From The Moral Economy To The World Econ PDF

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pamela mcelwee
From the Moral Economy to the World Economy:

Revisiting Vietnamese Peasants in a Globalizing Era
I n the 1970s, the Vietnamese peasantry was a key focus of social science
research in disciplines ranging from political science to anthropology to eco-
nomics. Understanding and explaining the role of peasants in revolutions was
understandably a prime topic of not only academic but real-world concerns at
the time, and such widespread attention to Vietnam in theoretical debates over
human behavior has not been rivaled since.1 One of the most well-publicized
of these debates over the nature of peasant economies took place with the pub-
lication of The Moral Economy of the Peasant by James C. Scott in 1976 and
Samuel Popkin’s response, The Rational Peasant, in 1979.2 Scott’s insistence
that the peasantry ought to be understood in relation to strongly held social and
cultural values guaranteeing a right to subsistence were challenged by Popkin’s
rational choice viewpoint that peasants are individualistic, profit-minded eco-
nomic actors. Both argued that their models of peasant behavior helped explain
the potential for agrarian rebellions. However, as a result of the depredations of
the Vietnam War and years of postwar isolation, few researchers could engage
in any field studies to shed further light on the debate. There was also little
opportunity to determine the continuing relevance of Vietnam for peasant stud-
ies theory, given the massive changes under way as the countryside underwent
large-scale collectivization under socialism.3
This article revisits some of the themes of The Moral Economy of the
Peasant and sets them against the world of the twenty-first-century
Journal of Vietnamese Studies, Vol. 2, Issue 2, pps. 57–107. ISSN 1559-372x, electronic ISSN 1559-3738.
© 2007 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests
for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California
Press’s Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI:
10.1525/jvs.2007.2.2.57
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Vietnamese peasant. The primary aims of this article are to bring new
ethnographic and economic data to the moral economy debate and to see if
Scott’s arguments still hold true in the increasingly globalized context of
contemporary Vietnam. My work here is based on recent field research in
the area of northern Vietnam known as Ngh0 T3nh, the same geographic
area focused on in The Moral Economy of the Peasant. The issues raised by
Scott as important in sustaining peasants’ right to subsistence, including vil-
lage reciprocity, social modes of income redistribution, conservatism in sub-
sistence food strategies, and resistance to state imposition on these survival
strategies, all persist to this day among communities in Ngh0 T3nh.
Yet we should be very surprised that so many things remain similar.
Surely with all the radical changes and economic depredations that people
experienced under the cooperativization of the 1950–1970s, we could
assume that peasants would now only want to farm individually? On the
contrary, labor reciprocity still exists and is particularly important for farmers
with small landholdings and small families. And surely with the expansion of
neoliberal economic restructuring and global markets for nearly every agri-
cultural commodity imaginable, we would find peasants rationally maxi-
mizing their production of goods to tap into the demands of global
consumers? In fact, peasants in Ngh0 T3nh still make seemingly “irrational,”
uneconomical decisions about what crops to plant based not on the prices
for the crops or their productivity but on what they like to eat and what they
have historically grown.
This article will show that despite radical changes throughout the twen-
tieth century in village organization and leadership structure, in the nature
and extent of landholdings, and in economic and political organization,
peasants in contemporary Ngh0 T3nh continue to value many aspects of a
“moral economy” as reflected in local social relations and economic deci-
sion making. In particular, I focus here on revisiting Scott’s emphasis on the
nature of the area’s peasant economy as being highly normative and highly
risk averse, even in an era of market-orientation and Vietnam’s new global
openness. The peasants of the early 1900s in Ngh0 T3nh of which Scott
wrote were living in an era that saw rapid economic transformations, as colo-
nialism integrated Indochina into a larger world economy. Today we see
similar changes on the horizon, as Vietnam moves from isolated socialist
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FROM THE MORAL ECONOMY 59
state to member of the World Trade Organization (WTO), an action that

was finalized in November 2006. I speculate at the close of this article what
the implications may be for the future of peasant moral economies in Ngh0
T3nh as agriculture and international trade undergo transformations man-
dated by WTO accession and as the rural peasantry increases its linkages to
global capitalism.
The Vietnamese Peasantry in The Moral Economy

of the Peasant
Before moving to the contemporary Vietnamese peasantry, it is worth engag-
ing in a quick recap of what The Moral Economy of the Peasant set out to do.
Scott argued that peasants who live close to the edge of subsistence are
highly influenced by economic uncertainty in all their daily dealings. What
could be taken for irrational behavior (such as not adopting new high-value
cash crops or paying exorbitant interest rates on loans from patrons) can in
fact be explained by understanding the moral economy of the peasant. That
is, any behavior that reduces risk and prevents a peasant from falling below
the subsistence level is more likely to be followed. Village institutions and
social ties further this subsistence ethic by providing safety nets and assis-
tance in times of hardship. Furthermore, outside influences on this moral
economy that push peasants closer to starvation (which in the case of
French colonial Vietnam included excessive taxes or corvée labor obliga-
tions) will, according to Scott, likely be greeted by resistance, protest, and in
some cases, outright rebellion. The central assumption of Scott’s work is that
“whatever their civil and political disabilities, the poor had the social right of
subsistence. Hence, any claim on peasants by elites or the state could have
no justice when it infringed on subsistence needs.”4 Scott took as examples
the well-known Ngh0 T3nh Soviets of central Annam and the Saya San
revolts in Burma, both of which took place in 1930, as examples of rebellions
starting from the natural grievances of peasants pushed to the edge of
food crises.
Scott emphasized that the moral economy for Vietnamese peasants was
firmly anchored by the twin norms of reciprocity and the right to subsis-
tence, both of which were gravely endangered by the predations of the new
French colonial state.5 For example, massive changes in land tenancy and
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distribution were taking place at this time. Previously, village common prop-
erty [czng IiMn or czng thv] and unclaimed forest land were often used by
poorer villagers and those without sufficient wet-rice land. Such holdings
were traditionally very important in Annam.6 But villagers had to sell many
of these common lands in order to pay the heavy collective tax loads that the
French regime imposed. These land losses were coupled with the consoli-
dation of large landholdings into plantations under wealthy French and
Vietnamese landowners [IiMn chG].7 In north central Vietnam, the usurping
of common lands and the closing of free forests forced many peasants into
new and inflexible tenancy arrangements based on fixed payments of grain,
not on the success of the crop, squeezing peasants even harder. These eco-
nomic problems were compounded by new burdensome tax regimes; those
not based on production levels or the landholding size were particularly
resented. This included the head tax [impôt personnel], which the French
had instituted, as it was “the ultimate in regressive fiscal measures. It falls
indifferently on rich heads and poor heads in good times and in bad, with
the result that its actual burden on the tax-paying family fluctuated widely
from season to season.”8 Finding themselves squeezed between new tenancy
arrangements and new taxes, the peasants of turn-of-the-century Vietnam
also found themselves losing traditional fallback measures that had been
used in the past to provide supplementary income in times of hardship, such
as the collection of fuelwood and forest products that could be used, eaten,
or sold.9
Significant social protest eventually erupted in 1930 in the Ngh0 T3nh area
as well as in other provinces, although the Ngh0 T3nh protests lasted the
longest. Droughts and floods in rapid succession in 1929 and 1930 caused the
failure of much of the area’s harvests. Increasing communist agitation
through Youth League party cells, local unrest, and the threat of starvation
were a volatile combination.10 Thousands of peasants joined with proletar-
ian workers at factories on May 1, 1930, and the mob marched on landlords
and government offices, burning buildings and stealing grain. Workers in
state factories began striking throughout the summer of 1930 and demanded
pay raises, an eight-hour work day, and social security, while peasants who
joined the protests at administrative offices demanded an abolition of the
head tax, market taxes, and river transport taxes and a reduction of land
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taxes.11 One of the first acts of the protesting crowds when they took over an
office was to burn identification cards, land registers [sv I]a b\], and tax rolls
[sv thuC].12
The French attributed the unrest to troublemaking of an incipient
Indochinese Communist Party. However, by far the largest number of peo-
ple incarcerated for being “red peasants” or “communists” claimed that they
had protested against high taxes, not for the establishment of a communist
administration or the defeat of French colonialism. Particularly in the south-
ern Hà T3nh area, most people questioned by a colonial task force looking
into the unrest singled out high forest taxes and corruption of forest guards as
the primary reason they had joined the protests.13 Such evidence supports
Scott’s conclusion that peasant rebellion often grows out of threats to sub-
sistence and that depredations on a local moral economy can have poten-
tially unpredictable consequences for states.
Not everyone was convinced of this thesis, however. Popkin argued in his
rejoinder that Scott was romanticizing precolonial traditional villages, in
which there was much injustice and hardship, and that contemporary peas-
ants, rather than clinging to the past, formed relationships and interactions
on sound, rational economic calculations of costs and benefits.14 Others crit-
icized Scott’s interpretations of unrest being closely timed to the drop in
world rice prices and natural disasters, while others noted that Burma and
Vietnam appeared to be extreme case studies chosen to fit the model.15
Vietnam scholars weighed in as well: Pierre Brocheux believed Scott did not
pay enough attention to the role of the state in precolonial village formation,
and Hy Van Luong has argued that Scott underestimated the role that indige-
nous elites and revolutionary parties played.16 Other authors objected to the
book’s claim to generalization by showing how the idea of a peasant moral
economy was not relevant or useful in other contexts.17 Anthropologists in
particular focused their critique of The Moral Economy of the Peasant on its
lack of attention to the religious and cultural factors of peasant unrest.18
But the major criticism of Scott’s work has questioned the predictive
value of the moral economy in anticipating when protest will result. Many
scholars have pointed to other subsistence crises in which peasant rebellion
did not occur, such as in other areas of Vietnam where hardship did not result
in protest. This critique appears to lend evidence to the idea that subsistence
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crises alone may not be enough to spark class struggle.19 However, Scott
himself makes this same point: “If anger born of exploitation were sufficient
to spark a rebellion, most of the Third World (and not only the Third World)
would be in flames. Whether peasants who perceive themselves to be
exploited actually rebel depends on a host of intervening factors—such as
alliances with other classes, the repressive capacity of dominant elites, and
the social organization of the peasantry itself.”20 The goal of The Moral
Economy of the Peasant was not to focus on the prediction of peasant revolts
but rather to understand the process by which they occur: the “creation of
social dynamite rather than its detonation.”
I do not wish to rehash these debates over the proximate causes of peasant
revolts—not because they have been settled but because others far more
theoretically engaged than I have been in the battles.21 What I wish to do
instead is to bring empiricism back into the mix and ask, with regard to
Vietnam and with specific regard to postcolonial, late-socialist, increasingly
market-oriented Vietnam, what (if anything) can we still learn from The
Moral Economy of the Peasant? There is a sense among some scholars that
the worlds of the smallholder in Scott’s and other peasant studies books are
worlds that existed only “prior to the triumph of capitalism.”22 Can moral
normative rules on economic transactions still guide peasants in an era of
“market triumphalism”?23 My answer is that yes, we can continue to learn
much by following The Moral Economy of the Peasant’s rejection of eco-
nomic reductionism in explaining peasant livelihoods, and by focusing
instead on understanding the social rules and expectations held by the poor
for the economic transactions they enter into. Further, I argue, we need to
understand not only that these norms may exist but also that they are rules of
the game that are constantly renegotiated.
The Modern Vietnamese Peasantry

and its Moral Economies
The research discussed in this article is based on fieldwork conducted for my
dissertation on environmental change in central Vietnam between 2000 and
2001 in CNm Xuyên District of Hà T3nh Province (formerly part of Ngh0
T3nh).24 This area (see Figure 1) is precisely the site of some of the strongest
activities during the 1930 Ngh0 T3nh Soviets protests, which The Moral
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FIGURE 1: Map of Hà T3nh

ı Province indicating site of field research.
Economy of the Peasant focuses on.25 I conducted group meetings, interviewed

village leaders and government cadres, and did more than one hundred in-
depth household interviews and economic surveys with a random sample of
peasant families concentrated in five villages [thôn] of three communes of the
district (labeled Village A, B, C, D, and E throughout this article). My overall
goal was to understand household and village economies, social relations, and
uses of natural resources, as the rural area in which I was working was in the
buffer zone of a newly demarcated and very large nature reserve.
It is important to note here that my findings are representative of the
Ngh0 T3nh area only and cannot be extrapolated to other regions easily.
There are strong regional differences in livelihoods and production in
Vietnam, as many have noted. Farms in the south tend to be larger than
those in the north; handicrafts and services complement much on-farm
employment in the north, but less so in the south, where off-farm wage labor
is the norm; and landlessness is on the rise in the south but remains fairly low
in the north. Many of these differences are attributed to historical trajectories;
agricultural production in the south has long been more commercial and
export oriented.26 Ngh0 T3nh lacks both the highly commercialized qualities
of agriculture in the south and the strong supplements to agriculture in the
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TA B L E O N E : Population and Land Statistics for Study Villages A–E, 2001
Village Population Households Land Area (in hectares)

