Abstract

Drawing on my fieldwork among undocumented migrants, upwardly mobile residents, returnees, and mass transit riders of Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), this paper explores sensory encounters, embodied practices and cultural imaginings that shape the feel of the city. HCMC is among the most rapidly urbanising places in Asia. As a post-war and post-socialist (đổi mới, ‘new era’ since 1986) context, everyday life in HCMC is characterised by a grammar of change involving renewal, evolution and reconfiguration rather than an abrupt ideological shift, rupture or loss. The city is encountered in qualitatively different ways not only through a variety of sensory stimuli that in part reflect continuities in daily life, but also via representations and imaginings of the metropolitan life and lifestyle. While individual and particular, these may also be experienced as shared and, building on my previous work with middle classes, these shared experiences may blend or erase differences and inequalities on the one hand, or create or reinforce them on the other. For this paper, I propose experimenting with a keyword methodology drawn from the new mobilities paradigm which, as I will explain, enables me to work with unsettled, accumulated, co-existing and perhaps contradictory conceptualisations, representations and imaginings of HCMC. Departing from earlier arguments I have made about the layering of HCMC’s urbanscape, or the plasticity of the city, I aim to explore what characterises the feel of the city, how the feel of the city may change or endure, and in what ways hard-HCMC and soft-HCMC may be related. 

Biography

Catherine Earl is a social anthropologist whose research focuses on the rise of middle classes; the senses in society; gender and social change; and the changing nature of welfare and work in contemporary Vietnam and Australia. Currently she is working on the Saigon Bus, a project that explores post-socialist sociality, mobility, incivility and individualism through sensory experiences. Her recent book is Vietnam’s New Middle Classes: Gender, Career, City (NIAS Press, 2014). She has taught in anthropology programs in Australia, Estonia and Vietnam. Catherine is research fellow at Federation University where she works on the ageing workforce and women’s retirement in Australia.