Buddhist Groups among Chinese Immigrants in France: Three Patterns of Religious Globalization
Résumé
Based on fieldwork conducted in the Île-de-France, this article distinguishes three patterns in the organization of Buddhist-themed collective practices in the Chinese diaspora in France. Each of these patterns prioritizes a particular globalization linkage, which are respectively an ethnolinguistic immigrant group, a transnational organizational system, and information technology. The author argues that religious globalization is a multilayered trans-boundary process through which communities,
organizations, and individuals reconstitute relations between religious practice and sociogeographic space. In this process, various clergy-laity relationships and diverse manners of authority legitimization are integrated into a complex topology, which is at the same time shaped by global, national, and local factors.