Village A 549 120 112.5
Village B 412 105 29.5
Village C 632 135 300
Village D 320 75 142.2
Village E 432 100 97
source: Household survey and interviews with village headmen carried out by author in
2001.
form of services, trading, and handicrafts that are found in the north, leading
this area to be much more highly dependent on noncommercial subsistence
agriculture than the Red River or Mekong River deltas.
For example, of the five villages of CNm Xuyên District in which my
research took place, all were dependent on agriculture. Not a single house-
hold in three of the researched villages made a living from trading or busi-
ness, while in the other two villages only one or two households did not
farm.27 However, agriculture was notoriously poor in this area because of
very low-quality soil and dramatic climatic changes between summer
droughts and fall floods. Many areas produced only one rain-fed crop of rice,
and only one village (Village E) had a stable irrigation system for fields that
could produce two irrigated rice crops a year. Table 1 lists general population
and land figures for each of the five study villages.
During my surveys of 104 households (a 20 percent random sample of the
population of the five villages), I was able to gather and analyze general sta-
tistics on household composition, household incomes, and household land
holdings (see Table 2). The highest incomes were recorded in Village E,
with a yearly per capita cash income of more than 1.3 million VNA (about
US$89 in 2001), while Village D recorded the lowest at around 750,000
VNA (US$52).28 It is not surprising to note that the two villages with the
largest irrigated wet-rice holdings, Village E and Village B, had the highest
overall incomes. The poorer villages with less wet-rice land were far more
dependent on forest-based incomes, most of which came from the extraction
of timber, fuelwood, charcoal, and other goods from nearby state forests and
the K6 G? Nature Reserve.
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TA B L E T WO :
Population, Income, and Land Holdings in Study Villages A–E, 2001
Average for All

Indicator A (n 24) B (n 19) C (n 26) D (n 15) E (n 20) HHs (N 104)
Average number 4.66 4.42 5.27 4.33 5.05 4.8
of persons
in HH
Average per 1,112,625 1,576,784 899,119 756,121 1,330,495 1,112,455
capita income
(in VNA)a
Average HH 4,924,146 6,050,368 4,373,808 3,368,083 6,630,825 4,971,483
income
(in VNA)
Average HH 5,625,645 6,599,614 5,426,212 4,724,507 5,867,790 5,670,319
expenditure
(in VNA)
Average HH total 25.96 6.992 36.00 15.168 9.307 20.25
land holding
(in sào)b
Average HH 8.12 6.992 11.93 12.168 8.577 9.54
agricultural land
holding (in sào)
source: Household survey carried out by the author in 2001.

HH = household.
a US$ = 14,500 VNA at the time of the survey.
b Hà T3nh follows the central regional standard that one sào is equivalent to five hundred
square meters.
As part of my research project, I conducted detailed analysis of peasant

household economies, asking questions about all income and expenditures
the family reported for the previous twelve-month period. Overall, livestock
was the biggest contributor to cash incomes in Hà T3nh households (see
Table 3). Forest products held an impressive second place, contributing on
average almost 900,000 VNA. However, these figures do have one major
problem in that they reflect an overall average and do not indicate how
many people rely on each source. Table 4 shows how many people in the
sample relied on each source of income, and it indicates the average income
benefit only for the people reporting that source of income rather than aver-
aged over the 104 respondents. Analyzing the data shows us that local wage
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TA B L E T H R E E : Main Sources of Income Generation in CNm

a Xuyên
Overall average cash contribution,

in VN–D, and as a percentage
Income Source of total HH income (N 104)
Livestock 1,164,904 (23%)
Forest-based income 898,828 (18%)
Salary/government benefits 647,212 (13%)
Employment (both local and 638,462 (13%)
migrant wage labor)
Rice 661,233 (13%)
Gardens 435,078 (9%)
Dry field crops 351,442 (7%)
Services 125,243 (3%)
Trading 14, 423 (less than 1%)
Other misc. income 35,865 (less than 1%)
TOTAL 4,972,000
source: Household survey carried out by author in 2001.
labor (mostly working for brick factories) provided the largest amount of
cash income out of all sources—but that only five families received money
from this source. Viewed in this way, livestock remains the number one
source of cash income for the largest number of people, as one hundred
households got some cash from raising livestock. Gardens then move up to
the second most important income stream for the next largest group of peo-
ple, as eighty-two people sold some produce from their gardens. Forest-based
income was the third most popular source of cash income.
Reported incomes were generally lower than reported expenditures;
there were likely some illicit and unnamed income sources for households
so that incomes were underreported (which is why many international
development agencies use expenditures, not income, as a proxy for house-
hold economic status). Most households spent nearly everything they
earned, and the majority of households lived fairly close to the poverty line
(see Table 5). The largest category of expenditures was agricultural produc-
tion: seedlings, fertilizer, and pesticides had to be bought; equipment had to
be replaced; sometimes other people had to be hired to till or plow fields
if a family did not have a buffalo. Once rice was harvested, families had
to pay to have it milled and to have it transported if they were selling it.
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TA B L E F O U R : Sources of Cash Income by Numbers of People Benefiting
No. of Households Average Cash Contribution

with Cash Income (in VN–D) to Each
Income Source (N 104) Participating HH
Livestock 100 1,211,500
Gardens (fruits, vegetables, 82 551,806
medicinals)
Forest-based income (timber, 63 1,483,777
fuelwood, charcoal,
protection payments)
Dry field crops (cassava, corn, 52 702,885
peanuts, beans)
Rice 41 1,677,273
Migrant employment and 26a 1,876,923
remittances
Government salary and state 24 2,804,583
benefits
Services (motorbike repair, 10 1,612,500
plow rental, etc.)
Local wage labor (brick and 5 3,520,000
fertilizer factory work)
Other miscellaneous income 4 932,500
Trading 2 750,000

aThree of these households with one member who had migrated for employment had not
received any remittances yet.
Most families also spent money at the local markets on supplemental food,
such as vegetables and meat.
In looking closely at incomes and expenditures, we can see that most
households were living very much on the edge, with little room for
increased expenditures or decreased incomes. However, in rural Hà T3nh
there was not yet a serious problem with people taking out loans and getting
into debt; most people avoided large loans if they could and were more
likely to cut food intake or send someone from the family to the south to
work as a wage laborer (at the time of the survey, 40 percent of households
included at least one person who was away from the local commune to find
work). Commercial money lending was not yet common in CNm Xuyên
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TA B L E F I V E : Average Yearly Household Expenditures, by Category
Average Yearly Expenditure,

Item in VN–D (N 104)
Agriculture
Rice seed 102,265
Pesticides/herbicides 117,294
Fertilizers 516,182
Equipment 78,971
Tilling/other labor 51,324
Milling rice 74,706
Livestock
Young animals (purchased) 286,029
Feeds 92,059
Vet expenses 67,794
Gardens/tree farms
Seedlings/seeds 37,794
Fertilizers 131,794
Pesticides 22,706
Irrigation fees 65,494
Household food
Additional rice 142,059
Other purchased foods 1,102,458
Household items
House construction/repair/upgrading 533,088
Electricity 173,294
Other household items 507,353
Children’s expenses
School fees 220,294
Uniforms/supplies 223,676
Medical expenses
Medicines 361,617
Doctors’ fees 69,531
Taxes (land and agricultural) 226,335
Social occasions
T!t 388,529
Other social visits/travel 843,235
TOTAL 6,772,776

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villages, which is a considerable departure from the Vietnam of the turn of

the century described by The Moral Economy of the Peasant.
Part of the explanation for the lack of landlordism and usury in this part of
contemporary Vietnam was that the years of socialism and cooperativization
had laid the basis for a general equality of land holdings and income oppor-
tunities; as one family recalled, “Everyone was poor back then.” Even though
some corrupt cadres may have been skimming off the top and everyone else
tried to find (often illegal) ways to make ends meet, informants did not
report huge income differentials in the cooperative era from the 1960s to the
1980s. Further, when the cooperatives were dissolved in the early 1990s, most
lands in CNm Xuyên were redistributed on a per capita basis, not according
to the amount of land families had in the past. Families that had been large
landlords in the 1950s did not receive any more land than anyone else. As a
result, no one yet had redeveloped into landlords or money lenders as of
2001; this was attributed locally to both an abundance of available land and
its poor quality.29
In the following subsections, I will look at some of the key topics outlined
by Scott as being important parts of a “moral economy” to see if such issues
remain important today. The main areas of focus are reciprocity within vil-
lages, redistribution of income from rich to poor, risk-averse agricultural
strategies, continued dependence on common lands and freely-collected
forest products from these lands, and protest responses to what is perceived
as the unjust state collection of taxes and duties.
reciprocity as social act
In modern Vietnam, the individual family household is the prime kin unit,
and extended kin relations remain one of the strongest markers of identity.
However, suprafamily social relations have always been important as well, as
nowhere can one find a village made up of solely a single patriline.30 Rather,
several families cluster together to form villages, with some villages con-
taining up to ten or more extended patrilines or clans. (Most villages in CNm
Xuyên consisted of between seven and ten patrilines per village). The pres-
ence of several family lines and the need to maintain harmonious relations
between the families through marriages and other social arrangements have
oriented much of family life toward village sociality.
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There are usually a number of extrafamily social groupings in an average

