Professor Susan Bayly

The study of modernity and achievement; globalisation; theories of historical change; the disciplinary interface between history and anthropology; colonialism and its cultural afterlife.

As an anthropologist originally trained in history, I specialised initially in Indian religion and the lived experience of south Asia’s caste system. Thereafter, with the aim of making a distinctive historically informed contribution to anthropology, I explored the French and British empires as settings for divergent interactions between Western and non-Western peoples, focusing since 2000 on fieldwork in Vietnam. Having begun with fieldwork among Hanoi’s intelligentsia families, exploring their experiences in the socialist world system as an arena of dynamic ‘socialist moderns’ handling the legacies of empire and revolution as makers of highly divergent colonial, postcolonial and socialist modernities, I am now focusing on two related projects.

One is an exploration of the visual language of success and aspiration in contemporary urban Vietnam, and is a development out of my research for an ESRC-supported comparative project with Dr N. Long of LSE on The Social Life Of Achievement & Competitiveness in Vietnam & Indonesia, involving fieldwork on the ways achievement and competitiveness are being enacted and understood in these two key sites of Southeast Asian transformation experiences.

The other is on Familial and Personal Experiences of Marketisation in Contemporary Vietnam, a project building on fieldwork with Hanoi families from diverse urban backgrounds, exploring the values attached to skills and moral capital attained from work and training in sites where women particularly have learned to hold their own as traders and service-sector workers in the key labour-deficit Asian ‘tiger’ states.