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For most of us, work is a basic daily fact of life. But that simple fact encompasses an incredibly wide range of experiences. Hard at Work takes readers into the day-to-day work experiences of more than fifty working people in Singapore who hold jobs that run from the ordinary to the unusual: from ice cream vendors, baristas, police officers and funeral directors to academic ghostwriters, temple flower sellers, and Thai disco girl agents. Through first-person narratives based on detailed interviews, vividly augmented with color photographs, Hard at Work reminds us of the everyday labor that continually goes on around us, and that every job can reveal something interesting if we just look closely enough. It shows us too the ways inequalities of status and income are felt and internalized in this highly globalized society.
Making liquor isn’t rocket science: some raw materials, a stove, and a few jury-rigged pots are all that’s really needed. So when the colonial regime in turn-of-the-century French Indochina banned homemade rice liquor, replacing it with heavily taxed, tasteless alcohol from French-owned factories, widespread clandestine distilling was the inevitable result. The state’s deeply unpopular alcohol monopoly required extensive systems of surveillance and interdiction and the creation of an unwieldy bureaucracy that consumed much of the revenue it was supposed to collect. Yet despite its heavy economic and political costs, this unproductive policy endured for more than four decades, leaving a...
Through 67 interviews and 59 colour photographs, It's a Living reveals the energy and struggle of the world of work in Vietnam today. A goldfish peddler installing aquariums, a business school graduate selling shoes on the sidewalk, a college student running an extensive multi-level sales network, and a girl doing promotions but intent on moving into management, are just a few of the people profiled. Based on frank and freewheeling interviews conducted by students, the book engages a broad range of Vietnamese, both living in Vietnam and abroad, on their feelings about work, life and getting ahead. By providing a ground-level view of the texture of daily working life in the midst of rapid and unsettling change, the book reveals Vietnam today as a place where ordinary people are leveraging whatever assets they have, not just to survive, but to make a better life for themselves, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Liquor has become a “party” in East Asia – a beverage phenomenon popular among countries throughout the region. But, in fact, each country of East Asia has experienced a different evolution of spirits. Indeed, there is a liquor idiosyncrasy to each country of East Asia. Moreover, hooch is the popular alcoholic beverage for the lower classes while more sophisticated spirits are exclusive to the higher classes. The book examines liquor: moonshine and retail liquor in East Asia. It analyzes the following questions as to why liquor is becoming so popular in East Asia. Why is production of liquor in East Asia becoming so financially lucrative? Why has the production of hooch (moonshine) become so lucrative? In fact, the production and consumption of liquor in East Asian have become crucial as East Asia enters a period of craft liquor. A valuable resource for academics, students, and professionals interested in public policy, history, political economy, consumer goods in East Asia, and the evolution of hooch and hard liquor in East Asia.
International law concerning maritime boundary dispute resolution reflects normative aspirations for peacefully managing some of the most intractable challenges in foreign affairs. Focusing on key international law issues relating to maritime boundary disputes, this book explores how international law and legal institutions facilitate these goals theoretically and practically. This process includes a balance of equities among states grounded in the Charter of the United Nations and the protection of sovereignty, territorial integrity, and political independence of Member States, while avoiding threats to the peace, breaches of the peace, and acts of aggression. The UN Charter is complemented...
"The Architects of Dignity: Vietnamese Visions of Decolonization traces an intergenerational debate among six major political figures in Vietnam who had competing visions for how the Vietnamese should respond to French colonial domination (1858-1954). These thinkers engaged in cross-cultural political thinking, drawing on Indian, Japanese, Chinese, French, German thinkers, and more, conducting what political theorists would today call an engaged form of "Comparative Political Theory." Despite their differences, they sought to channel feelings of national shame and inadequacy for constructive, dignifying ends. In contrast to theorists who tend to view shame as a destructive form of false cons...
This book is a must-read for any specialist in the history of colonial and post-colonial psychiatry, as well as a fantastic case study for those interested in the social history of European colonialism more generally.― Choice Claire Edington's fascinating look at psychiatric care in French colonial Vietnam challenges our notion of the colonial asylum as a closed setting, run by experts with unchallenged authority, from which patients rarely left. She shows instead a society in which Vietnamese communities and families actively participated in psychiatric decision-making in ways that strengthened the power of the colonial state, even as they also forced French experts to engage with local u...
Since the 1950s, the domestic politics of the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) has puzzled outside observers. To these external analysts, the American-backed regime seemed to be plagued by instability and factionalism for no apparent reason. Their bewilderment, however, has obscured a deep and complex history. In Disunion, Nu-Anh Tran shows how factional struggles in the Saigon-based republic reflected serious disagreements about political ideas at a pivotal moment in the lead-up to the Vietnam War. The book traces the emergence of Vietnam’s anticommunist nationalists back to the struggle for independence and explores how their alliances were tested and then broken during the rule of the RVN’s ...
A moving portrait of the lives of six poor city-dwellers, set in early twentieth century colonial Saigon Historian Haydon Cherry offers the first comprehensive social history of the urban poor of colonial French Saigon by following the lives of six individuals--a prostitute, a Chinese laborer, a rickshaw puller, an orphan, an incurable invalid, and a destitute Frenchman--and how they navigated the ups and downs of the regional rice trade and the institutions of French colonial rule in the first half of the twentieth century. "Down and Out in Saigon is marked by three qualities that endow it with unusual value: the originality of its subject matter, as the first and only history of colonial Saigon's poor population, the excellence of its research, and Cherry's elegant prose."--Peter B. Zinoman, University of California, Berkeley "This is more than a corrective of revolutionary historiography--it is a tour de force that brings marginal and forgotten lives into the story of modern Vietnamese history."--Charles Keith, author of Catholic Vietnam: A Church from Empire to Nation
Conventional wisdom emerging from China and other autocracies claims that single-party legislatures and elections are mutually beneficial for citizens and autocrats. This line of thought reasons that these institutions can serve multiple functions, like constraining political leaders or providing information about citizens. In United Front, Paul Schuler challenges these views through his examination of the past and present functioning of the Vietnam National Assembly (VNA), arguing that the legislature's primary role is to signal strength to the public. When active, the critical behavior from delegates in the legislature represents cross fire within the regime rather than genuine citizen fee...