Carving out Hybrid Cultural Space: Building a Thai Buddhist Temple
in the United States
Jiemin Bao（包洁敏）
Many Americans have never visited a Buddhist temple. Most, however, think that they know what a temple looks like—grandeur and a lot of wood. The reality is different. Most Buddhist temples in the United States look like ordinary hous from the outside (See Figures 1 and 2). It is challenging to build a Buddhist temple in a predominantly Christian society. In building a temple from scratch or converting a hou into a temple, Chine, Cambodian, Burme, Laotian, Thai, and Vietname communities have repeatedly encountered enormous resistance and outright racism. For example, in Texas in the early 1980s, one retired teacher who signed a petition against the building of a Vietname temple said, “I don’t want a bunch of monks under my no. It wouldn’t matter if it were a Catholic boys’ school or any other kind of school” (Times Daily 1984: 8a). In 2010, I attended a public hearing in Las Vegas becau neighbors were afraid that a Buddhist temple might “attract gangsters.” The public hearings often are emotionally and politically charged. Zoning issues, traffic, and noi frequently are cited as reasons to veto the construction or even the existence of a temple (Cheah 2011:
grinding92; Johnson 2012: 1; Keppler 2008; Nguyen and Barber 1998: 139; Powers 2011: 1; Xian 2010). To build a temple, a Buddhist community needs to obtain permission from multiple regulatory agencies and refute the notion that
一对一补习Buddhism is a cult.
Figures 1 and 2 Two typical Buddhist temples (Photograph by the author).
Scholars have long argued that space is physically, materially, and culturally constructed (Foucault 1
984: 252; Gupta and Ferguson 1992: 17; Harvey 1993: 25-28; Liechty 2003: 21; 255; Somekawa 1995: 46; Yaeger 1996: 4). Doreen Masy urges us to “conceptualize space as constructed out of interrelations, as the simultaneous coexistence of social interrelations and interactions at all spatial scales, from the most local level to the most global” (1993: 155 my emphasis). Space is inscribed with socio-economic boundaries, some visible, others invisible; space also is invested with various cultural symbols. In particular, when people immigrate, they come with their notions of space and religious beliefs, and often put them into a spatial form to connect with their roots and articulate who they are. By so doing, they inrt their existence into space which already is laden with meanings and power. The same space which absorbed socio-economic, racial, ethnic, religious and class meanings is constructed, transformed, and reconstructed by a diver group of people over generations. Different people and practices juxtapod in the same space communicate with one another and with the past and prent.
Building a temple in the United States is a place-making project—carving out Buddhist cultural space and expressing class and cultural identities. As Mark Liechty points out, “middle-class practice is about carving out a cultural space in which people can speak and act themlves into cultural existence” (2003: 265). What middle class members do is more important than what the middle日语真题
vagaa是什么
pants是什么意思Carving out Hybrid Cultural Space: Building a Thai Buddhist Temple in the United States
三年级下册英语pep
class is; class is neither a “thing,” nor a “category,” but is a “cultural practice”and “a process” (ibid., 20-21; 255). Carving out temple space is a big part of how
a community collectively builds class respectability, acquires cultural visibility, and resists racialized profiling.
Many Thai immigrants were middle class before coming to the United States. Middle class, for them, is understood as tho who have a stable income,
a hou, a good education, and a comfortable lifestyle. Collectively, they perceive themlves as better educated, more affluent, more urban, and as holding more professional jobs and living a more cosmopolitan lifestyle than Cambodian, Laotian, and Vietname refugees. Thai immigrants, nevertheless, suffer cultural and class “invisibility” (Rahpee 2003: 102; Watanabe 2008). Especially prior to
the 1990s, many Americans knew little about ethnic Thai or Thai culture, some even confud Thailand with Taiwan. Among tho who did know of Thailand, Thai often were associated with the “l
财务总结范文and of smiles,” the x industry, and spicy food (Rahpee 2003: 102). Thus, some find that being middle class individuals
is not enough to gain cultural and class visibility. When a temple thrives, the individuals associated with that temple are dignified. Furthermore, a temple symbolizes a home away from home; a place where they can perform their spiritual and cultural existence with dignity; a place where they can socialize and address common concerns; and a place where they ek wellbeing. No restaurant, shopping mall, association, or workplace can offer them this much.苹果发布会2019秋季
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Today, there are hundreds of Buddhist temples throughout the United States. Unfortunately, little has been written about how communities construct the temples in the process of (re)territorializing Buddhism. How do the temples negotiate between American building codes and Buddhist regulations? How do they integrate cultural symbols of the United States with tho of the country they
left behind? And, how do they invest time, money, and emotion into cultural and communal space to articulate their multiple identities?美术考研培训班
In this paper I u Wat Thai of Silicon Valley in Northern California (hereafter referred to as Wat Thai)
as a ca study to address the questions and
