Gertrud Hüwelmeier

Socialist cosmopolitanism meets global Pentecostalism: charismatic Christianity among Vietnamese migrants after the fall of the Berlin Wall

Abstract By focusing on Pentecostal charismatic Christianity, this article explores the encounter of Vietnamese boat people in former West Germany with their political counterparts, Vietnamese contract workers in former East Germany and those from ex-COMECON countries, who became asylum seekers in reunified Germany. It argues that Vietnamese migrants, formerly divided by different political attitudes and experiences, create social relations by joining global Pentecostal networks. However, this new unity cannot be understood as a new form of diasporic ethno-nationalism, despite the fact that many believers live primarily within Vietnamese networks, some of which extend transnationally to Vietnam. Once former contract workers from Russia, Poland, the Czech Republic and other East European countries become mobile believers, most of their proselytizing activities are based on global Christian sociality. Reconstructing their previous global socialist networks, new believers are spreading the Gospel in ex-COMECON countries and in late socialist Vietnam.

Creating and Refining Boundaries – Church Splitting Among Pentecostal Vietnamese Migrants in Berlin

In many parts of the world, Pentecostalism is becoming the fastest growing religious movement. As a result of migration, people from Asia, Africa and Latin America carry religious ideas and practices across borders, in other cases, migrants establish religious networks in the diaspora. However, while embracing newcomers from various backgrounds, Pentecostal believers constantly cross cultural boundaries by incorporating people from different ethnic, national and language backgrounds. While Pentecostal charismatic practitioners blurr boundaries in many situations, simultaneously, they create ‘bright boundaries’ by rejecting ‘traditional’ religious practices, imagined as the Other of Pentecostalism and thus to be eliminated. By referring to the concept of boundaries (Barth 1969; Alba (Ethnic and Racial Studies 1:20–69, 2005)) this article argues that charismatic Pentecostal Christianity, alongside its embracing practices with regard to social, ethnic and political boundaries, generates religious boundaries: First, church members reject “traditional” religious practices such as ancestor veneration and spirit possession, practices migrants carry across borders. Second, Pentecostal believers create boundaries towards those who split from the church. By exploring the ambiguities of migrant converts, I will investigate, how some of them subvert and reject control and authority exerted by religious leaders. Therefore, this article, based on ethnographic fieldwork among Vietnamese Pentecostalists, contributes to widely underresearched practices of boundary making and church splitting in the diaspora.

Mobile Entrepreneurs: Transnational Vietnamese in the Czech Republic

This chapter focuses on transnational Vietnamese in Central Europe, in particular on the cross-border ties established by former contract workers from Vietnam in postsocialist countries such as the eastern part of Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary.1 After the breakdown of communism, thousands of Vietnamese stayed in these countries rather than return to Vietnam. Most of them managed to survive economically only by engaging in retailing or wholesaling and therefore started careers as petty traders. A considerable number of these Vietnamese traders have become successful entrepreneurs in recent years, with business networks that extend across national borders. The entrepreneurs travel regularly between various Central European countries, but also foster and maintain connections with China, Vietnam, and other states. Local markets in former socialist countries, increasingly comprising diverse peoples, play key roles in postsocialist economic development while transnationally linking a variety of geographical and sociocultural spaces. Based on multisited ethnographic fieldwork with transnational Vietnamese in “Asian” bazaars in the eastern part of Berlin, Prague, and Warsaw, as well as in various marketplaces in Hanoi, this chapter addresses questions of (1) socialist pathways of migration, (2) the establishment of bazaars by migrants in Prague, and (3) diversity and encounters between locals and migrants in contemporary Central Europe.

Cell phones for the spirits: ancestor worship and ritual economies in vietnam and its diasporas

Abstract Religion has been thriving in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam since đổi mới, the onset of market reforms in the late 1980s. Votive paper offerings, part of spiritual and economic well-being, play a crucial role in performing religious practices in the socialist country as well as among diasporic Vietnamese. In urban Hanoi, material objects made from paper are traded in marketplaces and later burned in the streets, in temples and pagodas, in private yards and other places on special occasions in order to be transmitted to the ancestors. In the past few years, the range of votive paper offerings produced, traded, and sent to the deceased has expanded to include new forms and references to new media. Drawing on recent debates in the role of media in religion and in particular on technologies of mediation, I focus on the use of votive paper offerings in the sociocultural context of the Vietnamese spirit world. I explore how new media and media technologies are embedded in multilayered processes of mediation in Vietnam and its diasporas. Taking religious practices of burning votive paper offerings as an ethnographic example, this essay aims to contribute to ongoing debates on popular religion and the sacred life of material goods in late socialist Vietnam, on its transnational ties, and on the entanglements between religion, media and materiality.

