Scavenged Shrine: The Presence of Ghosts and Moral Economies of Demolition in Contemporary Saigon

Demolition and “slum clearance” for road building have accelerated in Vietnamese urban areas since the late 1990s. In Ho Chi Minh City the stated objective of urban demolition is to improve the transportation infrastructure, optimize the movement of people and goods, and clear illegal settlements. Most demolition projects target slum areas where squatters reside, often without household registration permits and legal land titles. Lack of proper compensation, illegal land seizures, and speculation on prime property in future development corridors now trigger various forms of popular protest, often relayed by the press. Demolition and urban planning projects violate norms of reciprocity embedded in local moral economies, which in turn inform social life and protests against official abuses. This points to a re-evaluation of notions of rights, reciprocity, and value in the wake of rapid urbanization and economic growth. Based on long-term ethnographic study (since 2000) of neighborhoods alongside canals in Districts 1, 5, and 6 in Saigon, I examine the social resilience of people faced with large-scale demolition, and focus on their articulation of discourses of suffering and sadness, as idioms of justice. Demolition gives rise to stories. Residents’ fragmented narratives quickly move away from issues of demolition and compensation per se, and on to discussions of spectral presences which seem to re-emerge from the rubble. The erasure of the traditional urban fabric, the demolition of colonial heritage buildings, and the construction of modern blocks and highways in some of the oldest and densest neighborhoods in Saigon give rise to stories about ghosts, about what has disappeared and cannot be mourned. In contrast to the neat official memories of government planners, abject and nomadic voices emerge among the displaced, the resettled, and the scavengers who roam these indeterminate zones. People erect small shrines in the rubble to re-localize disappeared neighborhoods and re-conceptualize territories that have been razed in the name of urban development. I argue that these local practices give voice to what has been denied a place in official memories. These practices of remembrance – the dedication of anonymous shrines, supernaturally potent sites, and the stories that emerge around sightings of ghosts – articulate unofficial memories which cannot be voiced publicly. Sites haunted by ghosts in newly razed neighborhoods connect back to long-repressed wartime memories. Tales of violent “bad deaths” among Southern Vietnamese were suppressed by Northern Vietnamese victors in the name of national reunification after the end of the war in 1975. The ghosts which reappear today are the errant souls of Southern Vietnamese soldiers or Viet Cong fighters killed in action in urban guerilla, who were not properly buried and mourned, and have not found a place yet in official national narratives of post-war Vietnam. I examine ethnographically these long absences, and local narratives of the uncanny presence of ghosts, a usually silenced moral economy which has the power to challenge official national narratives by giving testimony to the fragmented re-emergence of long-buried and repressed histories.