Situated Agency: Contextualizing Experiences and Perceptions of Ethnicity of Children in the Multi-Ethnic Highlands of Vietnam

Truong Huyen Chi, PhD, University of Toronto

The paper explores the perceptions and experiences of ethnicity of children living in the highlands of Vietnam and examines the structural conditions under which their ethnic identity takes shape. It addresses the multiple dimensions of everyday life as lived and narrated by the children themselves and the local socio-economic structures that shape their childhood. The paper draws on a qualitative study of 12 girls and boys, aged 13 to 14, from two communes in Lao Cai and Phu Yen provinces. The children were drawn from Kinh, H'Mong and Cham H'Roi ethnic groups and were sampled from Young Lives older cohort. The methodology involved extended conversations with the children and participant observation of their daily activities and interactions. The first part of the paper presents children's views of themselves and people from other ethnic groups and contrasts different children's experiences at home, work and play. The second part examines both the children's individual characteristics and the social arenas in which they are embedded - the neighborhood and the family - and highlights the ways in which these structural conditions shape their childhood. The paper concludes by making two propositions. Firstly, there cannot be a simplistic prescription for ethnic identity as viewed and lived by children in the multi-ethnic uplands of Vietnam. Instead, ethnicity is proven to be constantly produced and reproduced, negotiated and transcended, in the practice of daily life and at the intersection with, among other things, gender and social class. Secondly, any understanding of children's experiences and perceptions of ethnic identity is incomplete without an insight into the structural conditions within which ethnicity, children's identities, and their childhood as a whole take shape. Children's agency, therefore, has always been situated and needs to be so in order for it to be fully realized.

Truong Huyen Chi received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Toronto (2001). She taught at Vietnam National University and the Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences (2002-2004) and undertook post-doctoral research at the Harvard-Yenching Institute (2005-2006) and the National University of Singapore (2006). Her publications include "Winter Crop and Spring Festival: The Contestations of Local Government in a Red River Delta Commune" in Benedict Tria Kerkvliet and David Marr (eds., 2004), Beyond Hanoi: Local Government in Vietnam, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies Press; "A Home Divided: Work, Body and Emotions in Post-Doi Moi Vietnamese Family", in Danièle Bélanger and Magali Barbieri (eds. 2009), Reconfiguring Family and Gender in Transitional Vietnam, Stanford University Press. Dr. Truong is currently a Lead Qualitative Researcher of a sub-study at Young Lives, an international study on child poverty (University of Oxford). Her research interests include narrative, auto-ethnography and knowledge production, memory, and ethnicity and education in Vietnam and Southeast Asia.

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