Papers

• Infrastructural impositions: Ethnic minority traders and their marketplace manoeuvres in upland Vietnam. Sarah Turner McGill University

  In Vietnam’s northern mountainous borderlands, ethnic minority Hmong and Mien farmers must constantly negotiate the Vietnamese state’s aspirations to bring these rural communities under greater control. The state is working hard to integrate this territorial periphery, along with its people, land, and resources, to better align with centralised objectives. These efforts are closely linked to a number of infrastructure programmes. I focus here on one such state-driven infrastructure project, namely the ‘upgrading’ and construction of new permanent marketplaces. This is part of the state’s ‘New Countryside Programme’ which necessitates eliminating what officials regard as undesirable and uncontrollable elements of marketplace trade. As such, informal marketplaces initiated by local residents – and which meet local needs and priorities – are deemed in need of formalisation to create ‘aesthetic order’. Moreover, as unambiguously stated in the 2003 Decree on the Development and Management of Marketplaces, “preventing and putting an end to the state of marketplaces emerging spontaneously or built in contravention of planning” is of key importance. Drawing on conceptual literature from the infrastructural turn, especially regarding infrastructural violence and infrastructural lives, I examine the impact of these projects on upland ethnic minority marketplace traders and their livelihoods. I highlight how individual traders (re)shape specific infrastructural lives with tactics that include subtly disrupting or resisting such state-supported initiatives. I make the case that attention needs to be paid to infrastructure projects that might be only barely perceptible but are nonetheless perpetuating slow forms of infrastructural violence in Vietnam’s uplands.

• Small Hydropower, Slow Violence, and Gendered Struggles in Northwest Vietnam Nga Dao York University

  Small hydropower has widely been considered as a renewable energy with minimum adverse
  social and environmental impacts. However, the expansion of small hydropower in the
  northwest uplands of Vietnam over the last two decades has created and even normalized
  persistent and multidimensional water injustice for ethnic minority groups in the region. For
  some, this expansion has meant persistent, but silent, generational, and cumulative
  experiences of marginalization and impoverishment, and the erosion of a way of life. Extractive
  activities redistribute resources and decision-making power, reconstruct identities, but not
  without igniting resistance. Local ethnic minority households struggle in negotiating their
  everyday realities, which has been occupied with livelihood maintenance, social interactions,
  and fights over their use/control of resources. This is characterised as a type of “slow violence”
  (Nixon 2011) or “slow dissent” (Murrey 2016) that has spanned generations and is often
  overlooked. My work unravels the particular gendered workings of this slow violence, drawing
  on over a decade of fieldwork in the northwest uplands where hundreds of small hydro-
  development projects have been planned and implemented since early 2000s. Seemingly
  mundane tasks carried out by women, like cooking, weaving and dying fabrics, or cultivating
  vegetables are revealed through a gendered perspective to be foundational in cultivating
  community resilience, solidarity and resistance in the face of ongoing injustices and hardships
  brought about by small hydropower development in Vietnam’s northwest uplands.

• From Fields to Fish: Aquaculture Infrastructure and Its Impacts on Ethnic Minority Communities in Northern Vietnam Peter Garber McGill University

  In the uplands of northern Vietnam, the majority of ethnic minority farmers are adapting to economic reforms and market integration by diversifying their livelihoods. For those with the necessary resources, this has included the cultivation of trout and sturgeon, both introduced species. This shift, propelled by state policies and growing demand from lowland consumers, signifies an important transition from farmers’ previous small-scale trade of non-timber forest products and upland livestock. It also relies on an assortment of new infrastructure and skills which are completely new to these farmers. Building appropriate fish tanks, determining the correct fish food and antibiotics, regulating water supplies, and transporting live fish, are all novel skillsets that these farmers are having to learn rapidly, most frequently by watching and talking to neighbours and relatives. We evaluate the socio-economic, cultural, and environmental repercussions of fish farming on these communities, questioning the potential for new market dependencies to entrap farmers. Despite concerns of entrapment (Hodder, 2016), my findings reveal that fish farming usually serves as supplemental income, allowing long-standing agricultural practices to continue alongside new market engagements, rather than entrapping farmers more deeply into the market economy. This study highlights the adaptability of Hmong and Mien households to new infrastructural options, challenging the notion of inescapable market dependency. It contributes to the wider discourse on the impact of infrastructural changes on livelihood transformations, market integration, and socio-economic shifts in rural ethnic minority areas of Vietnam.

• Cultural Concretions: Hmong Creative Adaptation In Vietnam Jean Michaud Université Laval

  This analysis, informed by the infrastructural turn, considers concrete not just as a material but as a socio-material agent reshaping socio-cultural norms and community resilience in the face of modernity. Among the Hmong or rural northern Vietnam, the widespread adoption of concrete in construction profoundly impacts the socio-cultural landscapes. A shift from bamboo, wood, and thatch housing to incorporating brick, mortar and concrete signifies more than a mere architectural change; it underlines a cultural challenge. Historically, Hmong dwellings, with their earthen floors, were closely linked to life events like birth and death. Building on long-term ethnographic work, one specific case that I focus on is how this transition challenges the burial of newborns’ placentas, a practice embedded in Hmong animistic worldviews and essential for connecting the living with ancestral spirits. Hmong families have found ways to creatively incorporating concrete into their lives while preserving cultural practices. This adaptation highlights a careful embrace of modernity, balancing practical benefits with ensuring the resilience of cultural identity. This case study underscores the interplay between state-led modernization efforts, the materiality of infrastructure, and ethnic minority worldviews, revealing the nuanced strategies Hmong households employ to navigate the complexities of modern life in Vietnam.

Abstract