Danièle Bélanger

Magali Barbieri

Reconfiguring Families in Contemporary Vietnam chronicles and analyzes the most significant change for families in Vietnam's recent past – the transition to a market economy, referred to as Doi Moi in Vietnamese and generally translated as the "renovation". Two decades have passed since the wide-ranging institutional transformations that took place reconfigured the ways families produce and reproduce. The downsizing of the socialist welfare system and the return of the household as the unit of production and consumption redefined the boundaries between the public and private. This volume is the first to offer a multidisciplinary perspective that sets its gaze exclusively on processes at work in the everyday lives of families, and on the implications for gender and intergenerational relations. By focusing on families, this book shifts the spotlight from macro transformations of the renovation era, orchestrated by those in power, to micro-level transformations, experienced daily in households between husbands and wives, parents and children, grandparents and other family members.

Reconfiguring Families in Contemporary Vietnam

Jayne Werner

A collection of essays addressing the state of women's lives in Viet Nam during doi moi, the period of economic market reforms that characterized the nation in the 1990s. These fascinating and varied essays illuminate women's daily lives as they are shaped by culture, economics, and traditional ideals.

Doi Moi in Viet Nam

Gender, Household, State

Van Nguyen-Marshall

Lisa B. Welch Drummond

This pioneering collection brings together an international group of scholars to explore the Vietnamese middle class. From the leisure pursuits of the colonial middle class to the impact of the new urban rich on landscape of the countryside, this interdisciplinary volume explores the ways in which middle classness has been practiced in a wide range of contexts throughout the 20th century and into the 21st. In addition to offering insights into how middle classness was and is constituted and negotiated, this collection illuminates the cultural and social conditions of two distinctive periods in Vietnamese history. Three historical chapters consider how middle class status was experienced and displayed under French colonialism and in 1960s republican. These chapters offer examinations of middle classness through recreation, consumption, and associational life. Six contemporary studies examine the modes of experimentation and practice within middle class urban Vietnam. Still a sensitive topic politically, the contemporary middle class, nascent but increasingly powerful, is exerting a strong impact on the shape of contemporary society and culture, as well as on urban and rural landscapes. This volume offers a series of studies which critically interrogate the practices of those who engage in or aspire to urban middle-class lifestyles in Vietnam both in the past and in the present.

Danièle Bélanger

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