Introduction: Religion and Belonging in Diaspora

[Published Fall 2016]

This special issue of Diaspora looks at a classic form of identity—religion—as it presents itself across space and time. Much historical and ethnographic work over the course of the last century has explored religious identity among bounded—or even unbounded—communities, but recent concerns (both scholarly and political) with the challenges of global mobility have led to new investigations into the complex dynamics of religion in sustaining, creating, and sometimes complicating connections across dispersed populations. Indeed, religion is one of the most prominent idioms through which diasporas come to produce shared consciousness, and shared practice. This volume is a way in to the problem of understanding how religion accomplishes the deep sense of belonging that it so often elicits, and how it is that religious life can bring about solidarity even when communities are not limited to one location.

Neither a religion nor a diaspora is a clearly defined or finite category, however, as either is mapped out in human experience. In all their regional, religious, and historical variation, the six articles that follow show how religions and diasporas produce each other: in these cases, religious life is premised upon dispersion—and global, networked connectedness depends upon the enduring links of shared religious action. In particular, the articles in this volume ask why and how religion is deployed for the sake of communities that identify transnationally, or globally, or extra-locally, and address the terms of its engagement. Understanding the relationship between religious formations and global networks returns us to a critical nexus of belonging: religion—public and private; individual and collective; in European capitals and in African ones; in Asian contexts and in Middle Eastern ones—lays the groundwork for human attachments across space.

As communities move, religions change: this observation should be no surprise to social scientists or historians attendant to the natural shifts in social processes over time. What we see here, further, though, is that shifts in religious life over time mirror those that we see in religious life over space: not only are communal practices dynamic, but theologies are, too, so as to bring about not only enduring ties in dispersion but also a malleability and applicability of ideology for the purpose of finding new homes and new ways of constituting community lives in multiple locations. Religions change in the way they are practiced, and also in their emphases, capacities, priorities, and structures. New locations pose new exigencies, and religions can offer ways to accommodate new circumstances—and even new hardships. Religion is perhaps one of the most flexible social formations there is: it is practiced for the sake of solidarity, and for the sake of resistance; for the sake of connection, and for the sake of disconnection.

Most importantly, we see in this volume how local formations of religious life are a response to—as well as a product of—the impulses and processes involved in establishing forms of belonging in new settings. This is clearly a transitive relationship, and yet if one side of the equation has to be identified as the initiator, we suggest that it is the drive to belong that inspires the religious changes that we document in diaspora. Diasporic lives are necessarily marked by spatial rupture and upheaval, and while religious narratives are often constructed in terms of consistency across place, in lived reality, practices often shift as practitioners move. Desires for constancy mean that these variations do not necessarily evoke contradictions for religious practitioners, however: paradigms of religious life may change, as a result of—and effecting—new forms of belonging, such that life can appear a little more seamless. Religions must change if people move—and singular theologies must have multiple forms if they are to work in multiple places.

In the articles in this volume, processes of religious change are consonant with—and take place in close relation to—the extension of religious cultures. The ethnographies and histories here show with remarkable consistency how patterns of change both adhere to traditional religious rhetorics—pilgrimage, spirits, shrines, and associations are at the heart of the...