Reconfiguring Families in Contemporary Vietnam

Danièle Bélanger, Magali Barbieri, Danièle Bélanger, Magali Barbieri

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780804771122
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Matrimonio y sociología familiar

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.

Chapter One

Introduction

State, Families, and the Making of Transitions in Vietnam

DANIÈLE BÉLANGER AND MAGALI BARBIERI

Vietnamese families have experienced dramatic and transformative events through the country’s social, political, and economic history between the colonial period and current times. Indeed, historical benchmarks, such as colonization, independence, socialism, collectivization, the American War, the end of the Cold War, and the transition to a market economy have all resulted in far-reaching changes for family life. At the same time, families, through their agency and the deployment of myriad strategies, have also given shape and direction to these major historical events and social mutations. Among the numerous important events in Vietnam’s contemporary history, two dates stand out as particularly significant for Vietnamese families: first, the formation of an independent socialist state in the North in 1954 and, second, the official adoption of a market-oriented economic system in 1986. The respective institutional and moral environments brought about by these two “transitions” meant that families had to adjust, adapt, negotiate, and accommodate to new settings and imperatives of daily life. Several significant events are comingled in these two major transformations. These include the 1945—54 Colonial War, followed by independence and the partition between North and South in 1954, which separated entire families for two decades; the wars fought in Cambodia, against the United States, and at the Chinese border that took millions of men and women away from home either temporarily or permanently; and the end of the American War, followed by reunification in 1975, which opened the internal border and reinvigorated exchanges and migration between the North and the South. This book focuses on the most recent and 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.” Over two decades have passed since a wide range of institutions were transformed, which reconfigured the ways families produce and reproduce.

The impetus for this book lies in the argument that much of the renovation’s accomplishment as an economic transition is attributable to families’ strategies in adapting to the new institutional and economic setting. The new economic and political bargain between the state and families prompted families to take a central role in making the Vietnamese transition a success. Put simply, 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 the private. Some other edited collections have examined the widespread implications of the transition to a market economy for Vietnamese society (see Luong 2003; McCargo 2004; Taylor 2004). This volume, however, is the first to utilize a multidisciplinary perspective and to focus 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 microlevel transformations, experienced daily in households between husbands and wives, parents and children, and grandparents and other family members. In addition, it is our contention that while a rich body of scholarly work on Vietnamese contemporary society exists, a focus on families can contribute to a better understanding of postsocialist or late socialist capitalism, a shift also experienced by several countries of the world in the aftermath of the Cold War. For this reason, throughout this book, we refer to the renovation as a broad term encompassing not only economic changes but also a wide range of transformations experienced by Vietnamese society and, more particularly, families in many aspects of daily life. It is our hope that the accounts provided in this book will bring to life the significance of Doi Moi for families and of families for Doi Moi.

Through a multidisciplinary lens, authors of this book constructed their chapters around the following questions: What is the significance of the economic and institutional restructuring for families? How has the elimination of entitlement programs and fully subsidized social services impacted families’ modes of organization? Have gender and intergenerational relations been reconfigured by the new institutional setting? What is the significance of increased socioeconomic differentiation and geographic mobility on family relations? How have life-cycle transitions, such as marriage, home leaving, school leaving, and entry into the workforce, changed? How have state-family relations been redefined? Examining these issues from the standpoints of sociology, anthropology, demography, and economics, and using a variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives, authors of this book examine the renovation from the family’s viewpoint to take stock of two decades of family life in late socialism.¹ In sum, this book brings together chapters with a common focus on “families” and transcends disciplinary boundaries in order to shed light on fundamental social processes that define contemporary Vietnamese society.

This introductory chapter summarizes the contributions of this book to the recent literature on contemporary Vietnam. First, we discuss the “transition” period from socialism to capitalism that this book focuses on. Second, we introduce the conceptual and theoretical perspectives that bring the chapters together. Third, we examine family changes in presocialist and prerenovation times. Fourth, we place families in the context of Doi Moi and present the major themes emerging from this book. Our readership includes those who share an interest in families in developing Asia, in postsocialist societies, and in Vietnam.

