Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2018. xiv, 200 pp. (B&W photos.) US$27.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-5017-1688-1.
Vibrant debates and discussion in diaspora and transnational studies have taken an interest in how international remittances transform agency, social relations, mobility, and intimacies, and how transnational mobilities and identities can be understood in terms of these material and symbolic exchanges. Ivan Small adds a fascinating contribution to these debates through an innovative conceptual view of remittance as a form of gifting practice. Currencies of Imagination is an insightful and fine-grained examination of the politics and moralities of remittance flows between the US and Vietnam, weaving stories of individuals, households, communities, and the nations themselves. The book draws from intensive ethnographic fieldwork, with the main interlocutors being the overseas Vietnamese community in California and the Vietnamese communities in Ho Chi Minh City and Quy Nhon, the capital of the coastal province of Binh Dinh.
At the outset, the author shifts the analytical discussion of remittance from an economic perspective to one that focuses on “how remittances affect and reflect sociality and relational identities” (11). The book departs from the mainstream debate of remittance as an agenda of growth and development and enlightens readers to its social world. In order to fully grasp how the remittance economy operates, one must first understand the social norms, sentiments, and expectations binding the gifters, the receivers, and their community. These issues are discussed in detail in chapter 1 and become the main threads throughout chapters 2 to 4. Gifting goes beyond the exchange of material values; it symbolizes and transforms the physical and emotional connections between receivers and senders as well as the geographies through which they travel and live. To gift is not only to exercise one’s agency or to pursue recognition and merit, but also to repay past material and moral debts to one’s families and communities. In the same vein, the receipt of remittance is also considered deserving of those to whom the diasporic sender owes past or current favours of either emotional or material nature, or both (60).
We also see in chapter 4 how remittance can connect and rekindle social bonds across borders as much as create ruptures and anxiety within the diasporic families. Here generation matters, when elderly and younger members of the diasporic families share different sentiments and obligations towards their family and (extended) kin networks in the hometown, and hence different views of whether, how, and how much to send back. Such generational difference also illuminates a different sense of place, identity, and belonging, as well as views of the hometown as one’s intimate past and memory or as simply a place of origin that is held back by war and underdevelopment.
Amid social and economic transformations in Vietnam following doi moi (renovation), a hallmark economic reform in the late 1980s, transnational flows of people, money, and things also generate stories of hopes and life betterment should one afford the opportunity to move overseas. These issues emerge in chapter 2 and are discussed at length in chapter 3. “Where physical mobility is denied, imaginative mobility is seized” (98) is the gist of this discussion. Readers get to hear the voices of people who are not directly engaged in remittance exchanges and have never crossed borders to the US but have seen notable changes to their communities and neighbourhoods brought about by remittance. These changes are as concrete as the good-looking nha Viet Kieu (houses of overseas Vietnamese) in Quy Nhon, which are bought or upgraded with remittance money, or the social eating and drinking when overseas Vietnamese travel back home. Material flows become the window for imaginations of a better life overseas, where one seems to enjoy greater purchasing power due to better value and reward for work. The anecdotes here reveal how perceptions and meanings of remittance are entangled within capitalist sentiment and neo-liberal subjectivity. When remittance is perceived and imagined in monetary terms, it reinforces the desires to cross borders and horizons, to be “over there” rather than “here” (83) and join the sending side of remittance.
The forms of gifts and how they cross borders have seen critical transformations in Vietnam: from commodities meant to be used or traded for subsistence needs to symbolic gifts and money, from informal to formal means of transferral, and from individual, household-based to communal and collective forms of remitting. These transformations unfold as Vietnam shifts from a centrally planned to a market-based economy. As detailed in chapter 5, from relaxed laws and policies that allow overseas Vietnamese investment to the state’s rhetoric of diasporic subjects as kieu bao (overseas compatriots), we see how remittance economies become intertwined with the state’s neo-liberal project of development. The nationalistic and affective constructions of return migration and diaspora communities therefore mask economic interests and in turn compound the meanings of returning and giving back to the homeland. The conclusion to the book summarizes its key findings. Whether they take the form of money, gifts, or both, remittances by overseas Vietnamese carry traits of migratory adventures and aspirations, both real and imagined, and embody a sense of personhood, kinship, and communality that is lost and found, reinforced yet also ruptured.
The book’s theoretical discussion of remittance-as-gift is sound and sophisticated, but its high level of abstraction at times detracts from the narratives of its interlocutors. There are interesting details in different chapters concerning how class, gender, and generational differences matter in international migration and remittance exchanges. These variables and perhaps the intersections among them warrant more theoretical attention in the book, as well as more detailed methodological discussion.
Overall, this book will appeal to anthropologists and sociologists interested in remittance economies, international migration, as well as the diasporic community and social transformations of Vietnam. This reader in particular finds in it an intimate and intriguing portrayal of Vietnam, a nation that is always on a spectacular move but is haunted by its past and troubled by an ambiguous present.
Tu Phuong Nguyen
Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia