Asian Migrants and Religious Experience

Asian Migrants and Religious Experience
Author: Brenda S.A. Yeoh
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Total Pages: 347
Release: 2018-07-21
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9048532221

Typically, scholars approach migrants' religions as a safeguard of cultural identity, something that connects migrants to their communities of origin. This ethnographic anthology challenges that position by reframing the religious experiences of migrants as a transformative force capable of refashioning narratives of displacement into journeys of spiritual awakening and missionary calling. These essays explore migrants' motivations in support of an argument that to travel inspires a search for new meaning in religion.

Migration and Religion in Europe

Migration and Religion in Europe
Author: Ester Gallo
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2016-04-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317096371

Religious practices and their transformation are crucial elements of migrants' identities and are increasingly politicized by national governments in the light of perceived threats to national identity. As new immigrant flows shape religious pluralism in Europe, longstanding relations between the State and Church are challenged, together with majority-faith traditions and societies’ ways of representing and perceiving themselves. With attention to variations according to national setting, this volume explores the process of reformulating religious identities and practices amongst South Asian 'communities' in European contexts, Presenting a wide range of ethnographies, including studies of Hinduism, Sikhism, Jainism and Islam amongst migrant communities in contexts as diverse as Norway, Italy, the UK, France and Portugal, Migration and Religion in Europe sheds light on the meaning of religious practices to diasporic communities. It examines the manner in which such practices can be used by migrants and local societies to produce distance or proximity, as well as their political significance in various 'host' nations. Offering insights into the affirmation of national identities and cultures and the implications of this for governance and political discourse within Europe, this book will appeal to scholars with interests in anthropology, religion and society, migration, transnationalism and gender.

Religion at the Corner of Bliss and Nirvana

Religion at the Corner of Bliss and Nirvana
Author: Lois Ann Lorentzen
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 406
Release: 2009-09-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0822391163

Based on ethnographic research by an interdisciplinary team of scholars and activists, Religion at the Corner of Bliss and Nirvana illuminates the role that religion plays in the civic and political experiences of new migrants in the United States. By bringing innovative questions and theoretical frameworks to bear on the experiences of Chinese, Filipino, Mexican, Salvadoran, and Vietnamese migrants, the contributors demonstrate how groups and individuals negotiate multiple religious, cultural, and national identities, and how religious faiths are transformed through migration. Taken together, their essays show that migrants’ religious lives are much more than replications of home in a new land. They reflect a process of adaptation to new physical and cultural environments, and an ongoing synthesis of cultural elements from the migrants’ countries of origin and the United States. As they conducted research, the contributors not only visited churches and temples but also single-room-occupancy hotels, brothels, tattoo-removal clinics, and the streets of San Francisco, El Salvador, Mexico, and Vietnam. Their essays include an exploration of how faith-based organizations can help LGBT migrants surmount legal and social complexities, an examination of transgendered sex workers’ relationship with the unofficial saint Santisima Muerte, a comparison of how a Presbyterian mission and a Buddhist temple in San Francisco help Chinese immigrants to acculturate, and an analysis of the transformation of baptismal rites performed by Mayan migrants. The voices of gang members, Chinese and Vietnamese Buddhist nuns, members of Pentecostal churches, and many others animate this collection. In the process of giving voice to these communities, the contributors interrogate theories about acculturation, class, political and social capital, gender and sexuality, the sociology of religion, transnationalism, and globalization. The collection includes twenty-one photographs by Jerry Berndt. Contributors. Luis Enrique Bazan, Kevin M. Chun, Hien Duc Do, Patricia Fortuny Loret de Mola, Joaquin Jay Gonzalez III, Sarah Horton, Cymene Howe, Mimi Khúc, Jonathan H. X. Lee, Lois Ann Lorentzen, Andrea Maison, Dennis Marzan, Rosalina Mira, Claudine del Rosario, Susanna Zaraysky

Toward a Theology of Migration

Toward a Theology of Migration
Author: G. Cruz
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2016-04-30
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1137375515

Offering a theology of migration, Cruz reflects on the Christian vision of 'one bread, one body, one people' in view of the gifts and challenges of contemporary migration to Christian spirituality, mission, and inculturation and the need for reform of migration policies based on the experience of refugees, migrant women, and others.