The Contested Terrains of “Transition” and “Renovation”

One danger of dissecting Vietnam’s history using the disputed concept of “transition” as a departure point for examining society lies in the perils of making recent history “begin” with capitalism in the late socialist era. The collapse of communist regimes in Europe and Russia generated a new research area in the social sciences—postsocialism or postcommunism—that is concerned with the causes and implications of the “transition” to new social, political, and economic structures (Bonker, Muller, and Pickel 2002; Pickles and Smith 1998). Some critics have called the transition concept “a construct of the West” (Bersegian 2000), implying a “rescue scenario” from the economic failure and political oppression of communism to the promises of the market economy and freedom of liberal democracies (Berdahl 2000). In short, evolutionary assumptions often impregnate the language and discussion around the “transition.” Several authors have scrutinized the assumption that the renovation was the turning point for families. Scholarly work on Asian states that abandoned the socialist soviet-style economy reached Western audiences after the end of the Cold War and thus heavily emphasized the transition. In the 1990s, international collaboration and funding allowed the development of a new wave of research in Vietnam, including projects and surveys on family issues. In the bulk of firsthand research on Vietnam conducted since the early 1990s, the transition has prompted much research and been conceived as necessarily entailing change.² While this departure point is generally taken for granted in scholarly work on Vietnam,³ one of our objectives is to step back and view families in their historical context to situate “change” in a wider perspective.

In this respect, we consider that the so-called “transition” is far from being an entirely abrupt transformation in all arenas of social life. In fact, the renovation partly legitimized processes under way for some years: the state had no choice but to legalize and accelerate a de facto situation. In other words, to conceptualize that political leaders and international actors essentially concocted and imposed the transition on the country is to ignore the power of local and daily politics to redefine and redirect national objectives (Kerkvliet 2005). In nations that experienced open, or even revolutionary, processes, this fact is perhaps evident. In the cases of China and Vietnam, where limited public contestation took place before the official dismantling of the communist economy, it is less so. Kerkvliet’s look at agriculture has vividly brought to light the importance of local contestation and adaptation that preceded the abandonment of the socialist economic system (Kerkvliet 2005). His examination of the role played by local-level politics in the abandonment of collective agriculture powerfully illustrates how at least a decade of resistance and local initiatives undermined and weakened collectives to the point that they were no longer viable in the early 1980s. We echo this argument in the sphere of families. The state’s approach to family matters had to adapt to processes of resistance and negotiation in which families actively engaged. Family practices antedating the official renovation of the economy included a vibrant underground private petty trade; families’ contestations of state involvement in marriage, divorce, and reproduction; and the maintenance of presocialist worldviews and rituals in family daily life. Part of the difficulty here, nonetheless, lies in the dearth of research examining family strategies and practices prior to the abandonment of the socialist planned economy.

While maintaining our awareness of the complex meaning of the renovation and sharing a desire to avoid preconceived “impacts” and “consequences” of this process on families, the chapters of this book, together, indicate that, on the one hand, the late 1980s and 1990s did encompass fundamental changes that have altered family relations, practices, and behaviors. Based on firsthand fieldwork and the analysis of existing data, the authors document and discuss how the transformation of the institutional and economic settings affected family relations. For instance, a new organization of work, both in the urban and agricultural areas, assigned new roles to households and families, entailing new modes of sharing and collaborating (see Danièle Bélanger and Katherine Pendakis, Truong Huyen Chi, Hy Van Luong, and Xavier Oudin, this volume). On the other hand, this book shows how families are both core and stable institutions, that retained and reinvented old ways in an attempt to mediate and attenuate the speed of change imposed, in part, by internal and international forces. As leading family historian Tamara Hareven contends, families are both agents of change and custodians of tradition (Hareven 2000). Research on Vietnam has documented the revival and adaptation of presocialist rituals and symbolism, since the early 1990s, and shows how families never really abandoned these practices during the decades in which they were discouraged, if not prohibited (Luong 1993; Malarney 2002). Thus, families—as the guardians of practices and symbols—can actively contest change and retain values. Through processes of contestation, adaptation, resistance, and negotiation, families turned the transition into a daily reality (Perry and Selden 2000). Together, chapters of this book provide compelling evidence that the reforms have had a far-reaching impact on families. At the same time, they vividly illustrate how families propelled and made possible the transition, while living in continuity with the past. One observation emerging from this volume is that Vietnamese families are complex and connected entities that reflect actively and strategically.

