The Hybrid Nature of the Vietnamese Market Economy: Personal Relationships and Debt in the Dairy and Maize Sectors

This chapter contributes to analysis of the diversity of capitalisms by exploring the extra-economic foundations of the Vietnamese market economy. The Vietnamese economic system has undergone the transition from a domestic rural economy under imperial and colonial regimes to a collectivist system and then to today’s market economy connected to transnational capitalist forces. These dynamics have engendered a specific entanglement of various socio-economic logics that we propose to grasp through the concept of “economic hybridity”. Rather than describing how societies are penetrated by capitalism, we reverse the perspective and study how societies absorb capitalism and merge it within other socio-economic formations. Among the various norms and institutions that regulate the Vietnamese market economy, we focus on the role, logic, and functioning of interpersonal networks. To address this issue, we conducted two field studies in the dairy and maize sectors in northern Vietnam. Our results show how the gift and debt logics that regulate interpersonal relationships within village communities sustain and shape these industrial-capitalist sectors. We highlight an ambivalence whereby these non-capitalist logics and relations both support and alter the functioning of the capitalist economy.