The Institute for Money, Technology & Financial Inclusion presents:

"Anticipating a Market: Consuming Driving and Driving Consumption in Southeast Asia"
with Ivan V. Small, Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Irvine

Thursday, April 3, 2014
3:30–5:00 p.m.
Social & Behavioral Science Gateway (SBSG), Room 3323

In this talk Small will examine emerging consumption patterns in Vietnam’s rapidly shifting transportation market and consider their linkages to broader migratory, financial, and technological histories and developments in the region. Remittances and newly expendable incomes resulting from Vietnam’s rapid economic integration and growth have afforded a growing demand for motorcycles, with an anticipatory shift to automobiles. First he will consider the strategies and histories of Vietnamese buyers and sellers participating in the transportation commodity market. For many years, the economic and migratory conditions managed by the Vietnamese socialist state limited bodily and financial mobility, while also incentivizing new forms of value storage outside official state currency regimes. This contributed to a material remittance market in which foreign commodities were received and exchanged not only for consumptive purposes but also served as secure stores of economic and symbolic value. However, recently implemented regional and international trade agreements and regulations, in particular phased reductions of tariffs on imported motorcycles and automobiles, are potentially delinking such informal consumption and savings practices, while also reorienting material and temporal relations to the market. In the latter part of the talk he will explore how the transportation industry itself is anticipating and engaging these new consumer publics, and framing a broader Asian “cultural market” around and with them.

For further information, please contact Anne Marie Flores, annemf@uci.edu or 949-824-3230.