Creating a Buddhist Community Format: Hardcover

Bao, Jiemin

ISBN 10: 1439909547 / ISBN 13: 9781439909546

Published by University of Chicago press, 2015

About this Item

Brand New.

Seller Inventory # 9781439909546

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Creating a Buddhist Community Format: Hardcover
• Publisher: University of Chicago press
• Publication Date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1439909547
• ISBN 13: 9781439909546
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

The Wat Thai Buddhist Temple in Silicon Valley was founded in 1983 by a group of predominantly middle-class men and women with different ethnic and racial identities. The temple, which functions as a religious, social, economic, educational, and cultural hub, has become a place for the community members to engage in spiritual and cultural practices.
 
In Creating a Buddhist Community, Jiemin Bao shows how the Wat Thai participants practice Buddhism and rework gender relationships in the course of organizing temple space, teaching meditation, schooling children in Thai language and culture, merit making, fundraising, and celebrating festivals.
 
Bao’s detailed account of the process of creating an inclusive temple community with Thai immigrants as the majority helps to deconstruct the exoticized view of Buddhism in American culture. Creating a Buddhist Community also explores Wat Thai’s identification with both the United States and Thailand and how this transnational perspective reimagines and reterritorializes what is called American Buddhism.

About the Author

Jiemin Bao is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and the author of Marital Acts: Gender, Sexuality, and Identity among the Chinese Thai Diaspora.