What constitutes an appropriate site for empirical research? A research site limits what can be feasibly studied, especially given constraints on time and resources, and shapes the usefulness of the empirical work in relation to other past and future research. Yet research sites are not naturally occurring, ready-made fields of events that are easily accessible to researchers. Morita (2020) remarks that growing interest in the multiplicity of knowledge practices in the non-West has illuminated complex arrangements of difference that require new vocabulary beyond that of ‘culture’ and ‘society’ as autonomous entities. In imagining multiplicity, researchers make the movements and connections that explain not a world that exists ‘out there’, but rather problematize problem spaces in which a situation becomes a problem as it recursively refers to descriptions of itself.

As such, Vietnam as a country, a culture, a society is not a self-evident social context in which researchers can readily ‘immerse’ or unproblematically interrogate. What makes Vietnam appropriate as a research site is through the ongoing enactments of shared identity, common meaning, and bounded sovereignty that can be traced and assembled. Vietnam is both a site and a case insofar as it is well-circumscribed enough to not hide its locality while offering itself as points of contrast, reference, or comparison for other sites and situations. The locale of this book is local, albeit dispersed; while it seeks to do away with scholarly formats that carry universalistic pretentions, it is worth reiterating that the point is not to favour localism over universalism. A carefully studied case allows us to unravel what remains the same and what changes from one situation to the next, and thus informs findings that are particular to situations and findings that are not.

In circumscribing a case study as an ongoing enactment of sociality, we are preparing ourselves to attend to events that may disrupt and unfasten any preconceived notion about social relations. In doing this, we should also be open to the possibility of being taken by the actors involved to unfamiliar territories. What is at stake here is not only the changed ‘cosmos’ of social realities before and after experiences of illness as disruptive bodily events, but also the transnational social relations being mediatized by technologies – that which renders Vietnam as multiple, beyond its geographic sovereignty.