Government munificence and the struggle to be poor. Politics, power and the Local State in Vietnam’s Northwest Borderlands

Abstract

Successive regimes since colonial times have sought to develop and incorporate the lands and people of northwestern Vietnam under a biopolitical imaginary: to nurture and render the state periphery productive and integrated into a unified nation state. However, local people of the region have always had their own ‘projects’, which they pursue on the ‘margins’ of this state project of power (Ortner 2006). This thesis sets out to understand, through an ethnographic study of Vĩnh Thủy, an ethnic minority commune in northwestern Vietnam, how the different projects of power at work in Vĩnh Thủy commune come together in (and through) the local state.

I theorise the local state as a political space created through the coming together of the projects of power of four vectors in Vĩnh Thủy: the centre state, the local community, local officials, and the translocal flows, actors and institutions that are increasingly prevalent in the northwestern uplands. These projects of power meet around the governmental narratives, technologies and everyday rituals of state that permeate the commune, and through which the biopolitical imaginary of integrating the uplands into the wider nation state is projected, and enacted. Prominent governmental processes in Vĩnh Thủy commune include regulating the division of political office between ethnic minority groups; identifying ‘the poor’ and delivering poverty reduction support; and attempting to modernise the uplands through ‘the market’. Projects of power congeal around these governmental processes and are contested, negotiated and made anew in the local state space.

Governmental schemes are themselves productive of power, as through them local ethnic minority people exercise a particular, dexterous and constantly learning form of political agency, what James Scott (1998) has called metis. However, where Scott saw metis operating independently of the systems of state power, in Vĩnh Thủy metis instead flourishes within the governmental processes of state, and is sustained and nurtured by them. Local elites in the commune, and local people in so far as they are connected to these elites and therefore to power, pursue their projects within and through the regulating technologies of state. They reshape them as they are applied in the local state space, even as they are themselves shaped by them.

It is through the local state too, that ideas of state are locally re-imagined, and thereby achieve relevance and potency for the people of Vĩnh Thủy. State ideas are shaped in the local state space through an intense politics of intimacy, which recognises that local elites pursue projects of power for the benefit of themselves, their lineage groups and their wider networks, but which also privileges notions of general provision, obligation and duty to the unfortunate, and to the community as a whole. Hopes, dreams and desires for development also crystallise around the state and ensure that local people remain bound in to locally imagined ideas of state, despite these dreams and desires frequently being frustrated. Show more