FSI researchers work to understand continuity and change in societies as they confront their problems and opportunities. This includes the implications of migration and human trafficking. What happens to a society when young girls exit the sex trade? How do groups moving between locations impact societies, economies, self-identity and citizenship? What are the ethnic challenges faced by an increasingly diverse European Union? From a policy perspective, scholars also work to investigate the consequences of security-related measures for society and its values.
The Europe Center reflects much of FSI’s agenda of investigating societies, serving as a forum for experts to research the cultures, religions and people of Europe. The Center sponsors several seminars and lectures, as well as visiting scholars.
Societal research also addresses issues of demography and aging, such as the social and economic challenges of providing health care for an aging population. How do older adults make decisions, and what societal tools need to be in place to ensure the resulting decisions are well-informed? FSI regularly brings in international scholars to look at these issues. They discuss how adults care for their older parents in rural China as well as the economic aspects of aging populations in China and India.
Jesus, Lenin, and Victor Hugo: The “Outrageous” Syncretism of Caodai Religion in Vietnam and California
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Janet Hoskins
Walter H. Shorenstein
Asia-Pacific Research Center
Encina Hall, Room E309
616 Serra St.
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
0
hoskinsj@stanford.edu
2013 Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Distinguished Fellow
Janet Hoskins will spend three months at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center as a Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Distinguished Fellow in spring 2013. She is a professor of anthropology and religion at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
Her research interests include transnational religion, migration and diaspora in Southeast Asia, and she has done extended field research in Indonesia, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. During her time at Shorenstein APARC, she will be completing a book manuscript dealing with Caodaism, a syncretistic Vietnamese religion born in French Indochina, which now has a global following of about four million people, and a considerable presence in California. She is also co-editing (with Viet Thanh Nguyen) a volume introducing the field of Transpacific Studies (to be published by University of Hawaii Press).
Hoskins is the author of The Play of Time: Kodi Perspectives on History, Calendars and Exchange (University of California, 1996 Benda Prize in Southeast Asian Studies), and Biographical Objects: How Things Tells the Stories of People’s Lives (Routledge 1998). She is the contributing editor of Headhunting and the Social Imagination in Southeast Asia (Stanford 1996), A Space Between Oneself and Oneself: Anthropology as a Search for the Subject (Donizelli 1999), and Fragments from Forests and Libraries (Carolina Academic Press 2001). Hoskins has also produced and written three ethnographic documentaries, including The Left Eye of God: Caodaism Travels from Vietnam to California (distributed by Documentary Educational Resources).
Hoskins holds an MA and PhD in anthropology from Harvard University, and a BA in anthropology from Pomona College. She has been a visiting researcher at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the Getty Research Institute, the Kyoto Center for Southeast Asian Studies, the University of Oslo, and the Asia Research Center at the National University of Singapore.
Jesus, Lenin, and Victor Hugo: The “Outrageous” Syncretism of Caodai Religion in Vietnam and California
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Co-sponsored by the Department of Religious Studies
The Caodai religion is unique. Born in French Indochina in 1926, it mixes Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism with organizational elements from the Catholic Vatican and French spirit-writing practices. It is a masculine monotheism that worships Cao Dai (the Jade Emperor) as the head of an elaborate pantheon of “spiritual advisors” who include, alongside Asian sages, Jesus, Victor Hugo, Vladimir Lenin, and Jeanne d’Arc. The religion emerged in tandem with the Vietnamese struggle for independence as a form of “cultural nationalism” expressed as spiritual revival. Described as both conservative and revolutionary, nostalgic and futuristic, it has been called an “outrageous form of syncretism”—an excessive, even transgressive blending of piety with blasphemy, obeisance with rebellion, the old with the new. It counts some four million followers worldwide and has grown rapidly in the US, with dozens of temples in California. Using the case of Caodaism, Prof. Hoskins will explore the controversial concept of “syncretism” and its application to Asian religions.
Janet Hoskins is a professor of anthropology and religion at the University of Southern California. Her books include Fragments from Forests and Libraries (2001); A Space Between Oneself and Oneself: Anthropology as a Search for the Subject (1999); Biographical Objects: How Things Tells the Stories of People’s Lives (1998); and Headhunting and the Social Imagination in Southeast Asia (contributing ed., 1996). The Association for Asian Studies awarded its Benda Prize in Southeast Asian Studies to The Play of Time: Kodi Perspectives on History, Calendars and Exchange (1993). She has also written and produced three ethnographic documentaries, including “The Left Eye of God: Caodaism Travels from Vietnam to California” (2008).
The Left Eye of God: Caodaism Travels from Vietnam to California
Daniel and Nancy Okimoto Conference Room
Janet Hoskins
Walter H. Shorenstein
Asia-Pacific Research Center
Encina Hall, Room E309
616 Serra St.
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
0
hoskinsj@stanford.edu
2013 Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Distinguished Fellow
Janet Hoskins will spend three months at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center as a Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Distinguished Fellow in spring 2013. She is a professor of anthropology and religion at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
Her research interests include transnational religion, migration and diaspora in Southeast Asia, and she has done extended field research in Indonesia, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. During her time at Shorenstein APARC, she will be completing a book manuscript dealing with Caodaism, a syncretistic Vietnamese religion born in French Indochina, which now has a global following of about four million people, and a considerable presence in California. She is also co-editing (with Viet Thanh Nguyen) a volume introducing the field of Transpacific Studies (to be published by University of Hawaii Press).
Hoskins is the author of The Play of Time: Kodi Perspectives on History, Calendars and Exchange (University of California, 1996 Benda Prize in Southeast Asian Studies), and Biographical Objects: How Things Tells the Stories of People’s Lives (Routledge 1998). She is the contributing editor of Headhunting and the Social Imagination in Southeast Asia (Stanford 1996), A Space Between Oneself and Oneself: Anthropology as a Search for the Subject (Donizelli 1999), and Fragments from Forests and Libraries (Carolina Academic Press 2001). Hoskins has also produced and written three ethnographic documentaries, including The Left Eye of God: Caodaism Travels from Vietnam to California (distributed by Documentary Educational Resources).
Hoskins holds an MA and PhD in anthropology from Harvard University, and a BA in anthropology from Pomona College. She has been a visiting researcher at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the Getty Research Institute, the Kyoto Center for Southeast Asian Studies, the University of Oslo, and the Asia Research Center at the National University of Singapore.
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