Paper short abstract:

Drawing on an ethnographic research on Vietnamese migrant traders in Mafia-controlled wholesale markets in Moscow, Russia, I seek to reveal the complexities and contradictions in the ways the Vietnamese personhood is imagined and negotiated at the intersection of mobility, class, and ethnicity.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on an ethnographic research on Vietnamese migrant traders in Mafia-controlled wholesale markets in Moscow, Russia, I seek to reveal the complexities and contradictions in the ways the Vietnamese personhood is imagined and negotiated at the intersection of mobility, class, and ethnicity. The vast majority of the estimated 150,000 Vietnamese immigrants in Russia live in irregular status for indefinite periods of time with minimal settlement prospects. Post-communist Russia with a fragile economy, an extremely restrictive (and heavily corrupt) migration regime and disturbing levels of hostility towards foreign migrants proves to be a particularly unwelcoming host society. The routinisation of uncertainty and precariousness in everyday life holds both productive and destructive potential for social relationships. Through the conceptual lens of the notion of uncertainty, I discuss how Vietnamese men and women negotiate their collective identities as well as construe themselves as distinctive individuals in the course of migration. Central to my inquiry is the question of how money features in people's meaning making of the moral self and their navigation of market life. Money, Zelizer (1997: 19) notes, is a socially created currency, 'subject to particular networks of social relations and its own set of values and norms.' In the transnational life of Vietnamese irregular migrants, money emerges as a new anchor against which social relationships are benchmarked and around which social values and norms are redefined.