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THE “DANGEROUS” GIFT

In Annamite morality, to accept a present is dangerous.
—Marcel Mauss, The Gift
In this chapter I begin by reflecting on the concept of gifting that has been so central to analyses of exchange—particularly in anthropology, but also in the humanities and social sciences more broadly. How can thinking of remittances as gifts in the general Maussian sense help us examine contemporary cases of remittances sent from the Vietnamese diaspora to Vietnamese in Vietnam? The fact that remittances, even when monetary, are also gifts illustrates the limits of money’s function of settling accounts and, by extension, eschewing obligations and avoiding personal entanglements. Remittance gifts represent and reveal, but also obscure, the social relations and connections they mediate. To understand this, it is worth first examining the nonmonetary remittance forms that preceded and continue to accompany contemporary financial flows from the diaspora to homeland families.
In the case of Vietnam, remittances have taken many other forms besides money, particularly in the decade and a half after the Vietnam War, when international channels for sending money across borders were not always available. The history of remittance gifting from postwar migrants or refugees illustrates how relations and imaginaries connected to transnational gifting have shifted with and are contingent on the symbolisms, forms, and presentations of the gifting mediums. Due to the lack of financial channels between the United States and Vietnam after 1975 as a result of a generation-long severing of diplomatic and economic relations, a variety of material remittance forms emerged to assist and reconnect kinship networks dispersed after the war. These forms slowly began to be replaced by monetary gifts in the 1990s, but material remittances remain symbolically significant and have never been fully replaced. Since the 1990s material and monetary remittances have increasingly been accompanied by the bodies of the gifters or couriers from within their extended social networks, as diasporic return travel has become normalized. The long-distance nature of Vietnamese refugees’ practices of international remittance gifting, which have continued for over a generation, is being compressed with the increased availability of channels for rapid financial transfers. In addition, many formerly exiled Vietnamese are reorienting themselves as transnational subjects and moving back and forth across borders, if only occasionally.1
The occasional transnational subject returning to Vietnam may be a somewhat uncanny figure, in the Freudian sense, as encountered by the Vietnamese remittance recipient. The transnational lives in a foreign land, commonly referred to by informants as “over there (ở bĂȘn kia),” where new social practices are learned and slowly embodied. Yet these social practices do not only include the foreign; they are hybrid Vietnamese, as often practiced within the collective habitus of diasporic communities. The overseas Vietnamese (Việt Kiều) is commonly described by Vietnamese as simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar, and thus somewhat strange (láșĄ). Given that remittances are often the medium for bridging the gap that has emerged between dispersed kin, a key question that emerges is how hybrid diasporic practices of gifting as they relate to remittances are received and perceived in Vietnam. This includes assessments of their authenticity or purity, and how they compare to traditional or localized notions of gifting etiquette. The practice of gifting as a Vietnamese cultural concept or custom (phong tỄc) is commonly invoked by both remittance recipients and senders in explaining the obligations and expectations of remittance exchange.
Remittances as a basket of monetary, material, and social obligations that emotionally and economically tie remittance senders and receivers together are regularly explained by informants as gifts (quĂ ) that are both obligatory and altruistic, and to know and remember this is to be Vietnamese. Money is part of a larger collection of things given and received, in the past and the present, and it is only by conceptually including money in such a grouping that the gift can be recognized and duly reciprocated with hospitality or other material gifts on the part of remittance receivers. Mauss ethnographically recognized as much when he mentioned the gimwali that accompanied gifts; indeed, it was this very pairing that drove the circulation of the Kula (1967). As one remittance recipient described it, “Whenever my sister returns to Vietnam she brings money, of course, but she brings other gifts, too, such as cosmetics or soap. In the past we used to trade these kinds of things at the market, but now we keep them. There are nine siblings, and everyone gets something, even if small. We must also give small gifts to her when she returns to the United States, such as rice paper, green tea, dried shrimp, or squid. Of course, we cannot give money, but we give something that expresses sentiment (tĂŹnh cáșŁm). We are family, this is how we behave as Vietnamese.” The behavioral expectation of gifting across multiple mediums, temporalities, and directions in this case is familial but also culturally conceived. It is deemed to be neither selfless nor selfish, but a matter of fact. To understand gifting as a Vietnamese sentimental matter of fact requires some unpacking. To do this, it is worth taking a step back to consider a broader range of local gifting customs than merely the transnational remittance practices that emerged after the Vietnam War. This chapter traces discussions about ideas and practices of gifting across diverse situations in Vietnam and among Vietnamese, with the goal of appreciating the perceived sociocultural context within which remittances may be regarded as gifts.

