Anthropology
Searching for Well-Being: Buddhism and Youth Aspirations in Late-Socialist Vietnam
Based on extensive fieldwork and archival research, my dissertation examines the interactions of social and ethical changes that account for recent urban youth’s intensifying involvement in Buddhism and Buddhist initiatives in Ho Chi Minh City in Southern Vietnam. Since the economic reforms of 1986, Vietnamese youth, while embracing new opportunities presented by the market economy, including more access to education, technology, and global cultural trends, face severe challenges in their aspiration for a middle-class lifestyle as they attempt to establish themselves socially through employment, marriage, and materialist consumption. Since 2008, urban youth have been documented to suffer from an unprecedented increase in stress, anxiety disorder, and depression. I argue that the surge in urban youth’s participation in Buddhism is driven by a search for a renewed conception of happiness and well-being that move beyond the socially predominating ethical frameworks of Confucianism and market socialism. Concurrently, I contend that urban Buddhist monastics and institutions, with the support of lay Buddhist youth themselves, are transforming the Vietnamese Buddhist religious field in response to an acute crisis in youth’s management of their social and emotional realms by formulating new forms of ethical and psycho-therapeutic Buddhist educational programs that build on a repertoire of transnational Buddhist knowledge and practices, and creatively employ modern communicative technology. Together, these two processes form a new Vietnamese ethical subjectivity and carve out a new Vietnamese public ethics characterized by the Buddhist effort to mobilize youth as the precipitators of an alternative moral framework predicated on the Buddhist vision of inner peace, empathetic connections to society, and meaningful social engagement.