Vietnamese Intellectuals in Revolutionary and Postcolonial Times

Abstract

This article is concerned with cultural capital and its deployment in pre- and post-independence Vietnam. Its focus is transnational career and family life as experienced by multilingual women and men from Hanoi intelligentsia families who have negotiated a remarkable array of divergent socialist and post-colonial modernities over the past 40 to 50 years. The personal narratives explored here include recollections of francophone education during the 1946-54 Independence War, as well as work and training in the Soviet Union, and morally testing encounters with Western goods and entrepreneurial opportunities during employment as development experts in former French and Portuguese colonies in Africa. These accounts are seen as the reflective imaginings of people whose sense of a strong and active moral life has been constructed through and from both material and intellectual possessions and acquisitions.