History and Hope: The International Humanitarian Reader, edited by Kevin M. Cahill
Journal Name: New Global StudiesVolume: 8Issue: 2Pages: 211-212
Archiv für Juni 2014
The Power of Currencies and Currencies of Power, edited by Alan Wheatley
Journal Name: New Global StudiesVolume: 8Issue: 2Pages: 207-210
The Global Economic Imbalances: The Dangers of Not Rebalancing
Journal Name: New Global StudiesVolume: 8Issue: 2Pages: 153-176
Regrounding the sacred: transnational religion, place making and the politics of diaspora among the Congolese in London and Atlanta
Drawing on case studies of several Congolese churches in London and Atlanta, in this article I explore the practices and strategies of religious territorialization associated with the politics of diaspora. A focus on the manifold ways of enacting and performing diasporic religious identities enables one to understand how religious actors connect spaces and temporalities to carve out spiritual and symbolic cartographies. More specifically, I analyse the particular interplay of diasporic politics, religious identity, place and history in the context of political crisis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The transnational scope of the groups studied – Catholics, Kimbanguists and Pentecostals – significantly shapes their diasporic religious experience as they are embedded in larger polycentric social fields and ‘sacredscapes’ within which people, money, ideas, images, objects or values circulate. I also link the individual and collective experiences of diasporic religion to the shaping role of power relations and conflicts within wider transnational social fields.
Time, generation and context in narratives of migrant and religious journeys
Taking migration as the point of departure and biographical narratives as the entry to the formation of the religious self and the texture of religious life, I draw from four key narratives – one each from the Christian, Islamic, Hindu and Chinese religious/Buddhist traditions – to examine how religion intersects with migration in migrant and religious journeys. I conceptualize migration as an intergenerational process, transcending the physicality of the actual move through lived experience in the web of collective narratives, transmitted through family memory on the one hand, and official state narratives on the other. Hence, I also draw these four narratives from different migrant generations, located in different registers of migrant temporality and state policies and politics. In exploring their attempts to make sense of their migrant lives in the changing contexts of time and place, specific migrant generations use specific religious idioms to create particular narratives of the religious migrant self. In the article, I highlight the encounter with other gods in the making of the religious self, as well as differences in the way religion travels. This portability of religion in a world of migration has been one reason, I suggest, for the failure of the secularization thesis to gain traction in the contemporary world.
Playing global: the religious adaptations of Indian and Somali Muslims to racial hierarchies and discrimination in South Africa
In this article, I examine the role of religion in Somali and Indian Muslims‘ adaptations to South Africa’s ethno-racial political regimes from the country’s colonial to its post-apartheid eras. Somali and Indian Muslims created and drew on transnational dimensions of global Islam to contest the racial status imposed on their communities. Although colonial and apartheid legacies of ethnic separation, racial hierarchies and discrimination still mark the new South Africa, the new democratic state favours the development of autonomous religious communities that provide services and resources for their members. In this contemporary political context, Muslim solidarity helps Indians and Somalis to renew their religiously based adaptation to South African society.
Three dimensions of religious place making in diaspora
In this article, we explore comparatively how migrant minorities draw from their religious resources to carve out spaces of livelihood in three global cities – Kuala Lumpur, which includes Kajang, Johannesburg and London. We also examine the spatial regimes through which the state and its apparatuses seek to manage the migrants‘ presence and visibility or invisibility within these urban spaces. In particular, we focus on three of the most salient dimensions of migrants‘ religious place making – embodied performance, the spatial management of difference and belonging, and multiple embedding across networked spaces. Although these three dimensions intersect in dynamic, often tensile ways to constitute the fabric of the life world of migrant minorities, we separate them for heuristic purposes to highlight the richness and texture of religious place making.
Travelling faiths and migrant religions: the case of circulating models of da’wa among the Tablighi Jamaat and Foguangshan in Malaysia
In this article, we propose conceptual and methodological tools to study religion in motion and make an analytical distinction between two types of religious movement – travelling faiths and migrant religions. Travelling faiths are religious movements with universal claims around which a religious community forms (deterritorialized religions). They travel in order to proselytize. Migrant religions travel within the local ethnic confines of the migrant (and home) population, even as they reterritorialize and adapt to new contexts. Mission is one form that religious travel takes, which, especially in its Christian form, entails reaching out to a religious community with the intent of conversion. But religious outreach undertaken by travelling faiths can, and often is, directed at the existing religious community as a call to renewal and renovation. It involves a kind of conversion, if not to a new faith, then within the existing one. Many travelling faiths remain in their ethno-linguistic community, even as they embark on their transnational journey. Others succeed in a different kind of movement. Their missions, be they directed at purifying the practices of current members or converting new ones, cross the diasporic ethnic boundary. As we show in the case of Malaysia, part of the success of the Islamic Tablighi Jamaat movement is its ability to traverse that divide, while the Buddhist Foguangshan movement, although enormously successful on a global scale, has remained largely within the ethnic Chinese domain. When religious boundaries are transcended, globality assumes a particular significance.
Migration, religion and post-imperial formations
Most scholarship on international migration focuses on the incorporation of ethnic and religious minorities into societies in Europe and North America. Much of this work overlooks that a very substantial part of contemporary flows of migration happen within well-trodden pathways of language, commercial ties and cultural imagination established by colonial empires and the networks of exchange and control they enabled. Adopting a notion of the post-imperial formation as a crucial economic and cultural factor in contemporary migration flows affords one to understand a much broader set of migratory movements beyond the Euro-American context. In this article, I explore two such examples – migration to Johannesburg and Durban in South Africa, and labour migration from the Indian subcontinent to the Gulf States – in the light of how movement of labour, commercial transactions and religious-cultural difference were managed within the British imperial and post-imperial formation.
Introduction to the religious lives of migrant minorities: a transnational and multi-sited perspective
This introduction describes the evolution of the conceptual framework that guided the research and analysis of findings from an international research project bringing a multi-sited and transnational perspective to the study of the religious lives of migrant minorities. The project began by identifying potential contributions that studies of religion, migration and diversity offered one another. To research these issues, the project members investigated the lives of migrants who identify themselves as Christians, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists, who live as minorities within three urban contexts, and whose different national regimes for governing migrant and religious diversity have been shaped historically by the British Empire (London, Johannesburg, Kajang-Kuala Lumpur). The researchers employed a biographic method of investigation in order to examine how migrants organized their religious lives within individual, familial, communal, urban, national and transnational spheres. To understand the intertwining between migratory and religious aspects of the migrants‘ lives on each of these levels, the project members focused their analysis of the research findings in relation to three themes: migratory and spiritual journeys, sacred and secular place-making, and the circulation of people, objects, practices, and faiths. The introduction highlights how each of the articles in this collection both reflect and contribute to this intellectual framing in order to understand the interplay between religion, migration, and diversity.