CHAIRPERSON
Dr Eli Elinoff, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore
ABSTRACT
Recent scholarship on the politics of romantic love has focused on the ways that emotion and social action become fused as simultaneously tacit and culturally elaborated, embodied and rational, and spoken and unspoken. This paper examines the social context of anxieties about romance and intimacy in post-reform Vietnam in relation to how people make sense of political and economic regimes as well as each other and themselves. What residents of Ho Chi Minh City worry about as they fall in and out of love reflects a neoliberal re-configuration of the relation between self and society wherein romantic love and anxiety are co-produced by changing discourses of romance and powers of the self that have emerged out of economic reforms known as đổi mới (renovation). I present a close analysis of two case studies in order to understand how people draw from and reinvent tropes about romantic love to claim their own versions of a modern identity defined in part as a self with unique traits in search of recognition as such.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Allen L. Tran is an assistant professor of anthropology at Bucknell University. His research focuses on anxiety and anxiety disorders in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam and links affect, mental health and illness, and the body with the technologies of the self associated with global capitalism. He teaches courses related to medical and psychological anthropology and Southeast Asia.
REGISTRATION
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