Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how upland ethnic minority people’s imaginings of the state in Vietnam are mediated through the politics of intimacy in their dealings with local state officials, and each other. Affect, cynicism and desire are the prevalent registers in which this intimate politics takes place.

Paper long abstract:

This paper draws upon ethnographic fieldwork from an ethnic minority commune in northern Vietnam to explore how the state is imagined by local people. Ethnic minorities in Vietnam have long been the targets of state governmental schemes to mould them into modern and productive Vietnamese citizens and overarching national narratives, symbols and bureaucratic practices are deployed to inculcate a particular state imaginary in the borderlands of northern Vietnam. Local state officials are the interlocutors in this process: they are all ethnic minority people who have grown up in the commune and who share intimate connections of kinship, friendship and reciprocity with commune residents. It is through the routine and everyday interactions of local people with these local officials, and with each other, that the idea of the state and the operation of political power is truly made manifest. These local encounters spawn a politics of intimacy which is powerfully constitutive of state ideas quite different to those imagined by central state planners and bureaucrats. These state imaginaries take shape in the three intimate registers of affect, cynicism, and desire and the paper provides ethnographic episodes to illustrate how the idea of the state is constantly constructed, de-constructed and re-imagined by local people themselves in these intimate domains. Critically though, the exercise of power and the imagining of the state takes place within the bounded territory of already existing social hierarchies and relations of power in the commune, and the politics of intimacy also ultimately serves to reinforce these structured relations.