Infrastructure Meets Infrapolitics: Emic Negotiation of State and Market Inputs in Upland Northern Vietnam

Abstract

In the northern uplands of Vietnam, the socialist state is building infrastructures of many kinds to harness the once-remote peoples living there to the nation’s economic, political, and cultural core. As embodiments of uneven power forces, these new infrastructures have major impacts on local livelihoods and have triggered an array of responses to the modernist design of the state. This study examines how the Hmong, a kinship-based ethnic group of the Southeast Asian Massif, use, cope with, adjust to, and contest these infrastructures and related changes. In an emic perspective, we offer an ethnographic account of social change of a marginal people at the crossroad of infrastructures and infrapolitics.