Sacred canopies in Vietnam: Religious and ritual sacralizations of everyday practice
09 / 2008 - 09 / 2011
The purpose of this application is to develop a book manuscript provisionally entitled Sacred canopies in Vietnam: Religious and ritual sacralizations of everyday practice. In the proposed book I shall explore forms of (re)enchantment and sacralization in neoliberalizing Vietnam, looking at ways in which religious and ritual traditions take on novel forms by sacralizing and ritualizing economic and political practice in the context of market and state integration and transnationalization. In particular, I explore how religious traditions and ritual processes that are usually studied as discrete phenomena borrow from and influence one another when studied as everyday human practice rather than institutionally or theologically. By studying how religious and ritual boundaries between religious traditions are constructed and/or transgressed in everyday practice of flow (syncretism) and closure (purification), the book will question accepted categories of the religious and secular. It will argue that economic, political and religious practice - usually construed as separate societal categories - are guided by similar notions of the sacred and of sacralization, thus providing a vista of social and cultural life under a series of overlapping 'sacred canopies'.