Transpacific Networks and Religious Circulations Spanning East Asia and the United States: An Introduction

Abstract

The religious worlds of the United States, China, (South) Korea, and Japan have often been described in terms linked to national-cultural imaginaries: that is, constructions of national cultures as particular, unique, bounded formations that extend throughout a state’s territory and have a stable existence over time, such that contemporary phenomena anywhere within a state’s borders are considered in continuity with national characteristics from centuries past. Such linkages have led to the development of subfields (and their attendant specialized publications and journals) focused on religion as existing within national units, such as “American religion,” “Chinese religion,” “Korean religion,” and “Japanese religion.” However, as the existence of this very journal attests, the “transnational turn” has helped to deconstruct some of the artificial boundaries that can limit area studies and reinforce tropes of monolithic national cultures and narratives of national exceptionalism.

This special issue comes out of the “Transnational Religious Expressions: Between Asia and North America” seminar held at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion between 2017 and 2022. Like the many contributions to that seminar, the articles published here bring together multiple disciplines and methods to examine the translation, transmission, and transformation of varied religious activities that bridge Asia and North America. We consider “religion” in an expansive way that assumes its entanglement in other aspects of human life, including politics, economics, and medicine, and as much in the daily (sometimes unorthodox) practices of individuals as in the institutionalized forms of religious professionals. The papers in this special issue specifically examine how the circulation of religious practices within transnational networks spanning East Asia and the United States lead to the development of types of practice that reflect religious contexts of both sides of the Pacific.[1] The individuals and organizations who form the hubs of these networks often transform the practices that they circulate through processes of cultural translation or adaptation, while also being transformed themselves through their engagement with the practice. This special issue will contribute to the growing scholarly literature on transnational Asia and transnational religion, while also providing insights into the particular qualities that characterize the religious interactions and intersections between East Asia and the United States.

[1] We primarily examine religious entanglements between individuals and institutions located in the United States and in the East Asian nations of China, Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan. Of course, there are no strict cultural boundaries of “East Asia” that align with these political borders. Despite Vietnam’s geographical location on the Indochinese peninsula, Vietnam’s religious cultures are arguably closer to those of East Asia than they are to their neighbors in Southeast Asia, and U.S. actors have been major forces shaping Vietnam since the 1950s, including the religious impact of Vietnamese diasporic subjects in the U.S. (Fjelstad and Nguyen 2011). Conversely, the various ethnic minorities of western and southwestern China often having more in common with other ethnic groups across their respective political borders in Central Asia than with their Han Chinese compatriots. As such, we recognize the heuristic nature of the “cultural intersystem” between East Asia and the United States that we employ in this special issue.