In Search of the “Gift”

Our first investigation is a curious historical and textual one that begins in Western social and anthropological theory and ethnology, going back to Mauss, but carries us by coincidence to Vietnam. European spectators of non-Western societies have long been interested in the moral codes and functions that governed intracommunity exchanges. Anthropologists in particular have obsessively identified, categorized, and dissected universal codes and categories of gift giving, enthusiastically followed by scholars from across the humanities interested in the intersubjective affects of exchange.2 Frequently and perhaps mistakenly considered to be the first anthropologist to study the gift, Mauss (1967) relates ethnological stories of gifting practices from a broad spectrum of societies, including Polynesian, Melanesian, and Kwakiutl accounts, drawing primarily on works by Bronislaw Malinowski and Franz Boas that provide the core material for his analysis. But later he uses other sources to consider how traces of gifting in so-called primitive societies survive in other civilizational contexts. In doing so, he mentions in passing Vietnam—the subject of our present study, at the time referred to by its colonial name of Annam.3 Toward the end of The Gift, Mauss highlights the curious fact that “in Annamite morality, to accept a present is dangerous.” (ibid., 64). He does not elaborate the remark but attributes it in a footnote to the Finnish anthropologist Edward Westermarck, who “perceived some of its importance” (ibid.).
Like Mauss, Westermarck was an armchair anthropologist and sociologist who drew on the work of other ethnologists reporting from the field.4 He discusses (1924–1926) the dangers of Annamese gifting in the context of more universal fears and suspicions of strangers and the unknown. Offering an intriguing analytical take on cultural attitudes toward hospitality, Westermarck comments that “it seems likely that the custom of not receiving payment from a guest is largely due to that same dread of strangers which underlies many other rules of hospitality. The acceptance of gifts is frequently considered to be connected with some danger” (ibid., 1:593). Westermarck draws his account of dangerous Annamese gifting—“of the Annamites it is said that for fear of bringing ill-luck into the place the people even decline presents” (ibid., 1:594)—from a German ethnographer, Friedrich Ratzel. In turn Ratzel, infamous for his theories about the role of natural environments and geography in shaping human cultural outlooks and relations, draws on accounts of French ethnographers and traders such as Jean Dupuis, Jules Harmand, and Albert Morice to describe Indochinese society in the late nineteenth century. Further delving into this genealogical maze of secondary sources, we find the grand three-volume work titled The History of Mankind (1898) by Ratzel that presented, in the ethnographic fashion of the time, broadly interpretive ethnological insights into various cultures and civilizations around the world. In it, the author offers passing comments on Indochinese customs. The passage on gifts that Westermarck referred to is as follows: “The Annamite, says Morice, lives either on the water or on the mud. The villages are enclosed by palisades or thorn-hedges. Spikes of bamboo hidden in the grass render every approach unsafe; they are placed even round the houses. In the centre of the little place, surrounded by the huts, a small platform is raised on a tree-stump for the night-watchman. Amulets against mischievous spirits hang on trees and poles, and fine threads of cotton, stretched round the roof to keep off spirits, terminate in little sand heaps. For fear of bringing ill-luck into the place the people even decline presents” (ibid., 3:418).” In another passage on Annam, Ratzel discusses Vietnamese relationships to money. Quoting the French trader Dupuis, he notes that Tonkinese (northern Vietnamese) in particular “like making money, but are just as keen about spending as about earning it. The Tonkinese is extravagant, he is a great careless child and fond of jollifications and festivals. No sum is too high for him to pay for showy ceremonies and funerals” (ibid., 3:413).
