Epidemic Politics In Contemporary Vietnam

Through a tumultuous 20th-century period of revolution and foreign wars, Vietnam's public health system was praised by international observers as a “bright light in an epidemiologically dark world,” standing out for its accomplishments in infectious disease control. Since the country's transition to a “market economy with socialist orientation” in the mid-1980s, however, some of these achievements have been reversed as the “renovation” of national systems for welfare and health leaves gaps in the social safety net. A series of cholera outbreaks that spread through Northern Vietnam in 2007-2010 revealed the paradoxes, contradictions, and challenges that Vietnam faces in its post-transition period. This book presents an anthropological analysis of the political, economic, and infrastructural inputs to these epidemics and suggests how the most commonly repeated accounts of disease spread misdirected public attention and suppressed awareness of risk factors in Vietnam's capital. Drawing a parallel to the experience of novel coronavirus in Asia and beyond, this book reflects on how political priorities, economic forces, and cultural struggles influence the experience and the epidemiology of infectious disease.

Through a tumultuous 20th-century period of revolution and foreign wars, Vietnam's public health system was praised by international observers as a “bright light in an epidemiologically dark world,” standing out for its accomplishments in infectious disease control. Since the country's transition to a “market economy with socialist orientation” in the mid-1980s, however, some of these achievements have been reversed as the “renovation” of national systems for welfare and health leaves gaps in the social safety net. A series of cholera outbreaks that spread through Northern Vietnam in 2007-2010 revealed the paradoxes, contradictions, and challenges that Vietnam faces in its post-transition period. This book presents an anthropological analysis of the political, economic, and infrastructural inputs to these epidemics and suggests how the most commonly repeated accounts of disease spread misdirected public attention and suppressed awareness of risk factors in Vietnam's capital. Drawing a parallel to the experience of novel coronavirus in Asia and beyond, this book reflects on how political priorities, economic forces, and cultural struggles influence the experience and the epidemiology of infectious disease.

This dissertation concerns HIV/AIDS prevention and control in contemporary Vietnam, as an assemblage of Vietnamese Socialist governance, international NGO and US government mechanisms, and new biomedical regimes based on expert knowledges and international "best practices." It maps the emergence of HIV/AIDS in Vietnam, the rise of the complex of state practices, spaces and discourses created to deal with it, the unfortunate entanglement of this apparatus with that set against "social evils," and the rendering of HIV/AIDS a biological marker of socio-moral contagion. It examines the deadly consequences of this entanglement, the authorities' subsequent attempts at disentanglement following shifting epidemiological, political and economic conditions and Vietnam's internationally acclaimed success against SARS. It marks the new forms of exclusions and inequalities in health this generated. Broadly, I argue there was a shift from an emphasis on "The People" to one on "The Human" as the object at the center of this HIV/AIDS prevention and control apparatus, along with a shift from external enforcement (by authorities) to internal adherence (by oneself, to techno-scientific and expert discourses and practices). With the shift from enforcement (a present and past-oriented mode) to adherence (a mode that moves from the present forward), the near future has now become a target of and problem for government. As new and massively increased resources for HIV/AIDS prevention and control become available new contests over jurisdiction and precedence are breaking out between sectors of this apparatus dedicated to public security and health and human services, as well as central and local health authorities. Under these conditions new life-saving and harm-reduction programs effected and protected through and under interpersonal and political arrangements often classified in the foreign and domestic press as "corruption" are forcing reexamination of the ethical status of these practices. I argue that following my informants' stress on the "uses" of corruption, rather than their naming, a more nuanced portrait of contemporary power relations and constraints emerges, one that sheds light on the transformation, in these milieu, of the emerging ethical terrain of HIV/AIDS prevention and control in Vietnam. Third, I examine PEPFAR (US President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief), investigating the friction at the meeting points between a pair of incongruous bureaucracies, their effect on local financial, facility and human resource management, and the promotion of a certain regime of accounting and audit practices. These new technologies represent a curious marriage of neoliberal rationalities and humanitarian ethics that operate by refiguring political problems in other domains as non-ideological and non-political health problems, within the framework of what I term an "ethics of an economy of virtue." Here I track the penetration of neoliberal logics and calculations into the domain of humanitarian intervention. Truth games effected through the deployment of statistics, images, anecdotes and narratives collapse a broad range of meanings upon the subjected bodies of the ill, bodies and stories meant to stand in not only for those innumerable "others like them," but the exchangeable, comparable virtue of the deployer. The final chapter is a fleshing out of the framework I present in the preceding chapters, using the parallel stories of two exemplary figures; a famous and controversial Saigon social worker, and a relatively unknown young woman, a homeless heroin addict and "graduate" of the Vietnamese carceral regime. These stories highlight the benefits, constraints and vulnerabilities actors working on HIV/AIDS in Vietnam within an economy of virtue face, as well as enable us to trace certain turning points in their lives against the background of the minor history of HIV/AIDS in Vietnam that I have set out.

The first history of epidemics in modern Asia. Robert Peckham considers the varieties of responses that epidemics have elicited - from India to China and the Russian Far East - and examines the processes that have helped to produce and diffuse disease across the region.

