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Podcast: New Books in Anthropology
Episode: Edyta Roszko, "Fishers, Monks and Cadres: Navigating State, Religion and the South China Sea in Central Vietnam" (NIAS/University of Hawaii Press 2021
Description: This remarkable and timely ethnography explores how fishing communities living on the fringe of the South China Sea in central Vietnam interact with state and religious authorities as well as their farmer neighbors – even while handling new geopolitical challenges. The focus is mainly on marginal people and their navigation between competing forces over the decades of massive change since their incorporation into the Socialist Republic of Vietnam in 1975. The sea, however, plays a major role in this study as does the location: a once-peripheral area now at the center of a global struggle for sovereignty, influence and control in th...