Buddha Is Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, the New America Paperback - 2003 - 1st Edition

First line

When I moved from Massachusetts to California in the early 1980s, at a time in which the American public saw Asian Americans as people largely of Chinese, Japanese, or Korean ancestry, I was struck by the range of peoples from the Asia Pacific who lived here.

From the rear cover

"In this tour-de-force ethnography, acclaimed anthropologist Aihwa Ong trains her awesome ethnographic and theoretic talents on the brutal forces reconfiguring citizenship in a globalized world of war refugees, economic immigrants, and technicians of the modern soul. A work of breathtaking brilliance, beauty, perception and compassion that should bestir Buddha and the rest of us to action."--Judith Stacey, author of Brave New Families

"In this impressive and substantial work, Ong brings together rich ethnographies of Southeast Asia immigrants with a conceptually deft and poignant analysis of the human technologies of citizen-making. At stake is no less than a radical rethinking of the conditions of life, the meaning of the human, and a conception of power beyond the confines of traditional sovereignty."--Judith Butler, author of The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection

"Ong's vivid ethnography, filtered through her astute theoretical gaze, transforms and enlarges our understandings of immigration and citizenship in an increasingly multicultural nation. Ong closely follows the everyday lives of Cambodian refugees in California, as they struggle to make sense of, selectively embrace, and talk back to American demands for personal autonomy, narcissism, greed, and materialism, which fly in the face of Cambodian values of compassion, community, and reciprocity. Like her subjects' lives, this book is a marvelous and remarkable achievement."--Nancy Scheper-Hughes, author of Death without Weeping

Media reviews

Citations

• Choice, 05/01/2004, Page 1706