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

Global Networks 14, 4 (2014) 251–272. ISSN 1470–2266. © 2014 The Author(s)

Global Networks © 2014 Global Networks Partnership & John Wiley & Sons Ltd 251

Introduction to the religious lives of migrant

minorities: a transnational and multi-sited

perspective

MANUEL A. VÁSQUEZ* AND JOSH DEWIND†

*107B Anderson Hall, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611; USA [email protected]

†Social Science Research Council, One Pierrepont Plaza, 15th Floor, Brooklyn, NY 11201 USA

[email protected]

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.

Keywords RELIGION, MIGRATION, DIVERSITY, MINORITIES, TRANSNATIONAL, PLACE-

MAKING, BIOGRAPHIES, JOURNEYS, CIRCULATION, RESEARCH METHODS

Research on the relations between religion and migration has largely focused on the

ways in which religion mediates immigrants’ settlement and incorporation within host

Manuel A. Vásquez and Josh DeWind

252 © 2014 The Author(s)

nations. In the United States, for example, following Will Herberg’s (1955) pioneer-

ing study, Protestant–Catholic–Jew, such research has tended to examine the role of

religion for minority group integration (Alba et al. 2008; Dolan 1983). Preoccupied

with how migrants’ integrate into or are excluded from their new societies, and on

how migrant ethnic and religious minorities contribute to diversity in these societies,

studies of migrants’ religious lives have presented these processes of adjustment and

identity formation as taking place only within individual countries. Such studies have

neglected not only the transnational ties of migrants and their religions but also the

nature and impact that such ties have in places of both origin and destination (Eck

2002; Prothero 2006; Warner and Wittner 1998). In so doing, the scope of the study

of immigrant religion has been narrowed by ‘methodological nationalism,’ which has

framed much of modern social science (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2003).

In the last two decades, however, scholars have increasingly recognized the

persistence and importance of the ties that migrants and religious practitioners

maintain with their countries of origin. Such cross-border networks and processes are

nonetheless greatly affected by their local contexts, including the national policies

through which governments regulate immigrant and religious mobility and diversity

(Bramadat and Koenig 2009; Ebaugh and Chafetz 2002; Levitt 1998, 2009; McAlister

1998; Rudolph and Piscatori 1997; Vásquez and Marquardt 2003). Nonetheless,

relatively few studies of migration and religion have examined how their transnational

networks, processes of local adaptation, and contexts of governance interact and

affect one another. With some notable exceptions (Johnson 2007), work on trans-

national religion has focused primarily on the circuits and social fields established

between societies of origin and settlement, without fully recognizing the extent to

which religions and migrants move across and operate within multiple spatio-

temporal scales and follow poly-directional networks linking multiple sites.

To broaden the analytical framing of research about relations between religion and

migration, including a transnational perspective, the Migration Program of the Social

Science Research Council, with support from The Ford Foundation, organized a

project on The Religious Lives of Migrant Minorities. The project was informed by

the work of scholars of migration who have provided theoretical explanations for the

origin, nature, frequency and persistence of ‘transnational migration’ (for example,

Glick Schiller et al. 1992; Levitt et al. 2003; Portes 2001). However, our approach

was to use ‘transnationalism’ more as a conceptual rather than a theoretical tool with

which we framed the socio-geographic scope of our investigations. For our project,

‘transnationalism’ was like a wide angle lens that both permitted and required the

research to take into account the multiple spatio-temporal contexts, within which we

examined connections between migration and religion. Our goal was, thus, not to

engage or contribute directly to the debates and development of transnational theory

so much as to use a transnational framework to understand better the intertwined

dynamics of migration and religion. Ultimately, our understandings and explanations

of those relationships emerged more from the thematic analysis of our research

findings, as is described in the following pages, than from any theoretical implications

inherent in the notion of ‘transnationalism’ in and of itself.1

Introduction

© 2014 The Author(s) 253

In other words, this project has been transnational in the sense that it examines the

recent movements of migrants and religions between nations that have emerged out of

the British Empire. Nevertheless, our goal has not been to focus exclusively on the

transnational dimensions of migration and religion or specific types of social fields

that they might create (Glick Schiller et al. 1992; Levitt and Schiller 2004). Instead,

we sought a scope for our investigations that would enable us to examine how

migrant minorities organize their religious lives within and between multiple

individual, familial, communal, urban, national and transnational levels of social

organization. Rather than predetermine on what level we would seek to examine

relations between migration and religion, we followed the religious lives of migrants

where they took us within the broad historical context first established by the British

Empire and then reformed by the post-colonial system of national states that has

subsequently emerged.

The scope and focus on The Religious Lives of Migrant Minorities Project

Between 2006 and 2010, the project’s members investigated the local, national and

transnational migratory and religious experiences of migrants in the United Kingdom,

Malaysia and South Africa. More specifically, the researchers focused on the

everyday lives of migrants who were based in urban neighbourhoods of London,

Kajang (on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur), Johannesburg and Durban and who were

practitioners of Christian, Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist faiths. Contextually, the

national regimes governing religious and migrant diversity in these cities derived

from their shared transnational connections to the British Empire and well as from

their distinct regional and national histories. As the investigations progressed, the

researchers developed a comparative thematic approach to take note of and explain

similarities and differences among the migrant groups and their religious adaptations

in each urban context. By the end of the research, the project focused on three

adaptive and integrative processes in the everyday religious lives of migrants within

local, national and transnational spheres: migratory and spiritual journeys, secular and

sacred place-making, and circulation of people, objects, practices and faiths.

