Masters of in-betweenness: living on water, dreaming of land in Cai Rang floating market, Vietnam

Abstract

The present dissertation examines the Cai Rang floating market in Can Tho city, southern Vietnam, as clusters of informal settlements. Home to large numbers of rural-urban migrants from the Mekong Delta in search of work and opportunities, the research site has never been analyzed through the lenses of urban informality. Its data-gathering phase stretched over more than one year, with six months of intense ethnographic fieldwork (December 2018 – June 2019) in Cai Rang district and two subsequent follow-up visits in November 2019 and July 2020. Far from being relegated to a realm of informality, often represented as illicit transactions and criminality, the inhabitants of the houseboats establish respectful relationships and dialogue with various formal forces, such as the local government, the traffic police and the union representatives. The combination of the longitudinal immersive ethnography and the Actor-Network Theory as a tool to vividly visualize these connections allowed for the emergence of informal and bottom-up mechanisms which help migrants secure livelihoods and bargain for power and political weight in the site. The inhabitants of these floating informal settlements oscillate between the realms of formality and informality, carefully evaluating the situation and adjusting their behaviour and decisions accordingly. Their tactical in-betweenness manifests as a fluid space that opens various coping possibilities. The text argues that people often choose informal options deliberately because they prefer them to the formal alternative, thus are far from being passive actors and show a remarkably diverse set of agencies.