Introduction: Space, Mobility, Borders, and Trading Frictions

Abstract

This introduction provides a theoretical overview of the main mechanisms through which a market economy emerges. The chapters in this volume offer rich ethnographic exploration of daily interactions among traders, suppliers, customers, family members, neighbors, and officials within Vietnam and across its borders. These quotidian encounters occur within contested spaces, through expanding and contracting circuits of mobility, and across physical and conceptual boundaries that are fixed, yet porous. Taken together, the diverse contributions to this collection demonstrate that markets form and transform through uneven interplay among global processes, state regulatory regimes, and local trajectories of economic and social development. Rather than impede market function, these trading frictions shape the necessary ground on which new forms of political economy emerge.