Vietnamese village, depending on the region and history and not including
official Communist Party organizations such as the Farmers’ Union or the
Women’s Union. Other village associations often include elderly men’s asso-
ciations, elderly women’s associations (often Buddhist), cult committees,
mutual aid associations, agricultural laborers’ associations, youth associa-
tions, age-cohort associations, trade associations, and school associations.31
There are also much less formal links within any village. One major source
of the important social “glue” that holds together much of rural society is the
continued practice of sharing work in agricultural tasks. This remains very
true to this day, despite the dissolution of official cooperatives. Informants
told me that although people despised the work point system of collective
farming enforced during the cooperative era, reciprocal work exchanges
[trao Ivi lao Izng] between families and neighbors have always been impor-
tant and were never abandoned. Reciprocal help is essential at peak seasons
of rice cultivation, particularly during transplanting and harvesting. Labor is
most often exchanged for tasks like sowing [gieo] and transplanting [c{y], till-
ing and plowing [cày], and at harvest time [g|t]. Overall, more than 85 percent
of the households in my survey reported regular labor exchanges, with the
average number of days varying from a minimum of five to more than twenty
days per season.
These labor exchanges continued to take place within the new confines
of a market economy; there was a labor market in the area at the time of my
research that paid an average wage of 20,000 VNA/day. Yet, in my study site,
only a minority of households (32 percent) hired any agricultural labor, and
the average cost of agricultural labor was a paltry 50,000 VNA per year for
all households, less even than what households paid to mill their rice (see
Table 5). The hiring of labor was usually done by households that had more
land than they could reasonably farm with household labor alone: those
households who hired extra labor had on average 28.11 sào of land, while
those who relied only on reciprocal labor had 16.36 sào.32 However, even the
hiring of labor did not stop the use of reciprocal exchanges. Households that
hired labor still exchanged labor days, an average of 9.3 labor days a season,
compared to the average of 16.3 days per season exchanged by households
that did not hire labor.
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Here we should note clearly that reciprocity is not just an act of kindness
between friends or a grudgingly given obligation to a relative. Reciprocity is
a complicated exchange, based both on social relationships and to some
degree on “a lively sense of mutual self-interest in which each participant is
fully ware of what he is owed and what he owes. . . . One peasant assists
another because he knows that this is the only way he can elicit the assis-
tance he himself will need later.”33 Reciprocity in Hà T3nh also extended
beyond labor exchanges. Although cash donations to relatives and friends
were rare in CNm Xuyên, as few people had any money to spare, people
might occasionally make no-interest loans to relatives. More often, villagers
would bring meals, garden products, and extra rice to those kinfolk or neigh-
bors who were especially destitute. Tractors would be loaned at no cost to
help cousins; children would be sent to the house of an elderly uncle to help
him prepare his meals at night. The social obligations of relatives are
summed up in a folk saying: “Relatives are like arms and legs of one body:
those who are strong protect those who are weak, those who are wise help
those who are foolish” [Anh em nh} chân vRi tay, rách lành Iùm bLc, dw hay
IX I2n]. And as others have pointed out, strong village endogamy, particu-
larly in the north of Vietnam, has further contributed to the “multiplicity of
social ties, intensified social networks, reinforced trust, and reduced trans-
action costs among villagers.”34
In my study site, neighbors were often called on for assistance as well;
there is a common saying that one ought to “sell distant kin, and buy close
neighbors” [bán anh em xa mua láng giMng g2n]. In his study of Mekong
Delta villages, Gerald Hickey noted that “close neighbors are treated as kin,
and in this respect proximity of residence might be considered a more uni-
versal determinant of strong social bonds in the village than kinship.”35 I was
often told by informants of the paramount need to have “good relations with
one’s neighbors” [tình cym vRi hàng xóm]; this influenced behavior ranging
from inviting neighbors to share meals to loaning them equipment for their
fields. Even violations of local customary law, like errant buffalos eating
another family’s crops, might be overlooked if pressing for compensation
might endanger feelings of “social sentiment” [tình cym].
Were there other cultural prescriptions regarding the need for generosity
and reciprocity within villages? It is important to point out the relatively
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weak ties to religion in this area during the time of my study. There was a
strong Catholic presence in this part of Hà T3nh before 1954, but at the time
of partition many families and whole villages had left for the south. There
was no active Buddhist Association or even a pagoda in the villages I worked
in, and only loose attention to village tutelary spirits. As a result, many of the
villages in CNm Xuyên were not experiencing the same sort of local resur-
gence of village-wide ritual and religious practices that researchers have doc-
umented in other parts of Vietnam.36 Most of the villages of CNm Xuyên did
not have communal halls [Iình], for example.37 Because of the general lack
of large spaces for worshiping village spirits or ancestors and a lack of strong
associations tied to religious practice, CNm Xuyên’s villages focused on the
family and individual ancestor worship; religion was not pulling the villages
together in shared ideas and practices related to morality.
Yet, overall, it was clear that each village’s residents still formed a fairly
tight-knit community in which everyone was concerned with the social
welfare of even the most poor and those of the lowest status, and in which
tình cym governed important social interactions. This point was brought
home to me on one particular occasion in Village A. When I arrived in the
village early in the morning, I could hear drums pounding and tapes play-
ing the wailing music that accompanies a death. I was told by the head-
man that it was a very “sad case” of Mr. T, an elderly widower who had
been ill for some time and who had left behind an unwed daughter with
an illegitimate child. Their situation would now be very difficult [khv
quá]. When I made noises of compassion and said with what I thought was
concern, “Oh dear, that’s so terrible!” the headman looked up, visibly
annoyed, and snapped at me, “Why is that so terrible? It’s not like we’d
leave them to starve! The village will take care of them, not just the clan
and the neighbors. We’ll all look out for her, don’t you worry. We always
share the suffering [chia buOn] and take care of [chJm sóc] those who need
it.” With that he marched off to the wake without taking the money I had
offered as a funeral donation and left me to do the morning’s fieldwork
alone while he helped plan the funeral. Later that evening, I met with him
and other officials of the village, who were planning the expenses for the
man’s burial and deciding what village organizations and wealthier fami-
lies should be asked to make additional donations so the young woman
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could give her father a proper funeral. Even though the family was
extremely poor and did not exactly enjoy high social standing, the villagers
nevertheless all pitched in to look out for them. It was a story I saw
repeated again and again in CNm Xuyên.
income redistribution as social obligation
Another way to bring about more social cohesion in the village and to help
sort through complaints and problems between households were the
numerous social ceremonies and village rituals that took place throughout
the year. Informants in my study estimated that there were, on average,
about ten ceremonies a year that each household was obliged to support
with attendance and money or food. Among these were feasts, especially
those for weddings, where it is customary to give an envelope of money to
the guests of honor, but direct money transfers also happened at other occa-
sions. These contributions to others—particularly to the poor, as richer rel-
atives were obliged to be more generous with poorer ones—indirectly
resulted in some redistribution of resources within a village. In the study vil-
lages, the amount spent on all social visits, including visits to betrothal cer-
emonies [Ii hSi], to weddings [Ii c}Ri], to funerals [Ii Iám ma], to New
Year’s holidays [Ii mSng TCt], or to feasts [Ii #n tiDc], took up a considerable
amount of income. According to informant estimates, the average yearly
cost was 843,000 VNA per household for these occasions, and TCt alone
usually cost an additional 389,000 VNA on average. If we compare these
expenditures with the overall expenses per household, we find that they
take up almost 20 percent of the total annual costs of living per household
on average—not an insignificant sum.
It is even more interesting to look more closely at expenditures among
the different social classes. Here we find an interesting pattern, in which
social expenditures rise as a percentage of one’s overall income and the sta-
tus of the family rises. That is, social expenditures are a highly progressive
“tax” on the rich (see Table 6). Rich people, comprising a small proportion
of the overall village, reported spending 34 percent of their overall expenses
on social obligations, including ceremonies, New Year’s celebrations, and
loans to relatives and neighbors, while poor households devoted only 15 per-
cent of their total expenses to social occasions. Poor and hungry households
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TA B L E S I X : Social Expenditures by Income Class
Average Average Average Social Expenditures

Social Class Expenditures Expenditures Expenditures on as % of Total
of Householda on Ceremonies on T!t
e Loans to Others Expenditures
Rich/well-off 1,760,000 470,000 140,000 34%
HH (n = 5 )
Average HH 725,606 412,576 49,000 21%
(n = 66)
Poor HH 555,312 290,625 0 15%
(n = 32)
Hungry HH 20,000 75,000 0 3%
(n = 1)

HH = household.
aCommune authorities assigned households to one of these four categories each year as part
of their participation in “hunger alleviation and poverty reduction” (HEPR) programs;

other less poor areas of Vietnam do not undertake these detailed household classifications.
The classifications are based on a formula of income per capita per month.
did not have any reported loans to others, while average and better-off house-
holds were imposed upon for cash loans. One well-off family described their
economic expenditures at ceremonial occasions and for loans very bluntly as
“the price of having social relations” [chi phí quan hD x] hzi].
Such obligatory generosity has long been a common feature of Viet-
namese villages, not just in Hà T3nh. Hy Van Luong writes that in pre-1945
northern Vietnam, “The intense competition among the landed elite for
positions on this [village] hierarchy and their political intrigues in the context
of a mandatory feasting system functioned to reduce wealth differentiation
within the community.” He argues that these social occasions exemplify the
contradiction between trends toward both hierarchy and egalitarianism
within Vietnamese villages.38 In one example of this contradiction, commu-
nity leadership in precolonial villages was often determined by lineage, not
wealth, and therefore older men, although perhaps poor, could hold signifi-
cant political advantages over younger, more prosperous, villagers.39
The changing “price of social relations,” extending both between hier-
archically placed lineages of households and between patrons and clients
and landlord and lessees, is a common theme in Scott’s work in The Moral
Economy of the Peasant, one that was explored even more in his later work,
Weapons of the Weak, which stresses that “strategies of economic subordination
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FIGURE 2: The house of a family classified as “poor” (photograph by

author).
need to be transformed by means of gift exchanges, marriages, feast giving,

and other practices into relations of kinship, personality loyalty, piety and
generosity.”40 The obligation of the rich to be generous, as seen in CNm
Xuyên villages, is a strategic manifestation of “the desire to be thought well
FIGURE 3: The house of a family classified as “well-off” (photograph

by author).
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76 MCELWEE
of, or at least not despised.”41 Violations of this obligation, even among those
at the top of the hierarchy, are not tolerated and are met with gossip, petty
acts, and loss of face and respect and are thus avoided if possible, at least
among the rich of CNm Xuyên.
r i s k av e r s e l i v e l i h o o d s a s s o c i a l s t r a t e g y
The previous income and expenditure data indicated that some house-
holds are doing better than others in the new market-oriented Vietnam.
One of the best predictors of relative wealth in my study was the supple-
mentation of agriculture by other sources of off-farm income, such as
salaries or remittances from the south or abroad. Those without such
sources remained largely dependent on agriculture, and in particular on
rice farming. Rice production is considered the main basis of the economy
in Hà T3nh, despite the fact that the areas in which I did research were
environmentally unsuited to rice, as there were inadequate water supplies
and drought for most of the year and floods in the fall harvest season. Even
so, 94 percent of all families surveyed produced rice. As in other places in
Vietnam, rice is both a subsistence staple and a cash crop that can be sold
year-round for a guaranteed price. After it has been dried and threshed, it
stores well and provides an “edible” bank account for families. Even in the
village with the least amount of rice land, Village D, one family explained
that “Rice fields are the most important land there is” [Ruzng là I{t quan
trLng nh{t].
Households in Hà T3nh measured their wealth primarily in terms of rice
self-sufficiency. Households who said they were “short of food” [b] thiCu #n]
meant that they were unable to supply enough rice for their family to eat
throughout the year and would either have to find some way to buy rice or
else eat other crops like cassava or potatoes when the rice supplies ran out.42
The transition from rice-poor to rice-rich was considered by peasants to be
one of the major indicators that a family was no longer locally considered
poor. A slight majority of households in my study, 55 percent, reported in
2001 that they had not had a rice shortage in the last two years. Seventeen
percent of families reported rice shortages of one month per year, 23 percent
had shortages from two to three months, and 6 percent had shortages for more
than four months. These poorest households often had to turn to performing
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migrant labor, selling livestock, or collecting forest products to buy the rice
they needed to get them through their shortages.
However, despite their considerable efforts, the majority of families did
not produce a rice surplus large enough to sell. Only 39 percent of the fam-
ilies sold any rice on the market; the rest grew it for subsistence only. Of the
households that sold rice, the average amount of the rice crop sold was less
than half (41 percent). This is consistent with other studies that have indi-
cated that the farmers of the northern central coastal region sell far less rice
than those in the Mekong or Red River deltas. According to government sta-
tistics, only 33 percent of rice production in the north central coast is sold,
while the number is 62 percent for the Red River Delta region and 72 percent
for the Mekong River Delta region.43
Because the majority of households in Hà T3nh could not produce a rice
surplus given the poor environmental conditions, the government had
recently been promoting alternative cash crops (primarily peanuts, sesame,
corn, and beans along with garden crops like rattan). New crops were tested
and promoted through programs that gave out highly subsidized or free
seedlings, such as hybrid corn or improved bean varieties. However, despite
rather aggressive government efforts to introduce the hybrid corn, it was a
huge flop. Skepticism was rife among the villagers, who hesitated to switch
from rice to an untested crop. Many who had tried the seeds said that the
droughts in the area were too severe for corn to survive. There was also the
FIGURE 4: a Xuyên Village C, located between rice fields and hill

CNm
forests (photograph by author).
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78 MCELWEE
very firm perception that these alternative crops would always be inferior to
rice, since rice was what people knew best how to plant, what they believed
would always have a market guaranteed by the state, and what people most
enjoyed eating. Despite the difficulties with rice production and the poten-
tial for more income with extensive fields of dry-field cash crops, in CNm
Xuyên rice remained king.
So how do we explain that rice was planted by nearly everyone, even
though productivity was low, inputs were expensive, and the work in the
fields was hard? This seems to be a perfect example of the seemingly “irra-
tional” behavior peasants will sometime engage in given their natural risk-
averseness. As Scott first pointed out, peasants often prefer “choices in the
production process: a preference for crops that can be eaten over crops that
must be sold, an inclination to employ several seed varieties in order to
spread risks, a preference for varieties with stable if modest yields.”44 We see
these same calculations at work today. When measured in terms of cash con-
tributions to the households in Hà T3nh, rice ranked well below livestock,
forest products, dry cash-crop fields, and even gardens in contributions to
overall cash inflows (as seen in Tables 3 and 4). Yet dry fields and gardens
were rarely invested in heavily; fertilizer for gardens tended to be simply
night soil and manure, and people hesitated to buy garden seedlings that
were unfamiliar. Dry fields were sometimes fertilized, but with much less
chemical fertilizer than was given to rice, and people were hesitant to try
new dry-field crops. At the same time, the same farmers enthusiastically
embraced new varieties of rice: every single farmer I interviewed was using
at least one improved, high-yielding variety that had been purchased. Why
did farmers take more chances on rice—more investment, more labor, more
risk—and less on dry fields and gardens, which, on the overall face of things,
were more environmentally suited to the highland environments and more
economically productive? This seems to directly contradict the idea of a
“rational peasantry,” to use Popkin’s phrase, who “maximizes their utility.”45
We can see this dilemma of irrationality in the data from Hà T3nh. If we
do an analysis of how much families spent on average for inputs into rice
production (seedlings, pesticides, fertilizers, irrigation fees, tilling, milling,
and transport), we can get a sense of the average household costs for rice
(see Table 7, first row). Then, if we compare the average household rice
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TA B L E S E V E N : Comparison of Inputs and “Profits” from Rice and Garden

a Xuyên (all figures in VN–D)
Production in CNm
All Villages Village A Village B Village C Village D Village E

Average cost of 1,215,447 757,508 1,125,587 1,130,731 1,269,667 1,631,605
inputs for rice
per HH
Average rice 1,390 976 1,038 1,565 1,251 2,047
production
(kg) per HH
Average cash 1,668,000 1,171,200 1,245,600 1,878,000 1,523,600 2,456,400
equivalent for
rice production
per HH
Average HH 452,553 413,692 120,013 747,269 253,933 428,855
“profit” from
rice in cash
equivalent
Actual average 661,233 10,000 37,895 501,231 233,680 2,563,550
HH income
from rice sold
Actual average –554,214 –747,508 –1,087,692 –629,500 –1,035,987 931,945
HH return
based on cash
sales
Average costs of 148,629 208,625 117,632 133,462 127,000 142,025
inputs for
gardens per HH
Actual average 435,078 487,479 615,842 452,442 451,570 165,525
cash income
from gardens
per HH
Average HH 286,449 278,854 498,210 318,980 324,570 23,500
“profit” from
gardens

