Transnational Lives in Domestic Worlds: The Politics of Home in Contemporary Rural Vietnam

This thesis examines how the meaning and materiality of home are reconfigured in rural Vietnam amid transnational migration and post-socialist transformation. Set in a central Vietnamese coastal commune with an economy substantially transformed by labour migration, it explores how the domestic realm becomes a crucial site where the effects of neoliberal reform, mobility, and aspiration are negotiated in everyday life. Through the interplay of remittances, kinship, and material construction, the study investigates how villagers craft continuity and belonging under conditions of economic precarity and social change. In this context, migration and remittances have transformed both the physical and moral landscape in many Vietnamese rural areas. Improved economic situations and modern infrastructures stand as striking evidence to social mobility and rural development. However, labor migration remains a contingent project, sustained through precarity, sacrifices of emotional labor, intergenerational care, and the uneven circulation of money and value. As households adjust to the disruptions of family life, gendered and generational tensions emerge around conflicting aspirations and pragmatic calculations. The thesis conceptualises home as a multiscalar formation composed of four interrelated domains: the hierarchy of labour, where revaluation of work and morality unfold; the future, where hope, inheritance, and temporal aspiration are projected; the symbolic, where material and social recognition articulate traditions, status, and belonging; and the ecological, where the sea and consumption mediate class and local identity. Within and across these domains, home becomes a site of negotiation between actants within four intersecting social levels - individuals, community, the state, and global forces. By situating rural homemaking within Vietnam’s post-reform political economy which is marked by market liberalisation, labour precarity, and widening inequality, the study shows how the domestic operates as both refuge and frontier. It grounds moral life amid mobile uncertainty while also reproducing new hierarchies of gender, class, and forms of labour. Home thus emerges as a political terrain where state visions of modernisation, global capitalist logics, and local moral worlds converge and conflict. Ultimately, Transnational Lives in Domestic Worlds argues that home in contemporary rural Vietnam is neither fixed nor private, but a dynamic and contested process through which people strive to create stability in precarious times. It enhances anthropological discourse on post-socialism, neoliberalism, and moral economies by situating them within the lived experiences of rural Vietnam. It demonstrates that rather than signaling the retreat of the socialist state or the triumph of market rationality, neoliberal reforms in Vietnam unfold through intimate governance in the moral regulation of family life, as well as personal consumption and aspiration. Thus, homemaking in post-socialist Vietnam cannot be understood purely as a domestic or economic pursuit. It is a moral and political practice through which people engage with shifting forms of governance, labour, and global connectivity.