TY - JOUR
AU - Swenson, Sara Ann
AB - BOOK REVIEW A LLISON J . TR U I T T Pure Land in the Making: Vietnamese Buddhism in the US Gulf South. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2021. 226 pages. Allison J. Truitt’s Pure Land in the Making examines how Vietnamese migrants in the US Gulf South use Buddhist sites and practices to build community. This highly accessible book draws from ethnographic research that Truitt conducted between  and  at Buddhist temples in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida. Truitt demonstrates how these communities are fluidly interconnected not only with one another but also with Vietnamese Buddhist centers across the United States, Canada, Australia, and Vietnam. She uses the metaphor of lotus flowers to trace how Buddhist temples spread along the Gulf Coast like plants with rhizomatic root systems. A rhizome “sends shoots from nodes that run laterally, not upward,” thereby defying “efforts to locate a single point of origin” (). With this metaphor, Truitt illustrates how Vietnamese Bud- dhist centers in the United States are not systematized under one common set of values or institutional structures. Rather, each temple is supported by community members who have different—and occasionally conflicting— understandings of religious purpose, practice, cosmology, ethics, and 
TI - Review: Pure Land in the Making: Vietnamese Buddhism in the US Gulf South, by Allison J. Truitt
JF - Journal of Vietnamese Studies
DO - 10.1525/vs.2022.17.2-3.176
DA - 2022-08-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/university-of-california-press/review-pure-land-in-the-making-vietnamese-buddhism-in-the-us-gulf-kMmUzX2rJK
SP - 176
EP - 179
VL - 17
IS - 2-3
DP - DeepDyve
ER -