ACCOUNTS OF VIETNAMESENESS: MAPPING VIETNAMESE BUDDHISM(S) IN MONTREAL

Abstract

This thesis is a study of religion in movement through retellings of stories from members of the Vietnamese-Canadian immigrant community in Montreal, Québec. It aims to demonstrate that religion, specifically Buddhism, plays an important role in processes of homemaking. The thesis maps Vietnamese Buddhism as a complex system of shifting beliefs and practices, highly contingent on its encounters with different environments and people. It aims to show that the tradition is strongly anchored in members of the community’s everyday life given that it is tightly intertwined with cultural ways to interact, eat, care, and treat their family members, alive and dead. This thesis, following North American Religions scholars, aims to challenge the assumption that the modern world, due to its post-Enlightenment disenchantment with the superstitious in the move toward the rational and scientific, has been “secularized,” that is, emptied of religion, which has declined and become privatized. It argues that religion still has much to do with the way everyday life is lived. The research thus takes up a “lived religion” approach to enquire into the ordinary religious subject’s everyday practices in new, often non- religious, and profane spaces, rather than the explicit and exclusive religious life of the unambiguously religious individual. It aims to demonstrate that studying religion constitutes a generative avenue to understanding societies today.