In contemporary Vietnam, Hồ Chí Minh is ubiquitous and significant, but for reasons one might not expect. With his portrait appearing on nearly every note of the đồng, Vietnam's official currency, “the icon of Vietnamese independence,” Allison Truitt writes, “has come to mean nothing but money” (p. 4). But meaning nothing but money in fact means many things. In this concise, thought-provoking ethnography, Truitt details how Hồ Chí Minh, along with Ben Franklin and Saigon Jewelry Company taels of gold, does far more than serve as an abstraction or universal equivalent. Money as symbolic and material object mediates personal, social, political, and economic projects: constructing a self, building a nation, communicating with spirits, fulfilling kin responsibilities, representing the past, and divining the future. By compellingly illuminating a rich “social imaginary of money” (p. 149), Truitt makes a welcome contribution to both economic anthropology and Asian studies.
Continuing the associations between Hồ Chí Minh and money, the city that bears his name is known as Vietnam's wealthiest. Foreign and Vietnamese commentators, past and present, have tended to ascribe Ho Chi Minh City's fortunes to residents’ natural capitalist spirit or orientation to the West. Truitt combats such essentialism by chronicling how twentieth-century developments, especially the defeat of the Republic of Vietnam and the deterritorialization of money, “have amplified the power of money in Ho Chi Minh City” (p. 11).
Each chapter explores a different form of money or context in which it plays a significant role. Chapter 1 narrates a fascinating history of the nation through currency. Under French colonialism, money loosened the individual from hierarchical dynastic and village relations. Post-independence, separate currencies represented a divided nation, with different series issued in the southern Republic of Vietnam (1954–75) signifying the regime's instability. Following the liberation of Saigon in 1975, new currency and price controls were intended to mold socialist men and women. A key insight here is that the unified national currency in fact disunified money by generating two regimes of value: the command economy and the free or black market economy.
Chapter 2 considers how money and monetary policy have made households. Socialism classified household status with respect to the state economy, while recent market-oriented policies have reconfigured households as sites for production and consumption that constitute families and shape members’ obligations.
In chapter 3, Truitt analyzes the relationship between the đồng, U.S. dollars, and gold. Dollarization might be an economically rational alternative to inflation-prone domestic currency, but Truitt demonstrates that people wish to keep dollars because they offer a “form of self-making and a claim of global membership that eluded the territorial state” (pp. 64–65). Gold, often used in real estate transactions and weddings, similarly eludes the state by providing a means to store and display wealth that can be readily converted from bodily adornment to bars, dollars, or đồng.
Chapter 4 considers spirit offerings of votive “hell money” that replicates U.S. hundred-dollar notes. At the temple of Bà Chúa Kho (Goddess of the Treasury) outside Hanoi, money flows in the opposite direction, with the goddess granting loans that must be repaid by year's end. Given Truitt's focus on Ho Chi Minh City, she might have considered similar practices in the southern shrine to Bà Chúa Xứ, as that deity's Khmer associations suggest a syncretism that might parallel regional money practices.
That money does not simply measure quantity becomes strikingly clear in chapter 5's exploration of its physical qualities. Merchants’ refusal to accept torn bills bespeaks a lack of faith in the social order undergirding currency value. Banks run out of new polymer notes because people give these curiosities as non-circulating gifts. To reform an “underbanked” population, the state begins to pay salaries directly into bank accounts, but ATMs run out of cash when employees attempt to withdraw entire paychecks.
Chapter 6 considers tactics of “dodging,” or seeking financial advantage through official and unofficial lotteries, land speculation, and securities markets.
Truitt vividly illuminates the diverse imaginaries surrounding money's incarnations in Ho Chi Minh City. In showing how money as idea and object constructs “an alternative modernity project” (p. 151), Dreaming of Money in Ho Chi Minh City is reminiscent of classic monographs in economic anthropology, including Michael Taussig's The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980). While Truitt does not aim to offer a universal theory of money, she deftly demonstrates how currency and its associated fetishisms condense “the geopolitical dynamics of Vietnam's reintegration into global markets into intimate encounters” (p. 5). The book will be crucial reading for Vietnam specialists, economic anthropologists, and other social scientists interested in the cultural dimensions of political economy. With its focus on money, personhood, social relations, and citizenship, it would be an excellent selection for courses in economic anthropology or contemporary Asia.
