Sex and the temple: Interlocking categorizations of sexuality, gender and the sacred in post-secular Vietnam

12/11/2008 - 15:30

12 november 2008
15:30 - 17:30 hrs

The Leiden Southeast Asia Seminar by Professor Oscar Salemink, VU University Amsterdam

It is a truism to state that religious beliefs and ritual practices have made a come-back in post-Reform Vietnam, as is obvious from the expansion of religious organizations, the proliferation of ritual practices and the seeming ubiquity of pilgrimages, festivals and other ritual and religious events. In this paper I would like to explore how the category of the ‘religious' and the ‘sacred' is constructed, transgressed and re-constructed in religious ritual in Vietnam, based on a study of transgender and (trans)sexual practices within ritual. In particular, I look at ways in which transgender and transsexual categories denote religious boundaries and simultaneously offer privileged conduits of communication between this world and the other world within the ritual time-space of village festivals, Buddhist pilgrimages, and spirit possession practices associated with Daoist and Confucianist cosmologies. In my presentation I pay particular attention to the co-occurrence and articulation of religious, sexual, entertainment and material desires through sexualized transgender dance, music, juggling and bingo performances during two ritual events: a village festival and a temple festival at a Buddhist pilgrimage site. In so doing I hope to shed light on how the boundaries between the sacred and the profane are drawn, transgressed and re-drawn in Vietnam's post-Revolutionary ‘religioscape', and how that affects the valuation of what is seen as legitimately ‘religious' in contemporary Vietnam.

Oscar Salemink is Professor of Social Anthropology at the VU University Amsterdam. He studied anthropology and history in Nijmegen and Amsterdam and received his doctoral degree from the University of Amsterdam, based on research on Vietnam's Central Highlanders. Between 1996 and 2001 he held positions with the Ford Foundation in Thailand and Vietnam. His current research concerns the revival of religious and ritual practice in everyday life in Vietnam, in particular what could be called religious and ritual sacralizations of everyday practice.

Venue: KITLV, Reuvensplaats 2, 2311 BE, Leiden - Room 138 (Conference Room)

For more information on this seminar please contact Esrih Bakker at bakker@kitlv.nl / 071-527 2295

The Leiden Southeast Asia Seminar is a cooperation of the IIAS, ISIM, VVI, KITLV, the Department of Languages & Cultures of Indonesia and the Department of Cultural Anthropology & Development Sociology, Leiden University