This dissertation describes the 'social edginess' experienced by people who live on the rural-urban fringe of Late Socialist Ho Chi Minh City. Building from eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in the outer-city district of Hóc Môn, this work explores a site where "rural Vietnam" and "urban Vietnam" intersect. In contrast to an idealized Vietnamese model of urban space that divides the city into inside and outside, as well as rural and urban, the people who live in outer city districts like Hóc Môn are ambiguously in between worlds. Neither inside nor outside, they are always uncomfortably both.
The ethnography exposes how life on the city's edge can be both alienating and empowering. The same properties that cast the outer-city as a zone excluded from the networks of power and privilege associated with the inner-city can also offer a means of thwarting the status quo. Saigon's edge is truly a double edge---an edge that cuts people off from access to resources and a cutting-edge zone of opportunity. Furthermore, by linking the multiple meanings of life on the edge to idealized Vietnamese stereotypes of rural and urban difference, and by showing parallels within Vietnamese kinship idioms of "inside" and "outside," this work provides a novel way of understanding social constructions of time and space in contemporary Vietnam. In addition to providing a local case study of urban change that builds from ethnographic descriptions of the rapid urban development in Hóc Môn, the work also provides a window into Vietnam's larger turn towards 'market socialism' and the celebration of urbanization. It shows how these transformations, which are clearly connected with globalization trends, still require us to pay close attention to particular Vietnamese models of social and spatial organization.
At all turns, the work critically poses detailed ethnographic descriptions of everyday life against official texts and representations. This critical juxtaposition provides a look beyond essentialist state mythologies that depend on pure rural and pure urban social types that simply do not exist. (source: ProQuest)
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