Bazaar Pagodas – Transnational Religion, Postsocialist Marketplaces and Vietnamese Migrant Women in Berlin

Abstract

After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the breakdown of the East German Socialist government, thousands of former contract workers from Vietnam stayed in the then reunified Germany. Due to their resulting precarious economic situation, a large number of these migrants became engaged in small business and petty trade. Some of them, women in particular, have become successful entrepreneurs and wholesalers in recently built bazaars in the eastern parts of Berlin. Most interestingly, parts of these urban spaces, former industrial areas on the periphery of Germany’s capital, have been transformed into religious places. This article explores the formation of female Vietnamese Buddhist networks on the grounds of Asian wholesale markets. It argues that transnational mobilities in a post-socialist setting encourage border-crossing religious activities, linking people and places to various former socialist countries as well as to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Further, by considering political tensions between Vietnamese in the eastern and western part of Berlin, this contribution illustrates the negotiation of political sensitivities among diasporic Vietnamese in reunited Germany. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among female lay Buddhists, it focuses on entrepreneurship and investigates the relationship between business, migration and religious practices.