The pressing contemporary social and analytical issues that shaped the framing of

our investigations have deep and wide historical roots. Since the late fifteenth century

voyages of conquest and trade that initiated European colonial expansion, the

international movements of religions and peoples have played significant roles in the

emergence and consolidation of the contemporary nation state system that still asserts

sovereignty over the globe (Chidester 2013; van der Veer 1994, 2001). Like the other

European colonial powers, the nineteenth century British Empire formulated regimes

to regulate the movements of peoples and their religious practices as part of its efforts

to establish and maintain British national identity and hegemony within its global

sphere of influence (Carey 2011). Since the twentieth century decolonization and the

emergence of a neo-liberal international order, the movements of peoples and

religions have expanded, particularly from relatively less developed nations of the

South to the more developed nations of both the North and the South (Castles and



Miller 2009). In the nations of destination, this mobility has resulted in establishment

of new minority groups based on their diversity of racial, ethnic and religious

backgrounds. In response, national policy makers have sought to manage the effects

of these minority groups on national identity and cohesion. While employers have

generally welcomed new immigrant minorities as workers, other segments of

receiving societies have tended to greet migrants’ diverse ethno-racial identities and

religious affiliations with suspicion and at times with xenophobia. The selection of

three cities, all shaped by British imperialism, as sites of research allowed us to

understand these processes diachronically, within the ruptures and continuities of the

uneven transition from colonial to post-colonial societies and in relation to emerging

national modes of ‘governmentality’ (Agamben 2005; Foucault 2007). In each city,

administrators sought to control the diversity of mobile populations ranging from

undocumented workers to drug traffickers and terrorists.

In order to gain insight into the socio-cultural transformations that result for

migrants and their religious practices in relation to their host societies, our project has

taken into account the transnational ties that migrants and religions extend between

their places of origin and the urban centres to which they have relocated in both the

global North and South. Further, in each urban centre, contemporary national regimes

for managing migrant and religious diversity derived from the British mode of

imperial governance, have enabled the researchers to seek commonalities in these

processes and their outcomes as well as finding differences resulting from each

country’s distinctive national and regional socio-cultural traditions. Thus,

approaching issues of local integration and transnational connections within this

multi-centred contextual framework provided a basis for initial cross-regional

comparisons of the religious lives of migrant minorities.

This introduction describes how the project’s conceptual framework, research

methods and modes of analysis evolved from their inception, through research and

writing, to their full expression in the articles collected in this special issue of Global Networks. Underlying and supporting that evolution was the complicated organization

of multi-sited and comparative research incorporating the participation of 25 project

members2 based on four continents. Prior to beginning research, the project coordina-

tors, prepared preliminary descriptions of what they thought building on earlier

scholarship could contribute to understanding relations between migration, religion

and social diversity. These essays served as background to orient a series of three

consultations with researchers based in North and South America, Asia, Africa and

Europe, which took place between 2002 and 2004. These meetings contributed to the

project’s socio-spatial framing, including the decision for the research to focus on

connections between macro-, meso- and micro-levels of migratory and religious life

in urban centres of the United Kingdom, South Africa and Malaysia. In each country,

site research coordinators recruited teams of researchers who carried out field

investigations between 2007 and 2009. During this time, all the project members,

including a small number of international advisors, met at each one the research sites.

Those meetings were used to review initial findings and, significantly, to refine and

the project’s intellectual framing, whose basic elements and evolution are described

Introduction


below. Subsequent to the research, in order to explore how this shared framework

could inform analyses and comparisons across the sites, the project members met

again in 2009 at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Ethnic and Religious

Diversity in Göttingen. They met once more in 2010 at the Berkeley Center for

Religion, Peace, and World Affairs of Georgetown University.

In this special issue of Global Networks, we present a collection of essays that

represent the project’s culmination. Together the articles explicitly reflect how the

conceptual framework, research methods, and analytical approaches evolved as the

project unfolded. Research team members and site coordinators have already

produced a variety of publications: over 30 articles, a special issue of a journal and a

collection of migrant biographies, each of which focus on research findings from one

of the projects three different research sites.3 Here, the authors pull together a broader

transnational and comparative synthesis in a collectively coordinated effort. Each of

the essays explicitly elaborates and develops particular aspects of the project’s shared

conceptual framework and uses them to interpret and examine relations between

different dimensions of the religious lives of migrants who live as minorities within

contemporary urban contexts, where the management of migrant and religious

diversity derive from the historical antecedent of the British Empire.

Development of the project’s conceptual framework

One initial and basic goal of the project was to bring together and mutually inform

approaches to the study of migration, religion and social diversity that had for the

most part developed as separate fields of scholarship. The initial essays that the

project coordinators prepared to orient future research identified potential contri-

butions and benefits offered and gained from each perspective.4 Expressed at first in

general terms, over time these goals became more specifically defined and more

concretely tied to the project’s research questions and methods.

Beginning from the perspective of migration studies, the project coordinators

anticipated that research into religion would enable the project to gain insight into

how migrants draw from their religious beliefs, practices and institutions to create and

insert themselves into transnational social fields. They expected that examining the

form, organization and impact of transnational religious activities would provide new

insights into migrants’ capacity to negotiate their settlement and integration into host

societies. In turn, from the perspective of religion studies, the project coordinators

anticipated that examining migrants’ religious beliefs and practices in relation to their

settlement and adaptation to new societies would help to move the study of religion

beyond prevailing abstract and universalized notions of religion as unchanging beliefs

and doctrines, toward more historicized, re-materialized, and re-territorialized under-

standings. Phrased differently, research on migrants’ religious lives could help to

move religion studies from text to territory, from theology to lived religion, and from

symbol to practice (Asad 1993; Orsi 2005; Vásquez 2011). Finally, to help make

sense of differences in the relations between migration and religion in different

regional contexts, the project coordinators proposed to take into account the regimes



through which, in different historical epochs, governments have regulated ethnic and

religious diversity. Such regimes include immigration restrictions, the separation of

church and state, official sanction or prohibition of public religious and ethnic

expressions, state aid to religious and migrant associations, and other means of

accommodating or managing migrants’ religious and ethnic identity and organization.

This early framing of migration, religion and diversity guided the project’s

selection of the migrant groups, religions and countries that would become the focus

of research. The choice of the United Kingdom, South Africa and Malaysia as

research sites allowed the project to take into account these countries’ shared colonial

histories as well as their pre-colonial and post-colonial differences. The British

Empire’s mode of governing ethnic and religious differences in non-Western colonies

became incorporated into the United Kingdom’s contemporary liberal democratic

recognition of individual religious freedom and somewhat more strained tolerance of

plural collective religious identities and mobilizations in the public sphere. As part of

their shared colonial histories, South Africa and Malaysia adopted a similar tolerance

for diverse individual ethno-racial and religious expression, albeit hierarchically

differentiated and structured under colonial rule.

