Since the first group of refugees who fled Vietnam after the Fall of Saigon in 1975 arrived in the United States, Vietnamese migrants have become significantly involved in the expansion of the ethnic business of professional nail care. As the numbers of new migrants from Vietnam who find employment in the nail industry continue to grow, this study seeks to understand the experiences of first-generation immigrant Vietnamese who went through a training program to become professional manicurists. This research draws on data collected from interviews with 22 manicurists-in-training and six months of ethnographic fieldwork at a major beauty college in Southern California. I argue that the manicurists-in-training understood their future work in the nail industry as a form of independent entrepreneurial labor rather than contracted labor, which allowed them to move freely within the ethnic business network of nail care around the United States for their entrepreneurial work as manicurists.

As these manicurists-in-training went through the program, they carved out new forms of entrepreneurial selves, which were discussed in terms of liberation from exploitation and compliance with the law. These two understandings of the self work in tandem within the state’s neoliberal project, which seeks to produce subjects capable of self-government and self-realization (Rose, 1999, p.142). The training program was designed to produce compliant entrepreneurial subjects while also promising freedom in the form of autonomy (Rose, 1999). The program’s training practices were not about beauty but about “rendering moral” (Leshkowich, 2012), or producing good, disciplined and compliant entrepreneurial migrants. The training site showed tension between the state’s neoliberal entrepreneurial project, (which aimed to produce self-sufficient and liberated individuals who also comply with the law) and the Vietnamese migrants’ cultural sensibilities (which are linked to socialist-oriented collectivist understandings of the self). Students mitigated this tension by realigning the neoliberal logics of individual self with the collectivist understandings of the self exemplified in Vietnamese moral parenthood. This research offers an understanding of the stakes for migrants in engaging in an “ethnic business” such as the nail care profession.

Following the 1975-1979 genocide, Cambodian exiles in the U.S. recreated cultural institutions through music. Music remains significant in rebuilding cultural life in diasporic Cambodian communities. Live bands perform contemporary and classic ballads during Cambodian New Year in April, at wedding parties and in restaurants on weekend nights. Live rock bands continue to dot community celebrations as survivors collectively create musical repertoires and schedule practices to perform at festive community events. Despite the ubiquity of live musical performance in Cambodian communities, this aspect of Cambodian American cultural formation has been scarcely addressed in the literature. This Thesis addresses the deficiency in the literature through ethnographic fieldwork with a Southern California rock band called the Soriya Band, comprised of three guitarists, a keyboardist, a drummer and two vocalists who are all first generation Cambodian survivors. Music persists as a vehicle for cultural creation and change for Cambodian American refugee-survivors.

Following the 1975-1979 genocide, Cambodian survivors in exile appropriated land, funded and established clear physical boundaries to house sacred religious community spaces. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge had specifically dismantled religious institutions. As a result, an estimated 12-100 monks survived out of 65,000 (Harris 2013:135). This dissertation project examines forms of belonging among Cambodian refugees in Italy through the lens of Buddhist practice. While the Catholic Church resettled 3,000 Southeast Asian refugees throughout Italy in 1979, many of whom were practicing Buddhists (Gheddo 2015), no research has been done on this refugee population to date. My project remedies this gap by pursuing three research questions: 1) How is the temple a site of fraught integration? 2) How does religion mediate refugees’ sense of national belonging, as well as their relationship with the homeland and wider diaspora? 3) What does it mean to have objects and spirits be so crucial in the coproduction of Buddhism and Khmerness? To answer these questions, I examine the everyday experiences of Cambodian refugees in contemporary Italy through a study of a local Buddhist temple which stands at the center of community life.I conducted fieldwork in Lombardy from September 2019-March 2020. My methods are informed by interdisciplinary approaches to the study of religion and ethics. Grounded in anthropological training, fieldwork is a primary source of data through oral histories with particular attention to reflexivity in the field. This dissertation argues that the constellation of Wat Khmer Buddhist temples transnationally engrosses debates that merit further inquiry within the European and U.S. contexts of noted xenophobia. The findings suggest that, contrary to functionalist models of assimilation that romanticize refugees as resisting modernity through religion, Cambodian refugees in Italy use local cultures and their specific histories to shape their desires to simultaneously belong and maintain difference through the Buddhist temple, a religious opportunity structure that engages local Italian politics, war memories, and transnational Buddhist networks.

Elephants are significant animals in Vietnamese war history. One can see this with elephant statues, which are installed in certain temples for commemoration. In this regard, this research aims to study the role of elephant commemoration practice within spatio-temporal contexts to understand the relationship between people, objects, and animal patriotic imaginaries in Vietnam. It does so through the application of Benjamin’s concept of aura and Gell’s concept of social agency. Voi Phục Temple and Voi Ré Temple are the main research sites in this field study, which also included interviews and participant observation as methods of data collection. The research found that elephant commemoration does not blur the boundary between human-object and human-animal worship, but introduces a new hierarchy of respect and a new form of practices toward sacred objects. Certain animal statues, like elephants, maintain their secondary agency, which is transmitted from the power of human deities. The agency has a spiritual, historical, and political effect on worshippers. Moreover, I suggest that the aura of a ritual object is not inherently created through the authentic production process or the object itself, as Benjamin suggests, but is socially constructed and interpreted by worshippers, influenced by the historical imaginaries and the sacred environments of the temples. The mythical and historical narratives involved in creating the aura and agency of the elephant statues are tied to Vietnamese nation-building process, while other external factors, like gender and generation of the worshippers, also affect the meanings and attitudes toward ritual objects. Studying the diverse roles and meanings of elephants not only offers deeper insights into Vietnamese animal symbolism, but also provides an alternative understanding of Vietnamese society on the whole.

