Essential Trade: Vietnamese Women in a Changing Marketplace by Ann Marie Leshkowich (review)

This book, winner of the 2016 Harry J. Benda Prize of the Association of Asian Studies, focuses on the lives of women traders in the Bến Thành market in Ho Chi Minh City. In a study of Vietnam’s transition from a post-socialist country to a market-based economy, women traders might seem to be an unlikely topic. In the skilled hands of anthropologist Ann Marie Leshkowich, however, they prove an excellent case study, lying at the crossroads of several processes of change: gender relations, class relations, kin relations, state-society relations and religious dynamics.

Leshkowich draws on Gayatri Spivak’s insight that, in some circumstances, gender essentialisms can empower and be strategically deployed by subaltern subjects. For instance, women in politically volatile and insecure environments can embrace state-derived constructions of gender when it suits their purposes. For the petty traders of the Bến Thành market whose class backgrounds in post-revolutionary Vietnam put them at risk politically and economically, the state’s definition of their status as female economic subjects or “women traders” (tiểu thương; traders are essentialized as women in Vietnam) rather than as “capitalists” is an identity that they have embraced and played up for a whole host of reasons.

In other words, traders have found ways to bypass and overcome the negative and naturalized connotations of the gender essentialism of “women traders” and in fact to turn them to their own advantage. These connotations, both as deployed by the state and as sometimes found in the wider culture, include the ideas that women traders are money-grubbers, have low education, lack culture and neglect their families. They suggest further that only women are suited to trade, because men would not engage in such lowly pursuits. Women traders perform the feminine for many practical, moral, subjective and economic reasons. They are able to amply provide for their families. Many traders enjoy a “middle-class” lifestyle and make enough money to send their children abroad for higher education. They are the business face of the family enterprise, although their husbands may be just as involved in the business as they are. As such, they can assert their moral identities as wives and mothers who are good providers for and educators of their children. They are able to get the state off the backs of their families, too. As Leshkowich notes, “female traders paid lower prices for ‘class crimes’” (p. 57). What is not to like about this trade-off?

Of course, the trade-off comes with the need for some hedges. One is the need for a web of networks and contacts that women traders in the Bến Thành market must cultivate as insurance against risk. Otherwise, they face loss and even bankruptcy. Good relations with wholesalers, suppliers, the holders of neighbouring stalls and dozens of middlemen are a requirement for a successful trader. Traders rely on personal relations of trust and reciprocity in an environment marked by a lack of legal protections, arbitrary government regulations and self-interested cadres. Women traders also rely on kin, usually through the maternal line, to reinforce them when they need extra labour, especially for off-site work such as tailoring. Some stalls employ as many as fifteen seamstresses, and young second cousins and nieces stream in from the countryside for such work.

As in all their relationships, sister traders (as they call each other) cultivate tình cảm (affection) with each other to reinforce their bonds and build their own moral identities. As another hedge against the vagaries of the market and uncertain political environment, traders engage in regular ritual activities such as pilgrimages to sacred temples, the installation of stall shrines and preparations for Tết. As Philip Taylor (2004) has shown and Leshkowich confirms, women traders often spend considerable sums to gain favour with the spiritual world.

The traders of the B...