Chasing Shadows: An Ethnography of Gender, Education and Corruption in Vietnam

• In Event: Case studies of gender inequality in education

Proposal

It is a vicious cycle –like chasing shadows! Victims of corruption also resort to corruption in order not to be victims – Sua, a 20-year-old trekking guide in Sa Pa, Vietnam

Introduction. While there are many forms of corruption, to women, petty corruption, or the everyday abuse of entrusted power by low- and mid-level public officials and community leaders, is most visible as they try to access basic goods or services in places like hospitals, schools, police departments, land management agencies, and when they apply for jobs. This is particularly true for ethnic minority women living along the Sino-Vietnamese border who are increasingly required to negotiate with development bureaucrats vying to control the Vietnam’s borders for trade and tourism. Managing petty corruption – or what many call “chasing shadows” – is rarely captured in formal measures of corruption, or in anti-corruption campaigns. When it is, data suggests that men are more likely to be asked to pay bribes, while women and girls are more likely to fall victim to sexual extortion. While international development and humanitarian aid organizations have begun to focus on this disparity, the scholarly literature on its relationship to gender equality, education and development has yet to emerge.

Women’s intersectional social, political and economic positions in society shape their experiences with, definitions of, and strategies for dealing with corruption. Nevertheless, the gender and corruption literature tend to ignore or devalue these experiences, and rarely does it suggest a policy framework for understanding corruption itself as a gendered institution tied to the development regime. Drawing on ‘southern theory’ (Connell, 2007) and ‘decolonizing methodologies’ (Smith, 2005), this critical ethnography reveals how corruption and development are co-constructed as gendered institutions along the Sino-Vietnamese border in Vietnam. This paper uses the lived experiences of one Hmong family as they negotiate access and control over land, education, health care, and their livelihoods, reveals how corruption is shaped by transnational connections, and (re)produced in interaction with global development regimes.

The literature on gender and corruption can be divided into two main categories. The first finds a correlation between higher levels of gender inequality and higher levels of corruption. The resulting policy assertion is to increase women’s participation in the public domain to promote transparency and good governance. This category of literature tends to promote women as ‘political cleaners’ who can be rallied to political and organizational leadership to fix corrupt institutional practices and clean-up dirty network organizations. However, a review of experimental evidence indicates that women are not necessarily more intrinsically honest or averse to corruption than men in the laboratory or in the field. Rather, the attitudes and behaviors of women concerning corruption depend on institutional and cultural contexts in these experimental situations. This suggests that a further understanding of the gendered institutional and cultural contexts that differently shape men’s and women’s experiences with corruption is needed.

The second category attempts to address this gap via studies of institutional practices and network organizations across national contexts. Findings suggest that similarities across institutions increase women’s vulnerability as both direct and indirect victims of corruption. However, cross-country comparative analysis has several limitations when it comes to forming a deeper understanding of the casual mechanisms at work between two variables and, not surprisingly, when it comes to explaining variation within countries. Scholars have pointed out that such variation does exist to different degrees in different countries and that more attention needs to be paid to the ways that poverty and government or the state, for example, are themselves constituted or critiqued through the moralizing discourses and practices associated with ‘corruption.’ As such, more work is needed to understand the experiences of men and women negotiating corruption in every-day life.

Methods and Methodology. Based on 15 years longitudinal ethnographic data collection in Vietnam and contextualized by ongoing research on gender and corruption across Africa, Asia and the US, this paper focuses on one particular family’s experiences navigating corruption in education, land rights, trade, and access to health care, to illustrate the broader findings.

Meeting Sua. Let me introduce you to Sua, my friend and research collaborator. Sua is from an upland area of Vietnam, called SaPa, and is from an ethnic minority group called the H’Mong. There are 52 ethnic groups in Vietnam, with Kinh being the majority, or what we know of as the Vietnamese people. While many ethnic minority groups are integrated into mainstream society, many live more “traditional lives” in the rural uplands along the China, Lao and Cambodian borders; in central Vietnam along the Lao border and in the south along the Cambodian borders. In each of the sections that follow, we follow Sua as she negotiates opportunities, both personal and professional, but also has to navigate the increasingly opaque state bureaucracy – and corrupt petty bureaucrats – to improve her situation and that of her family.

Conclusion. The conclusion will illuminate how deep engagement with Southern contexts not only reveal the everyday lived experiences of globalization, education and development, but suggest the need for further education research linking development to corruption. Specifically, this paper draws on ethnography from the Global South and specifically the post-colonial, post-socialist context of the Sino-Vietnamese border in Vietnam to reveal the need for new conceptual frameworks for understanding corruption as an institution, and a particularly gendered institution, shaped by transnational connections, introduced through schooling, and (re)produced in interaction with global development regimes.

Recommended Reading
Anzaldúa, Gloria. (1987). Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books.
Connell, Raewyn. (2007). Southern Theory: The Global Dynamics of Knowledge in Social Science. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Tsing, Anna L. (2004). Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Tuhiwai Smith, L. (2005). Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books.
Turner, Sarah, Ed. (2013). Red Stamps and Gold Stars: Fieldwork Dilemmas in Upland Socialist Asia. Vancouver and Toronto: University of British Columbia Press.

Author

• Kristy Kelly, Drexel University