Background
Epidemiological data suggest that national levels of alcohol consumption have increased rapidly in contemporary Vietnam; concomitantly, social and public health harms associated with alcohol use are on the rise.
Methods
Over the last decade, a research literature on alcohol use in Vietnam has begun to develop.
Results
A consideration of this literature indicates lines of analysis to be extended and gaps to be filled.
Conclusion
This synopsis provides an overview of the major trends that studies have addressed, evaluates the state of research to date, and suggests avenues for further research on alcohol use in this newly middle-income nation.
A specter is haunting the academy: the figure of the ghostly, the phantasmic, and the unquiet dead. Over the last fifteen years, a large and rapidly growing number of works in diverse disciplines-sociology, 1 psychoanalysis, 2 literary criticism, 3 folklore, 4 cultural studies, 5 postcolonial studies, 6 race and gender studies, 7 geography, 8 media studies, and communication and rhetoric 9 -have sought to reinterpret stories of haunting as the return of traumatic memory. Within such work, ghosts manifest not as terrifying revenants, but as welcome, if disquieting spurs to consciousness and calls for political action.Most immediately, this interdisciplinary interest in ghosts was sparked by Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx (1993), a curious book that combines a profession of faith (i.e., the messianic spirit of Marxism still holds promise, 1
In October 2007, a series of cholera epidemics broke out in Hanoi, interrupting a moment of economic triumphalism in post-transition Vietnam. In seeking the source of a refractory disease associated with poverty and underdevelopment, officials, media, and citizens not only identified scapegoats and proposed solutions, they also endorsed particular visions of moral conduct, social order, and public health. Controversy over cholera, a potent politico-moral symbol, expressed an imaginary of "tainted commons" (i.e., an emergent space of civil society and small-scale entrepreneurship from which the state has partially withdrawn, while still exercising some measure of scrutiny and control). The ambiguities of this situation permitted the state to assume moral postures, evade responsibility, and deflect criticism to convenient targets. Prevalent outbreak narratives thus played on anxieties regarding specifically classed and gendered social groups, whose behavior was imagined to contravene ideals of public health and order.
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