Those who don't know : modernity, risk, and transition in Hanoi's local markets

Abstract

My research is about the particular effects of Vietnam's economic liberalization program (known as "doi moi") on the local food and market system in Hanoi. Doi moi policies, which began in the late 1980s, have instituted major changes in both the national system of agricultural production and in Hanoi's local system of marketplaces. The doi moi reforms have created many new opportunities in Hanoi, but they have also re-configured social relationships and market spaces along the food chain to present new kinds of risk for consumers. These include harmful chemicals, goods of uncertain quality, and sellers who operate outside of the moral obligations of the dominant system of personal relationships. These things have not yet been resolved through regulation and have therefore been left to consumers and sellers to work out among themselves. The competition between various actors to manage foodborne risk in the absence of state regulation has taken place amidst the state's campaign to re-order Hanoi's market system according to neoiberal ideals.

(cont.) This has made the local market system a site for the enactment of a symbolic politics of modernity in which discourses that are really about risk and political economy have been obscured by their expression as a debate about "tradition" and modernity." Beneath the discourse of modernization lies a range of hybrid market worlds as well as systemic issues related to the transition from a centrally planned economy to a free market system.