Saigon's Edge by Erik Harms

Erik Harm's Saigon's Edge explores the places where the rural and urban intersect, where many of the world’s people live.

Saigon’s Edge explores life in Hóc Môn, a district that lies along a key transport corridor on the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City. Erik Harms puts forth a revealing perspective on how rapid urbanization impacts people living at the intersection of rural and urban worlds and opens a window on Vietnam’s larger turn toward market socialism and the celebration of urbanization.

Erik Harms is a social-cultural anthropologist specializing in Southeast Asia and Vietnam.  His ethnographic research in Vietnam has focused on the social and cultural effects of rapid urbanization on the fringes of Saigon—Ho Chi Minh City.  His book, Saigon’s Edge:  On the Margins of Ho Chi Minh City (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), explores how the production of symbolic and material space intersects with Vietnamese concepts of social space, rural-urban relations, and notions of “inside” and “outside.”