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78 Chapter 4 From the “Imagined Community” to “Communities of Practice” Immigrant Belonging Among Vietnamese Americans Deborah Reed-Danahay Introduction One of the ways to theorize the nation and a sense of belonging to it is that of Benedict Anderson’s (1983) concept of the “imagined community”—the idea that belonging to a group that one cannot see or interact with directly is based on imagining the greater unit and coming to identify with it through various media such as newspapers and novels. Anderson writes also of the sense of simultaneity necessary to nationalism that is created not only through these print media but also through rituals. If a nation is an “imagined community,” then how can immigrants imagine their place within it? This is a question that Leo Chavez (1991) has asked about undocumented Mexican immigrants in the United States. He places them “outside” of the imagined community of America, and analyzes their experience of travel to the United States in terms of Arnold Van Gennep’s rites of passage. Chavez suggests that Mexicans go through stages of separation (from home) and liminality (in the United States after they first arrive), but not necessary that final stage of incorporation. There are parallels in the circumstances of refugees, who also make a separation from home (often quite abruptly) and are then in a liminal state while in refugee camps and after initial arrival in a host country. Vietnamese refugees who have settled in the United States differ from the undocumented Mexicans studied by Chavez in that they have been granted rights to permanent residence and eventual citizenship. The degree to which Vietnamese Americans are now making the transition to incorporation in U.S. society is based not only on Belonging Among Vietnamese Americans 79 formal citizenship but also on their participation in the public sphere (“participatory citizenship”) and on modes of belonging imagined for them by the dominant sectors of society. Although they are not necessarily “outside” of the imagined community, it may be more useful to view Vietnamese Americans in terms of a process of moving toward being “inside.” I suggest that although the nation may very well be an “imagined community ,” it is through “communities of practice” that are face-to-face, tangible units of sociality that immigrants come to experience a sense of belonging and citizenship.1 The concept of a community of practice can, therefore, complement the notion of the imagined community by paying more attention to social agency, social learning, and lived experience. The concept of a community of practice, developed by Jean Lave and Etienne Wegner (1991) originally in the context of studies of learning and cognition , is one that theorizes the relationship of newcomers to an already established unit of social interaction. A community of practice is a site for “situated learning,” a view of social learning adapted from work on apprenticeship learning that incorporates an emphasis on social practice and also uses a vocabulary of newcomers. These concepts of situated learning and community of practice have been used primarily in the contexts of work, education, and voluntary associations—contexts in which the term newcomer does not have the specific connotations associated with an immigrant but that of any person new to some form of social practice. One can conceptualize an association, a club, a classroom, a neighborhood, a political party, or wider social unit as a community of practice. Rooted in the anthropology of apprenticeship, a mode of informal learning, and based in a practice-oriented approach that sees learners as having social agency and not passively being taught, the concept of a community of practice, with its focus on situated learning, seems well suited to helping answer questions about how immigrants learn things about “belonging” in their new host country. It is a way of thinking about how newcomers can move from the outside to the inside, or from the periphery to the core, and also about the barriers to doing so. As Lave has written: “Newcomers become old-timers through a social process of increasingly centripetal participation, which depends on legitimate access to ongoing community practice. Newcomers develop a changing understanding of practice over time from improvised opportunities to participate peripherally in ongoing activities of the community. Knowledgeable skill is encompassed in the process of assuming an identity as a practitioner, of becoming a full participant, an oldtimer” (Lave and Wegner 1991: 68). Lave and Wegner define the process of “legitimate peripheral participation ” as a form of situated...

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