Janet Alison Hoskins
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- November 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780824840044
- eISBN:
- 9780824868611
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Hawai'i Press
- DOI:
- 10.21313/hawaii/9780824840044.003.0007
- Subject:
- Religion, Religious Studies
The final chapter examines how the syncretism of the colonial period has been transformed by the experience of exile into a diasporic formation. In 1975, Caodaism was a “religion in diaspora”—a group ...
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The final chapter examines how the syncretism of the colonial period has been transformed by the experience of exile into a diasporic formation. In 1975, Caodaism was a “religion in diaspora”—a group of refugees, “victims of an unpopular war,” dispossessed—and their displacement was seen as a tragic event. In the past forty years, however, it has come to be perceived as part of a larger plan to create a “religion of diaspora,” taking advantage of multiple locations around the world, using this as a spatial resource, elaborating a “global faith of unity.” The story of Caodaism forces us to reconsider how anthropologists study religious mixtures in postcolonial settings, since it may reveal and challenge the “unconscious Eurocentrism” of our own notions of how religions are bounded and conceptualized.Less
The final chapter examines how the syncretism of the colonial period has been transformed by the experience of exile into a diasporic formation. In 1975, Caodaism was a “religion in diaspora”—a group of refugees, “victims of an unpopular war,” dispossessed—and their displacement was seen as a tragic event. In the past forty years, however, it has come to be perceived as part of a larger plan to create a “religion of diaspora,” taking advantage of multiple locations around the world, using this as a spatial resource, elaborating a “global faith of unity.” The story of Caodaism forces us to reconsider how anthropologists study religious mixtures in postcolonial settings, since it may reveal and challenge the “unconscious Eurocentrism” of our own notions of how religions are bounded and conceptualized.
