marketplace speak, their language suggests that activity in the market is shaped by timeless, essential truths: Vietnamese women are naturally adept at buying and selling, while men are not; Vietnamese prefer to do business with family members or through social contacts; stallholders are by nature superstitious; marketplace trading is by definition a small-scale enterprise. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork and life history interviews, Essential Trade looks beyond the façade of essentialism to analyze traders’ performances of expected styles of gender, kinship, social networks, spirituality, and class as processes of subject formation that have helped them to navigate four decades of volatility caused by war, socialism, and market socialism. The book provides a compelling account of a “political economy of appearances” in postwar southern Vietnam as seen through the eyes of the dynamic women who have built their businesses in the stalls of Bến Thành market and joined the ranks of Vietnam’s growing urban middle class.
