Building on ethnographic fieldwork in a northern Vietnamese village, this article explores how rural households have negotiated the opportunities and uncertainties of marketisation (Đổi Mới). I focus on the surprising ways local households have handled the state's push to diversify livelihoods and adopt commercial home-based sidelines: by means of beingđa gi năng, a local term that means ‘keeping many livelihood options and never putting all eggs in one basket’. In pursuit ofđa gi năng, local households have actively adopted home-based production even when they were doing well with paddy farming and faced no subsistence crisis. However, they have evaded what state officials want most: specialising in a single home-production enterprise in rational maximising ways to accumulate transformational wealth. The idea ofđa gi năngcalls into question two contrasting universal approaches to rural households’ motivations for livelihood diversification: either a desperate search for survival by passive victims of market forces, or a quest for wealth accumulation by rational maximisers without careful judgement of potential risks to one's family.

中文翻译：

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既不生存也不积累：越南北部的市场化和农村生计多样化

本文以越南北部村庄的民族志田野调查为基础，探讨农村家庭如何协商市场化的机会和不确定性 (Đổi Mới)。我专注于当地家庭处理国家推动生计多样化和采用商业家庭副业的令人惊讶的方式：通过đa gi năng，一个当地术语，意思是“保留许多生计选择，从不把所有鸡蛋放在一个篮子里”。在追求đa gi năng, 当地家庭即使在稻田种植做得很好且没有面临生存危机的情况下，也积极采取家庭生产方式。然而，他们却回避了国家官员最想要的东西：专注于单一的家庭生产企业，以理性最大化的方式积累转型财富。的想法đa gi năng质疑农村家庭生计多样化动机的两种截然不同的普遍方法：要么是市场力量的被动受害者绝望地寻求生存，要么是理性最大化者在没有仔细判断家庭潜在风险的情况下寻求财富积累。