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Interactions of Class, Gender and Consumerism Among the Middle-Class in Ho Chi Minh City, Viet Nam

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Interactions of Class, Gender and Consumerism Among the Middle-Class in Ho Chi Minh City, Viet Nam Negotiating the Middle: Interactions of Class, Gender and Consumerism Among the Middle-Class in Ho Chi Minh City, Viet Nam Item Type text; Electronic Dissertation Authors Higgins, Rylan G. Publisher The University of Arizona. Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. Download date 26/09/2021 14:14:42 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/196062 1 NEGOTIATING THE MIDDLE: INTERACTIONS OF CLASS, GENDER AND CONSUMERISM AMONG THE MIDDLE CLASS IN HO CHI MINH CITY, VIET NAM by Rylan G. Higgins _____________________ Copyright © Rylan G. Higgins 2008 A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY In the Graduate College THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA 2008 2 THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA GRADUATE COLLEGE As members of the Dissertation Committee, we certify that we have read the dissertation prepared by Rylan G. Higgins entitled Negotiating the Middle: Interactions of Class, Gender and Consumerism Among the Middle Class in Ho Chi Minh City, Viet Nam and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy ____________________________________________________________Date: 12/04/08 Diane Austin ___________________________________________________________ Date: 12/04/08 Linda Green ___________________________________________________________ Date: 12/04/08 Elizabeth Kennedy Final approval and acceptance of this dissertation is contingent upon the candidate's submission of the final copies of the dissertation to the Graduate College. I hereby certify that I have read this dissertation prepared under my direction and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement. __________________________________________________________Date: 12/04/08 Dissertation Director: Diane Austin 3 STATEMENT BY AUTHOR This dissertation has been submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for an advanced degree at the University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library. Brief quotations from this dissertation are allowable without special permission, provided that accurate acknowledgment of source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the copyright holder. SIGNED: Rylan G. Higgins 4 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the members of my major committee, Diane Austin, Elizabeth Kennedy, and Linda Green, for all of their encouragement and mentoring. The members from my minor committee, Beverly Seckinger and Michael Mulcahy were also a great source of inspiration. Vu Thi Thu Hao, the women whose husband I am, also deserves special mention for her constant and undying support throughout the trials that have come with this project. Last, but certainly not least, I want to express my sincere appreciation to all of the participants in my study, without whom, it goes without saying, this dissertation would not have been possible. 5 TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................... 6 CHAPTER ONE: A RELATIONSHIP WITH THE WORLD ......................................... 7 CHAPTER TWO: ORIENTATIONS............................................................................ 38 CHAPTER THREE: A BRIEF HISTORY OF SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT......................................................................................................... 77 CHAPTER FOUR: SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC FOUNDATIONS OF THE MIDDLE-CLASS ....................................................................................................... 109 CHAPTER FIVE: MIDDLE-CLASS CULTURE: “MIDDLENESS” AND PERFORMATIVITY.................................................................................................. 146 CHAPTER SIX: WANTING TO BE BETTER: EDUCATION, WORK AND APPROPRIATENESS ................................................................................................ 198 CHAPTER SEVEN: MIDDLE-CLASS CONSUMERISM AND MIDDLENESS.................................................................................................. 260 CHAPTER EIGHT: EPILOGUE................................................................................. 327 REFERENCES ........................................................................................................... 342 6 ABSTRACT This urban ethnography examines the everyday lives of young adults participating in middle-class culture in Ho Chi Minh City. My analysis illuminates the motivations and processes by which middle-class people create a social and moral middleness. Middleness refers both to the experiences of this group and to the cultural space wherein individuals perform their gender-specific, consumption-driven roles and negotiate identities as modern Vietnamese people. In attempting to understand precisely how social class functions and is experienced, my analysis focuses on how it relates to other processes of identity formation (i.e. gender and consumerism). Doing so also requires that I call attention to the uneven, unstable impacts of globalizing processes and the importance of performativity. By arguing that class is best understood as a socio-cultural process and by confronting the myth of global cultural homogenization, I reveal important insights about what it means to be middle-class in Ho Chi Minh City. Individual and group responses to the city’s ever-changing consumer society show people carrying out their lives in social and cultural systems that are fundamentally unfinished. 7 CHAPTER ONE: A RELATIONSHIP WITH THE WORLD While we talked at a coffee shop downtown, I asked Tri to give me his opinion of living in Ho Chi Minh City.1 It was the fall of 2003; Tri was thirty-two years old, gainfully employed, not married; he appeared to be enjoying a life defined in part by financial stability, of modest comfort—neither rich, nor poor. He was literally the first person to agree to participate in my study, and he was eager to talk about a city (and a country) that he was both happy with and proud of. Tri answered with a smile full of enthusiasm, while glancing around at various retail shops, billboards and passing motor scooters: Saigon is so comfortable. I’m very happy here. Now, we can buy anything. It’s not like before, when you could not buy lots of things. My country opened, in 1986, for a relationship with the world. We have everything we need. Responding to his enthusiasm, I told Tri that I also considered Ho Chi Minh City a great place to live, and then we went on to discuss those consumer goods and services about which Tri was most excited—he was particularly pleased that he could buy the latest styles of Western clothing and that there was an abundance of nice, newly-opened eateries and coffee shops. During the nearly two years (October 2002 to September 2004) I studied and conducted research in Ho Chi Minh City2, I found Tri’s outlook common among people 1 Ho Chi Minh City is the largest city in Viet Nam and was, before 1975, called Saigon, the name given to the city by the French. Throughout this dissertation, I use these two names interchangeably. I explain the political dimensions of the city’s dual nomenclature further in the next chapter. 2 This period is actually the second of several during which I have spent time living in Ho Chi Minh City. The first was a two-month stay in 2000. I also lived in the city nearly full-time from the fall 2005 to the fall of 2008. 8 who identified as middle-class.3 With very few exceptions, the middle-class people who participated in my research emphasized the increased availability and variety of consumer goods and services as the most meaningful sign that life in Viet Nam was good. Though the level of zeal with which people held these beliefs varied somewhat, participation in the world economy—primarily through consumption—was closely linked to everyone’s personal sense of satisfaction and accomplishment. In his well-formed critique of the concept, Griffith (1993) observes that modernization theory4 relies heavily (i.e. foolishly) on the belief that there is something “called ‘progress’ that is slowly incorporating more and more of the world in its sweep, and that, given time, most of the backward nations will progress to our ‘level’” (238). Therefore, this Western-centric notion continues, changes to global power structures are not necessary. Rather, people in not-so-well-off places require only patience, because their turn for prosperity will eventually come. After decades of military struggle, political turmoil and economic crisis, as of 2003, when I began my research, it would have been difficult to convince middle-class people in Ho Chi Minh City, as anthropologists suggest 3 I use the hyphenated adjective middle-class liberally to describe people, beliefs, goods, and even events, whenever either Vietnamese people or I or both consider them part of the middle-class life in which they were participating. I reserve the compound noun middle class to refer to a socio-economic category. As I explain further in Chapter Three, the former (quasi-emic) term and the latter (etic) term do not always
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