Description
Book SynopsisMoney and Moralities in Contemporary Asia provides original, nuanced insights into social meanings of money and wealth in moral economies of Asia. Through case studies from South and Southeast Asia, the collection sheds important light on how the new mobilities and wealth created by neoliberal globalization transform people’s ways of life, notions of personhood, and their meaning making of the world. It highlights the moral dilemmas and anxieties emerging from the profound socio-economic transformations that are taking place across the region and deepens our understanding of local cultures as well as the inner contradictions of global capital in Asian contexts. With rich ethnographic insights and a diverse range of empirical contexts, chapters in this volume reveal multifaceted complexities and contradictions in the relationship between money and moralities. Money, they affirm, is not an impersonal, objective economic instrument with homogenizing powers but a culturally constructed and socially mediated currency in which meanings are constantly contested and re-negotiated across time and space.
Trade Review"The classic question of how the economic transforms the social is at the heart of Lan Anh Hoang and Cheryll Alipio’s new volume, focusing on money and morality in the context of some of Asia’s tiger and newly industrialized economies. […] Overall the volume achieves its goal of delving "deep into the economic, political, social and religious developments and dynamics engendered by the moneyed transactions and moral transformations arising from neoliberal globalization" (273). The range of case studies across topics and locales are carefully analyzed and offer fascinating insights."
- Ivan V. Small,
Asian Journal of Social Science, 49 (2021)
Table of ContentsLIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS INTRODUCTION Chapter 1: Money and Moralities: Theoretical Perspectives and Empirical Insights PART I: MONEY AND MORAL SELFHOOD IN THE MARKET ECONOMY Chapter 2: The Moral Economy of Casino Work in Singapore Chapter 3: Mobility and Flexible Moralities: Insights from the Case Study of Vietnamese Market Traders in Moscow Chapter 4: 'Billions and Retrogression of Knowledge'? Wealth, Modernity, and Ethical Citizenship in a Northern Vietnamese Trading Village PART II: SOCIAL CURRENCIES AND THE MORALITY OF GENDER Chapter 5: House, Car, or Permanent Residency? Higher-Wage Chinese Migrant Men's Flexible Masculinities in Singapore Chapter 6: 'Your Vagina is a Rice Paddy': Hegemonic Femininities and the Evolving Moralities of Sex in Chiang Mai, Thailand Chapter 7: The Gender and Morality of Money in the Indian Transnational Family PART III: THE SOCIAL LIFE OF MONEY IN ASIAN MORAL ECONOMIES Chapter 8: Money, Maturity, and Migrant Aspirations: "Morality-in-Motion" among Young People in the Philippines Chapter 9: Christianity as the Sixth Aspirational 'C': Megachurches and the Changing Landscape of Religion, Prosperity, and Wealth in Singapore Chapter 10: Cash, Women, and the Nation: Tales of Morality about Lao Banknotes in Times of Rapid Change EPILOGUE Chapter 11: Engendering Money and Morality in Asia Index
