The Reinvention of Distinction

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-vii

   PDF

2. Introduction: Who Are the Urban Middle Class in Vietnam?

   • Danièle Bélanger, Lisa B. Welch Drummond, Van Nguyen-Marshall

   Pages 1-17

3. Historical Perspectives

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 19-19

      PDF

   2. Advertising, Modernity, and Consumer Culture in Colonial Vietnam

      • George Dutton

      Pages 21-42

   3. Cuisine and Social Status Among Urban Vietnamese, 1888–1926

      • Erica J. Peters

      Pages 43-57

   4. The Associational Life of the Vietnamese Middle Class in Saigon (1950s–1970s)

      • Van Nguyen-Marshall

      Pages 59-75

4. Contemporary Perspectives

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 77-77

      PDF

   2. Middle Class Landscapes in a Transforming City: Hanoi in the 21st Century

      • Lisa B. Welch Drummond

      Pages 79-93

   3. Finances, Family, Fashion, Fitness, and … Freedom? The Changing Lives of Urban Middle-Class Vietnamese Women

      • Ann Marie Leshkowich

      Pages 95-113

   4. Exhibiting Middle Classness: The Social Status of Artists in Hanoi

      • Nora A. Taylor

      Pages 115-127

   5. Banking on the Middle Class in Ho Chi Minh City

      • Allison Truitt

      Pages 129-141

   6. When the Đại Gia (Urban Rich) Go to the Countryside: Impacts of the Urban-Fuelled Rural Land Market in the Uplands

      • To Xuan Phuc

      Pages 143-155

   7. Afterword: Consumption and Middle-Class Subjectivity in Vietnam

      • Elizabeth F. Vann

      Pages 157-170

5. Back Matter

   Pages 171-173

   PDF

This pioneering collection brings together an international group of scholars to explore the Vietnamese middle class. From the leisure pursuits of the colonial middle class to the impact of the new urban rich on landscape of the countryside, this interdisciplinary volume explores the ways in which middle classness has been practiced in a wide range of contexts throughout the 20th century and into the 21st. In addition to offering insights into how middle classness was and is constituted and negotiated, this collection illuminates the cultural and social conditions of two distinctive periods in Vietnamese history. Three historical chapters consider how middle class status was experienced and displayed under French colonialism and in 1960s republican. These chapters offer examinations of middle classness through recreation, consumption, and associational life. Six contemporary studies examine the modes of experimentation and practice within middle class urban Vietnam. Still a sensitive topic politically, the contemporary middle class, nascent but increasingly powerful, is exerting a strong impact on the shape of contemporary society and culture, as well as on urban and rural landscapes. This volume offers a series of studies which critically interrogate the practices of those who engage in or aspire to urban middle-class lifestyles in Vietnam both in the past and in the present.

• Asian studies
• Bourdieu
• Colonial
• Consumption
• Hanoi in the 21st Century
• Ho Chi Minh City/Saigon
• Life style
• Middle class in Vietnam
• Postcolonial
• The 'New Rich'
• Urban Vietnam
• Vietnamese Middle Class in Saigon
• urban geography and urbanism

• , Department of History, Trent University, Peterborough, Canada

  Van Nguyen-Marshall

• , Department of Social Sciences, York University, Toronto, Canada

  Lisa B. Welch Drummond

• , Department of Sociology, The University of Western Ontario, London, Canada

  Danièle Bélanger

Policies and ethics