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This book examines the dynamics of connection and disconnection in the lives of contemporary Vietnamese. It features 11 chapters by anthropologists who draw upon research in both highland and lowland contexts to shed light on social capital disparities, migration inequalities and the benefits and perils of gift exchange. The authors investigate ethnic minority networks, the politics of poverty, patriotic citizenship, and the 'heritagisation' of culture

Vietnam's shift to a market-based society has brought about profound realignments in its people's relations with each other. As the nation continues its retreat from the legacies of war and socialism, significant social rifts have emerged that divide citizens by class, region and ethnicity. By drawing on social connections as a traditional resource, Vietnamese are able to accumulate wealth, overcome marginalisation and achieve social mobility. However, such relationship-building strategies are also fraught with peril for they have the potential to entrench pre-existing social divisions and lead to new forms of disconnectedness. This book examines the dynamics of connection and disconnection in the lives of contemporary Vietnamese. It features 11 chapters by anthropologists who draw upon research in both highland and lowland contexts to shed light on social capital disparities, migration inequalities and the benefits and perils of gift exchange. The authors investigate ethnic minority networks, the politics of poverty, patriotic citizenship, and the 'heritagisation' of culture. Tracing shifts in how Vietnamese people relate to their consociates and others, the chapters elucidate the social legacies of socialism, nation-building and the transition to a globalised market-based economy. With compelling case studies and including many previously unheard perspectives, this book offers original insights into social ties and divisions among the modern Vietnamese.

This insightful study provides an overview of the changing employment context in industrialized nations, the risks associated with population ageing and how these are being tackled. Prolonging working lives is high on the agenda of policy makers in most of the world's major industrialized nations. This book explains how they are keen to tackle issues associated with the ageing of populations, namely the funding of pension systems and predictions concerning a dwindling labour supply. Yet the recent history of older workers has primarily been one of premature exit from the labour force in the form of redundancy or early retirement. Add to this a previously plentiful supply of younger labour and it is clear that much of industry will be unprepared for the challenges of ageing workforces. Older Workers in an Ageing Society includes up-to-date knowledge on issues of workforce ageing and provides useful commentary on policy responses and will appeal to scholars and public policy-makers

Vietnam's shift to a market-based society has brought about profound realignments in its people's relations with each other. As the nation continues its retreat from the legacies of war and socialism, significant social rifts have emerged that divide citizens by class, region and ethnicity. By drawing on social connections as a traditional resource, Vietnamese are able to accumulate wealth, overcome marginalisation and achieve social mobility. However, such relationship-building strategies are also fraught with peril for they have the potential to entrench pre-existing social divisions and lead to new forms of disconnectedness. This book examines the dynamics of connection and disconnection in the lives of contemporary Vietnamese. It features 11 chapters by anthropologists who draw upon research in both highland and lowland contexts to shed light on social capital disparities, migration inequalities and the benefits and perils of gift exchange. The authors investigate ethnic minority networks, the politics of poverty, patriotic citizenship, and the 'heritagisation' of culture. Tracing shifts in how Vietnamese people relate to their consociates and others, the chapters elucidate the social legacies of socialism, nation-building and the transition to a globalised market-based economy. With compelling case studies and including many previously unheard perspectives, this book offers original insights into social ties and divisions among the modern Vietnamese.

As one of the world's few states that remains nominally socialist, Vietnam is today caught up in a set of profound changes. These changes are reshaping its society in a manner that the expounders of this nineteenth century doctrine and the founders of the twentieth century states who drew upon it for inspiration could scarcely have imagined. At the forefront of such changes has been the opening up of a substantial role for private economic interests, the intensification of commerce and integration with the global capitalist economy. Political institutions from the National Assembly to mass organizations such as the Farmer's Association have had to contend with the decentralization of the economic landscape and now serve as venues for the voicing of evermore diverse social interests. The media holds up a mirror to an increasingly pluralist society, and emerging civil society groupings, sectoral interests, and localist emphases have dragged the initiative for setting political and economic priorities away from the bureaucracy and the country's sole political party. The society has become more urbanized, the popularization of technologies such as motorbikes, the Internet, and mobile phones has transformed the way people communicate with each other. A flow of human movements both within the country and across borders has refigured people's relationships to place and home. The growing importance of particularist cultural, ethnic, and religious affiliations, both new and reaffirmed, gives voice to the complexity and dissonance of Vietnamese people's temporal and spatial experiences and to the tensions and divisions that have opened up within their society. This book is about one of the most challenging of these changes in reform-era Vietnam, the emergence of social inequalities. Social inequality refers to differences between people in their material well-being, their social position, cultural standing, or ability to influence others. It also refers to disparities in people's ability to ensure that they have a better future and that their children are secure, healthy, and have viable livelihoods.

This essay explores the contestatory nature of land disputes in rural Vietnam. It builds on the findings of the research essays in this special issue and on recent scholarship to identify what is politically significant about contemporary land conflicts. Rural land disputes implicate a multiplicity of state, quasi-state and non-state actors in public, sometimes violent, contestations over the values attached to land. Their overt, discursive and contentious characteristics, the complex dynamics of protest and dispute mediation, and the manner by which disputants engage and disengage from their state representatives are identified as important dimensions of rural land politics in modern Vietnam.

This paper attempts an explanation for the persistence of Khmer cultural identifications on the Ca Mau Peninsula of Vietnam. This low-lying peninsula is a unique human environment, where Khmer villages, Buddhist temple festivals and livelihood activities are centred on a network of saline-infested rivers. The presence of Khmer communities along these waterways is noteworthy, for much scholarship suggests that the waterways of the multi-ethnic lower Mekong region tend to be dominated by non-Khmer ethnic groups. The vigorous Khmer presence on the peninsula is even more intriguing given that the peninsula is a migratory and trade oriented region, long under Vietnamese administration and subject to military and environmental upheavals that have challenged Khmer tenure. The paper suggests that mastery of communal water harvesting allowed Khmers to survive the long saline water season and gave them a secure foothold in this region. Additionally, their collaborative water harvesting practices contributed to cohesion and a common identity among Khmers and helped strengthen the Theravada Buddhist wat as one of the key cultural institutions on the peninsula. However, the development of an extensive irrigation network by the Vietnamese state in the last thirty years has had the opposite effect. Canal developments facilitated intensive agriculture, immigration and the introduction of new cultural models into the peninsula, while creating economic and environmental insecurity for Khmers and undercutting the traditional grounds for collaboration. Such changes cast light on the links between ethnic identifications and the system of fresh water provision in the lower Mekong region.

In one of the first in-depth accounts of a society long rendered virtually inaccessible by war and political closure, Philip Taylor explores how the southern region of Vietnam was integrated politically and conceptually into the unified nation. Showing the ways in which modernity has been adapted as an indigenous identity in Vietnam, he traces the recent volatile path of such self-identification." "A case study of the diversity of ways in which social, political and economic change is interpreted locally, Fragments of the Present is an important guide to the challenges to global integration faced by the world's remaining Communist states."--BOOK JACKET.

The Vietnamese economic reforms of the 1980s and 1990s were accompanied by a number of significant reversals among state social scientists writing on the legacy of pre-socialist alternatives in southern Vietnam. After the failed attempt to carry the momentum of military victory into the project of post-war economic development, Vietnam's communist leaders identified "voluntarism" and lack of attention to "objective conditions" as the key weaknesses of their economic unification policies. To revitalize the project of constructing socialism, social science researchers were charged with reinventorying the distinctive attributes which the area of Vietnam below the 17th parallel, could contribute to the nation's reforms.