Fuel Trade: People, Places, and Transformations along the Coal Briquetting Chain

This chapter focuses on those who produce, distribute and use an everyday, but increasingly shunned cooking fuel, the beehive coal briquette. It looks in particular at the inter-linkages between people, things and places along the briquetting chain. By tracing the journey of the coal briquette backwards, from the stove to the trolley in which it is transported and to the production site in which it is made, the chapter illustrates how the changing uses and meanings of place and space impact dynamics and networks of small-scale commercial activities in urban Vietnam.

A Mobile Trading Network from Central Coastal Vietnam: Growth, Social Network, and Gender

This chapter examines the significant growth of a mobile Vietnamese trading network in the past two decades, from Ho Chi Minh City to the entire southern half of Vietnam. The prominence of villagers from one lowlands village in the central coastal province of Quảng Ngãi in this trading niche highlights the importance of social network in Vietnamese political economy. About half of the traders in this trading network are male, and half, female, in contrast to the common dominance of women in Vietnamese petty trade. In relation to the literature on gender and trade in Vietnam and the rest of Southeast Asia, the chapter also examines how malleable gender is in Vietnamese trading activities.

Introduction: The Spatial Politics of Marketplaces

This essay provides an overview of how development ideologies catalyze diverse displacement and resettlement dynamics among market traders in Vietnam. Case studies presented by authors in this section analyze the kinds of policies and practices that structure market space and the different ways that traders themselves engage the efforts of bureaucrats and state authorities to transform them into malleable citizens. The ethnic identities of traders, their sociopolitical networks, knowledge of complex temporal cycles of trade and spatial mobility, as well as the state’s contradictory objectives create margins in which traders resist state control. The effects of scale, biopolitics, and the power of discourse on the part of traders’ ability to pursue more sustained political mobilization constitute significant future research directions.

Afterword

This commentary discusses parallels between these studies of Vietnam and prominent studies of African contexts with comparable themes and methods of historical and transnational analysis. Despite dramatic contrasts with the particularities of African history and societies, traders, their customers and their regulators navigate similar material and conceptual landscapes. Shifting public policies and trading practices invoke and enact highly charged dichotomies: urban and rural identities, socialist and modernist virtues, or globalism and indigeneity. These nuanced analyses show diverse actors internalizing and also strategically manipulating and redefining alternative ideals and ideologies of gender, adulthood, kinship, parenthood, neighborhood, technology, and tradition.

Money, Risk Taking, and Playing: Shifting Masculinity in a Waste-Trading Community in the Red River Delta

This chapter examines the practices of masculinity by male migrant waste traders from a Red River delta district as underscored by the shifting ways in which they conduct their migrant trading activities and live their lives between youth and adulthood. It demonstrates that their practices push the boundaries of normative manhood, and over time help to redefine it, at the same time that they reproduce its symbolic parameters. As such, gender ideas and practices interact with each other to concurrently produce changes to and sustain social structures. The chapter indicates the relational and hybrid nature of masculinity, as well as the ways in which gender identity shapes and is shaped by the men’s participation in the marketplace.

Ghost Markets and Moving Bazaars in Hanoi’s Urban Space

This chapter explores the demolition and renewal of traditional marketplaces in urban Hanoi, each in a different stage of renovation. It focuses on female traders, hawkers, and street vendors who employ creative strategies to cope with the loss of their livelihoods. By drawing on concepts such as clientelization and beneficial relations (quan hệ) this contribution highlights some of the social relationships that traders build up over time with members of the market management, other vendors, and customers in various marketplaces.

“Run and Hide When You See the Police”: Livelihood Diversification and the Politics of the Street Economy in Vietnam’s Northern Uplands

This chapter explores the everyday negotiations required for ethnic minority street vendors working in Sapa, a tourist town in upland northern Vietnam, to eke out a livelihood in an especially prescribed environment. These individuals, mostly women, face a local political environment where access and institutional requirements shift on a near-daily basis due to the impulses of state officials, and where ethnicity is key to determining who gets to vend, where, and how. A focus on the micro-geographies and everyday politics of itinerant trade in this rapidly growing tourist site reveals specific relationships and negotiations regarding resource access, ethnicity, state authority, and livelihood strategies.

Making the Marketplace: Traders, Cadres, and Bureaucratic Documents in Lào Cai City

Bureaucratic paperwork holds an important place in the toolbox of state rule techniques. Drawing on recent anthropological approaches to bureaucratic documentation, this chapter examines the role that the production and circulation of bureaucratic paperwork plays in actually shaping experiential and social realities in the marketplace. The cases presented show that written documents not only enable government officials to establish their positions and authority vis-à-vis their subjects, but also shape the market’s future. In contrast, ordinary people have little opportunity to insert themselves into these streams of bureaucratic paperwork through which authority is established, subjects are governed, and marketplaces are made.

Introduction: Space, Mobility, Borders, and Trading Frictions

This introduction provides a theoretical overview of the main mechanisms through which a market economy emerges. The chapters in this volume offer rich ethnographic exploration of daily interactions among traders, suppliers, customers, family members, neighbors, and officials within Vietnam and across its borders. These quotidian encounters occur within contested spaces, through expanding and contracting circuits of mobility, and across physical and conceptual boundaries that are fixed, yet porous. Taken together, the diverse contributions to this collection demonstrate that markets form and transform through uneven interplay among global processes, state regulatory regimes, and local trajectories of economic and social development. Rather than impede market function, these trading frictions shape the necessary ground on which new forms of political economy emerge.

Regulations and Raids, or the Precarious Place of Gold Shops in Vietnam

In 2014, police raided a gold shop in Ho Chi Minh City and confiscated US dollars, Thai baht, and more than 500 SJC gold bars. The public outcry following the raid underscores the contentious reaction to a 2012 government decree prohibiting gold shops from exchanging foreign currency and gold bars. This chapter examines official justifications for the raid as well as popular perceptions as a means of assessing the vulnerability of gold traders in Vietnam’s shifting monetary landscape.