Despite their shared inheritance of principles for tolerance of diversity, each of

these countries’ distinct pre-colonial and post-colonial histories and cultural traditions

have also influenced their contemporary governments’ in adopting relatively restric-

tive policies toward public ethnic and religious identification and mobilization. In

South Africa, for example, the post-apartheid and constitutionally-based notion of

inclusive citizenship seeks to abolish the racial categorization and hierarchy

established during the apartheid era between colonial whites, native blacks, mixed

heritage communities and imported Asians and to provide equal freedom for African,

Christian, Hindu and Muslim religious traditions. However, the national imperative of

protecting the rights of citizens has also led the government to restrict the growing

immigration of diverse labour migrants and refugees immigrating from across Sub-

Saharan Africa and failed to neutralize xenophobic public reactions to their arrival. In

Malaysia, despite pre-colonial and colonial traditions of tolerance for diverse regional

population movements and religious differences, the post-colonial national govern-

ment’s adoption of Islam as the official state religion has had a narrowing effect. In

particular, the contemporary government has promoted preferential ethnic and

religious policies for Muslim Malays, limited ethnic mobilization and religious

expression by descendants of earlier Chinese and Indian immigrant groups, and

favoured immigration by Muslims who are viewed as sharing a regional ethnic

culture.

Undertaking research that drew upon a shared colonial past and differentiated

present led the project to focus on immigrant groups settled within urban contexts for

primarily for two reasons. First, because immigrants tend to settle in urban centres,

national policies created to manage ethno-racial and religious diversity among

immigrants and citizens are largely implemented through urban bureaucracies. Thus,

the project gave particular attention to the urban impacts of government policies

regulating church–state relations, the administration of immigration controls, and

Introduction


management of relations between ethno-racial and religious communities. Second,

urban centres are also where migrants encounter commercial infrastructures and

religious or secular organizations that facilitate their journeys, settlement, and

maintenance of international ties – all of which provide a basis for the development of

locally adaptive and transnational fields of social organization. In other words, urban

centres tend to be central nodes of the relations between migration and religion that

the project set out to investigate.

Loren Landau’s article on Johannesburg illustrates clearly the wisdom of the

project’s urban focus. In the context of dramatic transformations in post-apartheid

South African society, cities like Johannesburg are ‘“estuarial” zones where various

demographic and ideational currents converge in a space of ongoing flux’. Amid the

chaos and pervasive condition of risk and lack of trust, religion enables migrant

minorities to deploy a ‘tactical cosmopolitanism’ that makes it possible for them to be

meaningfully ‘in a place but not of it, to be neither host nor guest’.

From the point of view of religious studies, cities have historically been spaces of

enormous creativity and transculturation. As Orsi (1999: 11) writes in reference to

how Christians have beheld the city:

[T]he dirty city is also the holy city: by the conventions of the genre, it is

precisely in those dark, filthy depths that God comes. The dramatic and

spiritual fulfilment offered by these Christian narratives of urban conversion

lies in their affirmation of the power of grace to touch absolutely the darkest,

most vile, and most inhuman corners of the city’s sinfulness.

We will see a similar abiding concern with purifying and sacralizing urban spaces in

the essays by David Garbin and by Manuel Vásquez and Kim Knott.

Building on the project’s temporal-spatial framework of contextual regimes of

governance, Thomas Blom Hansen’s article introduces the notion of ‘post-imperial

formations’ to take into account the cumulative effects of earlier modes of colonial

administration on contemporary national governments’ management of immigrant

and religious diversity. As he puts it, ‘[t]he scale and breadth of international

migration today is different from the imperial age. Yet, a not very distant imperial age

and mentality decisively shape the pathways, regulatory regimes and racial-cultural

hierarchies that govern and shape these movements.’ Adopting the notion of a post-

imperial formation helped the project to frame its approach to investigating migratory

movements taking place outside the Euro-American context, which has been a

primary locus of research on international migration.

Elaborating on the notion of a post-imperial formation within urban contexts,

Loren Landau’s article on Johannesburg foregrounds the normalizing and disciplining

effects of colonial and post-colonial regimes on the religious dynamics among various

transnational immigrants, local native minorities and majority groups. His history

makes clear the importance of related religious and ethno-racial issues in the political

dynamics between state attempts at governing and inter-group relations in responding.

To compare these dynamics in urban Johannesburg, Kajang, and London, the article



by Vásquez and Knott describes the ‘urban spatial regimes’ that present geographic

arrangements and challenges to which migrants’ religious practices respond by

‘marking, crossing and negotiating boundaries’ between sacred and profane, religious

and secular, personal and public spaces as ‘they seek to carve out places to be’. In

turn, Garbin’s depiction of Congolese immigrants in London and Atlanta illustrates

how significant religion, in this case Protestantism, Kimbanguism and Catholicism,

can become in giving meaning to and shaping the transnational strategies by which

migrants seek to take capture, defend, and build territories in urban centres of power.

Taken together the articles make clear how urban settings become, not containers, but

generative contexts for the interactions between post-imperial national regimes

created to manage religious and ethno-racial diversity and the local and every day

transnational religious lives of migrants.

In order to facilitate comparisons between the effects of contemporary national

governance regimes within different urban contexts, the project set out to focus

research on immigrant groups with affiliations to the same religious traditions:

Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism. However, during the research, the

project’s expectation of finding religiously-based patterns of adaptation were quickly

proven unrealistic. The researchers found not only that there were wide variations in

the beliefs and practices among migrants of similar faiths who settled in each country

but also that these categorical religious identifications were inconsistent with, and

even obscured, diverse processes of local religious vernacularization and cross-

fertilization within each city (Levitt and Merry 2009).

In other words, it turned out that migrant religions are not static, self-contained

wholes that travel unchanged (Tweed 2005). Rather, in the process of moving and

settlement, we found that migrants constantly contested religious orthodoxy and

heterodoxy. Similarly, the migrants’ urban border-making and border-crossing, which

is part and parcel of the dislocation and relocation of migration, were mediated

through religious transformations, such as the nostalgic invention of a tradition or the

articulation of cosmopolitan religious hybridity.

