Wandering Ghosts of Late Socialism

Conflict, Metaphor, and Memory in a Southern Vietnamese Marketplace

Bibliographic Data

ID3607736
AuthorsAnn Marie Leshkowich (College of the Holy Cross, corresponding author)
Year2008
Volume67
Issue1
Pages5-41
Publication date2008-02-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Journal of Asian Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0021-9118 • E-ISSN: 1752-0401
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1017/s0021911808000016
OpenAlexW2106075679
LanguageEN
Citations received24
References cited56

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

Communism · Harassment · Ho chi minh · Honor · Metaphor · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Socialism · Socioeconomics · Sociology · Theology · Vietnamese · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies

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