HH = household.
productivity in kilograms (second row) and multiply productivity by the

average price of rice when sold (1,200 VNA per kilogram in 2001), we get a
household cash equivalent for rice production (third row). If we take this fig-
ure and subtract the inputs from it, we get an estimate of “profit” or “gain”
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80 MCELWEE
(row four). In all villages, there was a net gain from rice if we calculate based
on the market price for rice. But a very different picture appears when we
look only at the actual cash figures for rice (i.e., what the family actually
sold, not their subsistence rice production given a market price, which
appears on the fifth line of Table 7). Since the majority of households did not
sell rice, using market prices gives a falsely inflated figure of “profit.” Then if
we take the true cash figure minus the inputs, we can see that in only one
village were households making cash over and above the inputs they spent
for rice (Village E, the one with the best irrigated rice holdings). All other
villages were “losing” money on rice; they spent more in cash (all inputs I
have tabulated require cash payments, with the exception of irrigation fees
and milling, which can be paid in paddy) than they took in by selling rice. In
other words, we could look at these figures and say that households were
“robbing Peter to pay Paul”: they took cash income from other sources (live-
stock, forest products, and remittances and salaries, primarily) and put that
cash into inputs for rice production.
Why didn’t households take the labor they used on rice farming and
spend it collecting forest products, which they could then sell for cash to buy
rice directly at the market, eliminating the middle step of buying so many
agricultural inputs and taking up labor to plant rice? Or given that forest pro-
duction collection is often laborious, involving long walks and carrying of
produce, let us ask a different, but related, question. Why did households not
invest in garden production, rather than rice production, given that garden-
ing is less laborious than forest collection and could produce similar prod-
ucts for sale or consumption (e.g., herbs, peanuts, vegetables, etc.)? We can
see from the bottom three lines of Table 7 the relative inputs and profits
from gardens. Cash garden income in all cases exceeded the costs of inputs
and produced a “profit.” (I was unable to generate a cash equivalent figure
for all garden produce because so much of it was not marketed and had no
price, but we can see that a cash equivalent figure would make gardens seem
even more profitable.) Yet rice remained the activity in which households
primarily invested. Gardening and dry-field crops were a distant second in
terms of agricultural strategies.
One explanation for this “irrationality” is the long tradition of rice grow-
ing and eating in Vietnamese villages: it is simply a preferred, culturally
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important crop. Another reason is the long investment in rice production by

the state, and the fear of risk in relying on uncertain markets for other crops.
Households also did not regularly do the sort of cash analysis I have done
here; as Enrique Mayer and Manuel Glave noted in the case of peasants in
the Andes, “when evaluating subsistence crops, farmers ignore the cash
expenses necessary to produce them. Profit calculations are irrelevant to
farmers in subsistence calculations, but attention to the flow of resources
that produces crops is highly relevant.”46 People in my study went with what
they knew best—rice—and were willing to do most anything to make rice
productivity go up. But they did not extend that same risk-taking to crops
they were less familiar with. Even though peanuts were obtaining a decent
price and seemed quite suitable to the highland soils and climate, they were
still a “new” crop to most people. The same was especially true of the hybrid
corn, which farmers felt was too risky to adopt.
Yet we cannot simply characterize the peasants of Hà T3nh simply as con-
servative and unwilling to take chances on new crops. Indeed, it is a mis-
reading of The Moral Economy of the Peasant to conclude that peasants
never take risks. As Grant Evans notes, Scott argues only that “particular
kinds of peasants are risk averse—not peasants per se—and that these tend to
be peasants skirting the margin of subsistence—that is, the ones who have
the most to lose if any innovation fails.”47 In fact, peasants in Hà T3nh have
taken tremendous risks with regard to rice production in the past thirty years.
New and improved “Green Revolution” high-yielding varieties of rice,
which provide higher productivity through the increased inputs of fertilizer
and pesticides, have been widely adopted in the past twenty years.48 On aver-
age, farmers in my study area used between three and ten varieties of rice per
season, often dependent on the size and quality of their rice lands. More
than half the total seedlings a family used annually were purchased modern
varieties. At the same time, not one farmer relied on only one variety of rice,
another indicator of risk-spreading behavior.49
dependence on common lands as a social right
Another way that households in Hà T3nh have long lowered their vulnera-
bility to overall risk in a hostile environment was to use alternative sources of
income production as supplements when agricultural crops failed, or when
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82 MCELWEE
prices for produce dropped. In CNm Xuyên, one main source of backup
income was forest product collection, a strategy that has been noted
throughout the world; indeed, forests are often called a “safety-net.”50 All of
the peasants I spoke with in CNm Xuyên considered themselves to be rice
farmers, first and foremost, but many of these farmers turned to forest
exploitation as a supplement to their agricultural production, and this sup-
plement was especially valued when agricultural crops failed.
The Moral Economy of the Peasant notes that access to forest goods had
been an important secondary occupation of peasants at the turn of the cen-
tury, and that they resented strongly the imposition of forest taxes and regu-
lations and the loss of access to forests and commons when they were
privatized or regulated by the French. Forests played a similar supplemen-
tary role after the end of French colonialism and during the cooperative era.
According to older informants, forests began to be a particularly important
source of cash income in the most difficult years of collective production in
the mid 1970s. A few farmers began harvesting fuelwood and charcoal (burn-
ing timber in the forest to turn it into easily transportable and lighter bri-
quettes) on the side and selling it on the black market. One man explained:
“There was no investment whatsoever when we got here [to the collective
farms]. People made rice fields, but it wasn’t enough to feed everyone.
There was a surplus of labor. So people went to the forest to look for work, to
have a secondary income outside the co-operative.” By the late 1970s, many
families estimated they were receiving about 30 percent of their income
from forest products, most of which were sold on the black market. Although
at this time private trade, particularly in wood products, was not officially
allowed, in fact it flourished rather openly.
As Vietnam under A%i M&i ushered in a more globalized, market-oriented
economy, there was increasing demand for some forest products (rattans,
medicinals, and wild meats in particular) at about the same time that col-
lective farms were folding in the late 1980s. Unfortunately, all of these activ-
ities had a degrading effect on forest ecology and composition. Certain
products, such as rattans and medicinals, were becoming harder and harder
to find, and collectors had to go even greater distances to obtain them.
Although markets for some products remained strong and became officially
legal with the opening of the economy to market forces, other products
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dropped in value with the introduction of the market. Nevertheless, by

the time I began my research in the year 2000, many households still
relied to some degree on forest products, for either subsistence or income
purposes.
This reliance has been recently complicated by the establishment of a
new nature reserve in the heart of Hà T3nh, the K6 G? Nature Reserve
(KGNR). In response to the boom-and-bust cycles of previous years, com-
bined with a new interest in conservation, the KGNR was established in
1996 with a total acreage of more than thirty-five thousand hectares; it has
been declared one of the more important areas for biodiversity in northern
Vietnam. Approximately forty thousand people now live in the buffer zone
of the reserve. Although a great many of these people do not use park
resources, the villages in which I worked did rely on collection of forest prod-
ucts from the park. However, the use of the nature reserve for extractive pur-
poses is illegal under Vietnamese law, and villages that had long used the
area’s resources now found themselves increasingly excluded from them and
fined and punished for collecting what used to be free.
So how dependent were the villagers on formerly freely collected forest
products? We can get a rough estimation of subsistence value of forest prod-
ucts by examining fuelwood, the forest product with the highest subsistence
value. In a separate household survey of fuelwood use, I was able to estimate
the average household fuelwood consumption at 3,920 kilograms a year.
Given the average market price for fuelwood of 12,000 VNA for around
thirty kilograms, we can calculate the subsistence value of a family’s freely
collected fuelwood at around 1,568,000 VNA a year. If we add the subsis-
tence value of freely collected timber, charcoal, bamboos, rattans, and so on,
the figure goes up. It would be nearly impossible for families to come up
with millions of VNA a year to replace the forest goods they had previously
used freely. This was a major reason people gave for continuing to exploit in
state forests even though they now risked fines and punishment.
In addition to the economic justifications people had for trying to con-
tinue to assert rights to resources that were now illegal, there are also nor-
mative notions of social justice that underlay local claims to forest resources
in particular, and this is where I want to extend the moral economy argu-
ment. The complaints that I heard from forest rangers about how villagers
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84 MCELWEE
refused to obey the new forest laws echo almost exactly the complaints of
French officials who grumbled that villages used forest resources without
regard to the forest guards, taxes, and fines that were in place to regulate
such use.51 Among the peasants I spoke with, a clear sense of entitlement
and social equity underlay people’s explanations for their continued use of
these lands.52 For example, it was well known in the villages that wealthy
illegal loggers from outside of the province used large boats to transfer wood
from the far side of the KGNR; therefore, why shouldn’t families be able to
cut a few trees now and then, especially if it was just to serve the needs of
their own households? If illegal loggers could get away with it, why shouldn’t
small farmers? Again and again, I heard “It’s just for my family, and I didn’t
deliberately mean to take from the Nature Reserve land—it was just there!”
Villagers saw their small collection of wood products as having an almost
insignificant impact on forest lands, especially in comparison with the
large-scale loggers they saw flouting the same regulations, but on a much
larger scale. As several people said to me in a focus group, “What’s wrong
with taking a tree now and then? It’s just to build a house. Everyone needs
a house.”
Furthermore, local people’s perceptions about forest guards and rangers
were almost uniformly negative. Most forest officers are sent to areas far from
their home provinces so they will not be tempted to help out relatives and
friends in procuring illegal wood. However, this policy usually ends up mak-
ing local people distrust the rangers as “outsiders.” In the past, locals could
usually pay off rangers to let them take a bit of timber. Depending on which
ranger you would meet, the bribe would vary, ranging from 300,000 to
400,000 VNA for a group of four or five men caught with a few logs (this
sum was equal to approximately one month’s salary for a forest ranger). One
logger informant reported that in the past, he got caught only about 10 per-
cent of the time, and then he had to pay a bribe but otherwise was let go.
Now that there was a nature reserve, he was getting caught more than half
the time and was having more logs confiscated. Further, the increasing ten-
dency to confiscate all illegal logs was not seen by loggers as a way to
improve ecological conditions in the park; rather, it was seen as an example
of the rangers’ increasing greed. As one man said, “It used to be that once we
pay [a bribe] we can take the logs.” Now, he complained, “Sometimes they
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take it all [the timber], and I have no choice but to turn around and go right
back into the forest to try to make my money back.” Informants noted that
rangers almost never stopped anyone from going into the forest; rather, they
stopped people when they were coming out and had already cut the timber.
One reason for this practice is that people coming into the forest can assert
they are doing nothing illegal, while someone with a plank certainly is. But
local people had a completely different interpretation. They believed the
forest rangers stopped them with the cut timber so they could confiscate it
and sell it themselves.
The forest rangers in Hà T3nh focused their enforcement efforts on the
market where people went to sell fuelwood they had collected and charcoal
they had made, which did not help the situation. This especially infuriated
local charcoal makers because it seemed a “lazy act” to come to the market
rather than catching people in the forest. According to charcoal makers, the
rangers were afraid of “hard work” and of “losing their energy” by going
into the forest, so they had concentrated their interdiction efforts at the
easier-to-reach marketplace. One woman who had lost several bags of char-
coal to forest rangers in the previous weeks sat down and told me, with tears
in her eyes, “It is so hard to go and make charcoal. We get so dirty—not even
FIGURE 5: o Nature Reserve with “illegally”