We describe below how a less categorical, more process-based, conceptualization

of relations between religion and immigration emerged from the research, as the

project members considered how to undertake comparisons across the different

national urban sites. To help explain how this reconceptualization emerged from the

research, we turn first to the research methodology that the project employed at each

of its three research sites.

Research methods

In identifying the challenges that mobility presents to research and interpretation,

Arjun Appadurai (1996: 48) argues that:

[a]s groups migrate, regroup in new locations, reconstruct their histories, and

reconfigure their ethnic projects, the ethno of ethnography takes on a slippery,

nonlocalized quality, to which the descriptive practices of anthropology will

Introduction


have to respond. The landscapes of group identity – the ethnoscapes – around

the world are no longer familiar anthropological objects, insofar as groups are

no longer tightly territorialized, spatially bounded, historically unself-

conscious, or culturally homogeneous.

To respond to this evolving reality, Appadurai calls for a ‘cosmopolitan ethnography’

capable of operating at multiple spatio-temporal scales. The project that gave rise to

the articles in this issue is an effort to operationalize this kind of ethnographic

imagination, seeking to understand the roles that religion plays in processes of

migrant deterritorialization and reterritorialization in multiple sites. Thus, in carrying

out our investigations, we also borrowed from the notion of multi-sited and global

ethnography as developed by George Marcus (1995), Michael Burawoy et al. (2000)

and others (for example, Coleman and von Hellermann 2011).

Multi-sited ethnography poses tough challenges. As Berg (2008: 15) puts it:

A real challenge with multi-sited fieldwork is that the researcher has less time

at each individual site and with each localized population, thus having fewer

opportunities to ‘get to know’ people and their social worlds, and to establish

more profound social relationships in ways that allow us access to more

existential fields of experience.

Moreover, Candea argues that multi-sited projects are also subject to the problem of

working with ‘arbitrary locations’. Their ‘weakness lies in [their] lack of attention to

processes of bounding, selection and choice – processes which any ethnographer has

to undergo to reduce the initial indeterminacy of field experience into a meaningful

account’ (Candea 2009: 27).

We sought to meet these challenges by collaborating with locally-based, inter-

disciplinary teams which engaged in extended research of religion as lived by

migrants within and outside religious organizations. Still, we realize that what

resulted was ‘ethnography through thick and thin’, as Marcus (1998) puts it. To the

extent possible, however, we have tried to make the variations in the ‘thinness’ and

‘thickness’ of our accounts a function of the multiple scales involved, rather than a

sign of methodological laxity. While the goal was to understand the religious

experiences, practices and worldviews of migrant minorities, we have also tried to

examine the spatial and migration regimes within which these minorities dwell, build

identities, establish affiliations and mobilize, bringing the logics of the city, the

nation-state, and (post)colonialism into the analysis. The task lies in bringing all these

scales into conversation departing from a particular level of analysis.

While collaboration with locally-based research teams enabled a multi-scalar

exploration, it also produced the daunting challenge of achieving a degree of

analytical integration that allowed for meaningful cross-site comparisons. These

appraisals mapped out the evolving connections among various sites, religions,

immigration regimes and modes of managing diversity, without losing sight of the

richness of religious and cultural generativity in various contexts. While the



interdisciplinary nature of the research teams, which involved anthropologists,

sociologists, geographers, political scientists, historians and religious studies scholars,

was crucial to the successful completion of the project, it also added considerable

complexity.

Finally, the selection of sites was ultimately a creative process, involving the

elucidation of saliences, which emerged from the questions and assumptions with

which the research started. It was, as pragmatist philosophers would put it, a process

of capturing the ‘differences that make a difference’ from a particular disciplined

standpoint (James 1971). In selecting, London, Johannesburg-Durban and Kuala

Lumpur-Kajang, we wanted historical depth in order to highlight continuities and

discontinuities in transnational processes from the colonial setting to the national

present. All too often the literature on transnationalism and globalization assumes that

the present is unique, marked by a radical rupture from the past. If, as Rudolph

(1997: 1) writes, religious organizations and movements, from Sufi orders and

Catholic missionaries to Buddhist monks, ‘are among the oldest transnationals’, they

must be approached diachronically.

To address these challenges, the project members agreed to focus the research on

the religious and migratory biographies of individuals. A biographical research

methodology allowed a processual exploration of how religious meanings, practices

and organizations reflect and inform individual migrants’ identities, affiliations and

strategies for living within new societies across different levels of social organization.

Initially, this method was intended to address both objective and subjective aspects of

three central themes and related questions:

1. Identity and meaning. What religious identities do migrants embrace within

receiving societies as they negotiate their minority status? How do religious

values and commitments shape and become shaped by other social identities

including gender, class, race, ethnicity and nationality?

2. Affiliation and membership. How do migrants’ religious identities guide

their participation in social groups and organizations and affect the nature and

extent of their membership – both inclusion and exclusion – within the wider

receiving society? And how does that membership affect participation in social

and religious life in migrants’ countries of origin?

3. Context and empowerment. On what religious resources – ideational,

material, and organizational – do migrants draw in collective mobilizations to

assert claims for recognition both by receiving and sending societies, which at

the same time deploy religion in their efforts to manage migrant diversity and

membership?5

In order to examine the intersection between religion, migration and diversity in

each site, we finally focused our research primarily on the personal narratives and

biographies of individuals. This seemed the best method to get at how the religious

and spiritual meanings and the physical and social processes of migration and religion

Introduction


intersect on different levels of social organization. As a complement to the migrant

and religious oral histories, the researchers also engaged in broader ethnographic

interviewing and participant observation to answer these questions through

experiences and activities of individuals as they moved in their daily lives between

family, communal, urban, national and international spheres. By focusing our

research on the religious lives of migrants in urban centres, we expected to see how

national policy regimes and institutional structures would affect their adaptations.

