Editor's Note: Harm’s book was briefly noted in a previous review (vol. 71.4, November 2012) but in keeping with the efforts of the Southeast Asia book reviews editors to provide timely reviews of Southeast Asia book prize awardees, a single review follows. Saigon’s Edge was awarded the 2014 Benda Prize.
Why, when orthodox structuralism has been widely discredited, do we find ordinary people—including the bureaucrats charged with their care and governance—actively conceptualizing their entire social world in binary terms? In a space that is neither city nor country, and that continually flips the relationship between inside and outside in an oscillation that reproduces the parallel dynamics of a kinship system similarly caught between intense patrilineal loyalty and the cross-cutting ties of the bilateral kindred, Erik Harms turns this intriguing set of concentric paradoxes on its head by revealing such oscillation as the core organizing principle whereby the people of a marginal space bordering Ho Chi Minh City organize their ideas and actions—as do other Vietnamese as they try to make sense of a socialism that adopts a capitalist economy and of a postcolonial, revolutionary state that insistently replays the colonial idioms of command.
Saigon's Edge is a remarkable ethnography of a space in the despised city outskirts where forward progress—materialized as a highway—repeatedly explodes in brutal traffic accidents. Roads have lately become a more central object of anthropological interest. The highway that bisects the community studied by Harms first emerged as a place where residents would sociably contemplate the spectacle of modernity and the promise of new horizons, only to find themselves sundered apart by that speedy modernity that had seemed to promise a better life. Speeding motorbikes shattered themselves and their riders on carelessly disported concrete blocks awaiting incorporation in the divider that had suddenly created locally internal distance at the same time as it brought the city's prestigious interior closer. Are the bemused residents modern urbanites or backward peasants, or some hybrid peculiar to the Vietnamese social experiment? They are all of these things; some artfully profit from these ambiguities and shape their own social time, while others, cowed by the clock's new discipline, seem unable to produce more than a limp subordination. Is this space of such cruel inequality rural or urban? It is both—the liminal arena in which both terrible danger and awesome opportunity lurk, as much in real life as in the Vietnamese imagination.
The “edginess,” Harms emphasizes, is a more active and productive framing device for his analysis than “marginality.” It offers a new perspective on the social dynamics of urban life, permitting Harms a gently biting irony to match: “If a person drove a car through the heart of a major walking street . . . society would punish that person for reckless driving. Yet somehow if a society builds a highway through its own central social space it can call the project development and write off the ensuing deaths as accidents” (p. 185). Edginess is a condition in which some can draw sustenance from injustice while others succumb. It pervades this place in the shifting contact zone between Saigon and its hinterland, between the urban and the rural, and between the allure of modernity and the trap of tradition.
Harms's deep mutual engagement with the residents emerges from tellingly detailed vignettes and conversations. As with most first-rate ethnographies, Saigon's Edge is not solely a study of one place; it draws on the concentric realities of conurbation, nation, and region. Harms also uses official and literary sources to contextualize the community. He avoids facile debates about representativeness, showing us, instead, that the community's conceptual and physical eccentricity reveals some of the cultural characteristics that animate the ability—and occasional failure—of many Vietnamese to navigate the encompassing entities. In one especially revealing moment, a party official complains that even though a man Harms interviewed produced the approved paean of praise for the teleology of state-guided progress, his wearing shorts indicated a shocking disregard for the very principles of “civilization.” That discourse, rooted in Sino-Vietnamese values as well as the French mission civilisatrice, exhibits, Harms notes (and I can attest), strikingly similar dynamics to those of “culture” and “civilization” in neighboring Thailand. Indeed, a vital strength of this study is Harms's refusal of reductionist generalizations about “post-socialist” states; his account of Vietnamese officials’ discomfort with the idea that the country was in a “Late Socialist” phase, taken together with the parallels between their and the Thais' concerns with modernity, image, and “politeness,” just might induce those who write about “post-socialism” in eastern Europe to look across borders at Greece or Turkey as an antidote to the teleological exceptionalism of the “post-socialist” category.
In describing the play of large cultural issues in such a locality, Harms thus offers us rich possibilities for comparative perspectives both within and beyond Southeast Asia. With a potent blend of wry humor and theoretical sophistication, he demonstrates the power of ethnography to illuminate the edgy oscillation of social life between the incomprehensibly tragic and the hilariously absurd, and to read beyond, but also within, the platitudes and refractions of official ideology. Highly accessible yet morally complex and theoretically profound, this book deserves a wide readership.
