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Abstract

After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the breakdown of the East German Socialist
government, thousands of former contract workers stayed in the then reunified
Germany. Due to their resulting precarious economic situation, a large number of
Vietnamese migrants, all former contract workers, 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 East 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 paper explores the formation of Vietnamese Buddhist networks on the
grounds of Asian wholesale markets in the eastern part of Berlin after the reunification
of Germany. By considering the tensions between Vietnamese former contract
workers and the political “other”, the Vietnamese boat refugees in West Berlin, the
first part of the paper deals with the arrival of different groups of Vietnamese in
socialist East Germany. Based on recent ethnographic fieldwork among female lay
Buddhists, the second part focuses on trading women and investigates the relationship between business and religion in the bazaar. The paper explores how gender
roles are shaped by geographical mobility and argues that female religious practitioners
engage with the places where they live and work, namely the bazaar.