“We did not know we would be swimming,” residents of San Jose Beach neighborhood in Tacloban City, Philippines told me, reflecting on Typhoon Yolanda wave surges. However, storm surge warnings circulated in official state updates. How could they have not known? Something was lost in communication. This dissertation shows how low-income coastal dwellers experience inequality within the disaster communication infrastructure of the Philippines, and examines the stakes involved in typhoon communication as a tool for survival in a time of global climate change. Communication gaps and assumptions made in disaster media have created the conditions for death, injury and property loss. I show in this dissertation that vulnerability and inequalities are not only experienced in disaster, but are also produced within the disaster mitigation and relief infrastructures. This dissertation is based on long-term ethnographic research conducted in Tacloban City, Philippines in the years after Super-typhoon Yolanda (Haiyan) caused extensive death and destruction in the region. Communication is an integral part of experiencing disaster. Residents of the Philippine Islands receive on average 19 typhoons every year. Typhoon alerts help affected people prepare for and survive oncoming typhoons. Beyond that, media like television and radio help interpret state-issued alerts to the public, or act as hotlines to answer questions. While these alerts are produced with the expectation that the message will make its way to all residents equally, that is not the reality. Residents across the Philippines experience disaster communication in different ways—according to their relationship to the infrastructure (access to media, their relationship to their local government, and more). This project asks: How do people experience the disaster communication infrastructure unequally? How does infrastructural inequality affect the ability of families and neighborhoods to respond to and survive a typhoon? I show throughout the dissertation that vulnerability and inequalities are not only experienced in disaster, but are also created in the space of disaster and media infrastructure. In particular I consider how vulnerabilities are produced through lived interactions with the disaster media infrastructure, historically-rooted marginalizations from infrastructure, and experiences of temporality through media and disaster.

On November 18, 2017, the Culture page of Indonesian-language newspaper, Sinar Indonesia Baru featured a foreboding headline: “Batak language under threat of extinction within 30 years.” But this phenomenon is not unique to Batak. Of the world’s estimated 7,000 languages, about half are projected to vanish by the end of the 21st century. While the urgency of addressing language endangerment has driven research on the topic for more than a century (Whaley, 2014), comparatively less attention has been paid to the operation of the endangered language as a discourse in society. In this dissertation, I investigate how socially-constructed meanings about language inform wider discussions about how to “save” them, and prompt a variety of actions, reactions, and efforts from people seeking to preserve, or revitalize, cultural forms such as language. Beginning with historical considerations of Batak writing, I move on to discuss the operation of socially-constructed ideas across three contexts of language use—the city, the university, and the village. My discussion aims to answer the question: do Toba Batak people today see themselves as victims of linguistic diversity, or the supporters of it? Furthermore, I discuss what acts of ‘languaging’ in relation to these discourses can reveal about how a community navigates the complex balance between individual empowerment and collective ownership in the preservation of a traditional language. In the end, this study is a recognition of the multitudinous forms of cultural texts as they are employed within the Batak nation today, and how acts of languaging can serve as forms of language preservation in face of the global endangerment discourse. In sum, this writing shows how everyday, social values of language can inform wider ideas about language endangerment. By addressing these questions, this research aims to point towards a shift in discussions about endangered languages, recognizing the difficulty with the term arising from the notion of “threat” and “death.” Here I propose to focus on empowerment and action, contributing a unique perspective on efforts of language preservation and its variegated dynamics. These articulate with discourses of language endangerment to show how heteroglossic, or multilingual, social contexts can also become socially-sanctioned forms of ethno-linguistic diversity and the basis for an individual’s belonging in corporate social organization. I had begun to conduct to fieldwork in Indonesia, yielding a total of six months in-country, before the pandemic occurred in 2020. I resumed fieldwork in a much-changed world on October 1, 2022, and concluded on August 1, 2023. The primary site of investigation was the city of Medan, North Sumatra, Indonesia with official support from the Fakultas Sastra Daerah Batak (“Faculty of Regional Batak Literature” or FSDB) at Universitas Sumatera Utara (“University of North Sumatra” or USU). The city served as the base from which I made numerous trips afield into the highlands with project interlocuters, experiencing the mobilities of the North Sumatran landscape for myself. My methods, in turn, are multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary, drawing variously from approaches to the study of language which examine its production as an ever-emerging social construct. Grounded in ethnographic experiences, this dissertation combines insights from fieldwork with analytically-driven considerations about the social meanings and values embedded in language to present a picture of contemporary subjectivities relating to ideas about the linguistic preservation of Toba Batak. The findings suggest that Toba Bataks have long seen themselves neither as victims or as benefactors but as architects of linguistic and cultural preservation. They continue navigating a complex social world in such a way that they engage directly, and intentionally, with the tensions inherent in global discourses of language endangerment. The point of this engagement is so that they can determine how best to rise above them.