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Conclusion
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Conclusion “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,” the Queen remarked. Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass If ritual is a genre more resistant to innovation than other kinds of human action—whether because it is kinetically based and buried beneath conscious critique, or because it has no author and is collectively owned and resistant to individual innovation, or because its very efficacy depends on the notion of faithful repetition—still, like other memory forms, it must be constantly renewed with fresh enactments, or it will die. Even faithful repetitions of homeland rituals change when performed in new surroundings and in response to new crises. While diasporic religion sacralizes continuity with a place and people left behind, in practice it projects and engages new horizons of present and future affiliations. As we have seen, the contents of a tradition multiply as ritual models are exchanged between homeland and diasporic contexts. This diversification occurs not only because the materials in the two sites differ and give religious practice a distinct “feel,” although this is certainly the case. It also occurs because ritual performance in each site is enfolded within what Lefebvre (1991: 42, 57) called “textures ” of space—the contours of representational regimes and signifying practices by which space is made place and filled with meaning. Here I call attention to three main theoretical issues. The first is the problem of authenticity that emerges in diaspora; the second is the 227 228 CONCLUSION divergence in the semiotic logic of ritual performance in diaspora and in the homeland; and the third is the form of community generated by diasporic religion—the ways in which ideas of “being a people” are highlighted and reified, but also by necessity extended to wider social networks. I attempt to theorize how the work of producing likeness between diasporic ritual events and those of the homeland discloses new horizons of religious identity, and how horizons of pastness are interwoven with horizons of futurity. My conclusions may offer traction for the comparative study of other examples of diasporic religions and the phenomenon of diasporic religion in general. Back to the Future As I have shown, diasporas neither simply extend a given set of practices and its practitioners in space nor simply maintain a set of memories about the place left behind through migration, exile, or removal. Rather, they adjust and transform religion as they perform and represent the left-behind place in new social contexts and places, with different resources. Garifuna ritual actors constitute history as a set of embodied competencies through which the ancestors return; but the question of exactly where they return from—St. Vincent, Honduras, or Africa—is a question that was first opened by Garifuna in New York. In a sense, then, diasporas even construct religion as a discrete entity by problematizing its boundaries and priorities; they shift them from implicit practice to overt debate, and from hegemony to ideological contest. Diasporic religion calls forth new standards of orthodoxy and orthopraxy and new modes of transmission. On the one hand, Garifuna ritual events are condensed and abstracted as a set of mimetic representations of the homeland shamans and the rites of territorial return they lead. On the other hand, if the versions of ritual in New York are in some ways materially condensed, they are in other ways extended and elaborated by the addition of new objects and practices of the hostland to their repertoire and by becoming systematically articulated and affixed as they jostle for recognition in a culturally pluralist milieu. Moreover, the rituals of the New York diaspora have different social functions. Diasporic ritual performances articulate the external ethnic boundary of the group as a whole rather than delimiting families or other subgroups. [3.239.119.159] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 11:32 GMT) CONCLUSION 229 In the dügüs I witnessed in Honduras, by contrast, ethnic identity was self-evident rather than in need of definition and defense. In sum, diasporic religion is characterized by its more symbolic redaction (a term I explain below), by the formal elaboration of its doctrines , and by a heightened attention to social boundaries. But this shift in performative mode also makes it possible for the religion to be extended to a broader religious community. In New York, an alternative , “cosmopolitan” version of religious authority has emerged. Diasporic practitioners of Garifuna religion, for example, now view their practice as comparable to other religions of...