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My project at the Wissenschaftskolleg has three main components. The first is an edited book under the same title, to be reviewed by Harvard University’s Asia Publications, that explores the intertwining societal implications of land, labour, and money emerging as “fictitious commodities” (Polanyi 1985) in the specific polity of market socialism where the political power of the Communist party states remains intact and where capitalist transformations are actively deployed to sustain that power. It will illuminate how state agendas interact with local people and societies’ responses to commodification processes and the counter-movements they unleash. Conceptually, the book is an opportunity for me to comparatively explore the entanglement between three kinds of politics underpinning these processes: the politics of care (in relation to labour), the politics of rights (in relation to land), and the politics of risk (in relation to financialization). Secondly, I will complete a review article commissioned by Annual Review of Anthropology titled “The Anthropology of Risk and Migration: The Spatial Production of an Universal Category”, which addresses the mutual production of risk and spatial mobility. Thirdly, I will finalise an ethnographic monograph titled Peripheral Mobility: The Moral Life of Transnational Economies in Rural Central Vietnam, which deals with the commodification of labour via transnational mobility.
Recommended Reading
Nguyen, Minh T. N. (2018). Waste and Wealth: An Ethnography of Labor, Value, and Morality in a Vietnamese Recycling Economy. Oxford University Press.
Nguyen, Minh T. N., Phill Wilcox, and Jake Lin, eds. (2024). “The Good Life in Late-Socialist Asia: Aspirations, Politics, and Possibilities.” Special issue, positions: asia critique 32 (1).
Nguyen, Minh T. N., Ngoc Luong, Yueran Tian, and Jake Lin (2025). “The Privilege of Being Exploited? Overtime Work in Global Factories of Market Socialist China and Vietnam.” Global Political Economy 4 (2): 120–141. https://doi.org/10.1332/26352257Y2024D000000027.
© Bielefeld University/Sarah Jonek
2026/2027
Minh Nguyen, Ph.D.
Professor of Social Anthropology
Universität Bielefeld
Born in 1976 in Thai Binh, Vietnam
BA in English Translation Studies, Vietnam National University, MA in Social Planning and Development, University of Queensland, PhD in Social Research in International Development, University of East Anglia
Arbeitsvorhaben
Fictitious Commodities Revisited: Enquiries into the Great Transformations of Market-Socialist Asia
China, Vietnam, and Laos went through decades of state socialism followed by market reforms under Communist party states, a context I shall refer to as market socialism. Since their reforms at the turn of the 1980s, these countries have been intensifying privatization and restructuring, as market-based values and moralities come to predominate social and economic life. To varying degrees, the deepening commodification of labour and land and the rising power of finance have given rise to what Polanyi (1985) characterises as “market society”, although socialist governing structures and rationalities make a difference for how these processes unfold.My project at the Wissenschaftskolleg has three main components. The first is an edited book under the same title, to be reviewed by Harvard University’s Asia Publications, that explores the intertwining societal implications of land, labour, and money emerging as “fictitious commodities” (Polanyi 1985) in the specific polity of market socialism where the political power of the Communist party states remains intact and where capitalist transformations are actively deployed to sustain that power. It will illuminate how state agendas interact with local people and societies’ responses to commodification processes and the counter-movements they unleash. Conceptually, the book is an opportunity for me to comparatively explore the entanglement between three kinds of politics underpinning these processes: the politics of care (in relation to labour), the politics of rights (in relation to land), and the politics of risk (in relation to financialization). Secondly, I will complete a review article commissioned by Annual Review of Anthropology titled “The Anthropology of Risk and Migration: The Spatial Production of an Universal Category”, which addresses the mutual production of risk and spatial mobility. Thirdly, I will finalise an ethnographic monograph titled Peripheral Mobility: The Moral Life of Transnational Economies in Rural Central Vietnam, which deals with the commodification of labour via transnational mobility.
Recommended Reading
Nguyen, Minh T. N. (2018). Waste and Wealth: An Ethnography of Labor, Value, and Morality in a Vietnamese Recycling Economy. Oxford University Press.
Nguyen, Minh T. N., Phill Wilcox, and Jake Lin, eds. (2024). “The Good Life in Late-Socialist Asia: Aspirations, Politics, and Possibilities.” Special issue, positions: asia critique 32 (1).
Nguyen, Minh T. N., Ngoc Luong, Yueran Tian, and Jake Lin (2025). “The Privilege of Being Exploited? Overtime Work in Global Factories of Market Socialist China and Vietnam.” Global Political Economy 4 (2): 120–141. https://doi.org/10.1332/26352257Y2024D000000027.