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HOSKINS, Janet Alison
Visiting Research Fellow
(Term: December 1, 2010 - May 31, 2011)
Transnational Dynamics of Indigenous Religions

Research Interests

I am finishing a book manuscript titled Sacralizing the Diaspora: Vietnamese Indigenous Religions in California & Vietnam. Based on six years of fieldwork in California and five trips to Vietnam, this transnational project traces encounters between Vietnamese immigrants and the spirits of ancestors, local goddesses, altar masters and religious teachers who continue to visit them from their homeland. Life histories, ritual analysis and a visual ethnography of altar design are used to examine (1) how followers of indigenous religions situate themselves as moral actors in Vietnam and the US, (2) how their religion has been institutionalized differently in Vietnam and the US, and (3) how refugees and exiles have been turned into “immigrants” and members of an “ethnic group” in California. The intellectual contribution will be to re-assess the study of religion in home and destination countries, showing how migration creates a “theologizing” moment, an impetus for religious innovation and a re-fashioning of the self and world view.

Academic Career

I finished a PhD at Harvard University in 1984, based on fieldwork done in Sumba, Eastern Indonesia. I spent two years at the Australian National University as a postdoctoral scholar, then moved to the Anthropology department of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, where I am still teaching. I have been a research scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, the University of Oslo, Norway, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia, and the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. I am currently the President-Elect of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion, and serve on the editorial boards of the American Ethnologist, Material Culture, and the Journal of Religious History.

Main Publications

My Indonesian fieldwork provided the basis for The Play of Time: Kodi Perspectives on Calendars, History and Exchange (University of California Press 1994, winner of the 1996 Benda Prize for Southeast Asian Studies), Biographical Objects: How Things Tell the Story of People’s Lives (Routledge, 1998), and Headhunting and the Social Imagination in Southeast Asia (Stanford, 1996). More recently, I have edited volumes that are more comparative and conceptual, such as Anthropology as a Search for the Subject: The Space Between One Self and Another (Donizelli, 1999), and Fragments from Forests and Libraries (Carolina Academic Press 2000). My interest in transnational religion developed from visiting Vietnamese temples associated with Caodaism and Mother Goddess worship in southern California.

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