February 2026 blog post: back from fieldwork in Vietnam - a turning point?

From 5 to 28 January 2026, I was in Vietnam with Thi Minh Ha Bui and Charlotte Da Cunha.

We started in Ho Chi Minh City, we attend in Giong Trom, then went down to Giong Trom, Phú Lễ, then to Tiệm Tôm, and came back to Ho Chi Minh City. We stayed in ago Riverside, conducted interviews. We stayed in Ruo Phule, at Vina Ecolife, conducted more interviews, moved around quite a bit, talked to people we already knew and to others we were meeting for the first time. As usual we conducted walking transect observing manifestations of local values and the impact of changes.

There had already been a lot of fieldwork in Vietnam before this trip. So there was no particular expectation that something fundamentally new would happen. But it did. The governance reform enacted in August 2025 by the Vietnamese government was a central and new subject of conversation. This change, and the associated adaptation mechanism behaved like, what I will name an axiological moment. A moment in time, in a place, where ongoing changes generates a situation where values, usually implicit to daily life, become visible as they are expressed when decision must be made. This led us to watch thing slightly differently.

In Phú Lễ, we were following questions around entrepreneurship and economic activity trying to articulate a concept of virtuous entrepreneurship. But the more we talked with people, the less convincing it became to think of entrepreneurship simply in terms of economic opportunity, individual motivation or even “values”. Economic choices were deeply entangled with relationships, obligations, reputation, family and the memory of what people owed to one another.

In Tiệm Tôm, and in our work on reform, something similar was happening. Reform looked very different once it entered people’s everyday lives. People did not simply accept it or reject it. They interpreted it, adjusted it, worked around it, sometimes embraced parts of it and sometimes defended other things that mattered to them. We talked about these things constantly. In the car. Over meals. Back at Vina Ecolife. Walking around Phú Lễ. After interviews. Between interviews.

And slowly, some of the observations started connecting. I remember the feeling more than a particular moment: we were beginning to see, with the help of Ha, that the Vietnamese words people were using to talk about what mattered to them were not simply translations of what we might call values. They were tied to relationships, obligations, ways of judging situations and ways of acting. And these things became particularly visible when people had to deal with change.

The entrepreneurship material in Phú Lễ began moving in one direction. The reform material from Phú Lễ, Tiệm Tôm and Giong Trom moved in another. And a third line started to emerge around the emic vocabulary itself and what it could tell us about the way people organise moral priorities in everyday situations.

At some point, these stopped being just fieldwork observations and started becoming papers.
Of course, there was still a long way to go. We went back to the notes and recordings, argued about interpretations, tried short abstracts, then longer ones, changed concepts, changed titles, and discovered several times that what seemed obvious in the field was much harder to formulate on paper.

But the papers have started (I hope). That is why I think of those three weeks in January as an important moment in the PREFER fieldwork in Vietnam. Not because they were the first fieldwork, and certainly not because everything suddenly became clear - yet some convergence occurred. Indeed patience is a virtue (please dot not look into Supertramp’s song Rudy)