In Vietnam's postreform era, the proliferation of profiteering opportunities have, in addition to creating new forms of corruption, transmuted previously prevailing types of corrupt acts in multiple ways across different levels of state-society relations. Everyday corrupt practices have thus become an essential means of economic survival for many. Starting from the metaphorical framing of petty bribery as "making law," I propose the notion of what I term "corrupt exception" as a conceptual tool to explore the power dynamics of petty corruption between state agents and small-scale traders at the Vietnam-China border. Whereas bribery is felt by local traders to create better profit opportunities, the corrupt exception likewise pushes them into a de facto illegality where they remain subjected to arbitrary "lawmaking" and excluded from legal protection. I show that the metaphors employed by small-scale traders to negotiate complicit relationships with corrupt state officials both contest and reinforce the exercise of a localized form of sovereign power in a permanent state of corrupt exception in which "law" is "made" in exchange for bribes. [corruption, cross-border trade, metaphor, exception, sovereign power, Vietnam, Lào Cai City] RESUMEN A través de los distintos niveles de las relaciones Estado-sociedad en la era post-reforma de Vietnam, la proliferación de oportunidades de beneficio ha transformado en múltiples maneras las formas de corrupción anteriormente prevalecientes, al tiempo que han surgido nuevos tipos de actos corruptos. Así, las prácticas cotidianas de corrupción han devenido un medio esencial de subsistencia económica para muchos. A través de la interpretación metafórica de la pequeña corrupción como "hacer ley," propongo el término "excepción corrupta" como una herramienta conceptual para explorar las dinámicas de poder de la pequeña corrupción en la frontera entre Vietnam y China. Al tiempo que el soborno es percibido por los comerciantes locales como una herramienta para crear mejores oportunidades de beneficio, la excepción corrupta los conduce a una ilegalidad de facto dentro de cuyo marco dichos comerciantes permanecen sujetos a un "hacer ley" arbitrario y, por lo tanto, los excluye de cualquier protección legal. En este artículo muestro que las metáforas utilizadas por los pequeños comerciantes para negociar una complicidad compartida con los oficiales estatales corruptos, desafían, al tiempo que refuerzan, el ejercicio de un poder soberano localizado en un permanente estado de excepción corrupta donde "la ley" es "hecha" en el intercambio de los sobornos. [corrupción, comercio transfronterizo, metáfora, excepción, poder soberano, Vietnam, Ciudad Lào Cai] E very morning, scores of Vietnamese transporters and trader intermediaries gather at the Lào Cai-Hekou border gate and wait for the checkpoint to open at 7:00 a.m.

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During the Vietnam War, unprecedented numbers of dead soldiers were buried in unmarked graves and remain missing today. Starting in the mid-1990s, the services of psychics came into high demand, prompting the establishment of a state-approved Center for Research into Human Capabilities that continues to offer grave-finding assistance for the general public. This article discusses the cases of two well-known female psychics. As the case studies demonstrate, such research programs have established a niche for psychics on the perimeters of the official discursive nexus of truth, science, and visuality. They also highlight the variability of social and semantic proc esses by which different psychics are positioned in relation to recognized distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate knowledge practices and truth claims.

Focusing on the issue of ritual efficacy in relation to the prior intentions (or agendas) of the ritual agents, this article probes the usefulness of Humphrey and Laidlaw's concept of ‘ritualized action as non‐intentional mode of behaviour’. The article describes and analyses a specific set of Vietnamese commemorative rites held with the purpose of communicating with the souls of the dead and smoothing the deification process of ten young heroines of the Vietnam War. The article contends that ritual efficacy emerges from the dialogic and interactive nature of ritual performance in which the enactment of the agents' intentions is a crucial factor. Résumé En s’appuyant sur la question de l’efficacité des rituels par rapport aux intentions (ou programmes) préalables des agents rituels, l’auteure évalue ici l’utilité du concept « d’action ritualisée comme mode de comportement non intentionnel » de Humphrey et Laidlaw. Elle décrit et analyse un ensemble spécifique de rites commémoratifs vietnamiens, pratiqués dans le but de communiquer avec les âmes des morts et de faciliter le processus de déification de dix jeunes héroïnes de la guerre du Vietnam. L’auteure affirme que l’efficacitéémerge de la nature logique et dialogique des pratiques rituelles, dans lesquelles la mise en scène des intentions des agents est un facteur essentiel.