Villagers leaving the K6e G?
collected forest products (photograph by author).
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86 MCELWEE
spouses can recognize each other with our black faces; you have to look at
their white teeth to tell people apart. Our lives are so difficult, and we would
not willingly do this difficult work unless we were genuinely hungry and
poor. So why do the forest guards come and take our charcoal away? Do you
agree with this forest policy? Do you think it is right, or wrong, to take it away
from poor people?” She went on to argue that the poverty of her family gave
her a moral responsibility to try to provide for them, despite the fact that her
chosen economic strategy was illegal and potentially risky.
c o l l e c t i o n o f ta x e s t h a t a r e s o c i a l l y j u s t
While the imposition of forest regulations and forest fines echoes what the
French administration introduced into turn-of-the-century Vietnam, there is
another, even more volatile imposition on local economies that mirrors past
times. The Moral Economy of the Peasant spends much time discussing how
taxes contributed to successive episodes of rural unrest in colonial
Indochina. Whereas in the previous precolonial era, taxes were flexible and
would be reduced in years in which crops failed, the French colonial state
was ruthless in its collection. Worse, it relied on fixed, regressive taxes like
the head tax that had to be paid in cash. While the Vi0t Minh and succes-
sive North Vietnamese administrations abolished many of the French taxes
when they took over in 1954, in recent years new taxes have begun to creep
back into rural Vietnam that bear uncanny similarities to the old French
head taxes.
In decentralizing, market-oriented Vietnam of the 1990s and 2000s, local
areas no longer can rely on central disbursements and cooperatives to pro-
vide the funding for social services and government salaries. The State
Budget Law adopted in 2004 provides that provincial governments have
more power to raise and keep money locally, and in most cases, this money
comes from the imposition of new fees and levies. As Benedict Kerkvliet
writes, “In communes, one of the key ingredients to being able to pay ade-
quate salaries, fund schools and other services, and develop new pro-
grammes is finding ways to raise money locally. Officials impose new fees
and levies on residents, charge tolls on vehicles passing through, and invent
other methods of raising revenue.”53 On average, according to analysis of the
Vietnam Household Living Standard Survey (VHLSS), communes in
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1997–1998 raised nearly half of their revenue from local taxes on household
production and lands, and 30 percent from other “contributions” [khoán
Ióng góp] and “donations” from local people.54 These contributions are col-
lected in either labor days, cash, or in-kind payment and are levied on a per
capita basis for development projects, such as infrastructure, school build-
ing, security, irrigation, and other things.
In the recent past, agricultural taxes were typically not controversial,
despite the fact they were organized by the central government.55 Because
these taxes have long been based on land quality and estimated yields, peo-
ple often paid lower taxes when they made improvements to land that was
still taxed in a lower land-quality bracket.56 But today “contributions” are by
far one of the most volatile issues in the contemporary countryside. In local
opinion, contributions are like the old French head tax: they are often
assessed in a completely arbitrary way with less transparency than land and
agricultural taxes; they are also levied on a per capita basis (unlike land
taxes based on land area). What is even more complicated is that contri-
butions are never directly called “taxes,” as the central government reserves
the right to assess tax rates and has a complicated formula for the sharing of
these taxes with localities. Rather, these payments are always called “fees”
or “contributions,” even though they are not in most cases voluntary and
“in practice, many fees are only loosely related to the services with which
they are supposed to be associated, and so have most of the characteristics
of a tax.”57
In Hà T3nh, citizens said that they had to contribute to at least fourteen
different contributions funds in 2005.58 Local people divided their contri-
butions into four types: voluntary contributions, such as funds for flood vic-
tims, poverty reduction, the fund for war veterans, Agent Orange funds, and
funds for poor children; service contributions, which included contributions
to agricultural extension and production services, irrigation fees, public
works funds, security funds, disaster prevention funds, and other manage-
ment fees; construction contributions, which included road construction,
canal construction, and school construction; and finally, state duties, such as
agricultural taxes, personal taxes, and land taxes. Some families argued that
in 2005 they were now paying up to 40 percent of their total household
income in contributions and taxes, even though such high figures are hard
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88 MCELWEE
to corroborate. In contrast, the agricultural and land taxes that I measured in

2001 were less than 5 percent of household expenditures (see Table 5).59
Villagers interviewed in 2005 said that contributions were the one thing
they were most strongly protesting against [I{u tranh] when complaining to
local authorities, not the land and agricultural taxes, which they accepted as
reasonable. As one example of complaints about the contributions assess-
ment, an intervillage road was being constructed in one commune of Hà
T3nh, and the commune had decreed that everyone living in the area, from
age two to one hundred years old, had to make an equal contribution of
either labor days, sand and dirt, or cash. One woman reported that she had
gone to the authorities to complain that her mother was ninety-eight years
old and ill, never left the house, and would never ever use the road that was
being constructed, so why should she have to contribute to this project? A
commune cadre told her, rather unkindly, that her mother’s funeral proces-
sion would pass over the new road, so she still would have to contribute.60
One of the biggest problems with the contribution system, one that vio-
lates the norms of the moral economy, is that it is highly regressive—it
affects poor households, who usually have larger families, more than rich
ones, who usually have smaller households and can afford the cash pay-
ments required. In this way, the new contributions system is exactly similar
to the impôt personnel that was so hated one hundred years ago. Several peo-
ple also pointed out the very arbitrary nature of contributions. There appear
to be no clear standards in any area that determine what labor is required
from whom and what the parameters of the labor are, which violates peo-
ple’s wish to see some attempts at egalitarianism.61 The injustice of the con-
tributions was highlighted to me by many householders; for example,
households that have more than two children have to pay full per capita
contributions from these additional children for any development project;
however, when it comes to allocating land from the village land fund, there
is no land to be had for children beyond the third child because these fam-
ilies have violated the two-child family planning policy encouraged by the
government. In other words, the administration is quite arbitrary about when
people “count” and when they don’t.
The arbitrary nature of contributions was also often seen as a way for cadres
to skim off the top to line their own pockets. Several officials mentioned that
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citizens’ concerns about corruption were hindering their ability to motivate

contributions. The increasing demands on households to pay for all sorts of
government services that used to be free, combined with a lack of voice to
determine where these taxes and contributions are going, has led to a disil-
lusionment with government administrative services in many areas.62 In the
minds of local people, taxes should not only be fair and make attempts at
egalitarianism, but their actual use should correlate to what they were col-
lected for. In some cases, concern over contributions, and especially the
potential for corruption, has spurred serious collective rural protests.
Protest, Resistance, and Hidden Transcripts

Scott writes in The Moral Economy of the Peasantry about the confluence of
events that sparked the Ngh0 T3nh uprisings in 1930. Many of the events he
noted have echoes in the current trends I have outlined above:
The claims on the income of the Nghe-Tinh peasantry tended to increase
throughout the early twentieth century despite the penury and instability of
its economy. The percentage of landless grew and the terms of tenancy
stiffened. Already by the 1920s many of Northern Annam’s dwarf-sized ten-
ancies could no longer provide a subsistence even in good years, and much
of the rural population took on secondary occupations such as woodcut-
ting, plantation labor, and petty trade to make ends meet. Communal land
that had once relieved the plight of the village poor had fallen increasingly
into the hands of local notables and mandarins. The most onerous form of
taxation, the head tax or impôt personnel, had gradually risen and fewer and
fewer villagers managed to keep their names off the village tax rolls. Actual
collections, moreover, were substantially higher than the law required,
because of the extortion of mandarins, notables and their subordinates.63
In the case of Ngh0 T3nh, these increasing impositions on subsistence even-

tually resulted in collective peasant protests, the sacking of administrative
offices, the burning of tax and land rolls, and the taking over of landlords’
properties in the radical atmosphere of the Ngh0 T3nh Soviets of the 1930s.
When do fights for individual survival become collective action, as they
did in Ngh0 T3nh? Since The Moral Economy of the Peasant, the literature
on collective action and revolutions has exploded.64 Scott himself moved
from questions about when peasants might rebel to explaining why they did
not, given the many depredations on their livelihoods. Work by the Subaltern
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Studies school and other scholars has aimed to explain the presence of hege-
mony in agrarian relations, which kept many peasants unable to contest, or
sometimes even recognize, their subordinate positions.65 Organized political
activity and protest is often a “luxury” that peasants do not have, and given
this lack of political space, many in inferior positions are left with no choice
but behind-the-scenes foot-dragging and resistance, however insignificant
and futile it may seem.66
We can see in Hà T3nh examples of the “hidden transcripts” that accom-
pany the small actions that peasants can get away with against those who vio-
late norms of economic justice. Rather than relying on direct action and
protest, peasants in Hà T3nh would often express their frustrations with
higher authorities through jokes, folk songs, or rhymes. For example, one of
the cleverest ways to make fun of others, particularly authorities, is to reverse
tones or syllables in phrases, much like pig latin, to make double entendres
[nói lái], or to use archaic words to make word plays [nói lói]. One example
from Hà T3nh shows the joke well: the word dZ kiCn [planning target] was a
very common word in the socialist era. DZ can also mean “to tend some-
thing” in the Hà T3nh dialect, and kiCn is the word for “ants.” I was told the
following story, set during the cooperative era: A young cadre was going to a
commune meeting and ran into an old woman out tending buffalo. The old
woman asked, “This season, how much is a day’s labor worth from the co-
op?” The smart young cadre answered, “The planning target [dZ kiCn] is five
kilograms of rice a day, old woman!” The woman called back, “Well, sonny,
if raising ants [dZ kiCn] gets me five kilograms a day, then surely I should get
at least ten kilograms a day for tending these big old buffalo!”
Amusing as they are, such jokes at the expense of those in power are often
not enough to assuage real moral grievances and threats to subsistence,
which is where more obvious and physical forms of protest come into play.
Certainly one can argue that the cooperative era came to an end when the
hunger and poverty of the late 1970s became unendurable. Kerkvliet has
convincingly argued that the cooperative era ended not because state plan-
ners were fed up with socialism, but because the average peasant was; peas-
ants refused to work in coops, engaging in small acts of resistance like
foot-dragging, shirking, avoiding collective duties, taking over cooperative
lands for private production, and a host of other small protest actions.67
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The same strategy of protest and foot-dragging that had caused the coopera-
tives to crumble could be seen in other daily actions in CNm Xuyên. Peas-
ants regularly went into the KGNR, where it was officially illegal for them to
be, to harvest forest products. They ignored village grazing laws for common
lands and let their buffalos wander freely. They did not plant the commune’s
selected rice seedlings and improved varieties of cash crops if they felt the
crop would not be economically successful. These sorts of “weapons of the
weak” are not surprising, common as they are throughout Southeast Asia.
To what degree are all these illegal actions the expression of moral protest
and “resistance” against the state, and to what degree are they acts for indi-
vidual benefit, taken by families trying to make a living in a poor and impov-
erished region? This is always the question with studies of resistance.68 I
heard numerous general complaints about the lack of support from the lib-
eralizing state in the postwar era, and many people expressed a sense of
moral outrage at the fact that state cadres appeared to be getting richer while
many poor families felt strapped by excess taxes and contributions that they
saw no clear benefit from. Therefore, many families said they felt free to
ignore state policies that either posed an impossible financial burden on
them, particularly the contributions system, or else did not provide their
household with economic benefits, such as state conservation policies that
placed restrictions on forest product collection.
These local definitions of what is moral or just and what is not are con-
stantly shifting. It may be, for example, that conservation regulations will
eventually become more acceptable to peasants threatened with drought
caused by loss of forest cover. Such shifts have always occurred. One good
example of the shifting concept of justice is illustrated in TrM.ng Chinh and
Vg Nguy#n Giáp’s famous treatise The Peasant Question: “We asked: ‘The
landlord collects half of the produce as rent at harvest time; is this exploita-
tion?’ The tenant replied, ‘You can’t really call it exploitation. I don’t own
any land, so I am lucky that he rents to me. I can farm, and he owns land, so
of course it is just that each of us gets half the harvest.’”69 Later years of
socialist ideology and communal ownership of land changed these ideals of
justice, and they were further changed by the failures of the cooperative
era—in which people had to supplement unproductive and increasingly
unwelcome collective land management with household production.
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When violations of the current rules of the moral game occur, we often
see protest. While I was in Hà T3nh in 2000–2001, a number of incidents of
fairly serious social protest occurred: villagers in Thfch Hà District sum-
moned for their mandatory road work service on National Highway One
refused to show up as a protest against corruption. When reprimanded by
authorities they attacked government buildings, and this mob reportedly
succeeded in blocking the entire highway for several days. In addition, inci-
dents of arson in the nearby state forests were common protests against forest
guards and restrictions on forest use. More seriously, in the past several years
anonymous homemade bombs have killed several people in Hà T3nh,
including a police chief, and the culprits remained at large.
The rise in social protests was not limited to Hà T3nh, and there are
numerous examples in the past ten years in the provinces of Thanh Hóa,
A7ng Nai, Hà Tây, and most famously in Thái Bình in 1997, where villagers
upset over perceived corruption and excessive tax burdens, particularly the
hated contributions, marched on administrative offices with placards and
banners and demanded redress.70 In some places it was said that peasants
tied up local officials and set up local “trials” to pass judgment on them and
their perceived crimes against peasants, an activity that was widespread dur-
ing the Ngh0 T3nh Soviets of 1930. In 2001 and 2004, even more serious
protests have been carried out in the Central Highlands, where ethnic
minorities protested perceived violations of subsistence rights and expressed
moral complaints about the treatment of minorities and religious practi-
tioners.71 Peri-urban land use protests have grown in size and scale in recent
years as well, and a “frequent theme in villagers’ complaints is that state offi-
cials are taking their farm land not to serve the people or national interest
but to serve investors or businesses.”72 Farmers protesting in these cases have
argued in moral terms: the price paid for land when it is purchased from
peasants for conversion to industrial parks and other schemes should reflect
not only the prevailing market value for land, but the value the land would
have had for future livelihoods that farmers must give up.
What are the links between these increasing social protests and subsis-
tence crises, given that Vietnam as a whole is increasing in prosperity, not
declining, and food crises are now increasingly rare? In a recent paper, Hy
Van Luong recounts incidences of social protest over corruption in Phú ThC
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province that were targeted at “onerous local taxes, corruption, and unre-
sponsive authorities”; however, he argues these “constitute important but
not sufficient conditions for the outbreak of agrarian unrest in Vietnam in
the 1990s.”73 In Luong’s view, protest is taking place not where subsistence
levels are threatened, but where social ties (primarily due to village
endogamy) and revived local associations (such as Buddhist and age-cohort
associations) are strongest, leading to the loudest demands for “relative
equality.” This, it seems to me, is very much in line with the thesis of The
Moral Economy of the Peasant: the accumulation of capital cannot take
place in a moral vacuum; rather, it is subject to normative pressures. These
normative rules over the “right” to wealth are in constant renegotiation,
involving assessments of morality and sociability that vary with place and
time.74 Such interactions are particularly complicated in cases of what
appear to be ill-gotten or corrupt gains.75 Much of the rural unrest in Vietnam
often seems to be spawned by not by peasants alone, but by cadres and oth-
ers acting as whistleblowers that highlight the immoral misappropriation of
state or peasants’ funds. The ringleaders of protests in Thái Bình, for exam-
ple, were mostly retired cadres enraged at the corrupt acts of their fellow
political elite.
Conclusion: The Moral Economy Meets

