Books and Edited Collections by Ann Marie Leshkowich
“My husband doesn’t have a head for business,” complained Ngoc, the owner of a children’s clothin... more “My husband doesn’t have a head for business,” complained Ngoc, the owner of a children’s clothing stall in Ben Thanh market. “Naturally, it’s because he’s a man.” When the women who sell in Ho Chi Minh City’s iconic marketplace speak, their language suggests that activity in the market is shaped by timeless, essential truths: Vietnamese women are naturally adept at buying and selling, while men are not; Vietnamese prefer to do business with family members or through social contacts; stallholders are by nature superstitious; marketplace trading is by definition a small-scale enterprise.
Essential Trade looks through the façade of these “timeless truths” and finds active participants in a political economy of appearances: traders’ words and actions conform to stereotypes of themselves as poor, weak women in order to clinch sales, manage creditors, and protect themselves from accusations of being greedy, corrupt, or “bourgeois” – even as they quietly slip into southern Vietnam’s growing middle class. But Leshkowich argues that we should not dismiss the traders’ self-disparaging words simply because of their essentialist logic. In Ben Thanh market, performing certain styles of femininity, kinship relations, social networks, spirituality, and class allowed traders to portray themselves as particular kinds of people who had the capacity to act in volatile political and economic circumstances. When so much seems to be changing, a claim that certain things or people are inherently or naturally a particular way can be both personally meaningful and strategically advantageous.
Based on ethnographic fieldwork and life history interviewing conducted over nearly two decades, Essential Trade explores how women cloth and clothing traders like Ngoc have plied their wares through four decades of political and economic transformation: civil war, postwar economic restructuring, socialist cooperativization, and the frenetic competition of market socialism. With close attention to daily activities and life narratives, this groundbreaking work of critical feminist economic anthropology combines theoretical insight, vivid ethnography, and moving personal stories to illuminate how the interaction between gender and class has shaped people’s lives and created market socialist political economy. It provides a compelling account of postwar southern Vietnam as seen through the eyes of the dynamic women who have navigated forty years of profound change while building their businesses in the stalls of Ben Thanh market.
With essays covering diverse topics, from seafood trade across the Vietnam-China border, to stree... more With essays covering diverse topics, from seafood trade across the Vietnam-China border, to street traders in Hanoi, to gold shops in Ho Chi Minh City, Traders in Motion spans the fields of economic and political anthropology, geography, and sociology to illuminate how Vietnam's rapidly expanding market economy is formed and transformed by everyday interactions among traders, suppliers, customers, family members, neighbors, and officials.
The contributions shed light on the micropolitics of local-level economic agency in the paradoxical context of Vietnam's socialist orientation and its contemporary neoliberal economic and social transformation. The essays examine how Vietnamese traders and officials engage in on-the-ground contestations to define space, promote or limit mobility, and establish borders, both physical and conceptual. The contributors show how trading experiences shape individuals' notions of self and personhood, not just as economic actors, but also in terms of gender, region, and ethnicity. Traders in Motion affords rich comparative insight into how markets form and transform and what those changes mean.
Contributors:
Lisa Barthelmes, Christine Bonnin, Gracia Clark, Annuska Derks, Kirsten W. Endres, Chris Gregory, Caroline Grillot, Erik Harms, Esther Horat, Gertrud Hüwelmeier, Ann Marie Leshkowich, Hy Van Luong, Minh T. N. Nguyen, Nguyen Thi Thanh Binh, Linda J. Seligmann, Allison Truitt, Sarah Turner
In this special issue, Vietnamese Studies scholars in history and anthropology revisit the work o... more In this special issue, Vietnamese Studies scholars in history and anthropology revisit the work of Hue-Tam Ho Tai to reflect on the remarkable transformation of our field over the past several decades. Since she began teaching at Harvard University in 1980, Tai’s groundbreaking scholarship on religion, social history, political history, memory, memoir, and gender has profoundly influenced the study of Vietnam and Southeast Asia. The essays also trace Tai’s efforts to foster a new generation of critical research on Vietnam through organizing conferences and mentoring students and colleagues around the globe. In the afterword, Tai reflects on her intellectual journey.
