CompleteMartialArts.com - Buddha Is Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, the New America (Public Anthropology, 5)
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Manufacturer: University of California Press
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Average Customer Rating: 
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 305.89593079466
EAN: 9780520238244
ISBN: 0520238249
Label: University of California Press
Manufacturer: University of California Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 352
Publication Date: 2003-09-04
Publisher: University of California Press
Studio: University of California Press
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Editorial Reviews:
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Fleeing the murderous Pol Pot regime, Cambodian refugees arrive in America as at once the victims and the heroes of America's misadventures in Southeast Asia; and their encounters with American citizenship are contradictory as well. Service providers, bureaucrats, and employers exhort them to be self-reliant, individualistic, and free, even as the system and the culture constrain them within terms of ethnicity, race, and class. Buddha Is Hiding tells the story of Cambodian Americans experiencing American citizenship from the bottom-up. Based on extensive fieldwork in Oakland and San Francisco, the study puts a human face on how American institutions--of health, welfare, law, police, church, and industry--affect minority citizens as they negotiate American culture and re-interpret the American dream.
In her earlier book, Flexible Citizenship, anthropologist Aihwa Ong wrote of elite Asians shuttling across the Pacific. This parallel study tells the very different story of "the other Asians" whose route takes them from refugee camps to California's inner-city and high-tech enclaves. In Buddha Is Hiding we see these refugees becoming new citizen-subjects through a dual process of being-made and self-making, balancing religious salvation and entrepreneurial values as they endure and undermine, absorb and deflect conflicting lessons about welfare, work, medicine, gender, parenting, and mass culture. Trying to hold on to the values of family and home culture, Cambodian Americans nonetheless often feel that "Buddha is hiding." Tracing the entangled paths of poor and rich Asians in the American nation, Ong raises new questions about the form and meaning of citizenship in an era of globalization.
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Summary: Fundamental Challenges, Everyday Lives
Comment: In one of the most productive books I have read on the subject of Southeast Asian immigration, Aihwa Ong weaves her way though the quotidian issues and fuses those with a larger theoretical framework to come up with this brilliant work. Balancing is a key element in this book. In Buddha Is Hiding: Refugees * Citizenship * The New America - we see Cambodian refugees in the process of developing into "citizen-subjects" by reconciling the forces of being-made by and self-making through some of the more coercive institutions and techniques of regulation. Taking into account such issues as religious salvation and juxtaposing that against neoliberal agendas, Cambodian refugees comply to the self regulating mechanisms but also challenge them and learn to negotiate with the welfare system, employment requirement, the medical establishment, issues of masculinity and femininity, as well as popular culture. The irony is that within the spectrum of color where the Cambodians are seen to occupy the lowest rungs (unjustly, of course) Cambodians have found a niche. Within this framework, Cambodians are dealing with their own struggles to cope with "American" living (battling with the ever present challenges of popular culture) while striving to maintain "Cambodian" values of family and home culture. In the end, Ong raises profound questions about current and past Asian American narratives while adding a new and very different dimension to the issue of citizenship in an era of globalization.
Ong writes: "Theoretically speaking, the model of Asian America as a community of ethnic exclusion is unable to conceptualize new transnational Asian subjects, except to identify them as "foreign-born" and therefore not Asian American. And despite rhetorical gestures to the contrary, Asian Americanism as a conceptual category has gradually picked up biopolitical criteria; in the practical world of an economy driven by forces of globalization, it operates within the framework of racial bipolarism, sorting out populations in the churning demographic diversity by separating the wheat from the chaff, whitened from the blackened. By ignoring the majority of disadvantaged immigrants, the discourse in effect participates in the racial coding of Asian Americans as elite citizen-subjects rich in wealth and intellectual accomplishments. The Asian America model thus inadvertently excludes in the same way that the model-minority concept initially excluded them. In this sense, it becomes and encoding technique of governmentality - in the interest of economic flexibility."
Initially, my sense was that Ong was looking to set some sort of "inclusion" agenda. Arguing, I thought, that the previous discourse of Asian America just did not include or have space for the neoliberal framework and refugee narrative that the new immigrants: Cambodian, Hmong, Mien, and Vietnamese fall under. After reading the passage above, my sense is that the challenge is more fundamental - arguing that the previous discourse actually set up and is complicit with the techniques of regulation and is party to the same kinds of classificatory systemic violence leveled against the refugees. Moreover, I have heard criticism of Ong not coming down hard enough on violence against spouse and children. I am on record in disagreement with such criticism and argue that Ong straddles a very delicate ridge - certainly not advocating the violence but cognizant of its cultural, institutional, and psycho-social origins. The challenge I see her presenting is to expose the limitations of the "system" in all its complexities but coming from the same postmodern/Foucauldian roots finds herself unable to prescribe.
Needless to say, the issue is not a simple one. These are new times and new conditions. Refugees' situations and the process of transnational citizenship is "big stuff." Finally, deftly including the problematizing strategy and theoretical framework made popular by Michel Foucault - for anyone note familiar with the issue this is a great piece to get a better understanding of the biopolitics. Ong writes one for the ages.
Miguel Llora
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