Further following these ethnographic vignettes to their respective sources (Harmand 1997; Morice 1880; Dupuis 1910), one gets swept away in fantastical ethnological descriptions, tales of daring adventures, and storied colonial and local political dramas. The accounts of explorers, administrators, traders, and missionaries, filled with exuberant descriptions of local geography, political intrigue, and reflections on cultural and social difference, serve as what the anthropologist Jean Michaud has called incidental ethnographies (2007) of Vietnam at an early stage of colonial encounter and highlight what Bradley Davis (2016) has identified as an imperial power vacuum in the Red River Delta, where travelers, explorers, and traders had to appease quasi-governmental authorities and local bandits by disbursing strategic gifts and tribute to gain passage through the region up to Yunnan in China. Men like Dupuis were arms profiteers and had much to gain financially by currying favor with local leaders through gift giving to open channels for their illicit trade. While these ethnographies of early colonial adventurers are admittedly intriguing, what is relevant for the purposes of the present study is that the notion of the gift, like money, has long intrigued anthropologists, ethnologists, and social observers. Indeed the gifting concept has been abstracted from the fabric of countless stories, such as those just related, in various humanistic reflections. The fact that a passing observation on Annamese presents by Dupuis wound its way through at least three scholarly ethnographic studies, eventually showing up in Mauss’s The Gift, speaks to the analytical valence of the gifting concept. The idea of the gift strongly appealed to Mauss not only because of its seeming universality, but also because it is a human practice that reflects humanity’s complex capacities for hospitality and social overcoming of differences through exchanges.
However, the inevitable social limitations of the gift also appear in these localized accounts compiled by Mauss. Gifts mark the circles of social exchange and sharing in which humans participate, but also their spaces of exclusion. Gifts appear almost double-edged in their possibility. One type is the familiar gift, which is given and returned and repeated among intimate community and kinship circles. Another type, the gift from the stranger (or the unknown, as Westermarck has suggested), is feared. Gifts from unknown people and places are surely met with heightened suspicion about their intention, and no doubt the gifts referred to in the ethnographic accounts just related were offered in such a context. French colonial explorers, adventurers, traders, and missionaries (who in many cases preceded or accompanied larger projects of political and military expansion and colonization) engaged in gift exchanges with local authorities, mandarins, warlords, and indigenous communities in pursuit of self-interested strategic agendas.5 Local Vietnamese governmental and quasi-governmental officials cautiously and sometimes begrudgingly engaged in gift exchanges like these, but with trepidation. Managing gifting relations in such scenarios were likely intended to keep the outsider at a cautious distance. To the extent that they were meant to demonstrate hospitality and extend recognition, it was a tepid performative hospitality and recognition that was intended, as Westermarck suggests, to keep the stranger a stranger, in the hope that he would go away and not return.
Tracing Mauss’s description of the “dangerous” Vietnamese gift back to its primary ethnographic source, then, we see that his commentary on it was rather loosely abstracted from the original context. The situation described does not involve traditional intracommunity gift exchange, unlike the major case studies of the Trobriand Islanders and the Kwakiutl that Mauss focuses on. Rather, the ethnographic accounts presented by Ratzel describe the suspicious Annamite reception of gifts coming from foreign places and strangers. Such gifts were laden with ambivalent intentions. In such a scenario the gift and its giver were not familiar or necessarily welcome, and their foreign origins appear to be suspiciously apprehended. Certainly, in retrospect it appears that the hesitation about and suspicion of the perfunctory gift exchanges with the French that preceded colonial intervention in what is now Vietnam were not altogether misplaced on the part of those who had much to lose, given the eventual political outcomes of such relationships.
The historical context of Mauss’s Annamese example may appear at first glance to contrast markedly with the contemporary Vietnamese remittance gift scenario. The remittance gift from the overseas Vietnamese, unlike suspicious gift exchanges with radically foreign traders with ambiguous intentions, comes from an intimately familiar and recognizable kinsperson of shared ethnicity, from a place that if not known is at least imaginable as a result of two generations of postwar transnational circulation. Still, fear of the gift’s capacity to disrupt settled social worlds is not out of place. Anxieties regarding remittances, even from familiar subjects, have been long-standing. Various Vietnamese governments from premodern and colonial times to the present have monitored the influx of financial and material remittances, gifts, and their accompanying ideas (that is, social remittances) from overseas Vietnamese. For example, many nationalists and anticolonial activists during the colonial period believed that ac...