Epidemic Politics in Contemporary Vietnam

Through a tumultuous 20th-century period of revolution and foreign wars, Vietnam’s public health system was praised by international observers as a “bright light in an epidemiologically dark world,” standing out for its accomplishments in infectious disease control. Since the country’s transition to a “market economy with socialist orientation” in the mid-1980s, however, some of these achievements have been reversed as the “renovation” of national systems for welfare and health leaves gaps in the social safety net. A series of cholera outbreaks that spread through Northern Vietnam in 2007-2010 revealed the paradoxes, contradictions, and challenges that Vietnam faces in its post-transition period.This book presents an anthropological analysis of the political, economic, and infrastructural inputs to these epidemics and suggests how the most commonly repeated accounts of disease spread misdirected public attention and suppressed awareness of risk factors in Vietnam’s capital. Drawing a parallel to the experience of novel coronavirus in Asia and beyond, this book reflects on how political priorities, economic forces, and cultural struggles influence the experience and the epidemiology of infectious disease.

In Epidemic Politics, [the author] provides an incisive and beautifully poignant account of the lived experience of poverty and disease in late-socialist Vietnam. Deftly moving between the worlds of state bureaucracy, public health surveillance and the intimate space of the home, this book asks what cholera epidemics - and their social response - can teach us about the market forces and political decisions that produce vulnerability to disease, and what is needed to survive epidemics humanely.

Martha Lincoln is Assistant Professor of Cultural and Medical anthropology at San Francisco State University, USA. Her work on the anthropology of contemporary Vietnam has been published in Comparative Studies in Society and History, Dialectical Anthropology, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, and Somatosphere.