When Hong Kong entrepreneur David Tang opened his Shanghai Tang boutique on New York's Madison Av... more When Hong Kong entrepreneur David Tang opened his Shanghai Tang boutique on New York's Madison Avenue, it was not an isolated example of the globalization of Asian fashion. Further evidence is written on the labels in our closets, and paraded in the form of salwaar-kameez and silk sarongs by the rich and famous of London. The phenomenon merits scrutiny. This vanguard attempt points to the colonial era as the origin of fashion globalization, and describes its development as paralleling the gradual take-over of Asian daily wear by Western dress. From indigenous Batak weavers to Hong Kong designers, and from Indonesian businesswomen's power suits to Korean feminists' national costume, this book explores the sartorial interface of East and West.The globalization of Asian dress needs to be understood as part of an ongoing Orientalism that construes Asia as a feminine Other to the masculine West. The conventional Orientalist definition of fashion as an exclusively Western phenomenon has proved self-fulfilling in both East and West so that the conceptual boundary between the two is continually reasserted by design. Paying close attention to Asians' decisions about what clothing to make, sell, buy, and wear, the case studies in this book challenge Orientalist stereotypes of Asian style as passive and traditional and highlight how these actions are often made invisible by global cultural, rhetorical, and material practices that feminize Asia and the fashion world. This timely book will be of interest to dress and fashion theorists, anthropologists, sociologists, historians, art historians and all those interested in globalization, Orientalism and their effects.
Journal Articles by Ann Marie Leshkowich
Indonesia 109 (April 2020): 57-63., 2020
I first read Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution from cover to cover shortly ... more I first read Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution from cover to cover shortly after I began graduate school in the early s. I had encountered earlier versions of some of the chapters in an undergraduate course on modern Vietnamese history that I had taken with Professor Tai, but it was not until I had the opportunity to savor the complete book while contemplating conducting my own fieldwork on gender and economic transformation that its scope and import captivated me. As an American of what had just then been termed Generation X, I came to the study of Vietnam with pressing questions forged by my earliest memories: heated political arguments between my parents; disturbing footage on the CBS Evening News that I could only quickly glimpse before my mother jumped up to change the channel (no remote control back then); the sense that the very word "Vietnam" meant something deeply significant and unsettling. I had since come to recognize these Vietnam questions as peculiarly American and had happily cast them off in favor of trying to learn about contemporary Vietnam. There, rapid market-oriented changes had rendered the late s to early s a time of both opportunity and uncertainty in which people were asking themselves questions about who they should be 32 Journal of Vietnamese Studies, Vol. , Issue , pps. -. ISSN -X, electronic -.
Vietnam has a long history of diverse forms of adoption. Yet contemporary domestic adoption remai... more Vietnam has a long history of diverse forms of adoption. Yet contemporary domestic adoption remains largely invisible, with families often keeping it secret. The three narratives of secret adoption examined here illuminate the complex dynamics that have naturalized the middle-class biological nuclear family as the ideal for a market economy. As women narratively perform kin-work to make such a family visible and real, they render invisible other relations of blood and desire. Enmeshed in classed, gendered and intimate dynamics of transparency and secrecy, adoptive kinship in Vietnam delineates new subjectivities, affects and forms of political economy.
Three standardized forms used to write the self in Vietnam structure ways of thinking about the r... more Three standardized forms used to write the self in Vietnam structure ways of thinking about the relationship between the individual, family, and state; legitimize technical expertise and tools of self-improvement; and promote specific configurations of political economy. Two of the forms (the lý lịch autobiographical statement and the “Cultured Family” self-assessment checklist) are closely associated with socialist practices. The third (social work case file) is best classified as neoliberal. Tracing the genealogy of these forms and their ethnographic contexts reveals, however, underlying continuities in logics of individual assessment and faith in the application of technical expertise to achieve desired development outcomes. It also demonstrates that the ostensibly more coercive socialist technologies of documentation have provided narrative frameworks that enable individuals to represent themselves in other contexts, whereas the social work case file that aims to empower individuals may ultimately render them passive subjects of transnational expertise.
