Hanoi’s Built Materiality and the Scales of Anthropology

Abstract

Hanoi’s ‘collective housing quarters’ (KTTs) are a living legacy of its socialist past. Since the 2000s the state has set out radical redevelopment plans to transform KTTs into new buildings, but these have largely failed. What are the possible explanations for this failure? KTTs have gradually transformed in their material forms through self-built modifications initiated by residents. Such material property of KTTs bears on the pathway of redevelopment, but official discourses are silent about this. In this article I show how KTTs as things have the capacity to transform anthropological thinking. The material property of KTTs as a citywide phenomenon affords a particular scale of analysis, with which we can imagine humans as participants in the material world instead of viewing materialities as participants in society.

Ethical Endeavours

“…A big focus of special issue, but also in European Anthropology 2022 more generally, is the moral economy of (public) infrastructure. How is the 'public good' negotiated between the state, private investors and citizens or community groups in fi elds like (social) housing (on Vietnam, see Schwenkel 2022;Fujita 2022;on Namibia, Metsola 2022;on Romania, O'Neill 2022a), electricity (on Ghana, see Destrée 2022; on Nepal, Vindegg 2022; on South Africa, Mögenburg 2022) or internet provision (on the Solomon Islands, see Hobbis and Hobbis 2022). Th emes that run through all the articles are people's attempts to hold the state accountable, their struggles and improvisations to access basic forms of infrastructure when state care is absent or insuffi cient, and the ways social inequalities are reproduced through infrastructural interventions, even through those aspiring to be egalitarian.…”