Such multi-sited research, according to Marcus (1995: 105) should be ‘designed

around chains, paths, threads, conjunctions, or juxtaposition of locations in which the

ethnographer establishes some form of literal, physical presence, with an explicit,

posited logic of association or connection among sites that in fact defines the

argument of the ethnography.’ He goes on to suggest that constructing multi-sited

ethnographies could proceed by tracking the movement of phenomena such as people,

things, metaphors, narratives, biographies and conflicts. The essays here take up this

suggestion seriously, following the journeys of not only migrants but also religions,

and within them particular strategies and tactics of place-making (see in this special

issue: Vásquez and Knott as well as Garbin) and circulating modes of piety (see in

this special issue: Levitt and Wong). Following these networks and flows also forced

us to trace their ramifications beyond the cities that were the focus of our project and

to bring into the picture migratory and religious activities in, for example, Atlanta,

Kinshasa and the Gulf states as well. Complementing Marcus’s multi-sited approach,

we deployed a global ethnography whereby ‘the place-bound site becomes a platform

from which a variety of place-making projects can be investigated’ (Gille and Ó Riain

2002: 291). In other words, we have considered Durban, Johannesburg, Kuala

Lumpur and London as particular cities, with their own histories and dynamics. Yet

these places are ‘themselves globalized with multiple external connections, porous

and contested boundaries and social relations that are constructed across multiple

scales’ (Gille and Ó Riain 2002: 291).

In pursuing embedded and travelling ethnographic methods, the project not only

looked from the outside at the functional aspects of behaviour, but also from the

inside – or at least from the perspective of the migrants themselves. We were

interested not only in the ways in which being an immigrant minority shaped

migrants’ views of their religious experiences but also in the religious meanings that

migrants gave to their experiences as minorities within different urban contexts. In the

end, we found that the national or ethnic status of migrants – particularly if they

affiliated to the same religions as native-born populations – was significant in shaping

not only their self-perceptions as minorities but also in determining how they employ

religious resources in their social adaptations.

Analysis of findings

As two years of research progressed, all the project members convened at each site to

share and compare findings. The goal was to understand local and transnational

relations between migration and religion in the sites’ different urban contexts. These



discussions, which included consultation with the projects’ international advisors (see

Appendix II), each with expertise in the study of religion and/or migration in the

regions researched, led us to recognize common themes in the migrants’ everyday

religious experiences. While these experiences varied with regard to the national or

ethnic origin of the migrants, the tenets of their religions, and the national contexts in

which they settled, cross-site comparisons revealed basic underlying processes. These

processes included the fusion or juxtaposition of migratory and spiritual journeys in

the attempt to render personal trajectories meaningful; the carving out of secular and

sacred communities to mark presence and belonging; and the circulation of people,

beliefs, practices and objects to sustain transnational relations.

After reviewing and seeking to make sense of the first research findings, the

project members felt compelled to re-examine and question their basic epistemo-

logical notions of identity, space, materiality, time and context in order to understand

the transnational nature of migratory and religious experiences in the lives of migrant

minorities. The overriding goal was to capture migrants’ religious generativity over

time, from initial settlement through succeeding generations. Specifying more closely,

the project members sought to explore how the engagement of individual migrants of

different genders and classes in transnational migration and religion created and

transformed their identities, established material and spiritual spaces, built communi-

ties, and responded and adjusted to varied social and political contexts.

Over time, the three themes mentioned above emerged with greater clarity and

cohesion as our central interpretive matrix:

1. Journeys: migratory and spiritual

The migrants’ biographies connected their migratory narratives of transitions from

initial up-rootedness and loss to economic and social betterment and progress with

narratives of religious engagements of devotion, conversion, purification and restored

authenticity. These stories as told by the migrants explained how their various forms

of religious activities – sometimes within their original religions, other times within

religions newly discovered within their host societies – contributed to and reflected

how they sought to cope with the upheavals of dislocation and relocation (Hagan

2012). Although the particular paths, experiences and outcomes of individuals varied

in relation to their particular religious affiliations as minorities within different urban

contexts, the basic connections between migratory and spiritual journeys remained

fundamental to migrants’ religious lives.

The article that most concertedly seeks to illustrate this theme is that by Diana

Wong. She deploys a phenomenological approach that allows her to move beyond

instrumentalist understandings of religions’ entwinement with the migration pro-

cesses, enabling her to capture how migrants across different generations experience

religion as part of their everyday lives. Here, she is influenced by the ‘lived religion’

approach pioneered by Robert Orsi (2005), David Hall (1997) and Leigh Schmidt

(1995) among others. In this approach, religion is not simply about church–state

relations, or about private beliefs and rituals evacuated from the public sphere.

Introduction


Instead, in her analysis of the lived religion of Indian, Chinese and Indonesian

migrants, as suggested by Orsi (2005: 167), ‘cannot be understood apart from its place

in the everyday lives, preoccupations, and commonsense orientation of men and

women’, who in this instance are settled as migrant minorities in Malaysia. Through

biographical narratives, Wong captures the rich and complex interweaving of the initial

immigration of her subjects and their families in relation to their spiritual discoveries

and renewals of faith, which they have in turn maintained through transnational

religious networks and familial ties back to their homelands, in some cases over

multiple generations. The article’s focus on the links between transnational migratory

and spiritual journeys at the micro-phenomenological level highlights how migration

poses dilemmas that religious ‘idioms’, narratives and practices seek to address by

building meaning and identities embedded in both countries of origin and settlement.

2. Place-making: sacred and secular communities

For migrants, establishing communities within which to base their livelihoods and

practice their religious faiths proved to be similarly intertwined processes. Central to

both were the networks of family and community through which migrants settled and

sought to secure their lives. These processes reflected the spatial strategies operating

at different levels: micro-strategies of embodying and performing the migrants’ daily

work and religious devotions; meso-strategies of constituting the spaces employed in

the activities of religious and community organizations, whether store-front churches

or monumental temples; and macro-strategies of engagement – including pilgrimages,

festivals, and public prayers – as minorities seeking recognition from the broader

society’s religious and political governance regimes and institutions that regulate their

status within local social and religious hierarchies. While heuristically distinctive

from an analytical perspective, these levels of analysis very often overlap and at times

reinforce or remain in tension with one another. Each of these scales becomes a space

of encounter and friction related to religious and social inclusion and exclusion

among migrants and the native-born. Moreover, each scale involves the deployment

of spatial practices that are symbolic and material, ranging from prayers and bodily

ritual to the construction of temples and the participation in transnational religious

networks.