the Global Economy
What are the likely impacts of these newly apparent trends in Vietnam? Can
we can draw parallels between what was going on in 1930s Vietnam and
what is going on in contemporary Vietnam, given that both periods were a
time of intense integration into global economies from a previous era of iso-
lation and inwardness? The Moral Economy of the Peasant argues that the
colonial imposition of market and state “telescoped” a process that had
taken centuries to develop in Europe into a matter of decades and created a
unbearable and inflexible burden on local moral economies. Similar paral-
lels exist with Vietnam’s rapid accession to the WTO; what has taken
decades in neighboring countries has been compressed to a short span of the
few years since Vietnam began A%i M&i. Will the economic restructuring
required in Vietnam now that WTO agreements are under way place a sim-
ilarly difficult burden on rural peasants, forced to compete in new global
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94 MCELWEE
markets? If so, what might be the consequences? Answering this question

requires us to think about two related questions: Does global integration
bring increased risk for smallholders? Does it bring forced and/or rapid
changes in local moral relations? I here consider both of these in turn.
First, will the changes demanded by the WTO increase risks for peas-
ant smallholders in Vietnam in general, and for Hà T3nh in particular?
Vietnam’s WTO bid will force it not only to open up domestic markets to
outside agricultural goods but also to drop the traditional price supports that
have kept rice and other crops highly subsidized.76 Thus, we could simulta-
neously see trends toward lower prices in some goods as a result of competi-
tion with imports (sugarcane, for example, will likely be vulnerable), while
farmgate prices could rise for crops like rice. When China entered the
WTO, “pessimists had predicted that WTO accession would lead to a mas-
sive flood of imports, deflation in the price of agricultural products, and a
shrinking number of jobs in the farming sector.”77 In reality, China’s agri-
cultural sector survived because of increased exports of grain (wheat and
corn) as worldwide stocks were depleted following natural disasters else-
where. High world prices, therefore, prevented massive imports and encour-
aged exports. Vietnam may be able to follow China’s example and keep its
agricultural sector afloat after accession, primarily because current agricul-
tural tariffs are not that high (about 14.3 percent), and in fact the agriculture
sector is much less protected than manufacturing and the state-owned enter-
prise sector.78 The Vietnamese agricultural sector is the dominant world
force in the price of several commodities (namely, rice and coffee) because
of the country’s large output, which could be used to Vietnam’s strategic
advantage.
It is likely, though, that these global markets will continue to stimulate
internal changes in Vietnam, and the coffee sector in the Central Highlands
provides a pessimistic example. There, disparities in the size of landholdings
are steadily on the rise as landlessness increases and the gap between rich
and poor grows.79 The landlessness is largely attributable to rising incidences
of usury and indebtedness, combined with the impact of a world drop in cof-
fee prices in 2000. This is a consequence of modern agriculture, as farmers
increase their dependence on private shops and government stores that sell
seeds and other inputs, and on the traders and state-owned enterprises that
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buy back the crops. These traders have increasingly gotten into the business
of selling on credit, extending loans, and advancing inputs at the start of the
season that are paid back in kind at harvest time (for lower than average
prices, of course). Farmers are increasingly dependent on these traders, as
they need the inputs for hybrid corn, high-yielding rice, and fertilizer-hungry
coffee as they move away from traditional low-input varieties. Farmers also
need these businesses to buy back their harvested products, as most rural
sellers lack the ability to travel far or seek higher markets for their goods.
Many rural farmers sell their goods unprocessed (fresh corn, fresh coffee
berries, unhusked rice) and depend on traders to process it for them. These
middlemen are beginning to take on the roles of moneylenders, charging
interest rates and inflexible repayment terms that resemble the problems of
usury described in The Moral Economy of the Peasant. Landlessness has also
increased in the past ten years, as these private traders often take control of
land mortgages from those who are too indebted to pay. The loss of lands to
debt has been most significant in the areas that have seen the strongest devel-
opment of export-oriented agriculture that requires high up-front invest-
ment—primarily the coffee-growing areas of the Central Highlands and
shrimp farm areas of the Mekong Delta.80 It is hard to say whether the rice
farmers of Hà T3nh will face what the coffee growers of the Central High-
lands have had to deal with in terms of debt and landlessness, but their expe-
rience does give us some indication of the links between rapid and
unregulated economic expansion and volatile world prices and increasing
risk for smallholders.
The second question posed above was whether globalization (particularly
in the form of the WTO) will force changes in local moral economic rela-
tions, as social interactions are replaced by purely investment-oriented inter-
actions. One of the biggest arguments against globalization is that national
authority over investments and markets becomes ceded to supranational
organizations like the WTO or the International Monetary Fund.81 In this
globalized world, a peasant not only has to know how to produce crops but
is faced with having to understand a wider world of “IMF-structural adjust-
ment loans; commodity dumping; intellectual property rights; new markets
for credit, technology and services and giant agrobusiness conglomerates.”82
Such a radical shift has serious implications for local moral economies; as
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96 MCELWEE
Joseph Stiglitz has noted in a new forward to Karl Polanyi’s classic work, The
Great Transformation, “rapid transformation destroys old coping mecha-
nisms, old safety nets, while it creates new sets of demands, before new cop-
ing mechanisms are developed. This lesson from the nineteenth century, has
unfortunately, all too often been forgotten by the advocates of the Washington
Consensus.”83
This neoliberal shift (the “Washington Consensus” of which Stiglitz
speaks) in the locus of authority-making to supranational institutions has
been met worldwide with protests, as seen in the “Battle of Seattle” in 1999.
However, the shift has not been debated much in Vietnam during the WTO
accession process, particularly within the agricultural sector. Thus we have
not yet seen peasant movements in Vietnam taking on global issues; agri-
cultural protests thus far have primarily been focused on what are seen as
local actors, such as corrupt officials or rapacious traders. Yet worldwide,
new transnational peasant movements, from the Zapatistas in Mexico to
cooperatives of cheese artisans in France, are taking their claims to a global
audience: that they are entitled not just to food security (the moral economy
of times past) but to “food sovereignty”—the right to continue to be agricul-
turalists and retain autonomy over livelihood decision-making rather than
ceding this autonomy to the WTO.84 As others have pointed out, “struggles
over human rights, heritages, homelands, clean technologies, and healthy
foods that dominate agrarian politics now are still mired, if differently, in
questions of moral claims and the basic right of those who work the land to
a dignified, secure, and fair livelihood.”85
Such transnational movements underscore the claim made here that
there is still relevance in thinking of peasant production as having a signifi-
cant normative component, what Karl Polanyi called the “embeddedness”
of market economics.86 For Vietnamese peasants, unlike those in Chiapas or
Europe, this normative component is one that has been strengthened by
experiences of collectivization and socialism. Protests in contemporary
Vietnam look not to some sort of peasant localism or tradition or imagined
past. Rather, they have focused on what peasants “regard as fair, what they
would claim as their right, and whom they consider responsible for their
plight.”87 Such claims of morality have varied through time, for these nor-
mative rules are continually in revision as times and social relationships
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change. But what the peasant protests of current-day Vietnam have in com-
mon with the protests of the Ngh0 T3nh Soviet era are the rallying cries of
moralism, virtue, and economic justice, whatever form they take, whether it
be calls for reduced taxes or increased access to forest resources. It remains
to be seen whether the peasants of Hà T3nh will soon add the WTO to their
list of parties responsible for violations of local economic norms. ■
pamela mcelwee is Assistant Professor, School of Global Studies, Ari-

zona State University. She thanks the Wenner Gren Foundation for
Anthropological Research, the National Science Foundation Dissertation
Improvement Grant, and the Global Security and Sustainability Program
of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation for financially sup-
porting the research presented here. The Center for Natural Resources and
Environmental Studies of Vietnam National University provided important
fieldwork support. She would also like to thank Michael Dove, Eric Worby,
and Jim Scott for their helpful comments on this material in a different for-
mat, and she is grateful to Jim Rush, Chris Duncan, and two anonymous
reviewers for the Journal of Vietnamese Studies for their close readings.
abstract
This paper revisits themes from a classic text on Vietnam, The Moral
Economy of the Peasant (1976), by James C. Scott. Fieldwork undertaken
in NghD TQnh provides a contemporary re-examination of some of the key
premises of Scott’s book. The article argues that a “moral economy” that
guarantees a right to subsistence, based on normative values and risk-averse
behavior, does indeed still exist. Recent protests and rebellious acts that
mirror previous revolts in the region are also noted, and changes in the
agrarian sector that may be a result of Vietnam’s recent WTO accession are
discussed.
keywords: household economics, economic anthropology, agrarian

