Mobility and Flexible Morality: Insights from the Case Study of Vietnamese Market Traders in Moscow

• In Event: 190. Mobility and Everyday Moralities in Contemporary Vietnam

Abstract

Drawing on an ethnographic research on Vietnamese migrant traders in Mafia-controlled wholesale markets in Moscow, Russia, I seek to provide important insights into the Vietnamese’s sense of moral self in the context of transnational migration. The vast majority of the estimated 150,000 Vietnamese in Russia are irregular migrants with minimal prospects for permanent settlement or naturalisation. Post-communist Russia with a fragile economy, an extremely restrictive (and heavily corrupt) migration regime and disturbing levels of hostility towards foreign migrants proves to be a particularly unwelcoming host society. The routinisation of risk and uncertainty in the migrant’s everyday life holds both productive and destructive potential for social relationships. Through the conceptual lens of the notion of uncertainty, I discuss how money features in people’s meaning making of the moral self and their navigation of market life. Money, Zelizer (1997: 19) notes, is a socially created currency, ‘subject to particular networks of social relations and its own set of values and norms.’ In my study, I show how money emerges as a new ‘mooring’ in social relationships in a context where virtually every element of life is in a state of flux and the so-called ‘groundings’ (family, community, place and nation) become volatile due to physical displacement.

Author

• Lan Anh Hoang, University of Melbourne