Transnational Perspectivism at Work: Remittance of Daughters and the Moral Economy of Innovation in Rural Vietnam

• In Event: 60. Crossing and Contesting Borders in Island and Mainland Southeast Asia

Abstract

Since Vietnam’s open economic policy has motivated young women in rural Vietnam to migrate to the United States, China, Taiwan, and South Korea for work and marriage, rural life in Vietnam has changed profoundly at multiple levels and in various social domains, the implications of which remain partially unexplored. Using ethnographic data on rural village life in Go Dau, Tay Ninh Province, where the remittance of migrants for marriage has contributed considerably to the booming local economy, I investigate the ways in which the villagers have used transnational flows and encounters not only in their everyday economic and moral practices, but also in understanding their cultural location. I argue that the transnationality that Go Dau villagers demonstrate in adopting imported cultural products in order to renovate both living spaces and bodies increasingly functions as a perspective from which the embodiment of diversities becomes visible. Such perspectivism serves as a universal, secularized site for exhibiting the growth of individual wealth and families, where participating in such innovation creates a sense of belonging. In that moral economy that serves to constitute transnationality, what compounds diversity are neither ethnic nor national varieties of married daughters’ destination countries fueled by geopolitical interests, but the embodied markers of spatially extended kinship. In this paper, I thus show how global migration and consequent cross-border exchanges transforms a type of local–global dynamics that is fundamental to a sense of belonging in rural Vietnamese communities.

Author

• Ju-Young Lee, University of Minnesota