A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Who, what, and how we fear reflects who we are. In less than half a century, people in Vietnam have gone from fearing bombing raids, political persecution, and starvation to worrying about decisions over the best career path or cell phone plan. This shift in the landscape of people’s anxieties is the result of economic policies that made Vietnam the second-fastest-growing economy in the world and a triumph of late capitalist development. Yet as much as people marvel at the speed of progress, all this change can be difficult to handle.
A Life of Worry unpacks an ethnographic puzzle. What accounts for the simultaneous rise of economic prosperity and anxiety among Ho Chi Minh City’s middle class? The social context of anxiety in Vietnam is layered within the development of advanced capitalism, the history of the medical and psychological sciences, and new ways of drawing the line between self and society. At a time when people around the world are turning to the pharmaceutical and wellness industries to soothe their troubled minds, it is worth considering the social and political dynamics that make the promises of these industries so appealing.
Allen L. Tran is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Bucknell University.
"A fascinating study of an important global phenomenon."—Li Zhang, author of Anxious China: Inner Revolution and Politics of Psychotherapy
"A timely book in a global age of anxiety, A Life of Worry takes us from Ho Chi Minh City's lively cafes to its burgeoning psychotherapy centers to offer an original phenomenological approach to anxiety as it is felt and enacted, often as a form of care for others, in Vietnam today."—Jocelyn Lim Chua, author of In Pursuit of the Good Life: Aspiration and Suicide in Globalizing South India
"A fascinating account of the psychic effects of development in Vietnam, A Life of Worry compels readers to consider how economic growth can diminish collective well-being, how uncertainty has structured our lives, and how we might mobilize our collective anxiety toward new political agendas and practices of care."—Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu, author of Experiments in Skin: Race and Beauty in the Shadows of Vietnam
196 pp.6 x 9Illus: 7 color illustrations
9780520392168$29.95|£25.00Paper
Aug 2023