Allison J. Truitt. Dreaming of Money in Ho Chi Minh City. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013, xii+193p.

Abstract

Dreaming of Money in Ho Chi Minh CityThe scholarly study of banknotes (notaphily) is not a new phenomenon. But it did not take systematic modern form until the 1920s. (Ironically, it emerged under the Weimar Republic just as Germany was entering a three-year period of hyperinflation.) Since then, the number of numismatic associations has grown considerably, as have specialized publications. Banknote News is one relevant example. Banknote News issues breaking stories about international paper and polymer money. Collectors are the primary audience, and the website contains hundreds of links to vendors for people who wish to purchase the bank notes they covet. One of the links directs collectors to the 2014 edition of The Banknote Book. It includes 205 stand-alone chapters, each of which can be purchased separately as a country-specific catalog. (The Vietnam chapter provides detailed information on notes the State Bank of Vietnam issued, but only from 1964 to present, color copies of them, as well as their current market valuations.) The four-volume set currently runs 2,554 pages and details more than 21,000 types and varieties of currency, some dating back centuries.The global community of currency collectors and the desires that shape their relationships to different forms of money provides a useful entry point into Allison Truitt's fascinating book, Dreaming of Money in Ho Chi Minh City. Truitt is similarly interested in state-issued currencies, especially with regard to how people conceptualize the interplay of their material and symbolic properties. But her interests do not end there. The ethnographic focus of the book is instead upon interpersonal relations, as mediated by different currencies (primarily coins, paper, and gold), which she dubs monetary pluralism (pp. 149-150).The author's attention to interpersonal relations enables her to raise new questions about the cultural politics of identity in Vietnam's economic capital, Ho Chi Minh City, which she rightfully acknowledges is not always representative of the country as a whole. Nevertheless, the central questions around which the book is organized are not specific to it. The questions are applicable everywhere, and I reproduce them here for this reason. First, she asks, Can people exert control over state-sponsored infrastructures such as territorial currencies? Second, How do we come to have faith in the currency we handle? Third, How do people personalize money so that it becomes a vehicle for expressing qualities other than exchange value? And, finally, What happens when those efforts fail? (pp. 3-4).The author describes how ordinary people-butchers, unlicensed money changers, small shop owners, street traders, lottery ticket purchasers, and so on-responded to the above questions over the course of six chapters. The first chapter provides a historical account of the problem competing currencies (Indochinese piasters, revolutionary-era financial notes, U.S. dollars, gold bars, and demonetized national currency) posed for people living in the south during the twentieth century. Chapter two features the rise of consumer culture, a process that began during the mid- 1990s when a series of reforms known as Renovation(Doi moi) accelerated the shiftfrom a centralized command-and-control economy to a decentralized marked-based one. Truitt's insights into what this process looked like at the household-level lays the foundation for chapter three. It features the methods prosperous households used to hide their growing wealth and to maintain its value in the face of mounting inflation, a consequence of the country's gradual reintegration into global financial markets. Chapter four reorients the reader's attention to the role fictive currencies, such as spirit money (tien ma), play in Vietnamese ritual life. Particular emphasis is placed upon how subjective debts rather than contractual debts are (re-)produced through social interactions, and the complicated ways they link people over time and across territorial spaces. …