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Currencies of Imagination , livre ebook

Cornell University Press - V. Small Ivan

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217 pages

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In Vietnam, international remittances from the Vietnamese diaspora are quantitatively significant and contribute important economic inputs. Yet beyond capital transfer, these diasporic remittance economies offer insight into an unfolding transformation of Vietnamese society through the extension of imaginations and ontological possibilities that accompany them. Currencies of Imagination examines the complex role of remittances as money and as gifts that flow across, and mediate between, transnational kinship networks dispersed by exile and migration.Long distance international gift exchanges and channels in a neoliberal political economy juxtapose the increasing cross-border mobility of remittance financial flows against the relative confines of state bounded bodies. In this contradiction Ivan V. Small reveals a creative space for emergent imaginaries that disrupt local structures and scales of desire, labor and expectation. Furthermore, the particular characteristics of remittance channels and mediums in a global economy, including transnational mobility and exchangeable value, affect and reflect the relations, aspirations, and orientations of the exchange participants. Small traces a genealogy of how this phenomenon has shifted through changing remittance forms and transfer infrastructures, from material and black market to formal bank and money services. Transformations in the affective and institutional relations among givers, receivers, and remittance facilitators accompany each of these shifts, illustrating that the socio-cultural work of remittances extends far beyond the formal economic realm they are usually consigned to.

Sujets

Sociologie, société et politique

International finance

Vietnam

History of Asia

Viêt Nam

Migration

Informations

Publié par	Cornell University Press
Date de parution	15 janvier 2019
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781501716904
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	7 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,7500€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

CURRENCIES OF IMAGINATION

CURRENCIES OF IMAGINATION Channeling Money and Chasing Mobility in Vietnam

IvaN V. SMaLL

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA AND LONDON

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress .cornell.edu.

First published 2018 by Cornell University Press

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data

Names: Small, Ivan Victor, 1972–author. Title: Currencies of imagination : channeling money and chasing mobility in Vietnam / Ivan V. Small. Description: Ithaca [New York] : Cornell University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identiﬁers: LCCN 2018016486 (print) | LCCN 2018017641 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501716904 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501716898 (epub/mobi) | ISBN 9781501716874 | ISBN 9781501716874 (cloth ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781501716881 (pbk. ; alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Vietnamese—United States—Economic conditions. | Vietnamese—United States—Social conditions. | Emigrant Remittances— Vietnam. | Vietnam—Economic conditions—1975–| Immigrants—Family relationships—Vietnam. | Immigrants—Family Relationships—United States. | Money—Social aspects—Vietnam. | Money—Social aspects—United States. | Families—Economic Aspects—Vietnam. | Families—Economic aspects—United States. | Transnationalism—Social aspects—United States. | Transnationalism—Social aspects—Vietnam. Classiﬁcation: LCC E184.V53 (ebook) | LCC E184.V53 S63 2018 (print) | DDC 973/.0495922—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018016486

Cover image: Fisherman navigating out to sea on the coast of central Vietnam, 2017. Photo by Ivan V. Small.

Contents

List of Illustrations Foreword Acknowledgments

Introduction:Money, Gifts, and Flows

1. The “Dangerous” Gift 2. Sài Gòn, Overlaid by HồChíMinh:Capitalist Desires and Deferrals3. Coastal Flows and Hypothetical Horizons 4. The Beautiful, Tired Country 5. Crossing the Bridge . . . Home?

Conclusion:NotYetEnough:Mobility and Its Malcontents

Afterword Notes Bibliography Index

vi vii xi

123

139

157 171 181 195

Illustrations

1. Navigating out to sea, south central coast of Vietnam xvi 2. Man with dollar bill from overseas relative 6 3. Remittance accounting 10 4. State war martyrs graveyard 41 5. Returning overseas Vietnamese with boxes, Tân Sơn Nhấ47t Airport, Saigon 6. Ho Chi Minh City, fourth district 55 7. Tracing diasporic remittance kinship networks 61 8. Waiting for an interview for a visa, U.S. consulate, Ho Chi Minh City 69 9. ANhàViệt Kiềuand its neighbors 76 10.Puttingmoneyonadrumstickatawhalegodfestival,QuyNhơn 89 11. Boats and the horizon 97 12. Phước Lộc ThọAsian Garden Mall, Little Saigon, California 103 13.Anabandonedboat,BìnhĐị155nh Province 14. Vietnamese American remittance shop, San Jose, California 162 15. Vietnamese bank with remittance services 166

