In the decade since Vietnam launched market-oriented reforms, almost all available space in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, has been taken over by petty traders, most of them women. Based on twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork among cloth and clothing stallholders in downtown Ben Thanh market, this dissertation explores the social and cultural factors shaping this proliferation of women's retail businesses.;Part I examines the social, economic, and kin relationships surrounding market trade, as well as cultural conceptions which denigrate trade as a morally dangerous activity. To acquire information, capital, and goods in Vietnam's risky environment of fragmented and unevenly functioning markets, female stallholders cultivate kin, social, and religious networks governed by principles of reciprocity.;Part II focuses on several recent dilemmas confronting stallholders in Ben Thanh market, including a protest over taxes and traders' apparent inability to develop their stalls into larger businesses. These issues highlight the tenuous position of female traders and the ambivalence with which they are regarded by state officials, local cadres, and the public in contemporary Vietnam---an ambivalence that a recounting of several traders' life histories suggests stems from the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. Rather than resist negative characterizations of themselves and their businesses, female traders in Ben Thanh market embrace them. Using a strategy of "secret agency," these women have successfully manipulated state-sponsored rhetoric about their weakness and ignorance in order to justify their trade activities, protect themselves from government interference, and shield themselves from a socialist backlash against traders as "enemies of the people." Although closely associated with Vietnamese notions of gender, kinship, and petty trade, secret agency is also a broader theoretical concept which illuminates how individuals or groups can quietly strategize within highly constrained cultural, social, political, or economic contexts in which appearing to be weak can become a source of strength.;Despite its current utility, the strategy of secret agency may ultimately backfire. The dissertation concludes with an exploration of how plans to redevelop Ben Thanh market as an international trade center may consign traders to the margins of Vietnam's developing economy.
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