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Essential Trade - Vietnamese Women in a Changing Marketplace (Paperback)
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Essential Trade - Vietnamese Women in a Changing Marketplace (Paperback)
Series: Southeast Asia: Politics, Meaning, and Memory
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“My husband doesn’t have a head for business,” complained
Ngoc, the owner of a children’s clothing stall in Bȇn
Th nh 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.
Essential Trade looks through the façade of these “timeless
truths” and finds active participants in a political economy of
appearances: traders’ words and actions conform to stereotypes of
themselves as poor, weak women in order to clinch sales, manage
creditors, and protect themselves from accusations of being greedy,
corrupt, or “bourgeois” – even as they quietly slip into
southern Vietnam’s growing middle class. But Leshkowich argues
that we should not dismiss the traders’ self-disparaging words
simply because of their essentialist logic. In B?n Th nh
market, performing certain styles of femininity, kinship relations,
social networks, spirituality, and class allowed traders to portray
themselves as particular kinds of people who had the capacity to
act in volatile political and economic circumstances. When so much
seems to be changing, a claim that certain things or people are
inherently or naturally a particular way can be both personally
meaningful and strategically advantageous. Based on ethnographic
fieldwork and life history interviewing conducted over nearly two
decades, Essential Trade explores how women cloth and clothing
traders like Ng?c have plied their wares through four decades of
political and economic transformation: civil war, post-war economic
restructuring, socialist cooperativization, and the frenetic
competition of market socialism. With close attention to daily
activities and life narratives, this ground-breaking work of
critical feminist economic anthropology combines theoretical
insight, vivid ethnography, and moving personal stories to
illuminate how the interaction between gender and class has shaped
people’s lives and created market socialist political economy. It
provides a compelling account of post-war southern Vietnam as seen
through the eyes of the dynamic women who have navigated forty
years of profound change while building their businesses in the
stalls of Bȇn Th nh market.
General
Imprint: |
University of Hawaii Press
|
Country of origin: |
United States |
Series: |
Southeast Asia: Politics, Meaning, and Memory |
Release date: |
November 2014 |
Authors: |
Ann Marie Leshkowich
|
Dimensions: |
229 x 152 x 19mm (L x W x T) |
Format: |
Paperback
|
Pages: |
286 |
ISBN-13: |
978-0-8248-3991-8 |
Categories: |
Books >
Social sciences >
General
|
LSN: |
0-8248-3991-9 |
Barcode: |
9780824839918 |
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