RT Article
T1 Holy Mothers in the Vietnamese Diaspora: Refugees, Community, and Nation
JF Religions
VO 9
IS 8
SP 1
OP 15
A1 Ninh, Thien-Huong
LA English
PB MDPI
YR 2018
UL https://www.ixtheo.de/Record/1586854860
AB Holy mothers, specifically the Vietnamese-looking Our Lady of Lavang and Caodai Mother Goddess, are the crucibles of faith for many Vietnamese Catholics and Caodaists. Based on ethnographic data collected in California, which has the largest overseas Vietnamese population, I argue that Vietnamese refugees and their US-reared descendants have been able to re-centralize their fragmented communities through the innovative adaptation of holy mother worship. In particular, Vietnamese Catholics in the US have transformed the European image of Our Lady of Lavang into a Vietnamese woman and exported it to the rest of the world. Meanwhile, Vietnamese American Caodaists have revived traditional religious rituals for the Caodai Mother Goddess which were repressed and prohibited for many years under communism in Vietnam. Through their shared devotion to holy mothers, these Vietnamese American faithful have also rebuilt relations with co-ethnic co-religionists living throughout the world. For both the Vietnamese Catholic and Caodai groups, holy mothers have emerged as emblems of their deterritorialized nation in the diaspora.
K1 Caodaism
K1 Catholicism
K1 Holy Mother
K1 Mother Goddess
K1 Our Lady of Lavang
K1 Vietnamese
K1 Virgin Mary
K1 Diaspora
K1 Nation
K1 Refugee
DO 10.3390/rel9080233