Buddha Is Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, the New America / Edition 1

by Aihwa Ong

Overview

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, this study puts a human face on the impact of U.S. institutions -- medical, social welfare, judicial, religious, and economic -- on refugees who are negotiating a strange new culture.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	2900520238243
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	09/04/2003
Series:	California Series in Public Anthropology
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 1.25(h) x 9.00(d)

About the Author

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).

Table of Contents

	List of Illustrations	ix
	Acknowledgments	xi
	Prologue	xiii
	Introduction: Government and Citizenship	1
Part I.	In Pol Pot Time
1.	Land of No More Hope	25
2.	A Hilton in the Border Zone	48
Part II.	Governing Through Freedom
3.	The Refugee as an Ethical Figure	69
4.	Refugee Medicine: Attracting and Deflecting the Gaze	91
5.	Keeping the House from Burning Down	122
6.	Refugee Love as Feminist Compassion	142
7.	Rescuing the Children	168
Part III.	Church and Marketplace
8.	The Ambivalence of Salvation	195
9.	Guns, Gangs, and Doughnut Kings	229
Part IV.	Reconfigurations of Citizenship
10.	Asian Immigrants as the New Westerners?	253
	Afterword: Assemblages of Human Needs	275
	Notes	287
	Index	323