Focusing on microlevel social interactions in the homeland, this lecture explores the projection and achievement of superiority within the context of Vietnamese diasporic and transnational repertoires. As a country undergoing dramatic economic transformation for more than two decades, Vietnam is a site of contradictory new hierarchies with the increasing return of overseas migrants who encounter a growing new monied class. Prof. Hung Cam Thai examines the formation of these hierarchies in situations where individuals seek to establish themselves as “social betters” in determining criteria of worthiness.
Prof. Thai is concerned with the cultural repertories and structural resources underlying how and why individuals create or draw lines to define themselves against each other – that is, the symbolic boundaries people draw—and how such lines and definitions lead to contests over the production of superiority and social parity. The homeland is especially apt for studying social parity because of the gap in the literature on symbolic boundaries regarding transnational cultures, where social inequalities are ubiquitous. Prof. Thai argues that the homeland is a site of cross-class interactions in which great confusions exist over meanings of taste, success, and achievements, all of which produce blurry measurements of worth.
The analysis is based on more than 90 in-depth interviews and participant observations over a seven year period with a cross section of the overseas migrant and local populations in Ho Chi Minh City, Can Tho, and Danang. The comparative approach Prof. Thai takes in studying these three cities allows us to see both distinct and universal social processes within urban centers and rural peripheries of contemporary Vietnam.
Co-Sponsor: CUNY Graduate Center Immigration Seminar Series
Hung Cam Thai is professor of sociology and Asian American studies at Pomona College, where he is former chair of Asian American studies, former director of the Pacific Basin Institute, and former chair of sociology. Prof. Thai is the 2019-2020 CUNY Thomas Tam Visiting Professor at the CUNY Graduate Center and Hunter College/CUNY. He received a sociology Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.
Prof. Thai's first book, For Better or for Worse: Vietnamese International Marriages in the New Global Economy (Rutgers, 2008), is a study of international marriages linking women in Vietnam and overseas Vietnamese men living in the diaspora. His second book, Insufficient Funds: The Culture of Money in Low Wage Transnational Families (Stanford, 2014), won the American Sociological Association’s 2015 Best Book Award on Asia from the Asia/Asian America Section, and the 2016 Best Social Sciences Book Award from the Association for Asian American Studies. Insufficient Funds examines how and why transnational families in the Vietnamese diaspora spend, receive, and give money.
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