transformations
Notes
1. See Eric R. Wolf, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper
and Row, 1969); Joel S. Migdal, Peasants, Politics and Revolution: Pressures
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98 MCELWEE
toward Political and Social Change in the Third World (Princeton, NJ: Prince-
ton University Press, 1974); and Jeffrey Paige, Agrarian Revolution: Social Move-
ments and Export Agriculture in the Underdeveloped World (New York: Free
Press, 1975).
2. James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence
in Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976); Samuel Popkin,
The Rational Peasant: The Political Economy of Rural Vietnam (Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979).
3. Hy V. Luong has noted in these pages that there continues to be a relative lack
of attention to rural areas in recent anthropological research on Vietnam,
meaning that our understanding of the peasantry and the changes they have
undergone in the past thirty years remains sorely incomplete; see Hy V. Luong,
“Structure, Practice and History: Contemporary Anthropological Research on
Vietnam,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 1, no. 1–2 (2006): 371–409.
4. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant, 33.
5. The idea of a “moral economy” was first associated with British historian E.P.
Thompson, who argued that poor consumers held moral expectations when
they interacted with the market, expectations that could be used to explain the
phenomena of eighteenth-century food riots in England. See E.P. Thompson,
“The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past
and Present 50, no. 1 (1971): 76–136.
6. As Pierre Gourou noted, “the communal lands are a legacy of the past, surviv-
ing despite the Annamese peasants’ voracious hunger for land, and in large part
thanks to the will of the Annamese government . . .; in certain circumscriptions
of Annam, the whole of the land is communal; each inscrit receives as much
as 3 mVu of land, or almost one and a half hectares.” Pierre Gourou, Land
Utilization in French Indochina [L’utilisation du Sol en Indochine Française],
trans. S. Haden Guest, Elizabeth Allerton, and Karl Pelzer (Washington, DC:
Institute of Pacific Relations, 1945).
7. Ngo Vinh Long, “Communal Property and Peasant Revolutionary Struggles in
Vietnam,” Peasant Studies 17, no. 2 (1990): 121–139; Ngo Vinh Long, Before the
Revolution: Vietnamese Peasants under the French, 2nd ed. (New York: Colum-
bia University Press, 1991).
9. Scott writes, “Of all these petty charges, however, the imposition of strict forest
regulations was the most resented. The forests of Annam had traditionally
served as an informal source of economic relief for the poorest villagers who
made charcoal or cut wood during slack seasons to sell at nearby markets. For-
est agents used the intricate regulations and taxes at their disposal to levy fines
at will and line their own pockets. Their interference with wood gathering on
JVS0202_02.qxd 6/25/07 1:32 PM Page 99
village lands that had always been open to the peasantry was interpreted as an
attack on traditional subsistence rights.” The Moral Economy of the Peasant, 135.
10. For summary reports of the Ngh0 T3nh Soviets see Tr6n Huy Li0u, Les Soviets
du Nghe-Tinh de 1930–1931 au Viet-Nam [The Ngh0-T3nh Soviets of 1930–1931
in Vietnam] (Hà Nbi: Hanoi Editions en langues étrangères, 1960); W. Duiker,
“The Red Soviets of Nghe-Tinh: An Early Communist Rebellion in Vietnam,”
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 4 (1973): 186–198; and Martin Bernal, “The
Nghe-Tinh Soviet Movement 1930–1931,” Past and Present 92 (1981): 148–168.
11. H.T., “The Ngh0 T3nh Soviets,” in NghD TQnh, Native Province of HO Chí
Minh: Vietnamese Studies 59, ed. Nguy#n Kh:c Vi0n (Hà Nbi: Xunhasaba,
1980): 64–97; Dinh Tr6n DMKng, NghD-TQnh vRi phong trào cách m\ng giyi
phóng dân tzc trong 30 n#m I2u thC k; XX [Ngh0 T3nh and Revolutionary
Movements in the First Thirty Years of the Twentieth Century] (Hà Nbi:
Ch5nh tri quhc gia, 2000).
12. Tr6n Huy Li0u, “V(n kj ch5nh quyjn xô vi!t” [The Problem of Soviet Adminis-
tration], Nghiên CHu L]ch SH [Historical Research] 33, no. 12 (1961): 1–7.
13. For the files of the Commission d’Enquête sur les Evèntements du Nord Annam
of 1931, see Centre des Archives d’Outre Mer, Aix-en-Provence (CAOM),
Gouvernement Général de l’Indochine, Indochine Nouveau Fonds, nos.
65363–65526, particularly the interviews in folders 72–96, which are from
Hà T3nh.
14. Scott argued throughout the book that peasants do make rational economic
decisions: “The safety-first principle does not imply that peasants are creatures
of custom who never take risks they can avoid. . . . There is a defensive perime-
ter around subsistence routines within which risks are avoided as potentially
catastrophic and outside of which a more bourgeois calculus of profit prevails”
(The Moral Economy of the Peasant, 74). Scott has since argued that Popkin’s
argument about rationality is a “deliberate misreading” of the book. See James
C. Scott, “Afterword to ‘Moral Economies, State Spaces, and Categorical
Violence,’” American Anthropologist 107, no. 3 (2005): 395–402. See also Edwin
Moise, “On the Symposium ‘Peasant Strategies in Asian Societies’,” The Journal
of Asian Studies 43, no. 3 (1984): 499–501.
15. See Hy Van Luong, “Agrarian Unrest from an Anthropological Perspective:
The Case of Vietnam,” Comparative Politics 17 (1985): 153–174; Michael G.
Peletz, “Moral and Political Economics in Rural Southeast Asia: A Review
Article,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 25, no. 4 (1983): 731–739;
Michael Adas, “‘Moral Economy’ or ‘Contest State’? Elite Demands and the
Origins of Peasant Protest in Southeast Asia,” Journal of Social History 13 (1980):
521–546; and Andrew B. Chovanes, “On Vietnamese and Other Peasants,” Jour-
nal of Southeast Asian Studies 17, no. 2 (1986): 203–235.
JVS0202_02.qxd 6/25/07 1:32 PM Page 100
100 MCELWEE
16. Pierre Brocheux, “Moral Economy or Political Economy? The Peasants Are
Always Rational,” The Journal of Asian Studies 42, no. 4 (1983): 791–803; Luong,
“Agrarian Unrest.”
17. James M. Polachek, “The Moral Economy of the Kiangsi Soviet (1928–1934),”
The Journal of Asian Studies 42, no. 4 (1983): 805–829; Jane Haggis et al., “By
the Teeth: A Critical Examination of James Scott’s The Moral Economy of the
Peasant,” World Development 14, no. 12 (1986): 1435–1455.
18. See Charles F. Keyes, “Economic Action and Buddhist Morality in a Thai
Village,” The Journal of Asian Studies 42, no. 4 (1983): 851–868; Charles F.
Keyes, “Peasant Strategies in Asian Societies: Moral and Rational Economic
Approaches—A Symposium,” The Journal of Asian Studies 42, no. 4 (1983):
753–768; and Michael Adas, Prophets of Rebellion: Millenarian Protest Move-
ments against the European Colonial Order (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1979). Scott wrote in 2005, in a section of the American Anthro-
pologist devoted to a review of his work, that he found in this critique of The
Moral Economy of the Peasant its “most severe shortcoming.” Post–Moral Econ-
omy works on Vietnam that have emphasized the role of millenarian move-
ments in peasant mobilization include, on the Hòa HOo, Hue-Tam Ho Tai,
Millenarianism and Peasant Politics in Vietnam (Cambridge: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1983); and on the Python God movement among minorities in the
central highlands, Gerald Cannon Hickey, Sons of the Mountains: Ethnohis-
tory of the Vietnamese Central Highlands to 1954 (New Haven, CT: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 1982) and Oscar Salemink, “Return of the Python God: Multiple
Interpretations of a Millenarian Movement in Colonial Vietnam,” History and
Anthropology 11, no. 1–4 (1994): 129–164.
19. Luong, “Agrarian Unrest”; Brocheux, “Moral Economy or Political Economy?”;
Paul R. Greenough, “Indulgence and Abundance as Asian Peasant Values: A
Bengali Case in Point,” The Journal of Asian Studies 42, no. 4 (1983); 831–850.
Scott gives some responses in “Peasant Revolution: A Dismal Science,”
Comparative Politics 9, no. 2 (1977): 231–248.
21. For some summaries of the arguments across many political and methodological
stripes, in addition to the works cited above, see also J. Craig Jenkins, “Why Do
Peasants Rebel? Structural and Historical Theories of Modern Peasant Rebel-
lions,” American Journal of Sociology 88, no. 3 (1982): 487–514; Robert Weller and
Scott Guggenheim, eds., Power and Protest in the Countryside: Studies of Political
Unrest in Asia, Europe and Latin America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
1982); John Walton, Reluctant Rebels: Comparative Studies of Revolution and
Underdevelopment (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984); Daniel Little,
Understanding Peasant China: Case Studies in the Philosophy of Social Science
JVS0202_02.qxd 6/25/07 1:32 PM Page 101
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989); and Mark Lichbach, “What
Makes a Rational Peasant Revolutionary? Dilemma, Paradox and Irony in Peas-
ant Collective Action,” World Politics 46, no. 3 (1994): 383–418. This is a necessar-
ily abbreviated list; there are many more studies that could be listed.
22. Timothy Mitchell, “Everyday Metaphors of Power,” Theory and Society 19
(1990): 545–577, quote on 546–547.
23. The phrase is that of geographers Richard Peet and Michael Watts in “Libera-
tion Ecology: Development, Sustainability and Environment in an Age of Mar-
ket Triumphalism,” in Liberation Ecologies: Environment, Development, Social
Movements, eds. R. Peet and M. Watts (New York: Routledge, 1996): 1–45.
24. Pamela McElwee, “‘Lost Worlds’ or ‘Lost Causes’? Biodiversity Conservation,
Forest Management, and Rural Life in Vietnam” (PhD dissertation, Yale
University, 2003).
25. Hà T3nh Province was divided from Ngh0 An Province in 1991; the two were
formerly joined and called Ngh0 T3nh.
26. Luong has argued that the different economic trajectories of north and south
Vietnam that have led to greater inequality of wealth in the south are “rooted in
the century-old commercialization of agriculture and the widely accepted
premise of land as a commodity.” See Hy Van Luong, “Wealth, Power and
Inequality: Global Market, the State and Local Sociocultural Dynamics,” in
Postwar Vietnam: Dynamics of a Transforming Society, ed. Hy V. Luong
(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003): 81–106.
27. By “trading or business” I mean selling goods that the family members have not
produced themselves; a minority of farmers sold agricultural goods they had
produced to middlemen, but I do not count this as “trading” per se.
28. Income was derived from a survey on all sources of cash income and agricul-
tural production for the household for the previous year. Any agricultural prod-
uct grown but not sold (as is the case with much rice) was not included in these
income figures, which are based on cash income only, not converted to cash
equivalents.
29. However, these trends may be changing, as strong land markets are developing
elsewhere in Vietnam and some households are forced to sell land due to ill-
ness or debts. It has been estimated that 12 percent of households throughout
the country may now be landless, a 66 percent rise from 1993–1994. See Martin
Ravaillion and Dominique van de Walle, “Does Rising Landlessness Signal
Success or Failure for Vietnam’s Agrarian Transition?” World Bank Policy
Research Working Paper 3871 (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2006).
30. John Kleinen, Facing the Future, Reviving the Past: A Study of Social Change in
a Northern Vietnamese Village (Singapore: Institute for Southeast Asian Stud-
ies, 1999).
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102 MCELWEE
31. See Hy Van Luong, Revolution in the Village: Tradition and Transformation in
North Vietnam, 1925–1988 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i, 1992); and Hy Van
Luong, “The State, Local Associations and Alternate Civilities in Rural North-
ern Vietnam,” in Civil Life, Globalization, and Political Change in Asia: Orga-
nizing between Family and State, ed. Robert Weller (London: Routledge, 2005):
123–147.
32. One sào is equivalent to five hundred square meters.
33. James C. Scott, “Exploitation in Rural Class Relations: A Victim’s Perspective,”
Comparative Politics 7, no. 4 (1975): 489–532, quote on page 501.
34. Luong, “State, Local Associations and Alternative Civilities,” 140.
35. Gerald Cannon Hickey, Village in Vietnam (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1964).
36. See Kristen Endres, “Local Dynamics of Renegotiating Ritual Space in North-
ern Vietnam: The Case of the Dinh,” Sojourn 16, no. 2 (2001): 70–101; and
Philip Taylor, Goddess on the Rise: Pilgrimage and Popular Religion in Vietnam
(Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2004).
37. Some scholars have noted that Hà T3nh has significantly fewer Buddhist pago-
das, local temples, and Iình than areas farther north; see Bùi Thi!t, TS xiWn Hà
TQnh [Dictionary of Hà T3nh] (Hà T3nh: S1 Ven Hoá Thông Tin Hà T3nh,
2000). In CNm Xuyên the situation was complicated by the fact that many villages
were established as part of new migration zones in the 1950s and 1960s, when ritu-
als and superstitions were discouraged. Already existing Iình were defaced, and
new migrant villages did not dare build halls in their new settlements.
38. Luong, “Agrarian Unrest,” 162.
39. Alexander Woodside argues that the rapid transformation of lineage-based
social relations to economically based ones was the end result of French colo-
nial practice, and he writes of this transformation in Cochinchina in particular:
“A crude economic determinism became embedded in southern village control
policies. Such policies now conceded their explicit reliance upon landlords,
whose preeminence depended not upon the mastery of a cultural tradition
which the French could not control, but upon an economy whose new legal
and institutional framework the colonial government did control. In pre-colo-
nial days, elite status in the Vietnamese village had depended nominally upon
multiple noneconomic criteria (like age and examination system degrees) even
if landownership had remained a primary qualification behind the facade of
Confucian civic ideology. Now, with the disappearance of the examination sys-
tem, and with the introduction in 1904 of this legal criterion that landowning by
itself was sufficient to open the door to membership on the village councils,
French administrative fiat performed a work of ‘terrible simplification’ which
made the economic inequities upon which the village political order rested
JVS0202_02.qxd 6/25/07 1:32 PM Page 103
much more obvious.” Alexander B. Woodside, Community and Revolution in