This volume is a comprehensive study of VietnamÕs greatest and most controversial 20th century writer who died tragically in 1939 at the age of 28. Vu Trong Phung is known for a remarkable collection of politically provocative novels and sensational works of non-fiction reportage that were banned by the communist state from 1960 to 1986. Leading Vietnam scholar, Zinoman, resurrects the life and work of an important intellectual and author in order to reveal a neglected political project that is excluded from conventional accounts of modern Vietnamese political history. He sees Vu Trong Phung as a leading proponent of a localized republican tradition that opposed colonialism, communism, and unfettered capitalismÑand that led both to the banning of his work and to the durability of his popular appeal in Vietnam today.

More than forty years have passed since the official end of the Vietnam War, yet the war’s legacies endure. Its history and iconography still provide fodder for film and fiction, communities of war refugees have spawned a wide Vietnamese diaspora, and the United States military remains embroiled in unwinnable wars with eerie echoes of Vietnam. Looking Back on the Vietnam War brings together scholars from a broad variety of disciplines, who offer fresh insights on the war’s psychological, economic, artistic, political, and environmental impacts. Each essay examines a different facet of the war, from its representation in Marvel comic books to the experiences of Vietnamese soldiers exposed to Agent Orange. By putting these pieces together, the contributors assemble an expansive yet nuanced composite portrait of the war and its global legacies. Though they come from diverse scholarly backgrounds, ranging from anthropology to film studies, the contributors are united in their commitment to original research. Whether exploring rare archives or engaging in extensive interviews, they voice perspectives that have been excluded from standard historical accounts. Looking Back on the Vietnam War thus embarks on an interdisciplinary and international investigation to discover what we remember about the war, how we remember it, and why.

Describes and analyzes Vietnam1s political, economic, social and national security systems and institutions and the interrelationships of those systems and the ways they are shaped by cultural factors. Also covers people1s origins, dominant beliefs and values, their common interests and issues on which they are divided, the nature and extent of their involvement with national institutions and their attitudes toward each other and toward their social system and political order. 19 maps and photos.

This timely, pathbreaking study of North Korea’s political history and culture sheds invaluable light on the country’s unique leadership continuity and succession. Leading scholars Heonik Kwon and Byung-Ho Chung begin by tracing Kim Il Sung’s rise to power during the Cold War. They show how his successor, his eldest son, Kim Jong Il, sponsored the production of revolutionary art to unleash a public political culture that would consolidate Kim’s charismatic power and his own hereditary authority. The result was the birth of a powerful modern theater state that sustains North Korean leaders’ sovereignty now to a third generation. In defiance of the instability to which so many revolutionary states eventually succumb, the durability of charismatic politics in North Korea defines its exceptional place in modern history. Kwon and Chung make an innovative contribution to comparative socialism and postsocialism as well as to the anthropology of the state. Their pioneering work is essential for all readers interested in understanding North Korea’s past and future, the destiny of charismatic power in modern politics, the role of art in enabling this power.

Analyzing the ways U.S. culture has been formed and transformed in the 80s and 90s by its response to the Vietnam War and the AIDS epidemic, Marita Sturken argues that each has disrupted our conventional notions of community, nation, consensus, and "American culture." She examines the relationship of camera images to the production of cultural memory, the mixing of fantasy and reenactment in memory, the role of trauma and survivors in creating cultural comfort, and how discourses of healing can smooth over the tensions of political events. Sturken's discussion encompasses a brilliant comparison of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the AIDS Quilt; her profound reading of the Memorial as a national wailing wall—one whose emphasis on the veterans and war dead has allowed the discourse of heroes, sacrifice, and honor to resurface at the same time that it is an implicit condemnation of war—is particularly compelling. The book also includes discussions of the Kennedy assassination, the Persian Gulf War, the Challenger explosion, and the Rodney King beating. While debunking the image of the United States as a culture of amnesia, Sturken also shows how remembering itself is a form of forgetting, and how exclusion is a vital part of memory formation.

Since the 1950s, the domestic politics of the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) has puzzled outside observers. To these external analysts, the American-backed regime seemed to be plagued by instability and factionalism for no apparent reason. Their bewilderment, however, has obscured a deep and complex history. In Disunion, Nu-Anh Tran shows how factional struggles in the Saigon-based republic reflected serious disagreements about political ideas at a pivotal moment in the lead-up to the Vietnam War. The book traces the emergence of Vietnam’s anticommunist nationalists back to the struggle for independence and explores how their alliances were tested and then broken during the rule of the RVN’s first president, Ngô Đình Diệm. The anticommunists rejected the authoritarianism and ideology of the Vietnamese communists and dreamed of building an independent, democratic government that would unite the Vietnamese nation. The RVN was supposed to be the fulfillment of this long-cherished vision. But discord soon erupted among the anticommunists. Politicians fiercely debated to what extent the government should be democratic and which groups had a legitimate place in political life. The unresolved disagreements provoked intense and continuous infighting that troubled the RVN throughout the regime’s existence. Ultimately, the animosity undermined any possibility of realizing the anticommunists’ shared vision for the country. Based on previously neglected primary sources and extensive research in Vietnamese and American archives, Disunion paints a rich and sensitive portrayal of leaders and activists in the RVN. Anticommunist nationalists were deeply devoted to their homeland and inspired by forward-looking visions, but they were also hobbled by their failure to live up to their lofty ideals. By examining these historical figures on their own terms, the book offers a fresh perspective on the political history of South Vietnam that has remained misunderstood to this day.