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Development in Spirit
Religious Transformation and Everyday Politics in Vietnam’s Highlands
Seb Rumsby
New Perspectives in Southeast Asian Studies
Alfred W. McCoy, Ian G. Baird, Katherine A. Bowie, and Anne Ruth Hansen, Series Editors
L.H.M. Ling Outstanding First Book Prize Honorable Mention
How marginalized communities engage with markets and the state through everyday economic and religious practices
As state economic policies promote integration under a single logic of modernist development, many impoverished groups remain on the margins. Development in Spirit explores the practices employed by communities on the fringes of such nation-building projects. Using an everyday political economy lens, Seb Rumsby demonstrates how seemingly powerless actors actively engage with larger forces, shaping their experience of development in ways that are underexamined but have far-reaching consequences.
Following state-led market reforms in the 1980s, Vietnam experienced stunning economic transformation. But for the Hmong communities of the country’s north and central highlands, the benefits proved elusive. Instead, the Hmong people have pursued their own alternative paths to development. Rumsby shows how mass conversion to Christianity led to a case of “unplanned development” that put the Hmong on a trajectory of simultaneous integration into the market economy and resistance to state authority.
Many of the strategies community members employ are tied to the Christianization of everyday life. Religious actors play complex and often contradictory roles in facilitating networks of exchange and shaping local ideas about progress. They are influenced by national and transnational religious networks, especially US-produced radio broadcasts by Hmong American Christians and local converts.
This compelling account provides fresh theoretical and empirical insights into the interplay of religion, neoliberal development, and marketization across the world.
Seb Rumsby is lecturer of Southeast Asian politics at Queen Mary University of London. He is the co-founder of Hmongdom, a nonprofit rural development organization.
Praise
“In this stimulating study, Rumsby shows how Christianity offers the Hmong in northwest Vietnam autonomous resources for engaging with state-directed modernization. Empowered by their faith, the people of this uplands minority have charted a path to development that promises prosperity and coexistence with the state on their own terms.”
—Philip Taylor, Australian National University
“A compelling study that provides new theoretical and empirical insights into the interplay of religion, neoliberal development, and marketization across the nations of the world.”
—Midwest Book Review
“In an ambitious and compelling study, Rumsby offers a valuable contribution. . . . Researched and written in vivid detail, and based on excellent empirical material, this book underlines the importance of long-term study. . . . This is a vivid, and important, picture of development in process.”
—LSE Review of Books
“Fascinating. . . . Demonstrates the value of everyday politics as an analytical concept and perspective in the social sciences. Being mindful of everyday politics helped the author see the political significance of how Hmong individuals and villages grapple daily with market forces, government programs, state policies, and religion. . . . [A] well-researched and thoughtful book.”
—The Journal of Peasant Studies
“Reconceptualises the people of Vietnam’s northern highlands not as a monolithic group, but as agentive actors seeking to engage in economic structures and negotiate with powerful external forces at the level of the local and the everyday. . . . A nuanced analysis of intersecting processes that connect the local with the national and global, and the mind with the body and the spirit.”
—The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology
“A brilliant, engaging and provocative contribution to topical debates about religion and development. . . . Provides a detailed a sophisticated example of religious transformation.”
—Religion & Development
Table of Contents
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1. Historical Context and Strange Parallels
Chapter 2. Changing Livelihoods, Precarious Development Trajectories
Chapter 3. The Political Economy of New Christian Elites
Chapter 4. Neoliberalism in Everyday Life
Chapter 5. Conversion and Gender Relations
Conclusion
Appendix
Notes
Bibliography
Index
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Larger images
June 2023
224 pp. 6 x 9
7 halftones, 2 b/w illus., 4 maps
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