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This thesis is a study of religion in movement through retellings of stories from members of the Vietnamese-Canadian immigrant community in Montreal, Québec. It aims to demonstrate that religion, specifically Buddhism, plays an important role in processes of homemaking. The thesis maps Vietnamese Buddhism as a complex system of shifting beliefs and practices, highly contingent on its encounters with different environments and people. It aims to show that the tradition is strongly anchored in members of the community’s everyday life given that it is tightly intertwined with cultural ways to interact, eat, care, and treat their family members, alive and dead. This thesis, following North American Religions scholars, aims to challenge the assumption that the modern world, due to its post-Enlightenment disenchantment with the superstitious in the move toward the rational and scientific, has been “secularized,” that is, emptied of religion, which has declined and become privatized. It argues that religion still has much to do with the way everyday life is lived. The research thus takes up a “lived religion” approach to enquire into the ordinary religious subject’s everyday practices in new, often non- religious, and profane spaces, rather than the explicit and exclusive religious life of the unambiguously religious individual. It aims to demonstrate that studying religion constitutes a generative avenue to understanding societies today. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA) / This thesis is interested in constructions of religion and of religious identity in the diaspora, specifically the making of Vietnamese Buddhism in Montreal, Québec. It both attempts to understand Vietnamese Buddhism in Montreal as constructed by those who experience it, and religion’s role in the creation of a Canadian and Vietnamese identity. How is Vietnamese Buddhism lived in Montreal? In what ways does Buddhism shape Vietnamese-Canadians’ interactions? How might Buddhism play into marking them as different?

Thesis (Ph.D.)--York University, 2005. Graduate Programme in Psychology. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 105-116). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:NR11607

This study is an inquiry into cultural conflict experienced by adolescents of Vietnamese origin in Montreal. It examines the nature of the conflicts as they are experienced by the adolescents themselves, as they are perceived by the parents, and by the teachers, counsellors and principals at the secondary schools they attended. The study also examines the course of the conflicts and the kinds of solutions used to resolve them. Separate semi-structured interviews were conducted with six adolescents, five parents and seven school personnel in two public schools attended by the students. Analysis of the interviews showed that students, parents and school personnel tended to define the problems in different ways and to have very different perceptions of their causes. In those families in which the problems of cultural conflict manifested themselves most severely, parents and children tended to use behaviours leading to a deterioration of relations between them and employed a very limited range of alternatives for conflict resolution.

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There is a tendency in Vancouver, British Columbia (BC), to racialize and criminalize recently-arrived minorities. This acts as a barrier to successful integration between newcomers and host groups. The difficulties inherent in these processes have been exacerbated for Vietnamese settlers through the prominence they gained in the media and public discourse during the Allied War in Vietnam, Operation Babylift and the Private Sponsorship Programme. Through interviews and discourse analysis, I have come to believe that the framing of Vietnamese 'refugee' bodies has provided an extraordinary venue for Canada to produce, naturalize and reify the settler nation as humanitarian, compassionate, enlightened, unified and permanent - as more than we truly are - in a collective forgetting of the less press-worthy of our flaws. This discursive strategy intersects and overdetermines the hi/multicultural settler state while also threatening to undermine it. Thus, to a certain extent, Vietnamese (and other) refugee bodies resignify from receptive, when/where the public is in favour of refugee sponsorship, to criminal, when/where they are not. This discursive 'risky refugee' rides the contradictions of liberal humanitarianism, marginalizing the formerly welcomed and undermining the political will to support the refugee process. There are strong interests in the Lower Mainland of BC who work tirelessly to sponsor and support refugees, despite this fickle nature of self-serving public opinion, pressuring the government to live up to its myth. Meanwhile, Vietnamese people in Vancouver, in general, have struggled and fought to rid themselves of the myths created through pejorative racialization and criminalization. My position in this thesis is that we need to relax this space of very constricted possibilities for negotiations around identity and space, acknowledging refugees as more than just under-educated, potentiallydiseased and probably-criminal Others. Suggestions, in the final chapter, come directly from interview material, as all study participants have had at least 20 years of refugee support and advocacy. The more general conclusion, from theoretical, operational and epistemological perspectives, is that we should work through all our diverse vulnerabilities to re-imagine a multiculturalism more expansive than inclusive. I hope my thesis will challenge the shaky short-term humanitarianism of the liberal state, encouraging a more stable and genuine commitment to refugee support / Arts, Faculty of / Geography, Department of / Graduate