Diaspora Identity And Religion

Over the last decade, concepts of diaspora and locality have gained complex new meanings in political discourse as well as in social and cultural studies. Diaspora, in particular, has acquired new meanings related to notions such as global deterritorialization, transnational migration and cultural hybridity. The authors discuss the key concepts and theory, focus on the meaning of religion both as a factor in forming diasporic social organisations, as well as shaping and maintaining diasporic identities, and the appropriation of space and place in history. It includes up to date research of the Caribbean, Irish, Armenian, African and Greek diasporas.

This edited collection addresses the relationship between diaspora, religion and the politics of identity in the modern world. It illuminates religious understandings of citizenship, association and civil society, and situates them historically within diverse cultures of memory and state traditions.

Religious identity constitutes a key element in the formation, development and sustenance of South Asian diasporic communities. Through studies of South Asian communities situated in multiple locales, this book explores the role of religious identity in the social and political organization of the diaspora. It accounts for the factors that underlie the modification of ritual practice in the process of resettlement, and considers how multicultural policies in the adopted state, trans-generational changes and the proliferation of transnational media has impacted the development of these identities in the diaspora. Also crucial is the gender dimension, in terms of how religion and caste affect women’s roles in the South Asian diaspora. What emerges then from the way separate communities in the diaspora negotiate religion are diverse patterns that are strategic and contingent. Yet, paradoxically, the dynamic and evolving relationship between religion and diaspora becomes necessary, even imperative, for sustaining a cohesive collective identity in these communities. This bookw as published as a special issue of South Asian Diaspora.

Although the religions of the Caribbean have been a subject of popular media, there have been few ethnographic publications. This text is a much-needed and long overdue addition to Caribbean studies and the exploration of ideas, beliefs, and religious practices of Caribbean folk in diaspora and at home. Drawing upon ethnographic and historical research in a variety of contexts and settings, the contributors to this volume explore the relationship between religious and social life. Whether practiced at home or abroad, the contributors contend that the religions of Caribbean folk are dynamic and creative endeavors that have mediated the ongoing and open-ended relation between local and global, historical and contemporary change.

This book charts the experiences of the Islamic diaspora around the world. It incorporates a broad range of case studies and includes issues such as identity, religious background and gender.

Migration has been a basic fact of Nepali life for centuries. Over the last thirty years, migration from Nepal has increased diaspora communities across the world. In these diverse contexts, to what extent do Nepalis reproduce their culture and pass it on to subsequent generations? How much of diaspora life is a response to social and political concerns derived from the homeland? What aspects of Nepali life and culture change? In this volume twenty-one authors address these issues through eighteen detailed case studies that tackle issues of livelihood, identity and belonging, internal conflict, and religious practice, in the UK, the USA, India, Southeast Asia, the Gulf countries, and Fiji. Throughout the volume, we see how being Nepali outside Nepal enables new categories and new kinds of identity to emerge, whether as Nepali, Gorkhali, or as a member of a particular ethnic, regional, or religious group. The common theme of Global Nepalis is the exploration of continuity, change, and conflict as new practices and identities develop in Nepali diaspora life.exponentially, leading to many new

Gatherings in Diaspora brings together the latest chapters in the long-running chronicle of religion and immigration in the American experience. Today, as in the past, people migrating to the United States bring their religions with them, and their religious identities often mean more to them away from home, in their diaspora, than they did before. This book explores and analyzes the diverse religious communities of post-1965 diasporas: Christians, Hews, Muslims, Hindus, Rastafarians, and practitioners of Vodou, from countries such as China, Guatemala, Haiti, India, Iran, Jamaica, Korea, and Mexico. The contributors explore how, to a greater or lesser extent, immigrants and their offspring adapt their religious institutions to American conditions, often interacting with religious communities already established. The religious institutions they build, adapt, remodel, and adopt become worlds unto themselves, congregations, where new relations are forged within the community -- between men and women, parents and children, recent arrival and those longer settled.

Within western political, media and academic discourses, Muslim communities are predominantly seen through the prism of their Islamic religiosities, yet there exist within diasporic communities unique and complex secularisms. Drawing on detailed interview and ethnographic material gathered in the UK, this book examines the ways in which a form of secularism – ‘non-Islamiosity’ – amongst members of the Iranian diaspora shapes ideas and practices of diasporic community and identity, as well as wider social relations.

Religion, Culture and Spirituality in Africa and the African Diaspora explores the ways in which religious ideas and beliefs continue to play a crucial role in the lives of people of African descent. The chapters in this volume use historical and contemporary examples to show how people of African descent develop and engage with spiritual rituals, organizations and practices to make sense of their lives, challenge injustices and creatively express their spiritual imaginings. This book poses and answers the following critical questions: To what extent are ideas of spirituality emanating from Africa and the diaspora still influenced by an African aesthetic? What impact has globalisation had on spiritual and cultural identities of peoples on African descendant peoples? And what is the utility of the practices and social organizations that house African spiritual expression in tackling social, political cultural and economic inequities? The essays in this volume reveal how spirituality weaves and intersects with issues of gender, class, sexuality and race across Africa and the diaspora. It will appeal to researchers and postgraduate students interested in the study of African religions, race and religion, sociology of religion and anthropology.

Many scholars have documented how migration from Latin America to the United States shapes the interconnected spheres of religious participation, political engagement, and civic formation in host countries. What has largely gone unexplored is how the experiences of migration and adaptation to the host country also shape the ecclesiological arrangements, theological imagination, and communal strategies of immigrant religious networks. These communities maintain close ties with their home countries while simultaneously developing a religious life that distinguishes them both from their home countries and from faith communities of the dominant culture in their host countries. João Chaves offers an account of the dynamics that shape the role of immigrant churches in the United States. Migrational Religion acts as a case study of a network formed by communities of Brazilian immigrants who, although affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention, formed a distinctive ethnic association. Their churches began to appear in the United States in the 1980s due to Brazilian Baptist missionary activity. As Brazilian migration increased in the last decades of the twentieth century, hundreds of Brazilian evangelical churches were founded to cater to first-generation immigrants. Initially their leaders conceived of these churches as extensions of their denomination in Brazil. However, these church communities were under constant pressure to adapt to their rapidly changing context, and the challenges of immigrant living pushed them in exciting new directions. Brazilian churches in the United States faced a number of issues peculiar to their nature as diasporic communities: undocumented parishioners, membership fluctuation caused by national and international migration patterns, anti-immigrant prejudice, and more. Based on six years of ethnographic work in eleven congregations across the United States, dozens of interviews with Brazilian pastors, and extensive archival history in English and Portuguese, Migrational Religion documents how such churches adapted to unique challenges, and reveals how the diasporic experience fosters incipient theologies in churches of the Latinx diaspora.