Ken Guest

Kenneth J. Guest is an Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Baruch College/CUNY. Dr. Guest is a graduate of Columbia University (B.A., East Asian Studies); Union Theological Seminary (M.A., Religious Studies); and The City University of New York Graduate Center (M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D., Anthropology).

Dr. Guest is the author of God in Chinatown: Religion and Survival in New York’s Evolving Immigrant Community (NYU Press, 2003) which addresses the role of religious communities in the recent migration of Fuzhounese from southeast China to New York City, the creation of transnational religious networks, and the effects of this migration on the religious revival sweeping coastal China. His research focuses on China, New York City, immigration, religion, and transnationalism. He has conducted fieldwork in China and the US.

Immigration, Education and Opportunity Among Chinese Americans of Fuzhounese Descent

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Over the last 25 years hundreds of thousands of new immigrants have been arriving in New York City from rural areas near Fuzhou, southeast China.  Fuzhounese immigrants, many undocumented, work primarily in restaurant, construction and garment industries. In the last few years, their children have begun to attend Baruch College—a senior college in the City University … Read more

Transnational Chinese Villagers: NY’s Fuzhounese Immigrants Build a Global Community

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Over the past twenty years Fuzhounese immigrants have transformed the face of New York’s Chinatown, supplanting the Cantonese as Chinatown’s largest ethnic Chinese community and vying for leadership in the area’s economics, politics, social life, and even language use. Drawing upon ongoing field research in New York and Fuzhou, this lecture will explore the emergence … Read more

New Gods of Chinatown: Faith & Survival in New York’s Immigrant Community

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Since the 1980s, as many as 200,000 mostly rural Chinese have migrated, legally and illegally, from the towns and villages outside the city of Fuzhou, on China’s southeastern coast, to New York’s Chinatown, bringing with them their religious beliefs, their religious practices and even their local deities. In recent years these immigrant laborers in Chinatown’s restaurants and garment sweatshops have established numerous specifically Fuzhounese religious communities, ranging from Buddhist, Daoist, Protestant and Catholic Christianity to popular Chinese religion.

This ethnographic study examines the central roles of these religious communities in the immigrant incorporation process in Chinatown’s highly stratified ethnic enclave. It also explores the transnational networks established between religious communities in New York and Fuzhou, including their role in transmitting religious and social constructs from China to the United States and the influence of these new US institutions on religious and social
relations in the religious revival sweeping southeastern China.

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