Suchergebnisse

"Traces the unique route through which Hmong in Vietnam discovered Christianity and appropriated it for themselves. Although a significant proportion of Vietnam's population has been Catholic since the days of French colonialism, the Hmong continued animistic spiritual practices shared across Hmong populations throughout Southeast Asia in the remote highland areas where most of them lived. After the Vietnam War, the Far East Broadcasting Company started an evangelical program in Hmong language targeting war refugees in Laos. In the mid-1980s this radio signal was accidentally received by listeners in Vietnam's Northern Highland, who related the content to their traditional expectation of salvation by a Hmong messiah-king who would lead them out of subjugation. Actual missionaries, mostly Laotian Hmong refugees in the US, eventually arrived to help them routinize their new Protestant faith. Today, this New Way (Kev Cai Tshiab) is the claimed religion of roughly one third of a million Hmong in Vietnam. This ethngraphic study describes what happened when some Hmong decided to become Protestants while many of their kin kept their traditional religion, how the communist state views their religious activities, and the global dimensions of Hmong Protestant life. Hmong conversion serves as a lens for viewing the complex politics of religion and ethnic relations in contemporary Vietnam and illuminates larger issues such as the dynamic interplay between local and global forces, socialist and post-socialist state-building, Cold War and post-Cold War antagonisms, Hmong transnationalism, and US-led evangelical expansionism"--

AbstractThis article analyses the dynamics of official and unofficial religious nationalism in the Vietnamese border town of Lào Cai. In 1979 it was one of many Vietnamese towns that were reduced to rubble during the short but bloody war between Vietnam and China. The normalization of Sino-Vietnamese relations in 1991 allowed a booming border trade that let Lào Cai prosper, while the painful memory of this war continued to haunt the town and the daily experiences of its residents, both humans and gods. Since the Vietnamese state forbids any official remembrance of the war, Lào Cai residents have found a religious way to deal with their war memories that skilfully evades state control. By analysing narratives about the fate of the gods and goddesses that reign in the Father God Temple and the Mother Goddess Temple—two religious institutions located right next to the border—this article shows that it is in the symbolism of the supernatural that one can find memories of the war and of the changing social landscape of Lào Cai and reconstruct its history.

This article analyses the social implications of the recent mass conversions to Protestantism by one-third of the one million Hmong in Vietnam. The conversions have been condemned by the Vietnamese state, while being understood by international human rights activists as acts of conscience on the part of the Hmong converts. This article focuses on the internal debate and divisions surrounding conversion among the Hmong themselves. The converts believe that Protestantism is the only way to alter the ethnic group's marginal status in Vietnam while the unconverted Hmong see conversion as a betrayal of Hmong ethnicity. Such conflicting views have been causing deep fractures in Hmong society. (J Southeast Asian Stud/GIGA)