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Negotiating Uncertainty in Late-Socialist Vietnam: Households and livelihood options in the marketizing countryside.
- Source :
-
Modern Asian Studies . Nov2019, Vol. 53 Issue 6, p1701-1735. 35p. - Publication Year :
- 2019
-
Abstract
- This article makes a case for Vietnam as a distinctive example of late- and post-socialist marketization, a painful experience that has brought widespread immiseration to rural societies within and beyond Asia. Building on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in a northern Vietnamese village, I explore a hitherto under-researched aspect of Vietnam's massive social and economic transformation in the 30 years since the onset of market transition or Renovation (Đổi mới): the surprising ways in which rural households have negotiated both the risks and opportunities of the state's push to de-cooperativize and marketize village livelihoods. The state expects that a minority of rich farmers will rapidly move into large-scale, mechanized farming, while the majority will abandon small-scale subsistence farming to specialize in trade or participate in industrial waged employment. Surprisingly, all village households insist on being đa gi năng , that is, on retaining multiple livelihood options instead of following the official modernization scripts. Their refusal to follow state plans is not market-averse 'resistance', but something rarely documented in the literature on peasant life in marketizing contexts: a local sense of agency and taking personal responsibility for the security and long-term welfare of their families, in the face of highly unpredictable state policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 0026749X
- Volume :
- 53
- Issue :
- 6
- Database :
- Academic Search Index
- Journal :
- Modern Asian Studies
- Publication Type :
- Academic Journal
- Accession number :
- 139036669
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X17000993