UC San Diego UC San Diego Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title A life of worry : the cultural politics and phenomenology of anxiety in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4q05b9mq Authors Tran, Allen L. Tran, Allen L. Publication Date 2012 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO A life of worry: The cultural politics and phenomenology of anxiety in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology by Allen L. Tran Committee in charge: Professor Thomas J. Csordas, Chair Professor Suzanne A. Brenner Professor Yen Le Espiritu Professor Janis H. Jenkins Professor Edmund Malesky Professor Steven M. Parish 2012 ! The Dissertation of Allen L. Tran is approved, and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication on microfilm and electronically. ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ Chair University of California, San Diego 2012 iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Signature page……...……………………………………………………………….……iii Table of Contents…...……………………………………………………………...……..iv List of Tables..…………………………………………………………………………….v Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………….vi Vita……………………………………………………………………………………...viii Abstract of the Dissertation………………….…………………………………………...ix Chapter 1…………………………………………………………………………………..1 Chapter 2…………………………………………………………………………..……..42 Chapter 3……………………………………………………………………………........73 Chapter 4………………………………………………………………………………..108 Chapter 5………………………………………………………………………………..154 Chapter 6………………………………………………………………………………..201 Chapter 7………………………………………………………………………………..224 References………………………………………………………………………………227 iv LIST OF TABLES Table 4.1: Incidence of mental illness in Vietnam and Ho Chi Minh City………….....109 v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS A colleague at my host institute in Ho Chi Minh City once told me that academics and mermaids share a common trait: put either of them at a desk with a chair and a computer and neither will be going anywhere soon. In all the time I have spent with a desk, chair, and computer, I owe many people on both sides of the Pacific a great deal of gratitude for their guidance, inspiration, and support. My most important debt is with the people whose lives fill my research with complexity, beauty, and a sense of purpose. Members of the Center for Sociological Research at the Southern Institute of Sustainable Development (formerly the Southern Institute of Social Sciences) patiently explained to me the many contours of sentiment and demonstrated them to me every time I saw them. Prof. Văn Thị Ngọc Lan, Bùi Linh Cường, Nguyễn Đặng Minh Thảo, Hà Thúc Dũng, and especially Lê Thế Vững went above and beyond to support my research. During fieldwork and afterwards, I could always depend on the rotating and honorary members of the (international) Saigon Researchers Club, including Mitch Aso, Haydon Cherry, Jesse Fly, Sarah Grant, Merav Shohet, and Chương-Đài Võ, to either clarify some of the confusions of fieldwork or reassure that clarity would come eventually. Special thanks indeed go to Khải-Thư Nguyễn and Alex Cannon as well as fellow anthropologists Ivan Small and Maria Stalford. I am particularly indebted to Van Ly, Rick Rodgers, Christine Tran, and “Vic,” who work outside of academia but are excellent researchers and even better co-conspirators. At UCSD, I am grateful to my dissertation committee, Suzanne Brenner, Yen Le Espiritu, Janis Jenkins, Eddy Malesky, Steve Parish, and my advisor Tom Csordas for vi ! insights that have proven critical in how I approach, analyze, and present my work and will no doubt continue to inspire. Just as important as my committee to any form of progress at UCSD have been my non-faculty colleagues, including Nicole Barger, Waqas Butt, Julia Cassaniti, Whitney Duncan, Esin Duzel, Eric Hoenes, Nofit Itzhak, Tim Karis, Corinna Most, Jess Novak, and Tim Shea. Eli Elinoff and Heather Spector Hallman warrant highlighted acknowledgment for their intellectual and moral support. This research was funded by the National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant, the University of California Pacific Rim Research Program mini-grant, and the UCSD Institute for International, Comparative, and Area Studies travel grant. Finally, I thank my family for making a home for me on both sides of an ocean. Của bố, mẹ, em. ! vii VITA 2001 Bachelor of Arts, University of California, Los Angeles 2003 Master of Arts, Case Western Reserve University 2012 Doctor of Philosophy, University of California, San Diego EMPLOYMENT 2004 – 2006 Teaching Assistant, University of California, San Diego 2009 – 2012 Research Assistant, Southwest Youth Experience of Psychiatric Treatment 2011 – 2012 Teaching Assistant, University of California, San Diego 2012 – present Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Bucknell University PUBLICATIONS Tran, Allen L. 2011. Book review. War and shadows: The haunting of Vietnam by Mai Lan Gustafsson. Journal of Vietnamese Studies 6(2): 144-143. Csordas, Thomas J., Christopher T. Dole, Allen L. Tran, Matthew Strickland, and Michael G. Storck. 2010. Ways of asking, ways of telling: A methodological comparison of ethnographic and diagnostic research interviews. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 34(1): 29-55. viii ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION A life of worry: The cultural politics and phenomenology of anxiety in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam by Allen L. Tran Doctor of Philosophy University of California, San Diego, 2012 Thomas J. Csordas, Chair Based on two years of ethnographic research on the transformation of people’s emotional lives in clinical and non-clinical settings, this dissertation examines the emerging sources, forms, and subjects of anxiety in post-reform Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Since Vietnam’s neoliberal reforms were initiated in 1986, many Ho Chi Minh City residents have benefited from a vastly increased standard of living yet reported worrying more now than ever before. This stands in marked contrast to a past when, according to many, extreme suffering stunted people’s spirits as much as their bodies. Anxiety has become emblematic of neoliberalism’s opportunities and risks in people’s public and private lives, yet to worry is a key means through which individuals enact forms of personhood based on care, compassion, and filial obligation. Against claims that ix ! increased rates of anxiety and anxiety disorders are the products of modernization and the subsequent erosion of social institutions, I conceptualize worry as a cultural practice through which people can both transform themselves into neoliberal subjects and define themselves in terms of sentiment and emotional relatedness that are considered to be traditionally Vietnamese. I analyze how anxiety is articulated by cultural discourses, and vice versa, across a wide range of domains associated with the neoliberal era, including biomedical psychiatry, romance, and leisure. Recent scholarship on neoliberal modes of modernity has called attention to affective practices and relationships of sentiment as a medium linking structural transformations and subject formation. However, such studies rarely examine how the experience of these practices and relationships come to be understood as specifically emotional themselves, a process that is crucial to subject formation in Vietnam’s transition to a market-oriented economy. Bringing together phenomenological and political theories of anxiety that frame it alternatively as an existential condition of humankind or the inevitable fallout of modernity's freedoms and choices, I examine the meanings and experiences of normative and pathological anxiety and the cultural forms that are marshaled to deal with potential threats—threats that may be more pressing than what has already transpired—in a society increasingly suffused with market imperatives. ! x Chapter 1 Introduction: Anxiety as an anthropological problem To say that anxiety is part of being human might skip over a more basic point of its being fundamental to being alive. It provides the grist for our roiling inner life and is the fallout from the instability of our social one. Anxiety is a register of human existence that invokes questions of meaning and deadlines, headaches and being-in-the-world. It can compromise a person’s ability to function in their everyday life, override their ability to cope with difficulties, or drown out their other emotions. Yet those same feelings can be responsible for the marshaling of one’s resources and the coalescing of the self. Its vicissitudes transform people over the short and long-term, yet anxiety itself gets acted upon—resisted, enabled, negotiated, etc.—by the same parts of ourselves that it changes. While psychologists and philosophers have addressed anxiety and its relation to psychic interiority, its significance to human sociality remains undertheorized within anthropology. Perhaps this is because people so often ignore, consciously or not, anxious experiences in everyday life, such is the result and enfolding of anxiety and the instability,