The arts of disclosure: Peasant-bureaucrats, historiography, and state socialism in Viet Nam.

This dissertation is a historical ethnography of actually existing state socialism in Viet Nam. It examines the administrative practices of low-level cadres, whom I term peasant-bureaucrats, and the historiography that surrounds them. I argue that these low-level cadres were state socialism's subalterns who, by virtue of their structural location within the Vietnamese Party/state (the bottom), found themselves in the uncomfortable position of having to serve their bureaucratic superiors and the people they ostensibly represented, often simultaneously. Importantly, the subaltern status of these peasant-bureaucrats was relational and relative rather than absolute and fixed. By tracing how various peasant-bureaucrats negotiated these conflicting demands (or failed to do so) over time, what I describe as the practice of partial disclosure, it becomes possible to develop a more nuanced view of what everyday life was like following the August Revolution of 1945 to the present. Such an approach moves discussion beyond previous studies of state socialism in Viet Nam, which have largely stressed either domination or resistance. The research draws upon a wide range of archival, literary, and ethnographic materials to explore several overlapping domains: the everyday conduct of low-level Party/state cadres, the models they used for mass mobilization campaigns, and the historiography surrounding them both. My dissertation is, as a consequence, also an extended study of bureaucracy itself---its personnel, its symbols, and its practices---for this is how most Vietnamese actually encounter the socialist Party/state on a routine basis. It is through such encounters and, importantly, efforts to avoid them that ordinary people form theories about how different segments of the Party/state actually function, the limits of its power and authority, as well as the precise location of its blind spots. It is also through such quotidian interactions that the bureaucratic practices associated with the Party/state and, increasingly, non-governmental organizations infiltrate everyday life to affect how people conceive of themselves and conduct their lives. This approach permits me to reexamine what Vietnamese state socialism was and what it is becoming now, as well as demonstrate the limits of some of our own analytical categories in the process.Ph.D.Asian historyCultural anthropologyPolitical scienceSocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/125155/2/3186699.pd