The Rehabilitation of an Uncomfortable Past: Everyday Life in Vietnam during the Subsidy Period (1975-1986)

Author: MacLean, Ken

Source: History and Anthropology, Volume 19, Number 3, September 2008 , pp. 281-303(23)

Publisher: Routledge, part of the Taylor & Francis Group

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Abstract:

In 2006, the Museum of Ethnology organized a special exhibit on everyday life in Hanoi during the “subsidy period”, the term increasingly used to describe the decade of high socialism that began in 1975 with the reunification of a divided Vietnam and ended in 1986 with the official introduction of market reforms known as Đi mi (Renovation). The representational strategies, which linked the collectivism of the past with the individualism of the present, prompted a nationwide discussion regarding the significance of a moment that previously had no clear name or place in official accounts due to the severe hardships it produced. The details presented demonstrate how the rehabilitation of this decade has expanded the political boundaries of what state institutions can present as having historical and ethnographic value in Vietnam as well as opened new avenues for comparative studies with (former) socialist states elsewhere.

Keywords: Socialism; Time; Historiography; Material Culture; Museum

Document Type: Research article

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02757200802449915

Publication date: 2008-09-01

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