From Contract Workers to Entrepreneurs: Gender and Work Among Transnational Vietnamese in East and Reunited Germany

Thousands of Vietnamese arrived in East Germany throughout the 1980s to work in state-owned enterprises. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the breakdown of the East German Socialist government, many of them stayed in the then reunified Germany and turned to small business and petty trade to make a living. Based on multisited ethnographic fieldwork in Berlin and Hanoi, this chapter explores the everyday lives and transnational ties of Vietnamese women in the socialist diaspora. Further, it highlights new economic opportunities, changing gender roles, and intensifying cross-border connections in the postsocialist migration context.

Global Sisterhood: Transnational Perspectives on Gender and Religion

On August 15, 1868, Mary Catherine Kasper, the founder of the Poor Handmaids of Jesus Christ (PHJC), wrote a letter from Le Havre, France, to her co-sisters in Dernbach, a little village in the Westerwald, one of the poorest regions in Germany. This letter gives an impression of her various feelings of sadness and pain after she had accompanied eight of her sisters to the harbor and had bidden them farewell before they set sail for America. Kasper wrote: They received priestly blessings, sang the song “Escort us on the Waves,” and then they left for the open sea, and the poor children [the sisters] could weep. But, my beloved sisters, what a touching sight, the huge ocean, the terrible waves, and the rapid retreat of the steamship out to sea. The poor sisters were no longer visible. Now I also could weep and I followed the ship with my eyes as long as we could see it. (Amend 2001: 73)

Ordensfrauen unterwegs. Transnationalismus, Gender und Religion

1 Eine frühere Fassung dieses Textes beruht auf einem Vortrag im Rahmen des workshops der Jahrestagung der Zeitschrift HISTORISCHE ANTHROPOLOGIE am Institut für Ethnologie der FU Berlin, 9./10. Mai 2003: „Perspektiven der Genderforschung: Ein Dialog zwischen Ethnologie und Historischer Anthropologie“. Der Aufsatz entstand im Zusammenhang des DFG-Forschungsprojektes „Transnationale Religion“, das an der FU Berlin, Institut für Ethnologie, unter der Leitung von Frau Prof. Dr. Ute Luig angesiedelt ist. Feldforschungen führte ich bisher in verschiedenen Häusern der Armen Dienstmägde Jesu Christi (ADJC) in Deutschland, den USA, England und den Niederlanden durch. Die nächste Station wird Indien sein. Ich danke allen Schwestern für ihre Gastfreundschaft und ihre Mitarbeit. 2 Brief der Katharina Kasper vom 15. August 1868, in: Gottfriedis Amend ADJC. Im Auftrag der Generalleitung der Armen Dienstmägde Jesu Christi. Katharina Kasper. Gründerin der Kongregation der Armen Dienstmägde Jesu Christi. Schriften. Band I. Erste Regeln und eigenhändige Briefe, Kevelaer 2001, 73. 3 Frühe Migrationsstudien fokussierten nahezu ausschließlich auf männliche Migranten, Frauen spielten darin eine weitgehend passive Rolle als Begleiterinnen. Veranschaulicht wurde diese Sichtweise in Michael J. Piore, Birds of Passage. Migrant Labour in Industrial Society, Cambridge, 1979. Kritisiert wurde diese Position von Patricia Pessar, The Role of Gender in Dominican Settlement in the United States, in: J. Nash/H. Safa (Hg.), Women and Change in Latin America, South Hadley/MA 1986, 173–94. Vgl. Caroline B. Brettell/Patricia A. deBerjeois, Anthropology and the Study of Immigrant Women, in: Donna Gabbaccia (Hg.), Seeking Common Ground, Westport/CT 1992, 41–63. Vgl. Mirjana Morokvasic, Birds of Passage are also Women, in: International Migration Review 18 (1984), H.4, 886–907. Ordensfrauen unterwegs. Transnationalismus, Gender und Religion