ABSTRACT
The dynamics of domestic service in Hanoi illuminates significant shifts in Vietnamese domesticity. Social groups have differential capacities in meeting their emerging social reproductive demands, while the state’s remedial role has been substantially curtailed. The situation is connected to global trends of liberalised care and social provision that have been creating and recreating various forms of social inequality (Williams 2010). Vietnam, however, differs in its dramatic departure from the socialist principles that were rigorously upheld until more than two decades ago and which the country still theoretically pursues. This has resulted in contradictions between the differential social valorisation of work and labour and the remaining ‘socialist legacies, claims, and structures of feelings’ (Yan 2008: 13). These contradictions shape the social relations of Hanoi domestic service, where age-old notions of servitude, made irrelevant under state socialism, are resurfacing in subtler yet no less powerful forms.
