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/9780824839901.003.0006
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Asian Cultural Anthropology
One Bến Thành trader described herself as plagued by wandering ghosts whom she had to appease with offerings. Although the postwar Vietnamese landscape teems with angry spirits who died violently ...
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One Bến Thành trader described herself as plagued by wandering ghosts whom she had to appease with offerings. Although the postwar Vietnamese landscape teems with angry spirits who died violently without descendants to honor them, the trader’s ghosts were in fact living humans: market cadres who demanded that traders pay a fee for use rights to their stalls. The controversy that resulted reveals dilemmas of governmentality, namely how the transition to market socialism left local officials bereft of resources, thus igniting tensions within various levels of the Vietnamese government and creating conflict between local officials and entrepreneurs. That ghosts are also a well-understood reference to war points to the ongoing, daily processes of memory work and recombinant history (Schwenkel 2009) that shaped what Bến Thành traders could remember and forget about the past and how its legacies affected their present experiences and selves.Less
One Bến Thành trader described herself as plagued by wandering ghosts whom she had to appease with offerings. Although the postwar Vietnamese landscape teems with angry spirits who died violently without descendants to honor them, the trader’s ghosts were in fact living humans: market cadres who demanded that traders pay a fee for use rights to their stalls. The controversy that resulted reveals dilemmas of governmentality, namely how the transition to market socialism left local officials bereft of resources, thus igniting tensions within various levels of the Vietnamese government and creating conflict between local officials and entrepreneurs. That ghosts are also a well-understood reference to war points to the ongoing, daily processes of memory work and recombinant history (Schwenkel 2009) that shaped what Bến Thành traders could remember and forget about the past and how its legacies affected their present experiences and selves.