Modern Vietnam (New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 1976), 136.
40. Mitchell, “Everyday Metaphors,” 550; James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak:
Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1985): 307.
41. Scott, Weapons of the Weak, 235.
42. To be thiCu #n is often translated into English as “to be hungry” or “to have a
hungry season”; in fact, outright starvation is no longer a problem in most of Hà
T3nh, but having enough rice is. Even in the direst of circumstances people
can usually find something to eat, such as cassava or sweet potatoes, even
though they do not prefer these foods.
43. LMu Thanh A+c HOi, “The Organization of the Liberalized Rice Market in
Vietnam” (PhD dissertation, Groningen University, 2003).
44. James C. Scott, “The Erosion of Patron-Client Bonds and Social Change in
Rural Southeast Asia,” Journal of Asian Studies 32, no. 1 (1972): 5–37.
45. Popkin, The Rational Peasant, 31. David Feeny, however, argues that risk aver-
sion “can also lead to a reliance on cash crops or modern cash-intensive tech-
niques of production. . . . Under safety-first decision making, if you are very
poor, you may be led to adopt the technique with the highest expected return
in spite of the higher risk.” David Feeny, “The Moral or the Rational Peasant?
Competing Hypotheses of Collective Action,” The Journal of Asian Studies 42,
no. 4 (1983): 769–789, quote on 771.
46. Enrique Mayer and Manuel Glave, “Alguito Para Ganar (a Little Something to
Earn): Profits and Losses in Peasant Economies,” American Ethnologist 26, no.
2 (1999): 344–369.
47. Evans, “From Moral Economy to Remembered Village: The Sociology of
James C. Scott” (Melbourne: Monash University Center of Southeast Asian
Studies Working Paper No. 40, 1986), 8.
48. Prabhu Pingali and Vg Tòng Xuân, “Vietnam: Decollectivization and Rice
Productivity Growth,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 40, no. 4
(1992): 697–718.
49. Because space is limited, I do not explore in-depth here the problems associ-
ated with the Green Revolution and the new varieties of rice, which have been
well noted elsewhere. See, for example, B.H. Farmer, “Perspectives on the
‘Green Revolution’ in South Asia,” Modern Asian Studies 20, no. 1 (1986):
175–199; Michael R. Dove and Daniel M. Kammen, “The Epistemology of Sus-
tainable Resource Use: Managing Forest Products, Swiddens and High-Yield-
ing Variety Crops,” Human Organization 56, no. 1 (1997): 91–101; and
Lakshman Yapa, “What Are Improved Seeds? An Epistemology of the Green
Revolution,” Economic Geography 69 (1993): 254–273. Because Vietnam has
JVS0202_02.qxd 6/25/07 1:32 PM Page 104
104 MCELWEE
been relatively late to switch to modern varieties, some of the effects of the
Green Revolution seen elsewhere (such as high pest infestation and indebted-
ness due to capital costs for investment) have not yet significantly appeared.
50. David Kaimowitz, Not by Bread Alone . . . Forests and Rural Livelihoods in Sub-
Saharan Africa (Bogor, Indonesia: CIFOR, 2002); Sven Wunder, “Poverty Alle-
viation and Tropical Forests—What Scope for Synergies?” World Development
29, no. 11 (2001): 1817–1833.
51. See “Letter from the Chief of the Division Forestière of Cao Bcng to the Com-
mander of the 2nd Military Territory,” Résident Supérieur du Tonkin, Nouveau
Fonds #02912, CAOM.
52. This is not uncommon, as Nancy Lee Peluso notes for the case of teak theft in
Java, Indonesia: “Whether or not they are intentionally breaking the state’s law
(by stealing wood or appropriating game), peasants have their own notions of
morality, rights, criminality, and subversion. Frequently, these differ from the
assumptions embedded in state ideology.” See Nancy Lee Peluso, Rich Forests,
Poor People: Resource Control and Resistance in Java (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California, 1992).
53. Benedict J. Tria Kerkvliet, “Surveying Local Government and Authority in
Contemporary Vietnam,” in Beyond Hanoi: Local Government in Vietnam, eds.
Benedict J. Tria Kerkvliet and David G. Marr (Singapore: ISEAS, 2004): 1–27.
54. In the north central coastal region in 1997, agricultural taxes contributed 9 per-
cent of commune budgets; other taxes, 6 percent; fees and fixed revenue, 14
percent; and rental of state assets, 1 percent. Public labor contributions were 5
percent; construction contributions, 14 percent; contributions for the poor, 1
percent; and other unnamed contributions, 44 percent of the total budgets. Fig-
ures derived from the 1998 Vietnam Household Living Standard Survey
(VHLSS) “Community Questionnaire,” General Statistical Office, Hanoi.
55. This is in contrast to the situation in China, where agricultural taxes have been
a source of peasant discontent for decades. See Thomas P. Bernstein and
Xiaobo Lu, “Taxation without Representation: Peasants, the Central and the
Local States in Reform China,” The China Quarterly 163 (2000): 742–763.
56. In fact, the government has now eliminated most agricultural land taxes. In
2000 they contributed around 3.1 percent of total central government revenue;
in 2005 they had largely been phased out in favor of value-added taxes and per-
sonal income taxes. See Jonathan Haughton, Nguyen The Quan, and Nguyen
Hoang Bao, “Tax Incidence in Vietnam,” Asian Economic Journal 20, no. 2
(2006): 217–239.
57. Ibid., 222–223.
58. This refers to focus groups in V: Quang District conducted by Hà Hoa LB of
the National Academy for Public Administration as part of a joint project she
JVS0202_02.qxd 6/25/07 1:32 PM Page 105
and I worked on in the summer of 2005 to assess grassroots democratization,

funded by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) in Vietnam.
See the final report of this study in UNDP, Deepening Democracy and Increas-
ing Popular Participation in Vietnam, UNDP Vietnam Policy Dialogue Paper
2006/1 (Hà Nbi: United Nations Development Program, 2006).
59. My figures match those in the 2002 VHLSS survey, which indicated about 2.9
percent of household expenditures for farming households were for agricultural
and land taxes. I did not systematically ask about contributions and other fees in
my survey in 2001, as I was told by district authorities to confine tax questions to
land taxes alone. It was fairly clear that a moderate amount of corruption was
involved with these contributions, and there were some mysterious taxes based
on rice yields, which the communes were calling “production taxes,” that
appeared to have no legitimate basis in state law. I was able to look at the lists of
all the fees, taxes, contributions, and other requests for a few households in the
survey who had kept detailed accounts, and indeed for one family the entire
bill was about 30 percent of their reported yearly income.
60.This example of the thoughtlessness of officialdom has echoes in the story of
Mrs. D=u, who had to pay the head tax for her dead brother-in-law, in the clas-
sic 1939 story TVt xèn by Ngô T(t Th, which is included in the translations in
Ngo Vinh Long, Before the Revolution (see note 7).
61. In contrast, in China, many village charters specify the labor requirements for
the area and give lists of the types of activities to which villagers should con-
tribute labor. Some laws in China also explicitly state that labor contributions
are applied only to households that have registered in the village and only to
men who are between eighteen and fifty-five years of age and women who are
between eighteen and forty-five years of age. Exemptions include locally paid
teachers, students, and those who are permanently or temporarily disabled. See
“Villager Self-Government Charter of Fuxi Village, Fucun Town, Zhangqiu
County, Shandong Province (Excerpts) (June 7, 1991),” Chinese Law and Gov-
ernment 34, no. 4 (2001): 73–84.
62. Similar problems in China motivated authorities to implement taxation reform
programs in recent years, resulting in the abolishment of many township levies
and compulsory labor. See Han Donglin, “Why Has China’s Agriculture Sur-
vived WTO Accession?” Asian Survey 45, no. 6 (2005): 931–948.
64. See, for example, Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution (Reading,
MA: Addison-Welsey 1978); Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Move-
ments, Collective Action and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994); Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilley, Dynamics of Con-
tention (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Mark Lichbach,
JVS0202_02.qxd 6/25/07 1:32 PM Page 106
106 MCELWEE
“Contending Theories of Contentious Politics and the Structure-Action Prob-

lem of Social Order,” Annual Review of Political Science 1 (1998): 401–424.
65. See, for example, Ranajit Guha, “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency,” Subaltern
Studies 2 (1983): 1–42.
66.Scott, Weapons of the Weak, xv.
67. Benedict J. Tria Kerkvliet, The Power of Everyday Politics: How Vietnamese Peas-
ants Transformed National Policy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005).
68. Ibid., 22–25.
69.TrM.ng Chinh and Vg Nguy#n Giáp, The Peasant Question (1937–1938), trans.
Christine Pelzer White (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Southeast Asia Pro-
gram, 1974), 22.
70. See Nguy#n Ven Sáu, Vietnam Village-Commune Community Today (Hà Nbi:
Ch5nh Tri Quhc Gia, 2001).
71. Human Rights Watch, “Repression of Montagnards: Conflicts Over Land and
Religion in Viet Nam’s Central Highlands” (New York: Human Rights Watch,
2002).
72. Benedict J. Tria Kerkvliet, “Agricultural Land in Vietnam: Markets Tempered
by Family, Community, and Socialist Practices,” Journal of Agrarian Change 6,
no. 3 (2006): 285–305.
73. Luong, “The State, Local Associations and Alternate Civilities,” 135.
74. See Kate Jellema’s evocative piece on the morality of wealth accumulation in
northern Vietnam: “Making Good on Debt: The Remoralization of Wealth in
Post-Revolutionary Vietnam,” The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 6, no. 3
(2005): 231–248.
75. Corruption in Vietnam deserves its own examination, which I cannot attempt
here. However, analysis by institutions that rank countries on perceptions of
corruption, such as Transparency International, are based primarily on levels of
how much has to be paid, not on the cultural circumstances, expectations, or
rituals of said payments, and therefore reduce complicated social performance
to a basic economic formula. For more on the cultural milieu in which corrup-
tion must be placed, see Akhil Gupta, “Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of
Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State,” American Ethnol-
ogist 22, no. 2 (1995): 375–402.
76. China’s example is instructive here. Chinese agricultural tariffs were about 31
percent before WTO, after which they were eventually to be reduced to 14 per-
cent. Vietnam’s tariffs are currently much lower and thus have less distance to
fall, which may help buffer shocks for smallholders. See Shaoguang Wang,
“The Social and Political Implications of China’s WTO membership,” Journal
of Contemporary China 9, no. 25 (2000): 373–405; Shujei Yao et al., “On
China’s Rural and Agricultural Development after WTO Accession,” Journal of
JVS0202_02.qxd 6/25/07 1:32 PM Page 107
Chinese Economic and Business Studies 3, no. 1 (2005): 55–74 ; and Joseph
Fewsmith, “The Political and Social Implications of China’s Accession of the
WTO,” The China Quarterly 167 (2001): 573–591.
77. Donglin, “Why Has China’s Agriculture Survived WTO Accession?” 931.
78. World Bank, Accelerating Vietnam’s Rural Development: Growth, Equity and
Diversification, vol. 1 (Hà Nbi: World Bank, 2006), 20. In comparison, Thailand
(a long-time member of the WTO) has tariffs of around 32 percent on agricul-
tural products.
79. Ravaillion and van de Walle, “Does Rising Landlessness Signal Success?”
80. Oxfam GB, Landless and Near Landless Farmers in Two Provinces of Tra Vinh
and Dong Thap: Problems and Solutions (Hà Nbi: Oxfam Great Britain, 2001);
ICARD and Oxfam, The Impact of the Global Coffee Trade on Dak Lak
Province, Viet Nam (Hà Nbi: ICARD, 2002).
81. For an example of this argument, see Michael Kearney, Reconceptualizing the
Peasantry: Anthropology in Global Perspective (Boulder, CO: Westview Press,
1996), 128.
82. Scott, “Afterword” (see note 14), 397.
83. Joseph Stiglitz, foreword to The Great Transformation: The Political and Eco-
nomic Origins of Our Time, by Karl Polanyi, 2nd ed. (Boston: Beacon Press,
2001), xi (italics in original).
84. Marc Edelman describes “food sovereignty” as a “concept that considers food a
human right rather than primarily a commodity, prioritizes local production
and peasant access to land, and upholds nations’ rights to protect their produc-
ers from dumping and to implement supply management policies.” See Marc
Edelman, “Bringing the Moral Economy Back in . . . to the Study of 21st Cen-
tury Transnational Peasant Movements,” American Anthropologist 107, no. 3
(2005): 331–345. See also Tom Brass, “Neoliberalism and the Rise of (Peasant)
Nations within the Nation: Chiapas in Comparative and Theoretical Perspec-
tive,” The Journal of Peasant Studies 32, nos. 3–4 (2005): 651–691.
85. K. Sivaramakrishnan, “Introduction to ‘Moral Economies, State Spaces, and
Categorical Violence,’” American Anthropologist 107, no. 3 (2005): 321–330,
quote on page 327.
86. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of
Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957).
87. Scott, “Peasant Revolution,” 246.

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From the Moral Economy to the World Economy:

FROM THE MORAL ECONOMY 59

state to member of the World Trade Organization (WTO), an action that

The Vietnamese Peasantry in The Moral Economy

FROM THE MORAL ECONOMY 61

The Modern Vietnamese Peasantry

FROM THE MORAL ECONOMY 63

FIGURE 1: Map of Hà T3nh

Economy of the Peasant focuses on.25 I conducted group meetings, interviewed

TA B L E O N E : Population and Land Statistics for Study Villages A–E, 2001

Village Population Households Land Area (in hectares)

FROM THE MORAL ECONOMY 65

Population, Income, and Land Holdings in Study Villages A–E, 2001

Average for All

source: Household survey carried out by the author in 2001.

As part of my research project, I conducted detailed analysis of peasant

TA B L E T H R E E : Main Sources of Income Generation in CNm

Overall average cash contribution,

source: Household survey carried out by author in 2001.

FROM THE MORAL ECONOMY 67

TA B L E F O U R : Sources of Cash Income by Numbers of People Benefiting

No. of Households Average Cash Contribution

source: Household survey carried out by the author in 2001.

TA B L E F I V E : Average Yearly Household Expenditures, by Category

Average Yearly Expenditure,

source: Household survey carried out by the author in 2001.

FROM THE MORAL ECONOMY 69

villages, which is a considerable departure from the Vietnam of the turn of

reciprocity as social act

There are usually a number of extrafamily social groupings in an average

FROM THE MORAL ECONOMY 71

FROM THE MORAL ECONOMY 73

income redistribution as social obligation

TA B L E S I X : Social Expenditures by Income Class

Average Average Average Social Expenditures

source: Household survey carried out by the author in 2001.

of their participation in “hunger alleviation and poverty reduction” (HEPR) programs;

FROM THE MORAL ECONOMY 75

FIGURE 2: The house of a family classified as “poor” (photograph by

need to be transformed by means of gift exchanges, marriages, feast giving,

FIGURE 3: The house of a family classified as “well-off” (photograph

FROM THE MORAL ECONOMY 77

FIGURE 4: a Xuyên Village C, located between rice fields and hill

FROM THE MORAL ECONOMY 79

TA B L E S E V E N : Comparison of Inputs and “Profits” from Rice and Garden

All Villages Village A Village B Village C Village D Village E

source: Household survey carried out by the author in 2001.

productivity in kilograms (second row) and multiply productivity by the

FROM THE MORAL ECONOMY 81

important crop. Another reason is the long investment in rice production by

dependence on common lands as a social right

FROM THE MORAL ECONOMY 83

dropped in value with the introduction of the market. Nevertheless, by

FROM THE MORAL ECONOMY 85

FIGURE 5: o Nature Reserve with “illegally”

FROM THE MORAL ECONOMY 87