Ladies Selling Breakfast: COVID-19 Disruption of Intimate Socialities among Street-Engaged Food Traders in Ho Chi Minh City

Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam's largest city, supports a vibrant street food culture. Most of the city's street-engaged food traders are poor and unskilled women, and there is scant research about how they build social networks and social capital that sustain their microbusinesses. This articl...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Anthropology in action (London, England : 1994) England : 1994), 2021-03, Vol.28 (1), p.34-38
Main Authors: Pham, Ngoc-Bich, Nguyen, Hong-Xoan, Earl, Catherine
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Anthropology
Breakfast
Cities
Consumers
Coronaviruses
COVID-19
Customers
Divorce
Economic change
Food
Interpersonal relations
Intimacy
Low income groups
Owners
Rice
Self employment
Social capital
Social networks
Trading
Women
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Summary:Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam's largest city, supports a vibrant street food culture. Most of the city's street-engaged food traders are poor and unskilled women, and there is scant research about how they build social networks and social capital that sustain their microbusinesses. This article focusses on the intimate socialities that street-engaged food traders develop with customers, shop owners and sister-traders in order to stabilise their incomes while their informal street-trading activities are policed and potentially shut down. Recent COVID-19 lockdown and social-distancing measures disrupted the crucial interpersonal relations of street trading and left the traders with no income. This article explores traders' strategies for achieving economic security, and outlines transformations of intimate socialities into mediated and digital relations after the lockdown.
ISSN:0967-201X
1752-2285
DOI:10.3167/aia.2021.280107