Vietnam. Essential trade: Vietnamese women in a changing marketplace By Ann Marie Leshkowich Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2014, Pp. 252. Photos, Notes, Bibliography, Index.

Abstract

Essential trade: Vietnamese women in a changing marketplace By ANN MARIE LESHKOWICH Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2014, Pp. 252. Photos, Notes, Bibliography, Index. Ann Marie Leshkowich's anthropological writings on postwar Vietnam have been among the most insightful about the shifting dynamics of class and gender in the fast-changing country. Her sharp analyses based on astute observations and long years of engagement with social and economic life in the urban milieu of Ho Chi Minh City should be required reading for scholars and students of contemporary Vietnamese society. Essential Trade will soon become a classic. Its meticulously crafted ethnography of female traders in the signature market of the city, Ben Thanh, tells us as much about everyday lives and economic practices as about the political-economic transformations that have been shaping these lives and practices in past decades. Leshkowich carried out the first stretch of her ethnographic research on Ben Thanh market between 1995 and 1997 and after that revisited the market and maintained relationships with the women traders in her study over a decade. She was thus able to document long-term developments in the market, although the dynamics of the mid-1990s seem central to her arguments. The mid-1990s were fascinating times, with much reshuffling and experimentation in a society that had just emerged from decades of central planning, war and internal geographical and ideological divisions. Almost a decade following the formal introduction of economic reforms (doi moi), the political economy remained laden with anxieties about an unknown future in which past regional and class antagonisms and ideological forces continued to loom large alongside the greater penetration of global ideas, linkages, and institutions. The Vietnamese state was taking further steps in advancing what it termed market socialism, a system in which a market economy operates under the Communist Party's political monopoly. As a symbolic marker of Ho Chi Minh City, Ben Thanh market represents a space that simultaneously invokes a traditional past (despite it being an emblem of colonial civilisation) and a future in which the South regains its stature as the economic engine of the country, a place infused with the contradictions of the new economy. In Leshkowich's skilful ethnography, the lives and livelihood strategies of women traders in Ben Thanh market do not just bear the marks of the uncertain political economy of post-war Vietnam, they are agents in the reproduction and remaking of it. Central to her analysis of their trading practices, which includes managing the relationship to local cadres and the state, their family life, spirituality and consumption, is the notion of essentialism, the idea that socially and historically contructed categories are taken as naturally given. Accordingly, certain qualities are attributed to particular groups in society as innate characteristics, creating a social and moral order in which some are necessarily of lower value than the other. …