Building Noah's Ark for Migrants, Refugees, and Religious Communities

Jin-Heon Jung, Kenneth A. Loparo, Alexander Horstmann

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137496300
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Emigración e inmigración

Building Noah's Ark for Migrants, Refugees, and Religious Communities examines religion within the framework of refugee studies as a public good, with the spiritual and material use of religion shedding new light on the agency of refugees in reconstructing their lives and positioning themselves in hostile environments.

Part I

Chapter 1

What Is a Refugee Religion? Exile, Exodus, and Emigration in the Vietnamese Diaspora

Janet Alison Hoskins

Within the field of migration studies, there are many ways of describing the experience of leaving one’s country. Migration is perhaps the most neutral term, since it simply designates the act or process of moving from one region or country to another. Exile is a more loaded word, referring to an unwilling rupture with the homeland, whether imposed by political circumstances or personal choice, but it hints at the idea of expulsion and suffering. Exodus evokes the biblical story of the Israelites forced out of Egypt and the movement of large numbers of people, described in less theological language as refugees. This chapter examines the narrative strategies applied to migration by followers of Vietnamese indigenous religions (Caodaism and Đạo Mẫu), and looks at the ways in which migration is inscribed into a religious theodicy, and ritual practice itself becomes a way of “returning” to an ancestral homeland. My title refers to refugees, as opposed to simple migrants, and this is because most overseas Vietnamese see themselves as refugees, people who were forcibly displaced from their homeland, although in recent years an increasingly number are legally classified as immigrants.¹ The idea of the “loss of country,” and the threat that it raises of a loss of identity, is central to the very different ritual and doctrinal responses of these two religions.

I also want to address scholarly discussions of whether overseas Vietnamese communities can be legitimately described as “diasporas,” or whether there is instead a “diasporic moment” that is linked to narratives phrased in terms of exile or exodus, but not necessarily applicable to the overseas community as a whole. It will be my argument that Caodai teachings infuse the Vietnamese refugee experience with an ideology of exodus that is “diasporic,” but this should be interpreted as a rhetorical device, an effort to persuade both themselves and others of the particular spiritual mission that was their destiny. Đạo Mẫu followers, in contrast, have developed a form of practice that provides an embodied and performative experience of the homeland, so for them the doctrinal emphasis on diaspora is unneeded. They do, however, see themselves as exiles who need to “bring Vietnam back inside themselves” by forging relationships with spirits from a legendary imperial past. Viewing notions of exile and exodus as part of the narrative construction of diaspora is part of an effort to refine our comparative vocabulary and come to a better understanding of the relationship between religion and nationalism, and the often porous boundaries between the two.

My argument is that religious practice can itself be a form of refuge, of solace, and of identity formation for diasporic Vietnamese. My two case studies are minority religions: Caodaism is officially Vietnam’s third largest religion (after Buddhism and Catholicism), is practiced by roughly 10 percent of the population of the southern part of the country, and it has at least 3.2 million followers in Vietnam and about four million followers worldwide.² Đạo Mẫu had its roots in northern Vietnam, although there is also a locally distinct tradition in central Vietnam, and offers a more intense, performative ritual based on an imperial pantheon of warriors, ladies of the court, and impish baby princes familiar to the ancestor worship practiced by virtually all Vietnamese. There is strong evidence that ethnic congregations of Buddhists and Catholics share many of these idioms, although they are probably clearest in Vietnam’s “indigenous religions”—those religions born in the country whose beliefs and practices enact Vietnamese historical experience (Hoskins 2011b).

