Hostname: page-component-84b7d79bbc-4hvwz Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-27T23:19:04.589Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Wandering Ghosts of Late Socialism: Conflict, Metaphor, and Memory in a Southern Vietnamese Marketplace

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 February 2008

Ann Marie Leshkowich
Get access

Abstract

In the late 1990s, a marketplace trader in Hồ Chí Minh City reported being plagued by wandering ghosts. The postwar Vietnamese landscape teems with angry spirits who died violently without descendents to honor them, but the trader's wandering ghosts were living: male market officials who demanded that merchants, most of them women, pay a fee for use rights to their stalls. Examining the conflict that ensued, this article argues that the wandering ghosts metaphor aptly captures the bitter struggles over resources and status that have accompanied late socialist economic reforms. More subtly, the metaphor also alludes to lingering wartime animosities. Market officials supported the victors, whereas many traders sided with the losers. Although daily interactions have intersubjectively reworked these tensions so that they seem instead to reflect gender differences, “ghosts” inevitably emerge: odd fragments of memory that wander homeless in the wake of social and individual efforts to render the past coherent.

Most traders have paid up simply to avoid the market management boarde's harassment. It's money sacrificed to appease the wandering ghosts [tiền thí cô hồn].

—Bến Thành market trader, Hồ Chí Minh City

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 67 , Issue 1 , February 2008 , pp. 5 - 41
Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