Foreword

In the spirit of anthropological reﬂexivity (Marcus and Fischer 1999; Clifford and Marcus 2010), I begin this book by acknowledging that this project has been in part framed and motivated by my personal observations and experiences with remittances to Vietnam in my own American family. As a child growing up in New Jersey in the 1970s and 1980s, I often watched my mother, a Vietnamese immigrant who came to the United States in the 1960s as a student, pack boxes full of goods to send to family members in Vietnam who were living under harsh and largely unknown political and economic conditions. These material goods wereoftenlacedwithhiddendollars,foreshadowingsomeofthestoriesthattheinformants in the present study relate, for my grandfather, uncle, cousins, and other members of my extended family in Vietnam. Sometimes my mother would ask me to write a short note to my grandfather, whom I had not met since I vis ited Vietnam at the age of one, to slip into the box. The ﬁnancial, material, and emotional ﬂows between our family and distant kin in Vietnam continued as the years went by. As I grew up, I saw family relationships revived but also some deterioration in the wake of transnational family sponsorships, trips back to Vietnam and remittance obligations—all of which involved various degrees of emotional expectation and exhaustion. In 2003, between getting a master’s degree in international affairs and start ing work on my PhD in cultural anthropology, I spent ﬁve months in Vietnam looking for a research topic that would allow me to apply a grounded social and cultural lens to my longstanding interest in macrolevel issues related to the global political economy. I was accompanied by my bàngoại (maternal grand mother), who had emigrated from Vietnam to the United States in 1981 to live with our family but had often been dissatisﬁed in her new environs and fre quently expressed a longing to return to her homeland and extended family. Carrying a bag full of thousands of crisp dollar bills earmarked for various rela tives, I traveled to Vietnam with my grandmother to explore what options she might have were she to return to live there. We explored and feasted, traveling to visit family members, tourist sites, and temples. Together we celebrated Tết (the lunar new year) in her home village (quê) and delivered much money and many gifts. Over the course of the trip, I was exposed to the complexities and compli cations of money in cementing and eroding social relations. Eventually I realized that the doctoral research topic I was searching for had been right in front of me,

vii

viii

Foreword

and that I had been participating in it all along. Intriguing stories from my family’s past that had been unknown to me were recounted by relatives on mul tiple occasions, making me increasingly aware of a side of my heritage that I had largely put aside when I was growing up. My grandmother eventually returned to the United States, somewhat tired and occasionally wary of some of the rela tives, friends, and neighbors whom we had visited and given presents to, but also relieved and grateful to have reestablished relationships with her extended kin network and appreciative of the hospitality they had shown us. I returned to Vietnam in 2007 for an extended period of time to conduct the present study on the social dynamics of migration and remittances across a broad spectrum of families and communities. During this period I based myself in Ho Chi Minh City, which, under the name of Saigon, had been the capital of South Vietnam. Many Vietnamese left their country from that city and now are returning to it, with the ongoing economic and political opening of the country. From there, I followed remittances to what I term in this book “remittance geog raphies,” including the central coast and the Mekong Delta. I use this term because each location had unique features in which remittances played an important role, but that role varied depending on context, as I will describe in the chapters that follow. I spent eighteen months in Vietnam during this ﬁrst period of ﬁeld work, without returning to the United States. When I ﬁnally did return, I went to California, home to the largest Vietnamese American communities in the United States. I lived in the greater San Francisco and Los Angeles metropolitan areas, to better understand the other side of the transPaciﬁc migration and re mittance equation. In all, I spent nearly two uninterrupted years conducting multisited ﬁeldwork and examining a host of angles to consider how remit tances have facilitated and complicated transnational kin and community rela tions among Vietnamese in Vietnam and the United States since the end of the Vietnam War. In deconstructing what remittances are and what they represent, I interrogate the roles, symbolisms, and affects of the movement of money and gifts, as well as the global and state infrastructures that facilitate their transfer and exchange. In the summer of 2015, after completing my ﬁrst year in a tenuretrack fac ulty position, I returned to Vietnam for three months to follow up on my earlier investigations as well as begin new research. I spent a portion of this summer traveling in Vietnam for the ﬁrst time with my mother, who had stayed away from the country for nearly twenty years in part due to the exhaustion that ex tended family obligations and memories had caused her. For me it was a re markable opportunity to see my mother rediscover and experience the land of her birth together with my father, who had spent his formative postcollege years in Vietnam working with agricultural development initiatives. Together

Foreword

we reﬂected on all that had changed since the 1960s and participated in reestab lishing relationships with places and people from which our family had long been disconnected. This book is not an autoethnography, and my purpose is not to tell this story here.However,inthespiritofreﬂexivityIrelateitbrieﬂytoofferthereadersome transparency and insight into the motivations and frameworks that may have inﬂuenced my interests in and orientation toward this study. The chapters that follow relate stories of money, things, and people, some of which may be pieced together and some that simply stand on their own. If I came to this study with an interest in clearly understanding the patterns by which remittances shape and manage social relations, inﬂuenced perhaps by my own complex ex periences with them, I come away from it not necessarily more informed—able to offer an interpretive or predictive framework or blueprint of how remittances work—but rather even more intrigued by themanyways they work and are re peated even when they do not work. The question of work itself, and how money reveals the connections we often implicitly weave between conceptions of iden tity and labor, will also be addressed in this study. If anthropological analysis can be understood as a dialectic between ethnography and theory (Boyer, Faubion, and Marcus 2015), this book offers the reader a journey that engages both, and both with each other. I can only hope that the experience of reading this book willbeascompellingandthoughtprovokingasmyownunforgettablejourneyresearching and writing it, and that it may inspire more inquiries and voyages in turn.