The Divine Eye and the Diaspora: Vietnamese Syncretism Becomes Transpacific Caodaism By JanetAlison Hoskins. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2015. Pp. xviii + 283. Cloth, $65.00; paper, $32.00.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Established in 1926, Cao Đài (officially, Đại Đạo Tam Kỳ Phổ Độ) belongs to Vietnam's largest religious traditions today with an estimated four to five million followers, a large part of whom are formally affiliated with the Tây Ninh denomination. Next to its growing domestic membership, Cao Đài experiences a sizeable diasporic presence, mainly in Cambodia, the United States (California), Australia, Canada, and France. Hoskins, a professor of anthropology and religion at the University of Southern California, has been a prolific contributor to Cao Đài studies over the last decade. Her scholarship culminates in this copious examination of Cao Đài in past and present times. Centering on the notion of “Transpacific religion,” Hoskins pairs the biographical profiles of five founding generation adherents with those of their diasporic successors, also depicting the wider contexts of both. In doing so, she skillfully weaves a brilliantly engaging narrative, outlining the complex history and nature of this movement in Vietnam and overseas. Under the ethnically demoralizing impact of French colonial rule, Cao Đài was formed as a religion with ab ovo diasporic doctrinal identity—a “religion of decolonization”—utilizing syncretism (“explicit syncretism”) as a means to create moral equity, religiously retrieve and canonize national consciousness/ethnic pride, and gain religious recognition and secular respect. Hoskins is especially intrigued by what she notes as the international community's shift from a “religion in diaspora” to a “religion of diaspora,” a shift that closes the circle, namely that between Cao Đài's “age of revelations” (1925–1934) and the “age of diaspora” (since 1975). This is an essential reading for the student of Vietnamese religions and those dealing with East Asian new religious movements in general.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".