Book review: Dreaming of Money in Ho Chi Minh City

Abstract

Book reviews South East Asia Research 2016, Vol. 24(2) 308–315 a SOAS 2016 Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav sear.sagepub.com Truitt A.J. (2013). Dreaming of Money in Ho Chi Minh City. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press. xii þ 193 pp. $28.50 (e-book) ISBN 9780295804620, $30 (pbk) ISBN 9780295992747, $90 (hbk) ISBN 9780295992754. Reviewed by: Bill Maurer, University of California, USA DOI: 10.1177/0967828X16649536 This book about people’s everyday interactions with money in Vietnam is particularly welcome, and not only for what it adds to the ethnographic record of the role of money in the formation of regimes of value, cultural identity, or everyday survival strategies. It is especially timely in the context of the global financial crisis that began in 2008 and that reopened money for debate. The idea that money can be reimagined is again common currency, even as goldbugs and bullionists renew the call for a tangible backing to ‘sound money’ and the more extreme voices of the political left and right seek the disestablishment of central banks. A case study of Vietnam provides an important touchstone for these new money debates. It was, after all, US military expenditures in the 1960s and 1970s in South East Asia that required the printing of more and more dollars. The result was that international confidence in the US dollar fell, and US President Nixon famously ‘closed the gold window,’ ending the dollar’s convertibility and ushering in an era of flexible exchange rates. Allison J Truitt’s excellent book helps explain why people hold onto a desire for stable money even as money proves itself time and again to be singularly unstable. At first blush, the motivation for stable currency would seem obvious. Yet Truitt complicates the standard eco- nomics textbook story, showing how even as people seek to hold sound money they continually qualify it, imbuing it with other values and using it to construct alternative social infrastructures to the market. This is not a simple story of ‘Asian,’ or ‘non-market’ or ‘community’ values, however, since in the south of Vietnam, and especially since market reforms in the 1980s, people seem genuinely invested (in more ways than one) in the capitalist market. However, modifi- cations of the strict law of supply and demand, and the use of different kinds of currency to convey different values, obtain alongside market fundamentalism. The tension in the book has to do with how far and in what manner Truitt is prepared to push the claim that people’s apparent desire for stable money does not confirm that money should be ‘invariable,’ as David Ricardo put it. Based on extensive fieldwork over a 10-year period, the book shows that despite the apparent ‘currency consciousness’ of contemporary Vietnamese people (Karl Polanyi’s term for the penchant in the modern era for elevating stable money to the position of society’s ‘supreme need,’