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/9780824839901.003.0005
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Asian Cultural Anthropology
As competition intensified in Vietnam’s marketplaces, social relationships helped Bến Thành traders acquire capital, merchandise, and information in a volatile commercial environment. Through ongoing ...
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As competition intensified in Vietnam’s marketplaces, social relationships helped Bến Thành traders acquire capital, merchandise, and information in a volatile commercial environment. Through ongoing exchanges, traders turned erstwhile outsiders into social insiders tied by mutual obligation. Although these sociofiscal relationships resemble Chinese guanxi networks, they reveal the dilemmas posed by the reconfiguration of public and private under Đổi mới. Because such relationships also displayed tình cảm (sentiment), a relational ethos associated with normative femininity, they played a key role in traders’ gendered subject formation as proper women. That these networks extended around the globe suggests a cosmopolitan sophistication that belies essentializing claims about both the scale of petty trade and the supposed Asian “tradition” of conducting business through personalistic relationships.Less
As competition intensified in Vietnam’s marketplaces, social relationships helped Bến Thành traders acquire capital, merchandise, and information in a volatile commercial environment. Through ongoing exchanges, traders turned erstwhile outsiders into social insiders tied by mutual obligation. Although these sociofiscal relationships resemble Chinese guanxi networks, they reveal the dilemmas posed by the reconfiguration of public and private under Đổi mới. Because such relationships also displayed tình cảm (sentiment), a relational ethos associated with normative femininity, they played a key role in traders’ gendered subject formation as proper women. That these networks extended around the globe suggests a cosmopolitan sophistication that belies essentializing claims about both the scale of petty trade and the supposed Asian “tradition” of conducting business through personalistic relationships.