In addition to being cautious about the meaning of the economic transformations for families, we apprehend the reforms of 1986 in a broad sense. Indeed, the political shift that accompanied the economic transition, and the changes in daily lives that were brought about by this political change, have often been neglected in research (An and Tréglodé 2003). Since the 1980s, the Communist Party has abandoned many mechanisms previously devoted to the promotion of the socialist ideology and to the close surveillance of its citizens. The nation’s insertion into the global economy and the maintenance of a political status quo within the country are examples of how resources have been mobilized to other ends. In family daily life, these changes have translated into a reduced need to comply with norms, including family norms, imposed by Communist Party lines. Outdoor speakers that used to educate peasants in villages about socialist ideology practice and imperatives are still utilized today, but for other purposes. In rural communities, for instance, private recruitment agencies enter villages to enroll peasants as international migrant workers bound for Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, or Taiwan and “advertise” their need for (cheap) labor using the community speakers. The public speakers (loa), which are emblematic of Vietnam’s communist history, are found in many localities of the country (particularly in the North) and now serve a capitalist order. While the country has not experienced a collapse of its communist regime, like the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and countries in Eastern Europe, the development of capitalist modes of production and consumption has profoundly altered the political state-family relations in Vietnam. This shift in political relations between the state and its citizens constitutes a central element of recent social change in Vietnamese society (Kerkvliet 2003).

Theoretical Lines of Inquiry and Contributions

FAMILY AGENCY

Another objective of this collection is to move family theory forward using Vietnam, taken here as a developing country of Southeast Asia and as an example of a socialist country that experienced a recent transition to capitalism and became an increasingly globalized and connected nation. In this regard, we conceive of families primarily as active agents of social change. The concept of agency is central to contemporary sociology; however, the focus is primarily on individual agency. Edgar argues that we need to shift our attention to families because “it is not the individual that acts reflexively; it is the family which mediates the impact of globalization, community resources and government action for and with individuals acting as part of a sharing, interactive unit” (Edgar 2004, 4). Thus, he puts forward the concept of family agency as being the driving force behind social change, particularly in developing societies “where life chances are largely constrained by family background, networks and values” (Edgar 2004, 3). For family theory to become relevant to non-Western societies, Edgar contends that a reassessment of family theory, a theoretical body fraught with a Western bias, is required. A critique of existing family theory that considers the individual above the family and the call for reversing this order is particularly relevant in the case of Vietnam. The conceptualization of families as central, mediating agents of social change and globalization informs this introduction as well as the analyses presented in this book. Indeed, the following chapters point to the centrality of agency, resilience, and adaptation in understanding Vietnamese families. This agency, however, manifests itself in a context that shapes the space in which families have to adjust, negotiate, and strategize.

FAMILY IDEALIZED MORALITY

In an attempt to develop family theory relevant for the study of Asian societies, family theorist Peter McDonald has put forward the concept of a “family idealized morality.” A “family idealized morality is embedded within the belief structure of what is proper family behavior and ”this belief structure will have developed over a long period of the society’s history“ (McDonald 1994, 22). Furthermore, McDonald postulates that an idealized family morality exists within all societies but with large variat...