PANA Institute for Leadership Development

Todd LeRoy Perreira, University of California, Santa Barbara:  perreira@post.harvard.edu

What does it means to speak of a distinctly “American” style of Buddhism given the mobility and transnationality of United States cultures today?  Drawing on field studies conducted in Thailand and the US, this study aims to render untenable the historically entrenched Eurocentric conception of American identity often assumed by researchers in the study of American Buddhism.  Thai Buddhist communities are not simply the latest installment in the master narrative of “Americanizing” immigrant America but have emerged as key sites for fostering new clusters of cultural formations that are constituted not only by Thais but by non-Thai spouses, children of mixed families, people of other religious faiths, as well as Latino, Lao, Cambodian, Vietnamese, and South Asian immigrants.  Such rich diversity among first generation immigrants is unprecedented in the history of Asian religions inAmerica.  A transnational ethnographic focus opens a critical new vantage point for understanding the broad appeal of both Thai Buddhism and Thai culture in America and for re-conceptualizing what we mean by “Asian”, “American”, and “Buddhism”.