Focusing on three case studies, Vásquez and Knott show how multi-scalar sacred

spaces become articulated through embodied ritual performance, the religiously-

inflected spatial management of difference and belonging, and the embeddedness of

migrants in religious networks. In a similar way, Garbin demonstrates the spatial

dimensions of community-building in diaspora, which include not only the

transposition of sacred spaces from the centre of the imagined homeland to the

periphery of the diaspora but also the production of ‘heterotopias’ or new forms of

marking collective visibility and appropriating public spaces, which flow in the

opposite direction. Both essays show that ‘dwelling’ and ‘crossing’, as Tweed (2005)

puts it, are mutually implicative processes that link sacred and secular place-making.

Place-making, however, can involve immigrants interaction not only with one another



but also with native-born residents, as Landau’s and Samadia Sadouni’s articles on

South Africa illustrate. The state too carves out urban spaces of belonging and

exclusion through regimes of laws, policies and bureaucratic apparatuses that

categorize and manage population growth and diversity.

3. Circulation: objects, ideas, practices and authorities

With the mobility of people comes the circulation of religious artefacts, notions of

faith and observance, codifications of ritual authenticity, techniques of bodily

performance, strategies for sacralizing landscapes, religious leaders and authorities,

and other components of religion. While the movement and embrace by migrants of

these circulating phenomena often have significant roles in migratory and spiritual

journeys and place-making, the emphasis here is on how the transfers, connections,

and identifications of circulation between sites of migration can enhance religious

meanings and at times power. While one intention of this theme is to focus on the

significance and meaning of transnational circulation, such movements and exchanges

also take place locally both within and between religious traditions as migrants not

only seek to sustain their faiths but at times also explore and at times embrace one or

more other faiths. Bringing to a location of settlement a traditional or new religious

object, idea, practice, or authority becomes a means by which to purify and sustain, or

at times to transform, migrants’ religious lives.

Focusing on the circulation of religious models of da’wa (literally a summons to

pursue greater piety), Diana Wong and Peggy Levitt’s article shows that, as a central

dimension of religion, mobility takes different forms. They distinguish primarily

between the religions that migrants carry with them and the religions that religious

leaders transport for purposes of proselytization. ‘Migrant religions’, they say, ‘travel

within the local ethnic confines of the migrant (and home) population, even as they

reterritorialize and adapt to new contexts’, while ‘travelling faiths’, are ‘religious

movements with universal claims around which a [deterritorialized] religious

community forms’. In other words, depending on their international horizons,

religions generate and operate at different scales, entering networks composed of

different actors, whether migrant ethnic groups or itinerant missionaries. These

networks also take different morphologies and involve different media. In Sadouni’s

article both migrant religion and travelling faith are at work, enabling Indian and

Somali Muslims to draw from religious discourses and practices that circulate

globally to construct and affirm non-racial aspects of their identities and statuses, as

they attempt to resist and/or accommodate to South Africa’s ethno-racial political

regimes from the imperial to the post-apartheid era.

Although the articles described above address each of the project’s three main

migration and religion themes separately, one of the project’s greatest challenges has

been to understand how migrants integrate these different aspects of their lives within

their everyday experiences. Examining this integration became possible by focusing

on the experiences of specific groups and faiths of migrants from a transnational

perspective.

Introduction


Conclusion: steps toward transnational synthesis

Each of the three themes that have framed our project’s examination of the relations

between migration and religion – journeys, place-making and circulation – have

transnational dimensions. Migration scholars have developed a wide range of theories

to explain the origins, processes and outcomes of international and transnational

migration (for example, Hirschman et al. 2001; Levitt et al. 2003; Massey et al. 2003;

Portes 2001). Similarly, although scholars have long-noted the international reach of

some religions, particularly in the histories of Catholicism, Protestantism and Islam as

universalistic faiths, only recently have they begun to examine the nature, causes and

effects of transnational religious connections (for example, Ebaugh and Chafetz 2002;

Levitt 2003). While these theoretical formulations offer some help in explaining how

and why migrants and religions develop, sustain and drop transnational ties and

networks, they offer no particular theoretical approach or analytical method with

which to explain how the three different transnational thematic processes of migration

and religion are interrelated.

The first steps toward such a synthesis have come from examining these themes in

relation to one another through case studies of individual migrant groups and religious

faiths within specific contexts. In his article about three groups of Christian migrants

within the Congolese diaspora, Garbin emphasizes the migrants’ efforts at establish-

ing religious spaces in London, Atlanta and Congo. Nevertheless, this emphasis does

not lead him to treat each location as a self-contained unit. Rather, he shows how

these sites are tightly connected by the journeys and circulation of leaders, followers,

religious ideas, political projects and material resources as part of a polycentric

diaspora. Similarly, in order to explain how Indian and Somali migrants used their ties

to global Islam in order to adapt to and escape the historically persistent racial

hierarchy of South Africa, Sadouni underscores the transnational spiritual and

migratory journeys of the leaders and members of particular reformist Islamic

schools, the circulation of ideational and material resources employed in those efforts,

and the connections between these processes created within urban communities based

on a shared Muslim identity.

The transnational character of the groups in these case studies does not alone

explain the diverse modes in which migration and religion interact. Nevertheless, a

comparison of the motivations behind migratory and spiritual journeys, the strategies

of place-making, and the dynamics of circulation can help to highlight similarities and

differences in the ways in which various actors, such as migrants, nation-states, and

religious organizations, negotiate the increasing connectivity, mobility, and multiple

embeddedness that often accompany transnational livelihoods. For the Somali and

Indian migrants, their transnational engagements with Islam were a reactive means to

circumvent ascribed racial identities and escape discrimination. For the Congolese

migrants participation in a religious and national diaspora was a proactive means to

conquer and liberate sacred and secular spaces and to mobilize resources needed to

promote the spiritual purification and liberation of their home nation. Through such

comparisons, the transnational conceptual framing of the project can facilitate a



creative dialogue between research strands focused on particular analytical themes

and those that take a specific group and context as their primary focus. Extending

such a comparative dialogue in the future promises to enrich our understandings of

the origin, nature and interrelations of transnational migration and religion.

