Erik Harms

Remote and edgy: New takes on old anthropological themes

Eight anthropologists working in various parts of Asia, Africa, and Latin America reflect on an essay by Edwin Ardener on the concept of remote areas recently reprinted in Hau(Volume 2, Issue 1). These reflections all show that the idea of the remote can be detached from its geographical moorings and understood not simply as a spatial concept but as a relativistic social construct. Considered in conjunction with the notion of edginess, they understand remoteness not so much as a place, but as a way of being. By purposefully comparing work in cities and in places more commonly described as remote, they show that the remote may be present in any site of anthropological inquiry.

Luxury and Rubble

Luxury and Rubble is the tale of two cities in Ho Chi Minh City. It is the story of two planned, mixed-use residential and commercial developments that are changing the face of Vietnam’s largest city. Since the early 1990s, such developments have been steadily reorganizing urban landscapes across the country. For many Vietnamese, they are a symbol of the country’s emergence into global modernity and of post-socialist economic reforms. However, they are also sites of great contestation, sparking land disputes and controversies over how to compensate evicted residents. In this penetrating ethnography, Erik Harms vividly portrays the human costs of urban reorganization as he explores the complex and sometimes contradictory experiences of individuals grappling with the forces of privatization in a socialist country. “With captivating ethnography and trenchant analysis, Erik Harms delves deeply into two communities created and destroyed by redevelopment in contemporary Ho Chi Minh City. He poignantly shows how master plans defining personhood in terms of property rights empower some to live in luxury, while leaving others in the rubble of dispossession.” ANN MARIE LESHKOWICH, author of Essential Trade: Vietnamese Women in a Changing Marketplace “Beautifully written. . . . A remarkable achievement in urban studies and a must-read for anyone interested in changing spatial form, sociality, rights consciousness, and class dynamics in neoliberal times.” LI ZHANG, author of In Search of Paradise: Middle-Class Living in a Chinese Metropolis “Once in a while, a book comes along and makes us rethink how cities and capitalism work. Luxury and Rubble is one of those, giving us new conceptual insights into urbanism and doing so through an intensely lived and beautifully narrated ethnography.” ANANYA ROY, editor of Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global ERIK HARMS is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Southeast Asia Studies at Yale University and the author of Saigon’s Edge: On the Margins of Ho Chi Minh City .

Porous Enclaves: Blurred Boundaries and Incomplete Exclusion in South East Asian Cities

Cities across Asia are increasingly dotted with large, upmarket, seemingly homogeneous and avowedly exclusive master-planned, mixed-use housing and commercial developments. From an outsiders perspective, these projects appear starkly uniform and to have been imposed on urban landscapes with little attempt to integrate them into local social, cultural and economic contexts. Recent research in South East Asia, however, shows how these developments are not in fact hermetically sealed from the surrounding world. Instead, they may be productively understood as ‘porous enclaves’, spaces marked not only by exclusion but by social interaction that cuts across the interfaces of inside and outside, public and private, city and country and local and foreign – all categories presumed to be kept separate in many modern city plans. This introductory article to this special issue on ‘Porous enclaves’ highlights new research at the interface of the porous city and the enclave, and calls on urban studies scholars to pay close attention to the social life within and among the porous enclaves that have emerged in South East Asia.

Book Review: The Birth of Vietnamese Political Journalism: Saigon 1916–1930PeycamPhilippe M.F., The Birth of Vietnamese Political Journalism: Saigon 1916–1930, Columbia University Press, New York, 2012, xi + 306 pp.

Chapter 5 examines the 1990s and covers material that is probably more familiar to most observers of modern South East Asia. Economic growth accelerated over the 1990s, and by 2001 per capita GDP was back to the 1970 figure. This was in spite of the fact that the UN-supervised elections produced a very unstable power-sharing government. But Slocomb argues that the growth produced an unbalanced economy with much of the new wealth concentrated in the main cities. Poverty was still widespread in rural areas and education and health indicators were very low in comparison with most other Asian economies. Her evaluation of the economic outlook in the twenty-first century is thus rather guarded; while she stresses the progress that has occurred since the early 1990s, she is also well aware of the development challenges that lie ahead for a country which has had more than its fair share of tragedy in the last 40 years. To sum up, Slocomb has produced an important book that all serious scholars of Cambodia will need to read. The presentation of statistical material could have been improved: there are no long-term series for key data such as population or rice production. The reader has to switch back and forth between chapters to get an idea of how key indicators have changed over the decades covered by the study. The Penn World Tables series for Cambodia (version 6.3) probably appeared too late for incorporation in the book, which is a pity as the reader is not given any information on how real per capita GDP has changed since the 1970s. There remains much work for future scholars to do in producing long-term statistical series. Nor does Slocomb attempt any comparison between Cambodia and other parts of Asia, or indeed between Cambodia and post-conflict economies in other parts of the world. The book is hardly the last word on Cambodian economic history, but it is a brave first attempt and all future studies will benefit from Slocomb’s pioneering work.