Competing Claims on Culture in the Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, Tourism Industry

In this dissertation I wish to contrast culture's uses by private tourism firms and actors in the Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), Vietnam, tourism industry with the Vietnamese Communist Party's (VCP) ideological claims on Vietnamese national culture. There are two primary goals to this study. The first goal takes as given the mutually constitutive nature of culture and economy and uses the hybrid concept "culture-economy" to critique the entrepreneurial model of urban governance. More broadly, I criticize the assumption that cities can be modeled based upon identifiable "capitalist" traits. The second goal endeavors to show how culture is expedient for both private actors and firms as well as for the VCP. In the first part of this dissertation I critique---through a description of the HCMC cultural-economy---the entrepreneurial city model of urban governance. The entrepreneurial city model is a replicable, Marxist-inspired approach to understanding cities operating under the logic of the capitalist economy. While I acknowledge the efforts of urban partnerships to capture mobile capital in the market economy, I dispute the entrepreneurial model's characterization of culture as an outcome of economic determinacy in cities. Instead, this study favors a hybrid view of cultural-economy, a position that adheres more fully to the performative and presentational aspects of actors, firms, and governments in their quest for financial success (in the case of the HCMC private tourism industry) and power (in the case of the VCP). These aspects are grounded in the second part of this study, an empirically-driven section dedicated to the values, uses, and deployments of culture by HCMC private tourism firms and actors. In its many guises, culture explains the various uses of a home, culture transforms painful spaces of memory into commodified sites of leisure, and culture drives the production of a foreign "outsider" and Vietnamese "insider" dialectic. The dissertation has at its backbone the tension and interplay of locally-based cultural strategies and the VCP's version of culture as a stable national system. Both of these are useful strategies for economic profit in the case of local HCMC actors and for the maintenance of political power in the case of the VCP. This interplay has consequences for theorizations of the entanglement of culture and economy in the urban realm and for post-socialist development more generally.