List of References

Atkinson, Jane Monnig. 1990. “How Gender Makes a Difference in Wana Society.” In Power and Difference: Gender in Island Southeast Asia, ed. Atkinson, Jane Monnig and Errington, Shelly, 59–94. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Số, Báo Cáo 4000/CCTTHC. 1994. “Announcement #4000 Reforming Administrative Procedure.” Inspection Department, Hồ Chí Minh City, September 26.Google Scholar
Bảo, Ninh. 1991. Nỗi Buồn Chiến Tranh [Sorrow of War]. Hà nội: Nhà Xuất Bản Hội Nhà Văn.Google Scholar
Barry, Kathleen, ed. 1996. Vietnam's Women in Transition. New York: St. Martin's Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beck, Brenda E. F. 1978. “The Metaphor as a Mediator Between Semantic and Analogic Modes of Thought.” Current Anthropology 19 (1): 83–97.Google Scholar
Bradley, Mark Philip. 2001. “Contests of Memory: Remembering and Forgetting War in the Contemporary Vietnamese Cinema.” In The Country of Memory: Remaking the Past in Late Socialist Vietnam, ed. Tai, Hue-Tam Ho, 196–226. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Burawoy, Michael, and Verdery, Katherine ed. 1999. Uncertain Transition: Ethnographies of Change in the Postsocialist World. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield.Google Scholar
Cole, Jennifer. 2001. Forget Colonialism? Sacrifice and the Art of Memory in Madagascar. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Khoa, Đặng Ngọc. 1994a. “Chung Quanh Cuộc Bãi Thị Của Tiểu Thương Chợ Bến Thành (TP HCM): Thấy Gì và Làm Gì” [About the Strike of Bến Thành Market Traders (Hồ Chí Minh City): See What and Do What?]. Thanh Niên [Youth], May 24.Google Scholar
Khoa, Đặng Ngọc. 1994b. “Nghịch Lý Chợ Bến Thành” [Bến Thành Market Paradox]. Thanh Niên [Youth], November 1.Google Scholar
De Pauw, Linda Grant. 1998. Battle Cries and Lullabies: Women in War from Prehistory to the Present. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.Google Scholar
Nghĩa, Đình 1996. “Chợ Bến Thành (Thành Phố Hồ Chí Minh): Những Khuất Tất Trong Việc Thu Tiền Thuê Quyền Sử Dụng Sạp” [Bến Thành Market (Hồ Chí Minh City): Underhandness in Collecting the Stall Use Fee]. Thanh Niên [Youth], November 16.Google Scholar
Nghĩa, Đình and Khoa, Đặng Ngọc 1994. “TP HCM: UBND Q. 1 Quyết Định Tạm Thời Giữ Nguyên Trạng Các Sạp Chợ Bến Thành Như Trước Ngày 13.5. [Hồ Chí Minh City: The District One People's Committee Provisionally Decides to Preserve the Pre-May 13 Status Quo of Bến Thành Market Stalls].” Thanh Niên [Youth], May 17.Google Scholar
Tai, Doan Van and Chanoff, David. 1986. The Vietnamese Gulag. New York: Simon & Schuster.Google Scholar
Drummond, Lisa, and Helle, Rydstrøm, ed. 2004. Gender Practices in Contemporary Vietnam. Singapore: Singapore University Press.Google Scholar
Duiker, William J. 1995. Vietnam: Revolution in Transition. 2nd ed.Boulder, COLO.: Westview Press.Google Scholar
Elshtain, Jena Bethke. 1987. Women and War. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Enloe, Cynthia. 1989. Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics. London: Pandora.Google Scholar
Enloe, Cynthia. 1993. The Morning After: Sexual Politics and the End of the Cold War. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Enloe, Cynthia. 2005. The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Fairclough, Gordon. 2005. “For Thai Survivors, the Dead Live on in Ghost Sightings.” Wall Street Journal, January 18.Google Scholar
Fernandez, James. 1974. “The Mission of Metaphor in Expressive Culture.” Current Anthropology 15 (2): 119–45.Google Scholar
Gal, Susan, and Kligman, Gail. 2000a. Reproducing Gender: Politics, Publics, and Everyday Life after Socialism. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Gal, Susan, and Kligman, Gail. 2000b. The Politics of Gender after Socialism: A Comparative-Historical Essay. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Gammeltoft, Tine. 1999. Women's Bodies, Women's Worries: Health and Family Planning in a Vietnamese Rural Community. Richmond: Curzon Press.Google Scholar
Goldstein, Joshua S. 2001. War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Goodman, Philomena. 2000. Women, Sexuality, and War. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Kim Nhung, Ha Pham. 1997. Stormy Escape: A Vietnamese Woman's Account of Her 1980 Flight Through Cambodia to Thailand. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland.Google Scholar
Hayslip, Le Ly, with Hayslip, James. 1989. Child of War, Woman of Peace. New York: Anchor.Google Scholar
Hayslip, Le Ly, with Wurts, Jay. 1993. When Heaven and Earth Changed Places: A Vietnamese Woman's Journey from War to Peace. New York: Plume.Google Scholar
Thong, Huynh Sanh ed. 1988. To Be Made Over: Tales of Socialist Reeducation. New Haven, Conn.: Council on Southeast Asia Studies, Yale Center for International and Area Studies.Google Scholar
Jacobson, Ruth, Jacobs, Susie and Marchbank, Jen ed. 2000. States of Conflict: Gender, Violence, and Resistance. London: Zed Books.Google Scholar
Jellema, Kate. 2005. “Making Good on Debt: The Remoralisation of Wealth in Revolutionary Vietnam.” Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 6 (3): 231–48.Google Scholar
Kleinen, John. 1999. Facing the Future, Reviving the Past. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.Google Scholar
