Rearranging Care, Reconfiguring Gender: Family and Household Business in Post-Đổi Mới Vietnam

Abstract

This paper locates changes in care practices and gender roles within the broader context of marketisation. The context is a northern Vietnamese village that has experienced an immense expansion in its wholesale clothing market since the beginning of the 2000s. The paper discusses how the current situation encourages women and men to assume new tasks at home and in the trade business, and how this process of changing gender roles across generations is driven by and again reinforces shifting notions of femininity and masculinity. Furthermore, the paper inquires how gendered expectations of care play into national level struggles over development and reinforce social hierarchies. The findings are based on twelve months of anthropological fieldwork, including in-depth and life-story interviews, informal conversations and participant observation.

Keywords:

• Care
• Gender
• Traders
• Family Businesses
• Femininity
• Masculinity
• Vietnam

Acknowledgements

This research was part of a broader project conducted from 2012 to 2013, supported by the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle (Saale), Germany. The author thanks the Ninh Hiệp traders and their families, colleagues and assistants in Vietnam, and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology and the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies, University of Zurich. My analysis has benefited from conversations with several friends and colleagues, especially Nguyễn Trường Giang, Varsha Patel, Anne Breubeck and Alexander Blechschmidt.

Notes

1 Decree No. 02/2003/ND-CP dated 14 January 2013 on development and management of marketplaces.

2 See, for example, Alexander (1998) and Brenner (1998) for Java.

3 See, for example, Arber and Gilbert (1989); Thelen (2005); Kay (2007); Hoang and Yeoh (2011); Naguib (2016); Nguyen (Forthcoming).

4 One quarter of all households in Vietnam are considered female-headed, with two-thirds of female household heads being either widowed or residing geographically separately from their husband. Out of all households where the household head is married and lives with the spouse, 96 per cent are male-headed (FAO/UNDP Vietnam 2002).

5 The administrative units used in the Vietnamese countryside are communes (xã), consisting of villages (làng or thôn), which are further divided into hamlets (xóm). Ninh Hiệp is classified as a commune with nine hamlets, lacking the intermediary category of village. However, when talking about the life space of a rural population, Ninh Hiệp is often referred to as a village, and only as a commune in relation to its political structure (Horat 2017, 49).

6 All names in this paper are pseudonyms.

7 The campaign contains ‘5 Withouts: Without poverty, law violations and social evils, domestic violence, giving birth to more than 2 children, having malnourished and school drop-out children; 3 Cleans: clean house, kitchen and surrounding lanes’ (Tam Binh 2015).

8 As village endogamy is common in northern and central Vietnam, spouses from within the community are generally preferred (Luong 2003, 100); yet, in Ninh Hiệp, women from within the village seem to have a real advantage over women from outside when it comes to managing a trade business, because they are provided with the required knowledge and experience from early on.

9 In Vietnam, the oldest son is in charge of carrying out important ritual tasks of his patrilineage, such as at funerals and death anniversaries of deceased members of his patrilineage (Rydstrøm 2003, 84–88).