Rich Sentiments and the Cultural Politics of Emotion in Postreform Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Abstract

Linking socioeconomic and personal transformations, recent scholarship on neoliberalism in East and Southeast Asia has examined the role of various emotional experiences in reconfiguring selfhood toward values of personal responsibility and self‐care. However, studies rarely focus on how such experiences come to be understood as specifically emotional themselves. In this article, I examine the growing use of emotion (cảm xúc) as a conceptual category to define the self and everyday life in a psychologistic idiom among middle‐class residents of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. While more established discourses of sentiment (tình cảm) define selfhood in relation to notions of obligation and care, the emerging model of emotion emphasizes individuated self‐knowledge. However, instead of replacing sentiment, newer understandings of emotion have developed alongside and in relation to sentiment. In categorizing various feelings as explicitly “emotional” in nature, people participate in a self‐fashioning project that cultivates an emotionally aware and expressive self that is informed by neoliberal sensibilities yet does not supplant socialist or Confucian models of selfhood. I argue that emotions are not only central to the subjective experience of the transition to a market‐oriented economy but also that emotion as a category itself is a medium through which economic transformations reorganize selfhood more generally. [emotion, self, neoliberalism, ethnopsychology, Vietnam]

Two deaths and a funeral: Ritual inscriptions’ affordances for mourning and moral personhood in Vietnam

“…Tình cảm refers to sentiments, affects, or emotions that people understand as not only arising “naturally” between kin and others but also as driving and motivating material relations of support between them . It is rooted in a local model of the self as interdependent rather than independent of others, and it encompasses other forms of love, care, and concern (Gammeltoft ; Leshkowich ; Rydstrom ; Shohet ; Tran ). My interlocutors describe tình cảm as a felt ethical imperative that spontaneously arises within their heart/guts ( lòng ) and that spurs them to display their care for social intimates through material and affective support.…”

Neurasthenia, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, and the Medicalization of Worry in a Vietnamese Psychiatric Hospital

“…Thus, the increased self‐sufficiency and individualism associated with east and southeast Asian neoliberalism results from engaging multiple forms of selfhood as individuals use neoliberal, socialist, and Confucian ideals simultaneously to define themselves (Ong and Zhang ; Yan ). Although rich expressions of specific types of feelings have long informed everyday discourse (Jamieson ), the conceptual category of emotion ( cảm xúc ) has only more recently become understood as the resource par excellence for understanding the self (Tran ).…”

“…However, although patients’ models of neurasthenia are influenced by Vietnamese medical beliefs, this dichotomy is not applicable here since both GAD and neurasthenia have biomedical origins. Rather, the primary difference between how patients’ symptoms are understood lies not just in the pathologization of worry but also in its psychologization, which Yang (:294) defines as “managing socioeconomic issues in psychological terms.” Increasingly popular among Ho Chi Minh City's middle and upper classes, Cartesian models of selfhood posit an individual's private thoughts and feelings as the locus of personal identity (Tran ). Moreover, that the only three patients (one woman and two men) in the study who endorsed their official diagnoses of MDD or GAD are in their 20s reflects generational changes in ways of defining the self.…”

Psicoeducaciónin the land of magical thoughts: Culture and mental‐health practice in a changing Oaxaca

“…These arguments inform debates on political subjectivity, self‐making, and medical and psychological practice in contexts of neoliberal development and modernization (Chua ; Edmonds ; Han ; Matza ; Nguyen ; Tran ). Viewed through the lens of Foucauldian governmentality, therapeutic and technoscientific practices and ideologies act as disciplinary tools by defining how modern citizens should know and act on themselves (Lakoff ).…”