SEAP Lunchtime Talk

Erik Harms Associate Professor of Anthropology and International & Area Studies, Yale University

Abstract: This presentation will offer a reading from one chapter in a book I am completing about New Urban Zones in Ho Chi Minh City. Based on research in Phú Mỹ Hưng, Ho Chi Minh City’s most famous master-planned residential and commercial development, I will focus on the story of one informant’s use of the concept of văn minh (civility). Her story will illustrate how periurban housing developments are understood by some residents as spaces of sociopolitical experimentation. Residents, planners, and builders in contemporary Vietnam use idioms of urban development in order to offer direct, yet politically benign commentary on their aspirations for new forms of social relations and political organization. In this way, the language of civility, while commonly critiqued as a form of ideology or social control, also offers some residents an idiom of liberation which allows them to address what would otherwise be sensitive social and political issues about governance and social control. Despite the many critiques of master-planned urban developments, this ethnographic evidence suggests that they also promise some residents new models of social life, and more transparent forms of urban governance. For some people, “urban civility,” it turns out, is a veiled articulation of urban citizenship.

Date: Thursday, April 16, 2015 - 12:00pm to 1:30pm Location: Kahin Center Contact Name: SEAP Graduate Commitee Contact Email: seapbrownbag@gmail.com