Krall, Yung. 1995. A Thousand Tears Falling: The True Story of a Vietnamese Family Torn Apart by War, Communism, and the CIA. Atlanta, Ga.: Longstreet Press.Google Scholar
Kumar, Krishna, ed. 2001. Women and Civil War: Impact, Organization, and Action. Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner.Google Scholar
L. Q. 1997. “Chợ Bến Thành Nỗi Lo Hậu Thanh Tra” [Bến Thành Market's Worries after the Audit]. Kinh Doanh và Pháp Luật [Business and Law] 11:9.Google Scholar
Leshkowich, Ann Marie. 2005. “Feminine Disorder: State Campaigns against Street Traders in Socialist and Late Socialist Vietnam.” In Le Vietnam au Féminin/Vietnam: Women's Realities, ed. Taylor, Nora A. and Bousquet, Gisèle, 187–207. Paris: Les Indes Savantes.Google Scholar
Leshkowich, Ann Marie. 2006. “Woman, Buddhist, Entrepreneur: Gender, Moral Values, and Class Anxiety in Late Socialist Vietnam.” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 1 (1–2): 277–313.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thanh, Lu Van 1997. The Inviting Call of Wandering Souls: Memoir of an ARVN Liaison Officer to United States Forces in Vietnam Who Was Imprisoned in Communist Re-Education Camps and Then Escaped. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland.Google Scholar
Luong, Hy Van. 1993. “Economic Reform and the Intensification of Rituals in Two North Vietnamese Villages, 1980–1990.” In The Challenge of Reform in Indochina, ed. Ljunggren, Börje, 259–91. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Luong, Hy Van. 2003. “Gender Relations: Ideologies, Kinship Practices, and Political Economy.” In Postwar Vietnam: Dynamics of a Transforming Society, ed. Luong, Hy V., 201–24. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.Google Scholar
Malarney, Shaun Kingsley. 1996. “The Limits of ‘State Functionalism’ and the Reconstruction of Funerary Ritual in Contemporary Northern Vietnam.” American Ethnologist 23 (3): 540–60.Google Scholar
Malarney, Shaun Kingsley. 2001. “‘The Fatherland Remembers Your Sacrifice’: Commemorating War Dead in North Vietnam.” In The Country of Memory: Remaking the Past in Late Socialist Vietnam, ed. Tai, Hue-Tam Ho, 46–76. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Mandel, Ruth, and Humphrey, Caroline 2002. Markets and Moralities: Ethnographies of Postsocialism. Oxford: Berg.Google Scholar
McElwee, Pamela. 2005. ‘“There Is Nothing That Is Difficult’: History and Hardship on the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Ha Tinh, North Vietnam.” Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 6 (3): 197–214.Google Scholar
Mueggler, Erik. 2001. The Age of Wild Ghosts: Memory, Violence, and Place in Southwest China. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Phuong, Nam. 1991. Red on Gold: The True Story of One Woman's Courage and Will to Survive in War-Torn Vietnam. Sutherland, New South Wales: Albatross Books.Google Scholar
Ngan, Nguyen Ngoc. 1982. The Will of Heaven: The Story of One Vietnamese and the End of His World. New York: E. P. Dutton.Google Scholar
Duc, Nguyen Qui. 1994. Where the Ashes Are: The Odyssey of a Vietnamese Family. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley.Google Scholar
Dan, Nguyen Trieu. 1991. A Vietnamese Family Chronicle: Twelve Generations on the Banks of the Hat River. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland.Google Scholar
Linh, Nguyễn Văn. 1985. Thành phố Hồ Chí Minh 10 năm [Ten Years of Hồ Chí Minh City]. Hà nội: Nhà Xuất Bản Sự Thật.Google Scholar
Nguyen-Vo, Thu-Huong. 2005. “Forking Paths: How Shall We Mourn the Dead?” Amerasia Journal 31 (2): 157–75.Google Scholar
Ohnuki-Tierney, Emiko. 1990. “Monkey as Metaphor? Transformations of a Polytropic Symbol in Japanese Culture.” Man 25 (1): 89–107.Google Scholar
Pelley, Patricia M. 2002. Postcolonial Vietnam: New Histories of the National Past. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Pettus, Ashley. 2003. Between Sacrifice and Desire: National Identity and the Governing of Femininity in Vietnam. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Phinney, Harriet. 2005. “The Shifting yet Conventional Logic of Sex and Reproduction in Northern Vietnam: Post-War Refashioning of Single Women's Reproductive Space.” Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 6 (3): 215–30.Google Scholar
Quyết Định 380/QĐ-UB. 1991. “Về Quyền Sử Dụng Sạp Kinh Doanh tại chọ’ Bến Thành” [Decision about Commercial Stall Use Rights in Ben Thanh Market]. People's Committee of Hồ Chí Minh City, District One, October 9.Google Scholar
Quyết Định 1117/QĐ-UB. 1993. “Về Tổ Chức và Hoạt Động các Chợ trên Địa Bàn Thành Phố Hồ Chí Minh” [Decision about the Organization and Activity of Markets in Hồ Chí Minh City]. People's Committee of Hồ Chí Minh City, July 22.Google Scholar
Quyết Định 1500/QĐ-UB. 1994. People's Committee of Hồ Chí Minh City, May 18.Google Scholar
Rydstrøm, Helle. 2003. Embodying Morality: Growing Up in Rural Northern Vietnam, Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.Google Scholar
Rydstrøm, Helle, and Drummond, Lisaed. 2004. Gender Practices in Contemporary Vietnam. Singapore: Singapore University Press.Google Scholar
Sài Gòn Giải Phóng [Sài Gòn Liberation]. 1984. “Lý, Tiành trong Chính sách” [The Logic and Circumstances of the Policy]. December 2.Google Scholar
Schwenkel, Christina. 2006. “Recombinant History: Transnational Practices of Memory and Knowledge Production in Contemporary Vietnam.” Cultural Anthropology 21 (1): 3–30.Google Scholar
