Linking socioeconomic and personal transformations, recent scholarship on neoliberalism in East and Southeast Asia has examined the role of various emotional experiences in reconfiguring selfhood toward values of personal responsibility and self‐care. However, studies rarely focus on how such experiences come to be understood as specifically emotional themselves. In this article, I examine the growing use of emotion (cảm xúc) as a conceptual category to define the self and everyday life in a psychologistic idiom among middle‐class residents of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. While more established discourses of sentiment (tình cảm) define selfhood in relation to notions of obligation and care, the emerging model of emotion emphasizes individuated self‐knowledge. However, instead of replacing sentiment, newer understandings of emotion have developed alongside and in relation to sentiment. In categorizing various feelings as explicitly “emotional” in nature, people participate in a self‐fashioning project that cultivates an emotionally aware and expressive self that is informed by neoliberal sensibilities yet does not supplant socialist or Confucian models of selfhood. I argue that emotions are not only central to the subjective experience of the transition to a market‐oriented economy but also that emotion as a category itself is a medium through which economic transformations reorganize selfhood more generally. [emotion, self, neoliberalism, ethnopsychology, Vietnam]

This article examines two forms of the medicalization of worry in an outpatient psychiatric clinic in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Biomedical psychiatrists understand patients' symptoms as manifestations of the excessive worry associated with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). Drawing on an ethnopsychology of emotion that reflects increasingly popular models of neoliberal selfhood, these psychiatrists encourage patients to frame psychic distress in terms of private feelings to address the conditions in their lives that lead to chronic anxiety. However, most patients attribute their symptoms to neurasthenia instead of GAD. Differences between doctors' and patients' explanatory models are not just rooted in their understandings of illness but also in their respective conceptualizations of worry in terms of emotion and sentiment. Patients with neurasthenia reject doctors' attempts to psychologize distress and maintain a model of worry that supports a sense of moral selfhood based on notions of obligation and sacrifice.

The interpretive understanding that can be derived from interviews is highly influenced by methods of data collection, be they structured or semistructured, ethnographic, clinical, life-history or survey interviews. This article responds to calls for research into the interview process by analyzing data produced by two distinctly different types of interview, a semistructured ethnographic interview and the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM, conducted with participants in the Navajo Healing Project. We examine how the two interview genres shape the context of researcher-respondent interaction and, in turn, influence how patients articulate their lives and their experience in terms of illness, causality, social environment, temporality and self/identity. We discuss the manner in which the two interviews impose narrative constraints on interviewers and respondents, with significant implications for understanding the jointly constructed nature of the interview process. The argument demonstrates both divergence and complementarity in the construction of knowledge by means of these interviewing methods.

This article examines the role of anxieties about romantic love in the modernist self‐making projects of Vietnam's growing middle class. Romantic ideals and discourses that emerged from Vietnam's neoliberal reforms emphasize personal compatibility through emotional intimacy and communication. Middle‐class residents of Ho Chi Minh City increasingly privilege the emotions in daily life and define themselves and their relationships in an affective register. This cultivation of emotional self‐reflexivity has, however, become a source of anxiety about the self. An analysis of two case studies traces how individuals draw on their class, gender, and age to negotiate conflicts between various models of love and selfhood and reinvent romantic discourses to claim their own versions of a modern identity. A critical component of both the experience of romantic love and the construction of middle‐class Vietnamese selfhood, love anxiety stems not just from people's changed relations to others but also from a changed perception of the self, which has been rendered unrecognizable to them.

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