[documentation, case files, expertise, social work, neoliberalism, socialism, Vietnam]
positions: asia critique, 2012
positions: asia critique 20(2): 379-401, 2012
Over the past four decades, petty traders in Bến Thành market (Ho Chi Minh City) and Vietnamese o... more Over the past four decades, petty traders in Bến Thành market (Ho Chi Minh City) and Vietnamese officials have experienced and propelled rapid economic, political, and social transformations entailing reconfigura-tions of class and gender. Exploring the co-construction of class and gender through state and individual narratives and performances, I here make three contributions to anthropological scholarship on socialism and late, post-, and market socialism. First, I highlight the importance of associative gendered logics to government efforts to deploy new, morally compelling notions of class. Second, I demonstrate that socialist constructions of gender and class are not simply imposed on resistant subjects but also internalized as meaningful structures of sentiment, even among those otherwise ambivalent toward state authority. Third, I reveal that state socialist logics provide fertile ground for those enframed to exercise strategic essentialism (Spivak 1995) that affords symbolic or material advantage, even as it might also reproduce marginality.
In 1993, the state-affiliated Labor Union Cultural House and a private investor opened Club Royal... more In 1993, the state-affiliated Labor Union Cultural House and a private investor opened Club Royale, a fitness center for women in Ho Chi Minh City, Viet Nam. Club Royale quickly built a membership of urban middle-class women who wanted to improve their health and appearance, display their status, and reduce stress. Fifteen years later, the fitness trend continued, but Club Royale's membership had fallen significantly. Club Royale's changing fortunes provide a lens through which to examine how market-oriented reforms enabled the state to promote politicized ideals of urban middle-class femininity through the new venue of public-private commercial ventures. These developments also demonstrate that body images become significant under conditions of increasing commodification because, like the commodity images that are such a prominent feature of global capitalism, they encapsulate a tension between idealized meanings and concrete manifestations. Touting a scientific approach to health, Club Royale enabled women to negotiate conflicting images of femininity by materially reshaping their bodies. Although Club Royale's philosophy of exercise continues to be popular, its crumbling facility and increased competition mean that it no longer satisfies another aspiration of urban middle-class Vietnamese: to acquire and display status through conspicuous participation in global exercise trends.
Female marketplace traders certainly resented their demonization by officials, academics, and the... more Female marketplace traders certainly resented their demonization by officials, academics, and the press in Vi . êt Nam, but they shared the sense that their children's fate, and hence the country's fate, rested on their careful management of family finances and emotions.
In the late 1990s, a marketplace trader in Hồ Chí Minh City reported being plagued by wandering g... more 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.
By the 1990s, Đổi mới had sparked both desire for profit and suspicion of wealth as a threat to t... more By the 1990s, Đổi mới had sparked both desire for profit and suspicion of wealth as a threat to traditional Vietnamese morality. This article explores how one successful businesswoman responded by attributing her prosperity to Buddhist piety. In rejecting the Confucian ethics favored by businessmen, she advanced an interpretation of traditional morality more accommodating of women and defended her class privilege as righteous. Her narrative draws attention to individual performances of class as a means both to justify one’s own status and to contribute to the gendered, political, religious, and moral discourses through which class stratification comes to be seen as natural.
Chapters in Peer-Reviewed Edited Volumes by Ann Marie Leshkowich
Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Vietnam. Jonathan D. London, ed. Routledge., 2022
Traders in Motion: Identities and Contestations in the Vietnamese Marketplace, edited by Kirsten W. Endres and Ann Marie Leshkowich. Ithaca, NY: Southeast Asia Program Publications, Cornell University Press., 2018
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Books and Edited Collections by Ann Marie Leshkowich
Essential Trade looks through the façade of these “timeless truths” and finds active participants in a political economy of appearances: traders’ words and actions conform to stereotypes of themselves as poor, weak women in order to clinch sales, manage creditors, and protect themselves from accusations of being greedy, corrupt, or “bourgeois” – even as they quietly slip into southern Vietnam’s growing middle class. But Leshkowich argues that we should not dismiss the traders’ self-disparaging words simply because of their essentialist logic. In Ben Thanh market, performing certain styles of femininity, kinship relations, social networks, spirituality, and class allowed traders to portray themselves as particular kinds of people who had the capacity to act in volatile political and economic circumstances. When so much seems to be changing, a claim that certain things or people are inherently or naturally a particular way can be both personally meaningful and strategically advantageous.
