190. Mobility and Everyday Moralities in Contemporary Vietnam

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

Things, people, networks are increasingly on the move in Vietnam today, with breathtaking urbanization and trajectories of mobility that take on longer distance and riskier destinations within the country and beyond. Mobile economic networks based on diverse lines of trade, economic activities or products, such as waste or textile trading, construction, cross-border and translocal labor migration have emerged that are often traceable to home place or kinship connections. Increasingly, such mobility is not just driven by lack of employment or stagnant rural economies, but also by visions of a good life and aspirations for particular kinds of personhood that are favored in the post-reform economy: self-responsible, self-enterprising and risk-taking. This panel asks how the mobility is reconfiguring the moral life of these mobile people and networks, and eventually everyday morality in Vietnam. How do people deal with moral values rooted in kinship, communal life and the home place as they are on the move? What kind of moral demands emerges when people depart and return, when they live in a new place or between places? What dilemmas and contradictions are they confronted with in their mobile livelihoods and economic activities? What do these dilemmas and contradictions matter for the construction of the moral subject and moral norms in Vietnam today? In answering these questions, we invite papers that critically examine the intersection of mobility with morality within mobile economic networks, especially papers with a focus on relatedness and care, trust and reciprocity, money and morality or moral economy.

Area of Study

• Southeast

Session Organizer

• Minh Nguyen, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology

Chair

• Minh Nguyen, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology

Individual Presentations

• Mobility and Flexible Morality: Insights from the Case Study of Vietnamese Market Traders in Moscow - Lan Anh Hoang, University of Melbourne

• “People in the West Are Terribly Naïve, and I Became Naïve As Well”: The Impact of Migration on Moral Values among Vietnamese Bazaar Traders in Poland - Grażyna Szymańska-Matusiewicz, University of Warsaw

• The Cost of Mobility: Prostitution with HIV/AIDS and Crisis of Morality in Vietnamese Contemporary Cinema - Qui-Ha Hoang Nguyen, University of Southern California

• In a “Half-dark, Half-light Zone”: Mobility, Precarity and Moral Ambiguity in Post-Reform Vietnam’s Urban Waste Economy - Minh Nguyen, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology

Discussant

• Hy Van Luong, University of Toronto