Authority and autonomy: Extending the boundaries of women through Thai dance.

摘要

The goal of this dissertation is to explore how the women of the Parent Teacher Association (PTA) of the Sunday school of the Vajiradhammapadip Temple, New York, have established themselves as cultural producers within the New York Thai Buddhist community. The New York Thai Buddhist community created the Vajiradhammapadip Temple in Mt. Vernon in 1985, as an imagined sacred space connected to Thailand, where Thai women would engage in the performance of moral goodness through their traditional roles in religious services, meditation practice, and volunteer teaching of Thai language. In the early 1990's, the women of the PTA moved the Sunday School to another Vajiradhammapadip Temple in Centereach, Long Island, which the women imagined as a physical communal space where they could make their PTA group visible and organize cultural practices such as dance, music, meditation, and martial arts for the transmission of sacred knowledge. I conduct my movement ethnography by looking at these cultural activities, particularly meditation and dance, as metaphors for expressing identity and creating harmony within the environment and community. Identity and harmony are achieved through performance of movement qualities embedded in dance training, such as adaptability, flexibility, fluidity and mobility, and through the practice of internal and external focus. The children of the Vajiradhammapadip Temple Performance Troupe experience these qualities as cultural values defining Thai Buddhist culture in the American setting as it is embodied in movement. I will show how the principal of the Sunday School has provided direction, metaphorically like that of dance teacher in Thai dance training, for the PTA women to perform new cultural roles. Cultural events such as the Thai Fair, held in American public space, have given the PTA women the opportunity to transform their role from that of primarily nurturers of the Temple to that of producers of cultural material, enhancing the women's autonomy and extending the boundaries of their authority and identity.