Ritual, identidad y transnacionalización en una celebración budista: el Vesak en la Argentina

This paper explores, from an ethnographic approach, the celebration of the most important festival in the Buddhist calendar: Vesak. Celebrated on the full moon of May, the occasion remembers the birth, enlightenment and death of Buddha. The aim of this research is to analyze the reception of Vesak in the various communities that make up the Argentinean Buddhism, the forms of appropriation and redefinition of this ritual and the visibility acquired in the local public space. First, the paper describes the ceremony held in Buenos Aires’s Chinatown in 2014. Then, examines the different social actors involved in the celebration, with special emphasis on the political uses and forms of symbolic appropriation of the holiday. Finally, the article reflects on the issues of transnationalization, identity and religious imagination related to this phenomenon.