1,720,956 research outputs found
Crafting a Buddhist public: urban Buddhism and youth aspirations in late-socialist Vietnam
Full text linkThis dissertation examines the recent proliferation of Buddhist youth programs and of youth participation in Buddhism in contemporary Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Drawing on twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork from 2016 to 2019, as well as in-depth interviews with Buddhist monastics, lay Buddhist youth, and educators, the dissertation investigates the collaborative endeavors between monastics and youth to develop a new modernist and youth-oriented Buddhism in response to young people’s social and emotional needs under the influence of urbanization, late-socialist economic growth, and cultural globalization. The dissertation provides a case study of the Temple of Wisdom (a pseudonym), one of the most prominent Buddhist temples that has pioneered the creation of Buddhist youth programs. The dissertation is divided into three key ethnographic chapters that examine the central components of the youth-oriented Buddhism: the creation of a new lay Buddhist educational curriculum with the incorporation of innovative media technology and pedagogies; the popularization of mindfulness meditation; and the construction of ethical citizenship through Buddhist volunteering activities. In developing these programs, monastics and lay youth are constructing an emerging, middle-class Vietnamese Buddhist public. The study shows that participants in this Buddhist public reformulate what constitutes “Vietnamese” Buddhist piety and community by fashioning a new generation of self-reflexive, (aspirational) middle-class lay Buddhists who actively contribute to the growing influence of Buddhist practices and discourses in Vietnam’s emergent public ethics. In approaching the crafting of the Buddhist public as a collaboration between monastics and youth, my dissertation reconsiders the dichotomy between modernist/institutional and devotional/popular Buddhism in Vietnam. It contributes to scholarly conversations on public religion and secularism in late-socialist contexts by illuminating how Buddhist actors navigate the complex entanglements between Buddhist ethics and market socialism. The dissertation shows that such processes of ethical coordination not only reshape the role of Buddhism in public ideals of social well-being and national culture, but also impact Buddhist youth’s endeavors at ethical self-cultivation. By highlighting youth experiences, it demonstrates that religion is playing an increasingly important role in the lives of Vietnamese youth, as young Vietnamese draw on religious ethics in their striving towards socio-economic mobility and well-being
Constructing a Buddhist Infrastructure: Nationalist Politics and the Transformation of Buddhism in Contemporary Vietnam
Full text linkSince the late 2000s, anti-China sentiments have increased across Vietnam, with large public protests against China’s encroachment in the ‘South China Sea’ or the ‘East Sea’. Such sentiments have raised important questions about Vietnamese sovereignty and cultural identity . Among Buddhists, the ‘China’ question has motivated endeavours to construct a ‘Vietnamese’ Buddhism that maintains a critical distance from ‘Chinese’ religious influences. Based on extensive fieldwork in Vietnam, this paper examines Vietnamese Buddhism as a form of soft power, particularly its ability to shape public understanding of Vietnamese identity and geopolitics. In analysing a few initiatives linked to a prominent Buddhist temple in Ho Chi Minh City, including a Buddhist public health campaign to promote organ donations and the organisation of the United Nations Day of Vesak, I explicate the intense efforts by Buddhists to create a religious infrastructure aimed at broadening the scope of Buddhist influence on Vietnam’s public life and international diplomatic relationships. I argue that this emerging Buddhist infrastructure signals transformations within Vietnamese Buddhism as it becomes increasingly entangled with local and transnational socio-political concerns
<Book Reviews>Janet Alison Hoskins. The Divine Eye and the Diaspora: Vietnamese Syncretism Becomes Transpacific Caodaism. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2015.
Full text linkThe Cult of Ho Chi Minh: Commemoration and Contestation
Full text linkHo Chi Minh, the “father of modern Viet Nam,” remains a powerful figure in contemporary Vietnamese politics and culture. Since his death in 1969, the Vietnamese Communist Party has constructed a state cult surrounding his image. The construction of the Ho Chi Minh memorial complex in Hanoi, the propagation of Ho Chi Minh’s teachings, and the state commemorative rituals for Uncle Ho contribute to his continuous presence. The state cult posits Ho Chi Minh not only as the “father figure” to whom Vietnamese people pay respect and tribute, but also as the moral compass by which the people orient themselves socially and culturally. The state cult, however, is continuously contested. On the one hand, meanings attributed to the state commemoration of Ho Chi Minh are changing temporally and regionally. On the other hand, development of various religious cults of Uncle Ho challenges the Party’s hegemonic interpretation of the image of Ho Chi Minh. Drawing from historical research and short-term fieldwork, this paper discusses various modes of commemorative rituals dedicated to Ho Chi Minh, and explores how they contribute to the cult of Ho Chi Minh as a contested field of knowledge, where political, cultural, and personal meanings are constantly negotiated. Particular attention is paid to how Vietnamese people, both in Vietnam and abroad, perform, construct, and challenge the discourses surrounding the cult, as well as to how the Party and the state respond to these voices of discordance
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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