Wednesday, November 20th, 2013 From Colonial Syncretism to Transpacific Diaspora:Caodaism Travels from Vietnam to California

Description

This paper will explore two key concepts, which seem to relate quite differently to the spatialization of religion: syncretism, the mixing and synthesizing of different religions to create a sense of unity in one place, and diaspora, the creation of a sense of unity across different places. Syncretism is often described as the “localization” or “indigenization” of world religions, while diaspora involves the sacralization of an idea of home through the experience of exile and dispersal. Caodaism, founded in 1926 in French Indochina, has been a religion of decolonization and is now becoming a religion of diaspora, moving its axis of meaning from one that stretched back to the French metropole to one that extends across the Pacific Ocean. Summoning spiritual advisors that include Victor Hugo, Lenin, Jeanne d’Arc and even (in the US) Joseph Smith, its eclectic pantheon builds on East Asian ideas but expands to include a cast of sages of all ages, who now advise a global religious movement of about four million people.

Janet Hoskins is Professor of Anthropology and Religion at the University of Southern California. She is the author of The Play of Time (1996 Benda Prize in Southeast Asian Studies), Biographical Objects and the contributing editor of Headhunting and the Social Imagination in Southeast Asia, A Space Between Oneself and Oneself: Anthropology as a Search for the Subject and Fragments from Forests and Libraries.