Mandy Thomas

Out of Control: Emergent Cultural Landscapes and Political Change in Urban Vietnam

This paper plots the recent changes in the uses of public space in Hanoi, Vietnam. It is argued that the economic and social changes in contemporary Vietnam have paved the way for a dramatic transformation in the ways in which streets, pavements and markets are experienced and imagined by the populace. The efflorescence of individual mobility, street-trading and public crowding around certain popular events has led to the emergence of a distinct public sphere, one which is not immune from state control and censure but which is a flagrant rebuttal of the states appeal. The immediate struggles over space herald a new discursive arena for the contest over Vietnamese national imagery as represented in cultural heritage and public space, memorials and state-controlled events which the public are rapidly deserting. The paper concludes by suggesting that the everyday cultural practices that have created a bustling streetlife in urban Vietnam will inevitably provide the vitality and spectacle for the destabilisation of state control in a struggle for meanings in public space.

Autistic Artists Give Clues to Cognition

Certain autistic children whose linguistic ability is virtually nonexistent can draw natural scenes from memory with astonishing accuracy. In particular their drawings display convincing perspective. In contrast, normal children of the same preschool age group and even untrained adults draw primitive schematics or symbols of objects which they can verbally identify. These are usually conceptual outlines devoid of detail. It is argued that the difference between autistic child artists and normal individuals is that autistic artists make no assumptions about what is to be seen in their environment. They have not formed mental representations of what is significant and consequently perceive all details as equally important. Equivalently, they do not impose visual or linguistic schema—a process necessary for rapid conceptualisation in a dynamic existence, especially when the information presented to the eye is incomplete.

Australian Aboriginal words in English : their origin and meaning

This extensive reference provides authoritative information about the history of over 400 words from Aboriginal languages, offering the fullest available information about their Aboriginal background and Australian English history. The book begins with a general history of the 250 Australian aboriginal languages, including profiles of the languages that have been most significant as sources for borrowing. The words are then grouped according to subject: birds, fish, edible flora, dwellings, etc., with each work listed in a dictionary-style entry. The book concludes by addressing how words changed in English, and discusses English words that have since been adopted into Aboriginal languages.

Public spaces/public disgraces: crowds and the state in contemporary Vietnam

This article argues that a semantic shift in the crowd in Vietnam over the last decade has allowed public space to become a site through which transgressive ideologies and desires may have an outlet. At a time of accelerating social change, the state has effectively delimited public criticism yet a fragile but assertive form of Vietnamese democratic practice has arisen in public space, at the margins of official society, in sites previously equated with state control. Official state functions attract only small audiences, and rather than celebrating the dominance of the party, reveal the disengagement of the populace in the partys activities. Where crowds were always a component of state (stage)-managed events, now public spaces are attracting large numbers of people for supposedly non-political activities which may become transgressive acts condemned by the regime. In support of the notion that crowding is an opening up of the possibility of more subversive political actions, the paper presents an analysis of recent crowd formations and the states reaction to them. The analysis reveals the modalities through which popular culture has provided the public with the means to transcend the constraints of official, authorized, and legitimate codes of behaviour in public space. Changes in the use of public space, it is argued, map the sets of relations between the public and the state, making these transforming relationships visible, although fraught with contradictions and anomalies.

Young Women and Emergent Postsocialist Sensibilities in Contemporary Vietnam

The material we have collected for analysis is from interviews in Hanoi as well as from popular texts newspapers magazines films and internet sites. From October to November 2001 and November to December 2002 Mandy Thomas conducted a series of interviews with young people in Hanoi in five internet cafes located in the densely populated old city centrally located near Hoan Kiem Lake. Internet cafes in Hanoi are the principal sites for accessing the internet as most young people do not own computers at home or have domestic internet access. The old part of the city in which there are many restaurants tourist cafes and small hotels has become the major site for these cafes which are small crowded spaces often overflowing with young people online or waiting for access to a computer. In total more than 20 in-depth interviews were recorded along with observations at each of the internet cafes and throughout central Hanoi all of which were also sites for research into the everyday popular activities of young women. During these two research periods interviews were also conducted with a cross-section of families about their consumption of popular cultural products. On separate field trips to Vietnam Nguyen Bich Thuan interviewed ten young women in Hanoi from a diverse range of backgrounds in May 2002 and a comparative group in Ho Chi Minh City in February 2003. Further the present research builds on a decade of research on social change that both authors have undertaken in both major cities. Through our attention to both everyday culture and recent media and internet articles we read popular culture as the key site in which many of the current preoccupations of young people are played out. We focus on the meanings of womens bodies and their use of public space in different social contexts looking at young womens leisure activities and in particular their embrace of the internet and other communication technologies; the world of sensual enjoyment and consumption; and finally young womens desires and aspirations with respect to identities and appearances. (excerpt)

Dislocations of desire: The transnational movement of gifts within the Vietnamese diaspora

Gifts have intrigued and challenged scholars ever since interest in the subject was piqued by Marcel Mauss who, in 1925, wrote the book The gift: The form and reason for exchange in archaic societies. Although ethnographic studies of giftgiving have been mostly confined to small-scale communities, scholars have more recently turned their attention to industrial societies, with studies of Christmas giving, Japanese gift-giving, etc. Now, as studies of consumption are entering a phase of efflorescence, it is time to re-evaluate gift-giving. The recent rapid expansion in the transnational flow of people, objects and ideas has had an impact on the social conditions associated with new global patterns of consumption. In this atmosphere of overlapping cultural, economic and political worlds, there is a need to look again at the objects that pass between us as gifts...

Crossing over: The relationship between overseas Vietnamese and their homeland

This paper deals with the question—what are the effects of displacement on the perceptions diasporic Vietnamese have of their homeland, and of themselves? Identity has become an issue partly because there has frequently been an assumption that identity is somehow seamless, stable and unchanging. Migration highlights the relational and intersubjective nature of identity (see Bhabha, 1990; Hall, 1990). The homeland itself is also a site of constant transformation and negotiation of identities but the translocation of people accentuates the disjuncture between place and identity. When examining the Vietnamese diaspora, identity must be conceived within the locus of power relations that Vietnamese people operate within, both at a local and global level. The efflorescence of an interest in the politics of identity has come about through massive post-war decolonisation and the redrawing of national boundaries. Here, I will scrutinise how these wider relations of power act upon diasporic identities.

Book reviews : INDOCHINESE IN AUSTRALIA: THE ISSUES OF UNEMPLOYMENT AND RESIDENTIAL CONCENTRATION Nancy Viviani, James Coughlan and Trevor Rowland Canberra, Australian Government Publishing Service, 1993, 119 pp.,

are volumes waiting to be written on subjects such as the relationship of indigenous people to the places of suburbia, or which explore past and present representations of suburbia in popular culture and the visual arts by both male and female artists. Despite the strength of many of the individual chapters, Beasts of Suburbia is a very uneven collection in terms of quality and intellectual orientation. Granted, some unevenness in tone is almost unavoidable in edited collections, but for this reader the absence of a clearly defined theme and of any consistent intellectual voice ultimately proved undermining. Equally, the collection would have benefited from being read with a sharper editorial eye. These reservations aside, however, Beasts of Suburbia is an eminently readable book that provides an informative