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Spatiotemporal Oscillation The constructs of rural and urban Vietnam and of the inside and the outside in Ho Chi Minh City fashion images and expectations of distinct spatiotemporal worlds bifurcated into discrete, opposed categories. As idealized asymptotes, the inside is understood as having a certain urban time orientation regimented by the clock and the outside as having a certain rural time orientation regimented by cycles of agricultural production . Both poles in this set of oppositions have potential advantages and disadvantages. If one could somehow harness the potentials and escape the limitations of both idealized poles, one could become a master of time and space; one could be traditional and modern, sentimental and sophisticated, carefree and efficient, attached to the land and yet spatially mobile. These conceptions recall the way that Vietnamese kinship idioms about the inside and the outside relate to time and space. The inside extends deep in time but is bounded in space. The outside does the opposite —it has no history but extends outward across a wide area of social catchments. What if one could combine these two? Then one could be unbounded in both time and space, rooted in the land but also able to reach outward into the outer world of exchange and capital production, a traveling businessperson with a strong sense of family and a permanent home address. One could wield the legitimate authority of tradition and embrace the rationalized wisdom of the future. The oppositions of rural versus urban and inside versus outside produce and maintain a sense of fundamental difference. But in doing this, they also create the possibility for a type of movement between discrete 4. Negotiating Time and Space Household, Labor, Land, and Movement Outside and inside form a dialectic of division, the obvious geometry of which blinds us as soon as we bring it into play in metaphorical domains. It has the sharpness of the dialectics of yes and no, which decides everything. Unless one is careful, it is made into a basis of images that governs all thoughts of positive and negative. —Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space 121 categories. This movement produces a socially constituted form of spatiotemporal power that accrues to those capable of harnessing the advantages and minimizing the disadvantages of each idealized asymptote. Producing these discrete spaces also creates the potential for a level of transcendence, a powerful space that straddles both realms.1 The ability to oscillate between different spatiotemporal modes of social relations represents a form of power that is both symbolic and material at once. In this chapter I show how Hóc Môn residents deploy their position within spatialized urban–rural and inside–outside dichotomies as a means to harness the advantages of two competing forms of spatiotemporal organization that give them the power to reproduce themselves as social persons.2 Symbolic representations of space have potential material effects on the different socioeconomic positions of social actors within space. But this works the other way as well: the way people interpret and attach symbolic meaning to space depends on their different socioeconomic positions. On the one hand, a form of social, economic, and political power emerges from one’s relative ability to negotiate social relations situated in both space and time. The degree of movement between rural space and urban space influences the degree to which people see these categories as fixed or flexible. As Harvey has written, “The assignment of place within a socio-spatial structure indicates distinctive roles, capacities for action, and access to power within the social order.”3 Yet, on the other hand, the negotiation of these categories is not fully open to the limits of imagination and free will. This negotiation is constrained both by historical transformation and by the political-economic, status, and power relations between social actors, who in turn assert their own competing visions of spatial relations and temporality. The contest over the meaning of time and space is thus political and economic, connected to the very practical reality of how people hope to organize social action and relations of production within society. “Unless one is careful,” Bachelard warns, analysts risk mistaking the geometry of inside and outside for the basis of existence, such that “it is made into a basis of images that governs all thoughts of positive and negative.”4 The complex, ever-contested relationships between inside and outside rest not on unmediated geometry but on social negotiations that transcend the materiality of the oppositions themselves. Furthermore...

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