Cold War Coreligionists: Competing Nationalisms among Buddhist Vietnamese Immigrants and Refugees in Berlin

• In Event: 2384 - Section on International Migration Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 04. Diaspora and Identity

Abstract

After international migration, how do people who have experienced civil war in their homeland interact with one another and negotiate national(ist) divisions in their host land? I address this through a comparative study of Vietnamese refugees to West Germany and contract workers to East Germany, many of whom found themselves face-to-face in the reunified city of Berlin after 1990. I examine how they interact with one another and confront nationalist controversies in a religious space that puts a high premium on harmony. This paper is based on 14 months of participant-observation with three Vietnamese Buddhist pagodas across Berlin and 81 in-depth interviews. I argue that varied experiences with institutional religion in North, South, and present Vietnam have shaped the different norms of practice at Buddhist pagodas. Respondents then interpret dissimilarities in religious practice through Cold War politics and encounters on German soil. While the Buddhist leadership and institution seek to bring Vietnamese together as one spiritual community, the very practices embedded in these religious institutions heighten the tension among those from northern and southern Vietnam, contract worker and refugee migration streams, in turn increasing the potential for coethnic conflict. I conclude that Cold War developments and logics have unsettled and politicized multiple categories of shared identity, including ethnicity, religion, and nationhood.

Author

• Phi Hong Su, University of California-Los Angeles