In this article I seek to address a lacuna in Scandinavian studies of Southeast Asia, namely the study of cities. The current migration of population from rural areas to the cities in Asia represents “one of the greatest population movements the planet has ever seen” (Chapman, Dutt, and Bradnock, 1999:3). In 1995, 34 per cent of Southeast Asian populations were urban, and while the annual population growth rate in the region was 1.5 percent, the urban growth rate was 3.7 per cent (UNFPA, 2000). In this situation, the scant attention that social science research has paid to the city is striking. As Richard O’Connor remarks, “while Southeast Asia revolves around its cities, scholarship spins oV into disciplines that ignore this fact. In a region that has known cities for two millennia, research goes on as if the city were an alien entity” (1995:30). The academic . eld of urban studies has a strongly Anglo-American bent while Southeast Asian studies, particularly in Scandinavia, tend to maintain a focus on villages and village life (Haila, 2000). The research that does exist most often considers the city from a macro perspective, analysing the place of Southeast Asian cities in the world economy, discussing urban policies and economic development, or studying changing urban demographies.

In contrast, in this article I seek to provide an anthropological account of young people’s experiences of city life, tracing out the particular social and existential predicaments that urban life entails, as perceived by those engaged in it. In recent years the usefulness of the urban-rural contrast has been increasingly questioned in academic work (Whyte and Whyte, 2000), and the tendency of dualist abstractions to mask the complexities and diversities of social life has been pointed out (Long, 1992; Parikh, 2000). Yet, while the urban-rural dichotomy may indeed be academically limiting, this article argues that to Vietnamese youth, the opposition between the city and the village is an important metaphorical device, a tool that youth employ to articulate anxiety and to explore and come to terms with the social dilemmas of their daily lives. This is particularly clear in the context of intimacy and sexuality, which are the core topics of this paper.

Despite the centrality of sexuality to the conduct and continuation of urban life, investigations of sexual practices and experiences remain curiously absent from urban studies (Bech, 1998). In attempting to explore the ways in which Vietnamese youth perceive their social and sexual lives in an urban realm, I argue that existing theories of urban sexualities need to be recast in order to contribute to our understanding of sexual experiences among youth living in this Southeast Asian setting.

The author: Tine Gammeltoft

Anthropology Academy – University of Copenhagen - Denmark

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