Browse Exhibits (1 total)

Tu Lam Temple

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Tu Lam temple is a place where people honor their deceased loved ones, celebrate the Lunar New Year, practice their Buddhist beliefs, reinforce their Vietnamese identity, and pray for good fortune. All of these practices are encapsulated within the place’s identity as a temple on 1280 Lundy Avenue in San Jose, California. This small temple was opened on October 15, 2010 once renovations were complete to transform the space from a private home to a public Buddhist temple. Since then, the temple has seen a lot of different visitors as their trajectories intertwine with the place.

This exhibit will explore how the Tu Lam temple is designated as a place by the San Jose community through the temple’s different rhetorical methods to shape its relationship with the public that utilizes the space. Tu Lam temple is a crucial location for the Vietnamese Buddhist community within San Jose as people commonly use it to practice their Buddhist religion. This exhibit is dedicated primarily to a scholarly audience within the field of rhetoric as a case study to demonstrate how a place is designated with religious importance.

Scholars have demonstrated the many different methodologies that a place rhetorically conveys meaning to their public in order to create public memory. These scholars have recognized how places convey rhetorical meaning to public memory in order to identify and analyze a place as one would rhetorically analyze a piece of literature. Different scholars have recognized how restaurants, homes, museums, monuments, parks, nameplates, and megachurches perform a rhetorical function through their interaction with the trajectories of the people that utilize the space. Some of these rhetorical strategies include affect, affective dissonance, food, and materiality. These images will highlight how the Tu Lam temple affects its users to perform its religious purpose by maintaining and balancing its intersectional identities as a temple, Vietnamese cultural space, and home. By understanding how Tu Lam temple balances multiple identities, viewers may understand how a place is continuously being enacted upon to maintain and fulfill its primary purpose so that it does not lose its place within public memory.

Please navigate the exhibit through the menu on the right as any of the hyperlinks above the cover image lead to areas unintended to be part of this exhibit.

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