Marriage, Morals, and Markets: The Commodification of Vietnamese Brides

The connected lives approach to economic sociology proposed by Viviana Zelizer has posed a serious challenge to longstanding critiques of commodification. By looking at the many and varied ways people interweave economic and intimate life in their everyday experience, Zelizer and her successors have provided invaluable insight into the ways that the economic, the social, and the moral are mutually constitutive of one another. Yet in spite of these contributions, one feature of Zelizer’s theoretical framework can obscure fuller understandings of commodification: its tendency to conflate economic life in general with markets in particular. In this paper, we seek to revise and extend this approach by disentangling the unique implications of markets as a specific form of economic organization for social relations. 

We do so by analyzing the case of the contemporary market for brides in Vietnam. Drawing on the theoretical insights of Karl Polanyi and 19 semi-structured, in-depth interviews with various stakeholders in the bride market — ranging from Vietnamese brides, their families, marriage brokers, and government officials — we argue that the use of markets to organize intimate life brings about important qualitative changes in the structure of the social relationships that may have already been broadly economic in nature. That is, while marriage has always been an intrinsically economic institution — in which people engage in a division of labor, organize the production and distribution of resources, and routinely exchange money — the introduction of a formal market for brides brings about categorically different structures of rights and obligations between the social actors involved in a marriage. While we find that the commodification of brides has been shaped by local values around family and gender expectations, as Zelizer’s work would suggest, the market itself also reorganizes the relationship between marriage partners in line with rules and expectations for market actors. 

By disentangling the implications of markets as a specific form of social organization from economic life more generally, this analysis allows us to couple the insights of the connected lives approach with a narrower critique of commodification. In this way, we extend the approach by adding a critical analysis of markets as a form of social structure that reorganizes social and power relations in ways particular to market logic