Bayou lotus: Theravada Buddhism in southwestern Louisiana

This study suggests that understanding how religion promotes adaptation to social changes, such as immigrant resettlement, depends on viewing religion as a cultural institution that enables human beings to make sense of their environments. Religious beliefs solve problems of meaning in given social environments by expressing the essential facets of those environments as collective representations. Coping with change depends on maintaining continuity with a preexisting belief system while reshaping the belief system to reflect new environmental problems. The study illustrates this argument by offering a cultural analysis of Laotian-American Buddhism in three parts. First, it provides an interpretive discussion of Theravada Buddhism in the social context of Laotian village society. Second, it describes how a particular community of Laotians, resettled in the United States, came to construct a temple and to reconstruct their religious practices in the United States. Third, it uses interviews with members of this community to suggest how the religion has been subtly reshaped by the American social context and to describe how this reshaped religion supplies the resettled refugees with ethnic identities and with a comprehensible moral order.