Call for Papers: Religion, Network and Identity: The Chinese community in Vietnam For a workshop to be held in Ho Chi Minh City on 26 December 2014. For centuries, a vast overseas Southeast Chinese trading empire spread from the coast of China all around the coastal ports of Southeast Asia, replacing the earlier established Arab trading networks that had extended all the way from the Gulf of Arabia to the port of Quanzhou in Fujian, China. The new Fujian Minnan (Hokkien speaking) coastal trading empire was built up through the extension overseas of several social and cultural institutions which structured local society in the Minnan region. These included temples dedicated to regional deities and lineages, native place association and brotherhoods, and a distinctive form of Chinese capitalism. This network expanded in size and complexity in the 19th century, when migrants speaking Cantonese, Teochow, Hainanese, and other dialects established their own communities and institutions in Southeast Asia. Over the past 30 years, this entire network evolved differently in the distinct countries of Southeast Asia. In Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines, this network has turned its energies back towards China – sending substantial remittances to family members back home, and investing tens of millions of dollars in factories, schools, hospitals, and other facilities in their home towns and villages in Southeast China. They have also invested millions of dollars for the reconstruction of their founding temples, ancestral halls and Buddhist monasteries, many of which were destroyed or damaged during the Cultural Revolution. Beyond paying for repairs, they have also subsidized rituals and religious processions. What is more, many Chinese overseas business leaders have returned to participate in village rituals, sharing their ritual knowledge and often introducing ritual changes that took place within Southeast Asia. Vietnam is one of the earliest areas of settlement of Chinese people in Southeast Asia. Migration flows have continued for centuries until over thirty years ago. Due to the country’s proximity with China, Chinese communities in different locales in Vietnam have maintained intimate relationship with their sending communities. There are however limited scholarly knowledge about these relationships and their transformations over the last few century. This workshop invites researchers whose work helps us to understand the pattern of connection between Chinese communities in Vietnam with China and how these connections have changed over the last century. How did a sequence of historical events such as the process of decolonization and state building, the division of North and South Vietnam, the Vietnam War, and especially the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese Border War affect these connections? How do the transformations in the religious life, and in local and transnational networks change the way people of Chinese ethnic background in Vietnam identified themselves with the country as well as with China, their cultural homeland. How did different processes of identification in return influence their religious life and their connection within and beyond Vietnam? This workshop aims to identify and select potential members for the Vietnam research team that will conduct ethnographic research over five years in sites across Vietnam. The workshop shall be held in Ho Chi Minh City on 26 December 2014. The application would consist of a CV and a brief paper (5-10 pages, on the topic of the project). Deadline: 1 December, to be sent to [email protected]. If your application would be acceptable we would like you to prepare a 20 minute presentation at the workshop. After the workshop, presenters are invited to apply for research funding or full-time post-doctoral fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen to further their research in the topic. Their researches will be connected to a larger research project on the revitalization and transformation of religious networks of Overseas Chinese communities in Southeast Asia led by professor Kenneth Dean at National University of Singapore and Professor Peter van der Veer at Max Planck Institute. The larger research project carried out by Prof. Kenneth Dean and other team members focuses on the impact of the interaction between Southeast Asian Chinese temples with their mother temples in China. Preliminary research has shown that, across China, and especially in Southeast China, over a million temples have been rebuilt. This restoration of these localized but simultaneously transnational cultural networks is a major phenomenon in world history, but it has scarcely been studied. Inside the Chinese temples in the ports of Southeast Asia were the huiguan (the native place merchant associations), which handled the business of the community. The larger project seeks to map the spread of these temple networks across Southeast Asia, and to examine the ways in which these networks have been revitalized in the past 30 years. These flows of capital, local ritual knowledge, trade linkages, and cultural ties present unique features that can enrich the theoretical understanding of transnational networks. The research team will meet in annual workshops, leading to final interdisciplinary conferences, in which new research findings and new theoretical insights will be developed into monographs and edited volumes. GIS maps of the network, with linked image databases and textual information, will be developed into an open, public, interactive and searchable website to allow stakeholders and the interested public to access information on the network. The project will reveal an unexpectedly complex and heterogeneous dimension of China’s interaction with Southeast Asia, beyond simplistic and nationalistic models of the spread of Chinese “soft power”. This project will result in several volumes of focused ethnographies on specific links in the Chinese temple network in Southeast Asia, centering on the role of ritual in bringing the community together and fostering a wide range of interactions including business dealings within closed groups, generation of trust through collective participation in and funding of rites and processions, collective expression of “Chinese” identity, and the range of interactions with surrounding communities and political agencies. These studies will provide new understandings of the inner workings of the most central institutions in Overseas Chinese life, the Chinese temples, and explore the rise of Chinese self-identification within evolving Chinese communities across Southeast Asia. The sites for focused ethnographies will include Chinese temples in Singapore, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Myanmar and the Philippines. Issues that will be studied include the returned Chinese in Vietnam, and new assertions of Chinese identity through the building of large temples and huge statues of deities, large-scale processions in Indonesia and Thailand and Vietnam. Other themes will include the development of unique cults to local deities in Southeast Asia such as the Nine Emperor cult in Thailand (Phuket Vegetarian festival) and the cults to Lin Guniang in Pattani and Zheng He in Indonesia. In addition, following the method of multi-sited ethnography, researchers will explore the transnational networks that developed out of specific temples and lineages in “qiaoxiang (Chinese overseas) villages” in Fujian and Guangdong by visiting their branch temples and lineage halls situated in several ports across Southeast Asia. The project will thus explore the broad range of activities and functions of the Chinese temple network in Southeast Asia. This project will give policy makers, businessmen and scholars new insight into current developments in the South China Sea, while deepening historical and ethnographic understandings of the region.
Posted on: Sun, 02 Nov 2014 22:24:24 +0000
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