BOOK REVIEW
Renovation, market economy and modernisation:
Experiences from Northern Rural Vietnam
(Lam
Minh Chau. Ha Noi Publishing House. 2017. ISBN: 078-604-55-2241-7)
Nguyen
Van Suu (Tr 241-242)
This
book uses the case of Vietnam to explore the experiences of rural people living
in the aftermath of one of the greatest of the 20th century’s key social and
economic transformations: the transition from socialist to marketised economic
systems in Asia and beyond. The author conducted fieldwork in Xuan, a village
in lowland Northern Vietnam, an area hitherto under-represented in the
anthropological literature on post-socialist marketisation. Building on 15
months of fieldwork, I explore the highly diverse livelihood strategies of Xuan
households as they have experienced the challenges and opportunities of Renovation
(Đổi mới), Vietnam’s distinctive form of market opening launched in 1986. The
state’s key goal under Renovation has been to override what is now stigmatised
as ‘peasant’ thinking about risk-avoidance and excessive caution in livelihood
choices, in favour of a vision of the countryside as a place of prospering
commercial farmers plus a residual population committed either to commercial
entrepreneurship or wage labour in a host of new local enterprises.
In
exploration of Xuan households’ Renovation experiences, author's focus is the
local notion of đa gi năng. In pursuit of đa gi năng, Xuan households have
embraced almost every market initiative that state officials have sought to
implement under Renovation. At the same time, most have also maintained a
diverse portfolio of small-scale livelihoods, thus evading what state
modernisation advocates want most: commitment of householders’ whole resources
into a single growth-oriented enterprise. Author's concern is thus with the
sense Xuan households make of this mismatch between their decisions and the priorities
set out by the state, as well as the means by which they have nevertheless
sustained and even enhanced their families’ living standards.
The
book seeks to contribute in two key ways to the anthropology of socialism/
post-socialism. First, the author argue that Xuan households practice đa gi năng because they have experienced
Renovation as full of uncertainties of a relatively under-theorised kind. For
them uncertainty is a permanent state rather than a provisional condition of
early market reforms, and is felt by even the richest families rather than only
by the poor majority. Yet the uncertain environment of Renovation also contains
opportunities for improvements to families’ living conditions rather than
merely dangers and destruction as many anthropologists have argued about market
reforms in post-socialist Eastern Europe. Second, instead of fitting a single
universal model, either ‘moral economy,’ ‘rational peasant,’ or the ‘structural
inequality in access’ approach used by many Marxist scholars, Xuan households’
pursuit of đa gi năng is inspired by
a locally specific dynamic: the concern for family security acted on in the
light of a constant balancing of risk and opportunity. This dynamic motivates
Xuan villagers to reflect at all times on the unpredictable nature of the
market economy and state policies and their implications for family well-being,
and make active judgments about risks and gains. Villagers thus‘ predict the
unpredictable’: i.e. pursue two goals at the same time, these being the
protection of family security and the quest for ever-improving living
standards, rather than prioritising one at the expense of the other.
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