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Buddha Is Hiding
Refugees, Citizenship, the New America
Language:
English
Published/Copyright:
2003
About this book
Fleeing the murderous Pol Pot regime, Cambodian refugees arrive in America as at once the victims and the heroes of America's misadventures in Southeast Asia; and their encounters with American citizenship are contradictory as well. Service providers, bureaucrats, and employers exhort them to be self-reliant, individualistic, and free, even as the system and the culture constrain them within terms of ethnicity, race, and class. Buddha Is Hiding tells the story of Cambodian Americans experiencing American citizenship from the bottom-up. Based on extensive fieldwork in Oakland and San Francisco, the study puts a human face on how American institutions—of health, welfare, law, police, church, and industry—affect minority citizens as they negotiate American culture and re-interpret the American dream.
In her earlier book, Flexible Citizenship, anthropologist Aihwa Ong wrote of elite Asians shuttling across the Pacific. This parallel study tells the very different story of "the other Asians" whose route takes them from refugee camps to California's inner-city and high-tech enclaves. In Buddha Is Hiding we see these refugees becoming new citizen-subjects through a dual process of being-made and self-making, balancing religious salvation and entrepreneurial values as they endure and undermine, absorb and deflect conflicting lessons about welfare, work, medicine, gender, parenting, and mass culture. Trying to hold on to the values of family and home culture, Cambodian Americans nonetheless often feel that "Buddha is hiding." Tracing the entangled paths of poor and rich Asians in the American nation, Ong raises new questions about the form and meaning of citizenship in an era of globalization.
In her earlier book, Flexible Citizenship, anthropologist Aihwa Ong wrote of elite Asians shuttling across the Pacific. This parallel study tells the very different story of "the other Asians" whose route takes them from refugee camps to California's inner-city and high-tech enclaves. In Buddha Is Hiding we see these refugees becoming new citizen-subjects through a dual process of being-made and self-making, balancing religious salvation and entrepreneurial values as they endure and undermine, absorb and deflect conflicting lessons about welfare, work, medicine, gender, parenting, and mass culture. Trying to hold on to the values of family and home culture, Cambodian Americans nonetheless often feel that "Buddha is hiding." Tracing the entangled paths of poor and rich Asians in the American nation, Ong raises new questions about the form and meaning of citizenship in an era of globalization.
Author / Editor information
Contributor: Aihwa Ong
Aihwa Ong is Professor of Anthropology and of South and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationalism (1999) and Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia (1987), and the editor of Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism (1997) and Bewitching Women, Pious Men: Gender and Labor Politics in Southeast Asia (California, 1995).
Topics
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Frontmatter
i -
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Contents
vii -
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Illustrations
ix -
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Acknowledgments
xi -
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Prologue
xiii -
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Introduction: Government and Citizenship
1 -
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Part I. In Pol Pot Time
23 -
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PART II. Governing through Freedom
67 -
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PART III. Church and Marketplace
193 -
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PART IV. Reconfigurations of Citizenship
251 -
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Afterword: Assemblages of Human Needs
275 -
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Notes
287 -
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Index
323
Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
August 5, 2019
eBook ISBN:
9780520937161
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
Main content:
352
eBook ISBN:
9780520937161
Keywords for this book
cambodian refugees; buddhism; demographic studies; american citizenship; buddhists; asia scholars; cultural anthropologists; new america; pol pot regime; american dream; oakland; san francisco; southeast asia; citizenship experience; ethnic tensions; race and class; california; regional history; minority citizens; fieldwork; nonfiction study; textbooks; social sciences; modern history; welfare; globalization; cambodian americans; american institutions; anthropology; american culture
