Non-Fiction Books:

Buddha Is Hiding

Refugees, Citizenship, the New America
Click to share your rating 0 ratings (0.0/5.0 average) Thanks for your vote!

By:

Format:

Paperback / softback
$100.99
Available from supplier

The item is brand new and in-stock with one of our preferred suppliers. The item will ship from a Mighty Ape warehouse within the timeframe shown.

Usually ships in 2-3 weeks

Buy Now, Pay Later with:

4 payments of $25.25 with Afterpay Learn more

Availability

Delivering to:

Estimated arrival:

  • Around 8-20 May using International Courier

Description

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.

Author Biography:

Aihwa Ong is Professor of Anthropology and of South and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationalism (1999) and Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia (1987), and the editor of Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism (1997) and Bewitching Women, Pious Men: Gender and Labor Politics in Southeast Asia (California, 1995).
Release date Australia
September 4th, 2003
Author
Audience
  • Professional & Vocational
Illustrations
11 b-w photographs
Pages
352
Dimensions
152x229x23
ISBN-13
9780520238244
Product ID
1906902

Customer reviews

Nobody has reviewed this product yet. You could be the first!

Write a Review

Marketplace listings

There are no Marketplace listings available for this product currently.
Already own it? Create a free listing and pay just 9% commission when it sells!

Sell Yours Here

Help & options

Filed under...