Economic anthropology; political anthropology; economic and social transformation processes; neoliberalism; entrepreneurship; social networks; kinship, relatedness and gender; morality; Southeast Asia.

Vietnam

Esther Horat is a postdoc researcher and conducted fieldwork in northern and southern Vietnam for extended periods of time. During her PhD, she was part of the research group “Traders, Markets, and the State in Vietnam” at the Max-Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle (Saale), Germany. In her PhD she examined economic change in a Vietnamese trading village. Based on this research, she published the monograph "Trading in Uncertainty: Entrepreneurship, Morality and Trust in a Vietnamese Textile-handling Village" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). In her postdoc project she focuses on social entrepreneurship in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City and examines discourses on social entrepreneurs, the everyday practices they employ to bring about social change and their different conceptions of what constitutes “a good life”.

Publications