As part of my comps preparation, over the summer I read Saigon’s Edge: On the Margins of Ho Chi Minh City (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), an excellent book about contemporary Vietnam. The book is written by Erik Harms, a professor of anthropology at Yale University.
In this post, I talk about the power of standing between binaries, something that I've discussed before on a more personal basis. This post is a more intellectual or, dare I say, philosophical take on bifurcated categories.
Saigon’s Edge was first recommended to me by my friend [you can read his blog here]. He recommended it because he had read a draft of one of my articles about Old Nanjing. In the (still unpublished) article, I talk about contested urban modernity. That is, alternative visions of progress (i.e., looking beyond skyscrapers as a sign of improvement) that are both realized and resisted in Old Nanjing.
The residents of Old Nanjing showed me the contradictions and ambivalence of modernity and development. The residents of Old Nanjing both love and hate their neighborhood, and both eagerly anticipate and dread its demolition and their families’ displacement. Through their everyday practices, they both perpetuate and resist the state’s vision of urban modernity. The state defines modernity as progress and order of the urban built environment (e.g., skyscrapers). The residents seem to agree with this in some senses as they eagerly anticipate moving to a building with indoor plumbing. Yet, again and again they insist that the tight-knit relationships they have with their neighbors will be impossible in such a modern building. In this way, the new skyscrapers don’t mark progress, but rather fragmented social relations.
Harms’ book, packed full of extremely interesting ideas and colorful anecdotes, speaks to a lot of the same ideas and experiences I had in Old Nanjing. He very successfully ties the relevance of his case study in a neighborhood called Hoc Mon, located on the urban fringes of Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, to broader theoretical approaches of (post-)structuralism and modernity. Being a rapidly urbanizing rural area just outside the city limits, Hoc Mon is situated physically and socially between the urban and rural. Hoc Mon is “neither country nor city but uncomfortably both,” Harms writes.
The main point of the book is to examine the contradictions and paradoxes of categories. That is, how we try to put concepts into boxes with fixed labels, such as gay/straight or male/female. Even though these idealized categories are culturally and socially constructed, and in practice the categories often don’t fit our everyday lives (bisexuals and transexuals are good examples), the categories still have very real, tangible, and material effects on our lives. While we continuously create a world broken up into black and white categories, more often than not we find ourselves in some kind of grey area in-between. Those differences are a myth.
Harms is mostly interested in the binaries of rural versus urban and inside versus outside. He is very interested in how these binaries are false--that is, imagined social constructions because there is no real divide between the urban and rural. In reality, these two categories intermingle in both the physical landscape and in social practice, and are mapped onto spatial, material, temporal, and social realities.
He examines how people reproduce and try to make sense of the rural/urban and inside/outside categories; how the state represents them; how people utilize them for personal advancement; how people simultaneously oscillate between them across space and time; and how people express love-hate relationships of them.
For example, he shows how people love and hate the city, and how the city signifies both power and danger, and how the city is both empowering and oppressive. He shows how people see urban development with triumph and pride, but also are nostalgic for rural lifestyles. Hoc Mon residents straddle the line between the despised rural villagers and the civility of the urban.
The idealized categories of urban/rural and inside/outside are both transgressed and reproduced in the everyday lives of Hoc Mon residents. Life in Hoc Mon is a life simultaneously full of despair and opportunity, of power and oppression, of inclusion and exclusion.
He provides a brilliant example to illustrate the simultaneous oscillation between inclusion and exclusion that is experienced in Hoc Mon. According to the patrilineal marriage customs in Vietnam, where the wife of the family joins the male family, she is considered to be an outsider, and yet is still a part of the family; she is hated by her in-laws but needed for reproduction.
In a similar way the urban fringe is necessary for the life of the city (provides cheap labor and manufacturing), and is needed for capitalist reproduction. The urban fringe and the rural are necessary parts of the city, yet seen as the outside of it. Like the daughter-in-law, the urban fringe--where the poor and marginalized of the city live--is a source of life for the city, yet despised (think of the way New Yorkers seem to hate New Jersey and people from New Jersey, for example).
In another example, he uses a Vietnamese proverb that says, "suck the soapberry and call it sweet,” to describe the way that urbanization and development is bitter, but people force themselves to like it anyway. Like sucking on a soapberry, life in Hoc Mon is a bittersweet experience of social change, and people express a love/hate relationship with the changes of urbanization, and with the life changes that come with economic development. On the one hand, they have more money, technology, and an improved standard of living. On the other hand, there is dispossession, poverty, fatigue, pollution, inequality, crime, and a loss of community and close social connections. The sweet is the ideal of the city, imagined as civilized and orderly, but the bitter is the chaos of everyday life: despair, inequality, and poverty.
Meanwhile, people negotiate their own sense of self in these temporal and spatial worlds. You can think of this as similar to someone who lives in New Jersey but works in New York City. In this arrangement, this person is able to make more money than they would in New Jersey, but pay lower housing prices than they would in New York City. By working in the city, but living in the “country,” they put themselves at an advantage. Going abroad to work and sending remittances home is another example of manipulating space and time differences for personal benefit.
This is what Harms calls “spatiotemporal oscillation,” which occurs when one is able to move between the rural and urban in space and time. This is a form of power that attempts to harness the advantages of both rural and urban at once. The most relevant socioeconomic division in Hoc Mon is between those who manipulate the categories and those don’t. For those who don’t challenge the categories, the urban/rural dichotomy becomes an exclusionary and constraining binary. But for those who can straddle themselves with one foot in each category, landing in the grey area in-between the binaries? They’re the ones who succeed the most.
In other words, Hoc Mon residents use the false myth of the rural/urban dichotomy “as a means to harness the advantages of two competing forms of spatiotemporal organization that give them the power to reproduce themselves as social persons” (Harms 2011).
MIND BLOWN. By deconstructing these constraining binaires, and understanding ourselves as situated somewhere in-between, we can harness the power to reproduce ourselves as social persons, as unique snowflakes. Not as robots, or cogs in the machine, or slaves to the man. But as social persons: alive in the world through our social connections to other people, standing between binaries.
