planet-clio.org/toc

Three dimensions of religious place making in diaspora

Juni 6, 2014, 1:57 p.m., MANUEL A. VÁSQUEZ, KIM KNOTT, Allgemein.

Abstract

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.

Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2Fglob.12062

Kommentare geschlossen

Travelling faiths and migrant religions: the case of circulating models of da’wa among the Tablighi Jamaat and Foguangshan in Malaysia

Juni 6, 2014, 1:57 p.m., DIANA WONG, PEGGY LEVITT, Allgemein.

Abstract

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.

Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2Fglob.12063

Kommentare geschlossen

Migration, religion and post-imperial formations

Juni 6, 2014, 1:57 p.m., THOMAS BLOM HANSEN, Allgemein.

Abstract

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.

Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2Fglob.12059

Kommentare geschlossen

Introduction to the religious lives of migrant minorities: a transnational and multi-sited perspective

Juni 6, 2014, 1:57 p.m., MANUEL A. VÁSQUEZ, JOSH DEWIND, Allgemein.

Abstract

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.

Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2Fglob.12058

Kommentare geschlossen

Religion and the foundation of urban difference: belief, transcendence and transgression in South Africa and Johannesburg

Juni 6, 2014, 1:57 p.m., LOREN B. LANDAU, Allgemein.

Abstract

Because of tectonic shifts in South Africa's political economy, overlapping, often translocal, systems of exchange, meaning and privilege are transforming the country's post-imperial order. In the ‘estuarial’ zones where various demographic and ideational currents converge to create spaces of ongoing flux, religion serves as a mechanism of exclusion and a means of place making. In almost all cases, the historical privatization of religion among the country's black majority has meant that negotiations over difference and belonging take place beyond the sphere of state intervention and policy. The results are forms of horizontal citizenship that are uncertain and impermanent but often involve novel subjectivities shaped by local conditions but without defined territorial boundaries. Religious practices that resonate with migrants’ nomadic impermanence, while hindering the consolidation of hegemonic political or social orderings, are crucial to these formations.

Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2Fglob.12060

Kommentare geschlossen