Money 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.
- Cover
- Table of Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1. Money and Moralities
- Theoretical Perspectives and Empirical Insights
- Cheryll Alipio and Lan Anh Hoang
- Part I. Money and Moral Selfhood in the
Market Economy
- 2. The Moral Economy of Casino Work in Singapore
- 3. Mobility and Flexible Moralities
- Insights from the Case Study of Vietnamese Market Traders in Moscow
- Lan Anh Hoang
- 4. ‘Billions and the Retrogression of Knowledge’?
- Wealth, Modernity, and Ethical Citizenship in a Northern Vietnamese Trading Village
- Esther Horat
- Part II. Social Currencies and the Morality of Gender
- 5. House, Car, or Permanent Residency?
- Higher-Wage Chinese Migrant Men’s Flexible Masculinities in Singapore
- Sylvia Ang
- 6. ‘Your Vagina is a Rice Paddy’
- Hegemonic Femininities and the Evolving Moralities of Sex in Chiang Mai, Thailand
- Cassie DeFillipo
- 7. The Gender and Morality of Money in the Indian Transnational Family
- Part III. The Social Life of Money in
Asian Moral Economies
- 8. Money, Maturity, and Migrant Aspirations
- ‘Morality-in-Motion’ among Young People in the Philippines
- Cheryll Alipio
- 9. Christianity as the Sixth Aspirational ‘C’
- Megachurches and the Changing Landscape of Religion, Prosperity, and Wealth in Singapore
- Catherine Gomes and Jonathan Tan
- 10. Cash, Women, and the Nation
- Tales of Morality about Lao Banknotes in Times of Rapid Change
- Roy Huijsmans
- Epilogue
- 11. Engendering Money and Morality in Asia
- Cheryll Alipio and Lan Anh Hoang
- Index
- List of Tables and Illustrations
- Table 3.1 Demographic profile of research participants
- Table 5.1 List of passes for workers in Singapore
- Table 7.1 Selected characteristics of participants
- Table 10.1 Vientiane Times articles analyzed
- Table 10.2 Overview of Lao banknotes currently in use
- Table 10.3 Stylistic analysis of Vientiane Times article ‘Banknotes SymboliseNational Values’
- Image 10.1 Social advertisement
- Image 10.2 1000 kip banknote, 2003 and 2008 editions7
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