Suchergebnisse

Conversations with divinities: séance and the first disciples -- A spirit medium as nationalist leader: charisma and anticolonialism -- The spiritual sons of Victor Hugo: from séance to battlefield -- The fall of Saigon and the rise of the diaspora -- A "Caodaist in black" returns to live in Vietnam -- The divine eye on the Internet -- A religion in diaspora, a religion of diaspora

Religion and nationalism are analytically separated and often even seen as opposing forces. But Cao Dài history and theology fuses religion and nationalism, and their relationship is the defining tension in the life of Ð? V?n Lý (1910–2008). As a revolutionary, diplomat, ambassador, and religious leader, he was both a political and a religious activist who articulated a vision of "Vietnamese exceptionalism" first announced in spirit messages from the 1920s, and later developed into a diasporic theodicy to explain the fall of Sài Gòn and provide a new set of goals for exiled religious practitioners.

Language, Identity, and Marginality in Indonesia: The Changing Nature of Ritual Speech on the Island of Sumba. Joel C. Kuipers. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 185 pp.

Fantasizing the Feminine in Indonesia. Laurie Sears. ed. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. 350 pp.

Diasporas are experienced and theorized by those who move from one country to another, who may narrate their lives as ones of exile and separation, or alternatively as part of a divinely coordinated plan for exodus. The perspectives of the modernist and syncretistic religion of Caodaism stress the trauma of colonial conquest, and incorporate many new external elements into a constantly expanding cosmopolitan cosmology, while followers of the spirit possession practices of Đạo Mẫu instead look back at the grandeur of the imperial past, taking the "originalist" stance that the most ancient practice has the most authority. I argue that new rituals and new gender configurations emerge to "sacralize the diaspora," to craft different interpretations of religious symbolism, and to provide an innovative response to displacement.