Mark Selden
Benedict J. Tria Kerkvliet's innovative application of the theory of everyday politics to the transformation of collective agriculture places the peasantry at the center of Vietnamese politics. The product of more than a decade of fieldwork and archival research in Vietnam, The Power of Everyday Politics illuminates agricultural transformations in North Vietnam from the land reform of the 1950s to the collectivization of the 1960s, to postwar decollectivization and commodification. Kerkvliet contends that the driving force behind the return to the family farm was not the state. Rather, it was inchoate but pervasive village resistance to a flawed top-down and inefficient system that was both a product of and a cause for the decline of collective agriculture.
James C. Scott
Benedict J. Tria Kerkvliet again enlarges our understanding of subaltern agency and politics. This splendid volume is a great tribute to the capacity of Vietnamese villagers to doggedly defend their basic interests and restrict the options of elites. The Power of Everyday Politics is also a great tribute to Kerkvliet as the political analyst and ethnographer of this important struggle. It is an essential contribution to Southeast Asian studies and to our understanding of socialist bloc agriculture and of the 'other' struggle of the Vietnamese people.
Lynne Viola
The Power of Everyday Politics makes an important contribution to peasant studies by introducing readers to the Vietnamese experience in collective farming. In a superbly researched book, Kerkvliet demonstrates the vital importance of everyday political behavior on the shape of national policy. The result is not only an insightful examination of Vietnamese peasants and collective farming, but also a revised picture of Vietnam's political system and the interactions between state and society.