Vietnam’s long civil war between rival capitals in Hanoi and Saigon has meant that overseas communities in the United States, Australia, and Canada are overwhelmingly made up of refugees from southern Vietnam, while overseas communities in eastern Europe (Prague, Berlin, Warsaw and Moscow) are made up mainly of students and contract workers who came from northern Vietnam. Building on previous research in California’s “Little Saigons”, I reflect on new fieldwork on the ritual life of the “Little Hanois”, where a resurgence of popular religious practices has accompanied post-socialist development. Regional differences have traveled to new destinations and interacted with the cosmopolitan challenges of practicing Vietnamese religion in secular European countries. Generational differences, ritual uses of the flags of Saigon and Hanoi, the worship and/or commemoration of the spirit of Ho Chi Minh, the Hung kings, and of nature-based mother goddesses are explored in these new settings, for a comparative analysis of how cold war polarities continue to cast a shadow in contemporary Vietnamese communities.
Janet Hoskins is Professor of Anthropology and Religion at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Her books include “The Divine Eye and the Diaspora: Vietnamese Syncretism Becomes Transpacific Caodaism” (2015, University of Hawaii Press), “The Play of Time: Kodi Perspectives on History, Calendars and Exchange” (1996 Benda Prize in Southeast Asian Studies, Association of Asian Scholars), and “Biographical Objects: How Things Tell the Stories of People’s Lives (1998).” She is the contributing editor of four books: “Transpacific Studies: Framing an Emerging Field” (with Viet Thanh Nguyen, University of Hawaii 2014), “Headhunting and the Social Imagination in Southeast Asia” (1996), “A Space Between Oneself and Oneself: Anthropology as a Search for the Subject” (1999) and “Fragments from Forests and Libraries” (2001). She served as President of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion from 2011-13, and has produced three ethnographic documentaries (distributed by www.der.org), including “The Left Eye of God: Caodaism Travels from Vietnam to California”