Saigon's Edge: On the Margins of Ho Chi Minh City ERIK HARMS Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011, xiv+294p.

Abstract

Saigon's Edge: On the Margins of Ho Chi Minh City ERIK HARMS Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011, xiv+294p.In his introduction to the book, Erik Harms that there are no Vietnamese poems about Hoc Mon, a district lying on the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City, one of its five outer-city districts. Per- haps this statement was true when Harms was conducting his research there at the beginning of the 2000s and when he was writing this book. But the appearance of this book has changed the situation-in Harms, Hoc Mon found its own poet, as his book, even if written in prose, is nothing short of a poem of appreciation if not of this industrializing area then of its inhabitants.To be sure, it is a sophisticated and complicated prose poem, not an easy afternoon read. The book is firmly grounded into anthropological and sociological theories: spatial-temporal consider- ations, analyses of edginess, conflations and confrontations of rural and urban, dichotomies of kinship. It thoroughly considers the relationship between idealized myth-making and practical reality.The book consists of three parts with each part subdivided into two chapters. The first chap- ter delineates the historical-sociological framework of the primary binary distinctions between inner city and outer city, the city and the countryside. They are not only in opposition to each other but also complement each other-their mutual interdependence seems to be inevitable as without one the other cannot exist, cannot even be identified. Harms skillfully analyzes trajectories that influence the development of each space and the changes produced by their proximity, reach- ing the conclusion that the outer city, regardless of this proximity and these changes, persists in maintaining its own identity.Chapter Two explores the reasons for this persistence: economy, culture, upbringing, oppor- tunities or lack thereof, and-perhaps most importantly-power are the factors that perpetuate the distinctions between urban and rural, inner city and outer city, Ho Chi Minh City and Hoc Mon. Disparity between the center and the margins has a dual effect on the latter: some people get depressed by what they perceive as their inevitably inferior position, while in others the disparity generates creative forces as well as the desire and ability to overcome invisible but firmly estab- lished borders.In Chapter Three Harms considers temporal changes in the material landscape of Hoc Mon and in the perception of Hoc Mon by its insiders. He examines the ideas of real time, social time, universal time, and (the Communist Party's interpretation of temporal changes and its own role in them). Harms argues that even though the Party sees and presents itself as an engine unfailingly moving Ho Chi Minh City and its suburbs towards their successes and the development of socialism, it does not necessarily interfere with the other ideas of time; is a political stance rather than socio-philosophical concept. While progress in the center and on the margins is uneven, the developmental drawbacks of the outskirts are compensated by their celebration as the keeper of traditions, also viewed as an aspect of the relationship between continuity and change.Chapter Four discusses the relationship between time and space in terms of spatiotemporal oscillation. Harms argues that [u]ltimately, the power of spatiotemporal oscillation depends not so much on expressing distinctly rural or urban time orientation but on the ability to move, accord- ing to contingent social circumstances, between states (p. 124). He further considers the concepts of labor and leisure in the negotiation of spatiotemporal oscillation. …