Vietnamese food entrepreneurs in Bangkok’s Baan Yuan: everyday emplacement and ethnoreligious identity in a multicultural historical quarter

Abstract

This article examines how Vietnamese food entrepreneurs subjectively experience and continuously reconfigure identity and difference through their engagement with the unique spatio-temporalities of Baan Yuan, Samsen–a community characterised by its shared Christian faith, the prominence of Vietnamese cuisine, and the enduring continuity of food entrepreneurship in Bangkok, Thailand. Through the lens of spatio-temporal emplacement, the findings indicate that these entrepreneurs actively negotiate and instrumentalise their ethnoreligious identity–as Vietnamese and/or Catholic Christians–across interrelated forms of othering that emerged from post-World War II geopolitical realignments to transform cultural difference into socio-political and entrepreneurial capital. Everyday entrepreneurial emplacement entails spatio-temporal negotiations, thereby contributing to the construction of porous urban spaces and shaping Bangkok’s cosmopolitan trajectories from below.