Based on ethnographic fieldwork and life history interviewing conducted over nearly two decades, Essential Trade explores how women cloth and clothing traders like Ngoc have plied their wares through four decades of political and economic transformation: civil war, postwar economic restructuring, socialist cooperativization, and the frenetic competition of market socialism. With close attention to daily activities and life narratives, this groundbreaking work of critical feminist economic anthropology combines theoretical insight, vivid ethnography, and moving personal stories to illuminate how the interaction between gender and class has shaped people’s lives and created market socialist political economy. It provides a compelling account of postwar southern Vietnam as seen through the eyes of the dynamic women who have navigated forty years of profound change while building their businesses in the stalls of Ben Thanh market.
The contributions shed light on the micropolitics of local-level economic agency in the paradoxical context of Vietnam's socialist orientation and its contemporary neoliberal economic and social transformation. The essays examine how Vietnamese traders and officials engage in on-the-ground contestations to define space, promote or limit mobility, and establish borders, both physical and conceptual. The contributors show how trading experiences shape individuals' notions of self and personhood, not just as economic actors, but also in terms of gender, region, and ethnicity. Traders in Motion affords rich comparative insight into how markets form and transform and what those changes mean.
Contributors:
Lisa Barthelmes, Christine Bonnin, Gracia Clark, Annuska Derks, Kirsten W. Endres, Chris Gregory, Caroline Grillot, Erik Harms, Esther Horat, Gertrud Hüwelmeier, Ann Marie Leshkowich, Hy Van Luong, Minh T. N. Nguyen, Nguyen Thi Thanh Binh, Linda J. Seligmann, Allison Truitt, Sarah Turner
Journal Articles by Ann Marie Leshkowich
[documentation, case files, expertise, social work, neoliberalism, socialism, Vietnam]
Chapters in Peer-Reviewed Edited Volumes by Ann Marie Leshkowich
Essential Trade looks through the façade of these “timeless truths” and finds active participants in a political economy of appearances: traders’ words and actions conform to stereotypes of themselves as poor, weak women in order to clinch sales, manage creditors, and protect themselves from accusations of being greedy, corrupt, or “bourgeois” – even as they quietly slip into southern Vietnam’s growing middle class. But Leshkowich argues that we should not dismiss the traders’ self-disparaging words simply because of their essentialist logic. In Ben Thanh market, performing certain styles of femininity, kinship relations, social networks, spirituality, and class allowed traders to portray themselves as particular kinds of people who had the capacity to act in volatile political and economic circumstances. When so much seems to be changing, a claim that certain things or people are inherently or naturally a particular way can be both personally meaningful and strategically advantageous.
Based on ethnographic fieldwork and life history interviewing conducted over nearly two decades, Essential Trade explores how women cloth and clothing traders like Ngoc have plied their wares through four decades of political and economic transformation: civil war, postwar economic restructuring, socialist cooperativization, and the frenetic competition of market socialism. With close attention to daily activities and life narratives, this groundbreaking work of critical feminist economic anthropology combines theoretical insight, vivid ethnography, and moving personal stories to illuminate how the interaction between gender and class has shaped people’s lives and created market socialist political economy. It provides a compelling account of postwar southern Vietnam as seen through the eyes of the dynamic women who have navigated forty years of profound change while building their businesses in the stalls of Ben Thanh market.
The contributions shed light on the micropolitics of local-level economic agency in the paradoxical context of Vietnam's socialist orientation and its contemporary neoliberal economic and social transformation. The essays examine how Vietnamese traders and officials engage in on-the-ground contestations to define space, promote or limit mobility, and establish borders, both physical and conceptual. The contributors show how trading experiences shape individuals' notions of self and personhood, not just as economic actors, but also in terms of gender, region, and ethnicity. Traders in Motion affords rich comparative insight into how markets form and transform and what those changes mean.
Contributors:
Lisa Barthelmes, Christine Bonnin, Gracia Clark, Annuska Derks, Kirsten W. Endres, Chris Gregory, Caroline Grillot, Erik Harms, Esther Horat, Gertrud Hüwelmeier, Ann Marie Leshkowich, Hy Van Luong, Minh T. N. Nguyen, Nguyen Thi Thanh Binh, Linda J. Seligmann, Allison Truitt, Sarah Turner
[documentation, case files, expertise, social work, neoliberalism, socialism, Vietnam]