Erik L. Harms, Assistant Professor of Anthropology (PhD, Cornell University, 2006).

I am a social-cultural anthropologist specializing in Southeast Asia and Vietnam.  My ethnographic research in Vietnam has focused on the social and cultural effects of rapid urbanization on the fringes of Saigon—Ho Chi Minh City.  This research will soon appear in my book, Saigon’s Edge:  Space, Time, and Power on Ho Chi Minh City’s Rural Urban Margin (University of Minnesota Press, due Fall 2008), which 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.”
 
More recently, my work has focused on the uses and abuses of “culture” and “urban civility” in urban Vietnam, and how this civilizing discourse entwines with spatial action in ways that legitimize broad-scale privatization.  This new research explores how the study of social space can reveal unspoken relationships of power and ideology in post reform-era Vietnamese cities.  While grounded ethnographically in Vietnam, my research and teaching seeks at all turns to connect my own work with larger world-historic processes, unraveling the interaction between culture and politics, and the ways in which everyday acts are informed by larger political agendas.  In my teaching I will offer a rotating mix of courses on Southeast Asian area studies, postwar Vietnam, urban anthropology, as well as theories of space, time, and social action.

I am currently in the early project-design phase of an anticipated long term collaborative ethnographic project designed to develop a comprehensive ethnographic map of the Saigon—Ho Chi Minh City Metropolitan Region.  This project, tentatively entitled Spatial Divisions of Labor in Ho Chi Minh City, seeks to develop a set of interlinked ethnographies and urban studies that will highlight the way that unique urban spatial forms articulate with different modes of production and concomitant modes of social organization and cultural practice.  I warmly invite any students or researchers interested in collaborating on this project to contact me.