Spirit Possession as a Religion of Displacement

Spirit possession is a survival strategy developed by religions that suffer displacement, since it allows the deities of the land and of origins to move into the bodies of their disciples, and does not require that they actually return to the cult house of origins. The body of the possessed person becomes a new sacred space, the “seat” on which the spirits come to sit, and the platform through which they can come to teach. Spirit possession cults are famously developed among the displaced (the African slaves who formed Vodou, Candomblé, and Santeria [Brown 2001; Matory 2005]), the rural to urban migrants of the West African Hauka cult (Stoller 1992, 1995) and Sudanese zar (Boddy 1988, 1994), and northern Thai villagers crowding into Chiang Mai (Morris 2000). The Vietnamese practice of spirit possession may have developed as a response to dispersion, the dispersion of rural villagers as they moved into urban centers, and the dispersion of northerners who traveled to the south of Vietnam in the 1930s seeking economic opportunity or in the 1950s fleeing the communist takeover in Hanoi.

The earliest ethnographic descriptions we have are from urban practices, despite the fact that many of the most important temples are in isolated rural areas. A refugee community in France studied in the 1940s and 1950s provided the framework for one of the most complete descriptions of the pantheon (Simon and Simon-Barouch 1973). The idea of pilgrimage and of the enhanced efficacy of a distant temple seems a long established principle, as evidenced by the Vietnamese proverb: “The statues in the local temple are not efficacious.” Only those temples you need to travel to get to will really reward your wishes. Our experiences doing fieldwork this summer were that we would travel many hours on winding roads to go to a temple high in the mountains or in a remote area and there discover other minivans and even video crews. We witnessed elaborate ceremonies in isolated locations held by people from Hanoi or Saigon. These were rituals performed by urban people seeking out their rural roots, people living far from the land asking the goddesses of heaven, earth, water, and mountains to bless them so that they could be more prosperous in city-bound enterprises.

Traditional Vietnamese ancestor worship defined social identity as rooted in a particular place, the village of birth, and the family of descent, whose tombs provided the physical proof of the enduring presence of the past. Over the last three centuries, the Vietnamese people moved out from the Red River Delta to populate what is now central and southern Vietnam. To make this transition they needed to evolve modes of access to their deities that transcended any particular place—new ways of carrying the past with them and recreating its sacred authority in new locations. For those living far from the ancestral homeland, it became necessary to not only create new sacred spaces, but also acknowledge that these are only “shadows” or “reflections” of the original spaces once inhabited by the ancestors. Emigrants’ religious practices are not only echoes of the “land of origins,” but also transformed and reinvented on new territory. Spirits are summoned to fulfill new needs, reinvigorating some older rituals and repurposing them to fit another context.

Both Caodaism and Đạo Mẫu are often described as “indigenous Vietnamese religions,” since they were born in Vietnam and draw on the historical experience of the Vietnamese people. Since the most basic definition of an indigenous religion is one that is practiced in the land where it originated, there is an implicit contradiction in terms in talking about “indigenous religions in diaspora.” If these rituals are practiced overseas, then the religion is no longer purely “indigenous”—but it is precisely because the ritual practitioners are displaced from their homeland that they feel a stronger need to evoke these spirits specifically to get the guidance of their ancestors in a new world. The idea of the “indigenous” is associated with tropes of depth, density, and authenticity, which are framed by arguments that a particular practice is “true to its origins.” The indigenous and territorial would seem to be opposed to the cosmopolitan and diasporic. But in fact these two claims to religious authority are linked and mutually constitutive. As Johnson (2007) argues, the “indigenous” can only be defined in relation to the extended context of external relations, and “the diaspora” takes on its own identity through a project of maintaining aspects of indigeneity in a new world.

The refugee is defined by exclusion and forcible displacement, while the disaporic subject is—to a certain extent—a displaced person who has chosen to take on a specific subject position, which involves a new way of seeing the homeland. Forced into the political category of refugee, she or he can choose to respond with sentiments of affinity, making efforts to resettle in an ethnic enclave, performing certain ritual gestures, and choosing to identify with a particular community. Racial difference places certain boundaries of how far one can choose one’s own group membership, but within the framework of recognized physical differences there is still much room for individual agency. “Indigenous religions” offer one type of community in which the homeland is sacralized and performed in various ways that both reinforce the consciousness of displacement and try to transcend it.