Sider, Gerald, and Smith, Gavin, eds. 1997. Between History and Histories: The Making of Silences and Commemorations. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.Google Scholar
Steedly, Mary Margaret. 1993. Hanging without a Rope. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Steedly, Mary Margaret. 2000. “Modernity and the Memory Artist: The Work of Imagination in Highland Sumatra, 1947–1995.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 42 (4): 811–46.Google Scholar
Stoler, Ann Laura. 1992. “‘In Cold Blood’: Hierarchies of Credibility and the Politics of Colonial Narratives.” Representations 37: 151–89.Google Scholar
Stoler, Ann Laura, and Strassler, Karen. 2002. “Memory-Work in Java: A Cautionary Tale.” In Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule, by Stoler, Ann Laura, 162–204. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Tai, Hue-Tam Ho. 1985a. “Fortune Is a Woman: Talent and Destiny in the Lives of Women in 18th-Century Vietnam.” Unpublished manuscript, Department of History, Harvard University.Google Scholar
Tai, Hue-Tam Ho. 1985b. “Religion in Vietnam: A World of Gods and Spirits.” In Vietnam: Essays on History, Culture and Society, 22–39. Ithaca, N.Y.: Southeast Asian Program, Cornell University.Google Scholar
Tai, Hue-Tam Ho. 1992. Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Tai, Hue-Tam Ho. 2001a. “Afterword: Commemoration and Community.” In The Country of Memory: Remaking the Past in Late Socialist Vietnam, ed. Tai, Hue-Tam Ho, 227–30. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Tai, Hue-Tam Ho. 2001b. “Faces of Remembering and Forgetting.” In The Country of Memory: Remaking the Past in Late Socialist Vietnam, ed. Tai, Hue-Tam Ho, 167–95. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Tai, Hue-Tam Ho. 2001c. “Introduction: Situating Memory.” In The Country of Memory: Remaking the Past in Late Socialist Vietnam, ed. Tai, Hue-Tam Ho, 1–20. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Taylor, Nora A., and Gisèle, Bousquet, eds. 2005. Le Vietnam au Féminin/Vietnam: Women's Realities. Paris: Les Indes Savantes.Google Scholar
Taylor, Philip. 2002. “The Ethnicity of Efficacy: Vietnamese Goddess Worship and the Encoding of Popular Histories.” Asian Ethnicity 3 (1): 85–102.Google Scholar
Taylor, Philip. 2004. Goddess on the Rise: Pilgrimage and Popular Religion in Vietnam. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.Google Scholar
Trúc, Thạch. 1978. “Nghề Buôn Bán và Sự Hủy Hoại những Giá trị Đạo Đức [Trade and the Ruination of Moral Values].” Tuổi Trẻ [Youth] 136:11.Google Scholar
An, Thu. 1996. “Qui Định của Quận ‘Lớn Hơn’ Quyết Định của UBNDTP?” [The Decision of the District Is “Bigger” Than the Decision of the City People's Committee?]. Tuổi Trẻ [Youth].Google Scholar
An, Thu. 1997. “Quyết Định Về Thu Lệ phí Sử Dụng Sạp Chợ Bến Thành: Quyết Định Sai, Sao Chưa Hủy Bỏ” [Decision about Collecting Stall Use Fees in Bến Thành Market: Wrong Decision, Why Hasn't It Been Rescinded?]. Tuổi Trẻ [Youth], August 8.Google Scholar
Khánh, Trần. 1993. The Ethnic Chinese and Economic Development in Vietnam. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.Google Scholar
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1995. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Tang, Truong Nhu. 1985. A Viet Cong Memoir: An Inside Account of the Vietnam War and Its Aftermath. New York: Vintage Books.Google Scholar
Turner, Karen. 2007. “Shadowboxing with the Censors: A Vietnamese Woman Directs the War Story.” In Cinema, Law, and the State in Asia, ed. Creekmur, Corey K. and Sidel, Mark, 101–20. Houndmills, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Turner, Karen Gottschang, with Hao, Phan Thanh. 1998. Even the Women Must Fight: Memories of War from North Vietnam. New York: Wiley.Google Scholar
Utas, Mats. 2005. “Victimcy, Girlfriending, Soldiering: Tactic Agency in a Young Woman's Social Navigation of the Liberian War Zone.” Anthropological Quarterly 78 (2): 403–30.Google Scholar
Verdery, Katherine. 1996. What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Vickers, Jeanne. 1993. Women and War. London: Zed Books.Google Scholar
Watson, Rubie S., ed. 1994. Memory, History, and Opposition under State Socialism. Santa Fe, N.M.: School of American Research Press.Google Scholar
Werner, Jayne S. 2005. “Gender Matters: Gender Studies and Vietnam Studies.” In Le Vietnam au Féminin/Vietnam: Women's Realities, ed. Taylor, Nora A. and Bousquet, Gisèle, 19–41. Paris: Les Indes Savantes.Google Scholar
Werner, Jayne S. 2006. “Between Memory and Desire: Gender and the Remembrance of War in Doi Moi Vietnam.” Gender, Place and Culture 13 (3): 303–15.Google Scholar
Werner, Jayne S., and Bélanger, Danièle eds. 2002. Gender, Household, State: Doi Moi in Vietnam. Ithaca, N.Y.: Southeast Asian Program, Cornell University.Google Scholar
Yuval-Davis, Nira. 1997. Gender and Nation. London: Sage.Google Scholar
Zhang, Li. 2001. Strangers in the City: Reconfigurations of Space, Power, and Social Networks within China's Floating Population. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Zur, Judith. 1997. “Reconstructing the Self through Memories of Violence among Mayan Indian War Widows.” In Gender and Catastrophe, ed. Lentin, Ronit, 64–76. London: Zed Books.Google Scholar