Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the Vietnam state's agenda to develop cultural markets and 'cultural commodities' in the northern uplands, analysing its relevance for 'local development' in view of the actual strategies undertaken by ethnic minorities to engage with associated new cash earning activities.

Paper long abstract:

As of the mid-1990s, in the wake of Vietnam's transition to a liberalised economy 'with socialist orientation', both international and domestic cultural tourism to upland ethnic minority areas have flourished. Concurrently, the Vietnam state has begun to reframe minority culture as a resource wielding great market potential for external consumption. In the northern border upland province of Lao Cai for example, state-sanctioned cultural marketplaces, cultural villages, and cultural commodities made by ethnic minorities are now included in policies to develop the 'inefficient' upland economy - a process quickly being emulated by other neighbour provinces. Yet at the same time, state agents often consider semi-subsistence upland minorities such as Hmong and Yao to lack entrepreneurial 'know-how', and to be in need of being taught the 'correct' approach to market trade. To illustrate these conflicting processes at work, this paper focuses on case study examples of two cultural commodities produced and traded by Hmong and Yao ethnic minorities in Lao Cai province: upland artisanal alcohols and textiles. The Vietnam state's promotion of specific aspects of tourism in a particular format, and the diverse responses to such initiatives by minority traders, reveals how such official schemes at times mesh, while at others clash, with upland subsistence needs, customary practice, and with uplanders successfully realising new economic opportunities. Moreover, economic liberalisation has opened up important trade avenues for uplanders that modify, or exist outside of, the official approach envisaged by the state, and are either entirely overlooked or else marginalised by the state's development agenda in practice.