The Practice of Spirit Possession

In March 2010, I attended a special ceremony at the home of a Đạo Mẫu medium who had traveled back to Vietnam to purchase a full set of paper votive offerings for his temple in Orange County. Brightly colored horses in red, blue, and green, with shiny gold foil saddles and bridles stood in a small enclosure overlooking the drained swimming pool in the backyard of a suburban home. Elaborate ships filled with paper doll passengers and decorated with ribbons of pink, turquoise, and yellow fluttered softly in the breeze on the patio. Inside his apartment, an altar with statues of highland ladies, fierce warriors, stern mandarins, lovely princesses, and impish child spirits dominated the living room. Beside it was a “sacred mountain” topped by the Sixth Lady in Green (Chầu Lục), his guardian spirit, and her retinue of ladies in waiting, arranged behind a pyramid of tropical fruit (pineapple, mangoes, oranges, and dragon fruit) and a plate with fresh betel nut and sirih leaves.

The medium, who I will call Kiếm, was bowing in front of the altar, dressed in a simple white tunic, touching his head to the ground beside a stack of elaborately colored costumes. After a prayer by an older ritual master, he raised his hands above his head and attendants slipped on a sparkling red and gold veil. Rhythmic music began to play, another attendant started to beat the drum, and his body swayed from side to side. The first spirits evoked are always the Mother Goddesses—one in red, one in gold, and one in green—who sit, veiled, at the top of the altar. They preside over the ceremony but they do not “do the work” of interacting with their worshippers. Instead, they send a series of other spirits, coming down in hierarchical order, from the imperial court: famous heroes wielding swords and lances, lovely ladies with feathered fans, spoiled princes who sip wine and smoke cigarettes (some of them shaking slightly like opium addicts), and pretty princesses who dance with oars and distribute flowers. The final spirits are always the boy princes, who play with a bow and arrow, do pratfalls, tighten their fists in temper tantrums and scatter candy to the audience. Each ceremony is unique, and the medium himself does not know which spirits will descend to “sit on his shoulders,” although he has prepared costumes for about a dozen of his favored spirits.

Kiếm gestures with a hand signal to let his attendants know which spirit has come into his body. Then they dress him as he sits, wordlessly, watching himself be transformed into a coquettish dancer, a haughty mandarin, or a highland girl carrying a woven basket on her back. In the mirror, he sees his face take on the characteristic expression of the spirit he now embodies, and he stands in front of the altar. First, he will bow with a velvet cloak, and dance with flaming incense sticks. Then he will lift his sword or shake his feathered fan, stage props that dramatize the personality who dances inside him, using his arms and his legs but blocking his ability to speak. Figures from Vietnamese history and legend come alive in his living room, as he incarnates up to two dozen spirits.

He sits after each dance and receives requests from the audience. People approach with fresh dollar bills arrayed like a fan on a plate, asking for blessings of prosperity, true love, and healing. Rarely, he will speak to them, but if he does so it is not his own voice but that of the spirit. More often, he will respond with a gift—a bit of betel and sirih, a glass of wine, or other dollar bills he takes from the fruit displays on the altar. These gifts are blessed with incense and contain within them the power of his spirit. The spirit of a highland healer may rub the swollen knees of an older woman, or blow smoke into an envelope and hand this “spirit breath” package to a devoted disciple. Through an exchange of gifts, the human community and the spirit community are joined, and members of audience share in the health, wealth, and charisma of a glorified imperial past (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Kiếm dancing while possessed by the spirit of the child prince (Cậu Bé) in front of the altar in his home in Orange County, California

Kiếm came to California 15 years ago, as a young man accompanying his father who had been released from prison camp in Vietnam. He spoke little English at first and felt isolated, even within the Vietnamese community, since so many things were diff...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction   Refugees and Religion
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Notes on Contributors
• Index