Neither survival nor accumulation

Marketisation and rural livelihood diversification in northern Vietnam

Bibliographic Data

ID9083523
AuthorsMinh Chau Lam (corresponding author)
Year2020
Volume51
Issue3
Pages435-456
Publication date2020-09-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Southeast Asian Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0022-4634 • E-ISSN: 1474-0680
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s002246342000051x
OpenAlexW3102878878
LanguageEN
References cited36

Building on ethnographic fieldwork in a northern Vietnamese village, this article explores how rural households have negotiated the opportunities and uncertainties of marketisation (Đổi Mới). I focus on the surprising ways local households have handled the state's push to diversify livelihoods and adopt commercial home-based sidelines: by means of being đa gi năng , a local term that means ‘keeping many livelihood options and never putting all eggs in one basket’. In pursuit of đa gi năng , local households have actively adopted home-based production even when they were doing well with paddy farming and faced no subsistence crisis. However, they have evaded what state officials want most: specialising in a single home-production enterprise in rational maximising ways to accumulate transformational wealth. The idea of đa gi năng calls into question two contrasting universal approaches to rural households’ motivations for livelihood diversification: either a desperate search for survival by passive victims of market forces, or a quest for wealth accumulation by rational maximisers without careful judgement of potential risks to one's family

Agriculture · Business · Development economics · Diversification (marketing strategy) · Economic growth · Economics · Geography · Livelihood · Subsistence agriculture · Vietnamese · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development · Marketing · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies

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