This summary of the development of the project’s conceptual framework, methods

of investigation, and approach to analysing our findings indicates how the project

managed to sustain common understandings with which to prepare, guide and make

sense of the research, which was further complicated by its focus on multiple migrant

groups, religious faiths and urban contexts located on three continents. This bare

bones conceptual summary reveals only offers a glimpse of the content of the

migrant’s narratives as encountered, recorded and finally interpreted by the

researchers. Their essays demonstrate how the relatively abstract conceptual framing

of the research and the thematically based analyses have enabled them to provide

more substantive and meaningful understandings of the religious lives of migrant

minorities.

Notes

1. While a few of the contributors to this special issue use the concept of ‘diaspora’ to refer to

processes of migrants’ remembering and engaging with their homelands though the

re-enactment of traditions and the transposition of their socio-cultural landscapes in

countries of settlement, this notion was not part of the original framing of the project. For a

discussion of the tension between the concepts of transnationalism and diaspora, see

Vásquez (2008) and Johnson (2007)

2. See Appendix I for a list of project members.

3. See Appendix II for a list of project publications.

4. ‘Religion, migration, and diversity: a conceptual and analytic framework’, unpublished

project document of the Migration Program, Social Science Research Council, 15 June

2004.

5. ‘The religious lives of migrant minorities: a transnational perspective, project description’,

unpublished project document of the Migration Program, Social Science Research Council,

March 2007.

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Introduction


Appendix 1:

Members of the Religious Lives of Migrant Minorities Project

Project Coordinators:

Jose Casanova, Professor of Sociology and Senior Fellow, Berkeley Center for

Religion, Peace and World Affairs, Georgetown University

Peggy Levitt, Professor, Department of Sociology, Wellesley College and Co-Director,

Transnational Studies Initiative, Harvard University

Manuel Vásquez, Professor, Department of Religion, Florida International University

Research Teams:

1- United Kingdom:

John Eade, Site Research Coordinator (Professor of Sociology and Anthropology, and

former Executive Director of Centre for Research on Nationalism, Ethnicity and

Multiculturalism, Roehampton University).

David Garbin, Research Team Member (Lecturer in Sociology, School of Social Policy,

Sociology and Social Research, University of Kent).

Anne R. David, Research Team Member (Head of Dance and Reader in Dance Studies,

Department of Dance, Roehampton University).

2- South Africa:

Thomas Blom Hansen, Site Research Coordinator (Reliance-Dhirubhai Ambani

Professor in South Asian Studies; Professor in Anthropology; and Director,

Center for South Asia, Stamford University).

Samadia Sadouni, Research Team Member (Maître de Conférences (Associate

Professor), Political Science, Science-Po Lyon).

Caroline Jeannerat, Research Team Member (Research Associate, Department of

History, University of Johannesburg, South Africa).

3- Malaysia:

Diana Wong, Site Research Coordinator (former Visiting Professor, Universiti Sains

Malaysia, Penang).

Arfan Aziz, Research Team Member (editor, Kontekstualita: Jurnal Penelitian Sosial Keagemaan [Contextuality: Journal of Religious Social Studies], Institut

Agama Islam Negeri, Sulthan Thaha Saifuddin Jambi, Indonesia).

Lin Chew Man, Research Team member (former graduate student Universiti

Kebangsaan Malaysia).

Mohanna Nambian, Research Team Member (Associate Professor and Deputy Dean

(Undergraduate and Development), Faculty of Languages and Linguistics,

University of Malaya).

Ngu Ik Tien, Research Team Member (Postdoctoral Fellow, Malaysian Chinese

Research Center, University of Malaya).

Tan Pok Suan Research Team Member (former graduate student Universiti Kebangsaan

Malaysia).



International Advisors:

Judith Brown, Professorial Fellow and Beit Professor of Commonwealth History,

Balliol College, University of Oxford.

Loren Landau, Director, African Centre for Migration and Society at Wits University.

Robert W. Hefner, Professor of Anthropology, Boston University.

Kim Knott, Professor, Department of Politics, Philosophy, and Religion and member of

The Richardson Institute, Lancaster University.

Project Director:

Josh DeWind, Program Director, Social Science Research Council.

Introduction


Appendix II:

Articles resulting from The Religious Lives of Migrant Minorities Project

Aziz, Arfan (2013) Slametan tak perlu passport, biografi keagamaan buruh migran Indonesia di Malaysia [Slametan need no passport, religious biographies of Indonesian migrant workers in Malaysia], Bandar Lampung: Indepth Publishing.

David, Ann R. (2008) ‘Local diasporas/global trajectories: new aspects of religious “performance” in British Tamil Hindu practice’, in Performance Research, 13 (3), 89–99, doi: 10.1080/13528160902819364.

David, Ann R. (2009) ‘Performing for the gods? Dance and embodied ritual in British Hindu temples’, in South Asian Popular Culture, 7 (3), 217–31, doi: 10.1080/1474668090312 5580.

David, Ann R. (2010) ‘Gendered dynamics of the divine: trance and possession practices in diaspora Hindu sites of East London’, in A. Dawson (ed.) Summoning the spirits: possession and invocation in contemporary religion, London: I.B.Tauris, 74–90.

David, Ann R. (2010) ‘Gendering the divine: new forms of feminine Hindu worship’, International Journal of Hindu Studies, 13 (3), 337–55, doi: 10.1007/s11407-010-9078-z.

David, Ann R. (2012) ‘Sacralising the city: sound, space and performance in Hindu ritual practices in London’, Culture and Religion, 13 (4), 449–67, doi: 10.1080/14755610.20 12.728141.

David, Ann R. (2012) ‘Embodied migration: performance practices of diasporic Sri Lankan Tamil communities in London’, Journal of Intercultural Studies, 33 (4), 375–94, doi: 10.1080/07256868.2012.693815.

