Saigon’s Edge: On the Margins of Ho Chi Minh City

Conclusion: What Edges Do

Productive Binaries The story of Saigon’s edge is a complex one entangled with the story of urban transformation; dramatic changes in the Vietnamese political and economic orientation to socialism, capitalism, and global integration; and the legacy of the Vietnamese Revolution and its changing trajectory in the postwar and postrenovation period. In telling this complex story about life on the fringes of Ho Chi Minh City, however, nearly all of my Vietnamese informants, companions, friends, passing acquaintances, and even local social science research colleagues turned to binary spatial and temporal idioms for imagining the world as a set of rural versus urban and inside versus outside oppositions. Their version of the story seemed to favor simplification over engaging with the complexity of everyday life that marks contemporary Vietnam. In this book, based on accounts people told me of their lives in the outer-city district of Hóc Môn, I have shown how this reliance on binary schemes for explaining the world produced stories that were full of dreams and unspeakable silences as well. In one sense, the opposition between country and city and between inside the city and outside the city produced a felicitous dream of order Conclusion What Edges Do This, then, is the puzzle of cultural dualism on the Copperbelt: how are we to square off a well-founded suspicion of dualist models of society and culture with the ethnographic fact of a persistent sort of cultural bifurcation—one, moreover, that informants insisted on conceptualizing in terms of tradition and modernity, the old and the new, the rural and the urban? —James Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity Postmodern critics tell us today that this modernism is now finished, its creativity exhausted. Yet, I would suggest another aspect of the problem: if modernism is dying, it nevertheless remains dominant, at the very least in the third world. —James Holston, The Modernist City 221 and meaning, an understandable world made “legible” by the way it could conform to a notion of progress and development. Indeed, a profoundly beautiful set of images appears when one closes one’s eyes and imagines the pure stereotypes of rural and urban Vietnam; it is a harmonious place combining tradition and modernity, a place where social life appears to fruitfully combine intellectual verve and idyllic rural serenity. In another , less agreeable sense, this framework for knowing and understanding the world seemed to compress reality into overly neat conceptual categories that often obscured a great deal of practical social life. At best, some people did not fit into these schemes. At worst, some people were actively excluded, silenced, forgotten. In simple strokes, people explained Ho Chi Minh City to me as if viewing snapshots of pure social and spatial types through the lens of a postcard photographer’s camera: there are inner-city districts and outercity districts; there are urban areas and rural areas; different kinds of people (should) live in those different places. Despite the rapid transformation of the material landscape that would have seemed to confound such simple binary categories, idealizations of inside versus outside and rural versus urban consistently framed the way my informants described and imagined social space on the anomalous fringes of Ho Chi Minh City. As I have shown, however, these modes of viewing the world cannot be dismissed as simply wrong or derided as evidence of false consciousness. The camera never lies. Rather, it represents the world in particular ways, leaving much beyond the frame. These modes of representation are, as I explained in early parts of this book and elaborated with examples throughout, more productively understood as idealizations forged in a process that Herbert Marcuse has called “the absorption of ideology into reality.”1 They are “ideological” in that they represent ideals; they are not illusions, however, but simply provide another way of explaining and presenting social reality, with their own unique but always very real social effects. Although there are certainly other ways of describing social space, these categories represent profoundly important social facts that are themselves key parts of the social world that I set out, as an ethnographer, to study. To dismiss them would have meant dismissing my informants, ignoring their words, and ultimately producing my own set of binary truth claims that arrogantly opposed the ethnographer’s real truth against the informant’s imaginary truth. In his work on the Zambian copperbelt, 222 Conclusion James Ferguson confronted a similar theoretical...