Social Welfare, Ethical Citizenship, and Gendered Civil Society: A Historical Ethnography of Social Work in southern Vietnam, with Ann Marie Leshkowich

The development of a market-oriented economy in Vietnam over the past 35 years has fueled economic growth, rising household incomes, and consumerism, but it has also exacerbated inequality. Having earlier rejected social work as “bourgeois,” the Vietnamese government reversed course in 2010 and announced ambitious plans to train 60,000 cadres in social work by 2020. Although universities, government offices, and NGOs describe social work as a new field, it has a longer history in the southern part of the country that shapes the present-day content of its expertise and the types of people who practice it. Drawing upon participant observation, interviews, and archival research, this paper provides a historical ethnographic account of the field of social work in southern Vietnam during the last decade of French colonial rule (1945–1954), the second decade of the Republic of Vietnam (1965–1975), and the third full decade of market socialism (2010s). In all three periods, professional social workers—the majority of them women—and charitable volunteers addressed the same kinds of social problems. The two groups also shared ethical or religious commitments to improving social welfare by strengthening civil society. Yet social workers in each time period sought to distinguish themselves from charity by emphasizing the modern, scientific foundations of their practice as professionals. Just as charity can intensify power differences between givers and recipients, however, social workers’ professionalization and the middle-class status associated with it risked reproducing the very same class inequalities that they otherwise sought to break down.