Eade, John (2011) ‘Sacralising space in a Western, secular city’, Journal of Town & City Management, 1 (4), 355–63.

Eade, John (2011) ‘From race to religion: multiculturalism and contested urban space’, in J. Beaumont and C. Butler (eds) Post-secular cities: space, theory, and practice, New York: Continuum, 154–67.

Eade, John (2011) ‘Excluding and including the “Other” in the global city – religious mission among Muslim and Catholic migrants in London’, in N. AlSayad and M. Massoumi (eds) The fundamentalist city – religiosity and the remaking of urban space, Abingdon: Routledge, 283–302.

Eade, John (2012) ‘Religion, home-making and migration across a globalising city: responding to mobility in London’, Culture and Religion, 13 (4), 469–83, doi: 10.1080/14755610.20 12.728142.

Eade, John and David Garbin (2007) ‘Reinterpreting the relationship between centre and periphery: pilgrimage and sacred spatialisation among Polish and Congolese communities in Britain’, Mobilities, 2 (3), 413–24, doi: 10.1080/17450100701597384.

Garbin, David (2013) ‘Visibility and invisibility of migrant faith in the city: diaspora religion and the politics of emplacement of Afro-Christian churches’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 39 (5), 677–96, doi: 10.1080/1369183X.2013.756658.

Garbin, David (2012) ‘Marching for God in the global city: public space, religion, and diasporic identities in a transnational African church’, Culture and Religion, 13 (4), 435–47, doi: 10.1080/14755610.2012.728140.

Garbin, David (2010) ‘Symbolic geographies of the sacred: diasporic territorialization and charismatic power in a transnational Congolese prophetic church’, in Gertrud Hüwelmeier and Kristine Krause (eds) Traveling spirits: migrants, markets and mobilities, New York: Routlege, 145–65.

Garbin, David (2010) ‘Embodied spirit(s) and charismatic power among Congolese migrants in London’, in A. Dawson (ed.) Summoning the spirits: possession and invocation in contemporary religion, London: I.B.Tauris, 46–57.



Garbin, David (2008) ‘A diasporic sense of space: dynamics of spatialization and transnational political fields among Bangladeshi Muslims in Britain’, in M. P. Smith and J. Eade (eds) Transnational ties: cities, identities, and migrations, New Brunswick: Transaction, 147–62.

Garbin, David and Marie Godin (2013) ‘“Saving the Congo”: transnational social fields and the politics of home in the Congolese diaspora’, Africa and Black Diaspora: An International Journal, 6 (2), 113–30, doi: 10.1080/17528631.2013.793133.

Garbin, David and Manuel A. Vásquez (2011) ‘“God is technology”: mediating the sacred in the Congolese diaspora’, in L. Fortunati, R. Pertierra and J. Vincent (eds) Migrations, diaspora and information technology in global societies, Abingdon: Routledge, 157–71.

Hansen, Thomas Blom, Caroline Jeannerat and Samadia Sadouni (2009) ‘Introduction: portable spirits and itinerant people: religion and migration in South Africa in a comparative perspective’, African Studies, 68 (2), 187–96, doi: 10.1080/00020180903109565.

Jeannerat, Caroline (2009) ‘Of lizards, misfortune and deliverance: pentecostal soteriology in the life of a migrant’, African Studies, 68 (2), 251–71, doi: 10.1080/00020180903109631.

Landau, Loren B. (2009) ‘Living within and beyond Johannesburg: exclusion, religion, and emerging forms of being’, African Studies, 68 (2), 197–214, doi: 10.1080/00020180903 109581.

Sadouni, Samadia (2009) ‘“God is not unemployed”: journeys of Somali refugees in Johannesburg’, African Studies, 68 (2), 235–49, doi: 10.1080/00020180903109615.

Sadouni, Samadia (2013) ‘Somalis in Johannesburg: Muslim transformations of the city’, in I. Becci, M. Burchardt and J. Casanova (eds) Topographies of faith: religion in urban spaces, London: Brill, 45–59.

Sadouni, Samadia (forthcoming) ‘Being an immigrant and facing uncertainties in South Africa: the case of Somalis in Mayfair’, in G. Gotz, C. Wray, P. Harrison and A. Todes (eds) Changing space: Johannesburg within its city-region, Johannesburg: Wits University Press.

Vásquez, Manuel A. (2009) ‘The global portability of pneumatic Christianity: comparing African and Latin American pentecostalisms, African Studies, 68 (2), 273–86, doi: 10.1080/ 00020180903109664.

Wong, Diana and Arfan Aziz (2011) ‘Dwelling in transience: kyai, pesantren, and the circulation of piety among Indonesia migrants in Malaysia’, Kontektualita: Jurnal Penelitian Sosial Keagamaan [Contextuality: Journal of Religious Social Studies], 26 (1), 21–38, available at: http://e-journal.iainjambi.ac.id/index.php/kontektualita/article/download/ 24/16.

Wong, Diana and Arfan Aziz (2013) ‘Etnogenesis dan kehidupan keagamaan migran Muslim di Malaysia [Ethnogenesis and religious lives of Muslim migrants in Malaysia]’, Kontektualita: Jurnal Penelitian Sosial Keagamaan [Contextuality: Journal of Religious Social Studies], 28 (1).

Wong, Diana and Arfan Aziz (2013) ‘Kehadiran Jamaah Tabligh di Malaysia dan memoir seorang Karkun Tabligh [The Tabligi Jamaat in Malaysia and the Memoir of a Tablighi Member]’, in Kontektualita: Jurnal Penelitian Sosial Keagamaan [Contextuality: Journal of Religious Social Studies], 28 (2).

Wong, Diana and Tan Pok Suan (2012) ‘“Looking for a life.” Rohingya refugee migration in the post-imperial age’, in Barak Kalir and Malini Sur (eds) Transnational flows and permissive polities. Ethnographies of human mobilities in Asia, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 75–90.

Wong, Diana and Ngu Ik Tien (forthcoming) ‘A “double alienation”: the vernacular Chinese church in Malaysia’, Asian Journal of Social Science.

Documents

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