Migration: the Asian Experience

Migration: the Asian Experience
Author: Judith M. Brown
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2016-07-27
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1349236780

This edited collection of essays describes the main broad streams of Asian migration and their wide geographical spread, both in terms of migrants' origins and their destinations. Evidence comes from several of the countries of South and East Asia. It shows migrants moving within their own countries; abroad but still within Asia; and overseas particularly to Britain and North America. The essays address both the subjective and objective causes of migration and some of the consequences, for the individual, the family and the migrant community both as an entity and in relation to the host society.

Diasporic Journeys, Ritual, and Normativity among Asian Migrant Women

Diasporic Journeys, Ritual, and Normativity among Asian Migrant Women
Author: Pnina Werbner
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 487
Release: 2019-07-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317983238

The power of embodied ritual performance to constitute agency and transform subjectivity are increasingly the focus of major debates in the anthropology of Christianity and Islam. They are particularly relevant to understanding the way transnational women migrants from South and South East Asia, Christians, Muslims and Buddhists, who migrate to Asia, Europe and the Middle East to work as carers and maids, re-imagine and recreate themselves in moral and ethical terms in the diaspora. This timely collection shows how women international migrants, stereotypically represented as a ‘nation of servants’, reclaim sacralised spaces of sociality in their migration destinations, and actively transform themselves from mere workers into pilgrims and tourists on cosmopolitan journeys. Such women struggle for dignity and respect by re-defining themselves in terms of an ethics of care and sacrifice. As co-worshippers they recreate community through fiestas, feasts, protests, and shared conviviality, while subverting established normativities of gender, marriage and conjugality; they renegotiate their moral selfhood through religious conversion and activism. For migrants the place of the church or mosque becomes a gateway to new intellectual and experiential horizons as well as a locus for religious worship and a haven of humanitarian assistance in a strange land. This book was published as a special issue of the Asia-Pacific Journal of Anthropology.

The Chinese Exodus

The Chinese Exodus
Author: Li Ma
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 150
Release: 2018-07-02
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 153264597X

This book offers a sociological analysis as well as a theological discussion of China’s internal migration since the marketization reform in 1978. It documents the social and political processes that encompass the experiences of internal migrants from the countryside to the city during China’s integration into the global economy. Informed by sociological analysis and narratives of the urban poor, this volume reconstructs the political, economic, social and spiritual dimensions of this urban underclass in China who made up the economic backbone of the Asian superpower.

Chinese New Migrants in Suriname

Chinese New Migrants in Suriname
Author: Paul B. Tjon Sie Fat
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Total Pages: 478
Release: 2009
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9056295985

This book covers various aspects of New Chinese Migration in Suriname in the 1990s and early 2000s. It is an ethnography of New Chinese Migrants in the context of South- South migration, but also a first ethnography of Chinese in Suriname, as well as an analysis of Surinamese ethnic discourse and ethnopolitics. Starting in the 1990s, renewed immigration from China changed the dynamics of the Surinamese Chinese community, which developed from a Hakka enclave to a culturally and linguistically diverse, modern Chinese migrant group. Local positioning strategies of Chinese had always depended on ethnic entrepreneurship and political participation, but were now complicated by anti-immigrant sentiments.

Immigration and Religion in America

Immigration and Religion in America
Author: Richard Alba
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 414
Release: 2009
Genre: History
ISBN: 0814705049

Religion has played a crucial role in American immigration history as an institutional resource for migrants' social adaptation, as a map of meaning for interpreting immigration experiences, and as a continuous force for expanding the national ideal of pluralism. To explain these processes the editors of this volume brought together the perspectives of leading scholars of migration and religion. The resulting essays present salient patterns in American immigrants' religious lives, past and present. In comparing the religious experiences of Mexicans and Italians, Japanese and Koreans, Eastern European Jews and Arab Muslims, and African Americans and Haitians, the book clarifies how such processes as incorporation into existing religions, introduction of new faiths, conversion, and diversification have contributed to America's extraordinary religious diversity and add a comprehensive religious dimension to our understanding of America as a nation of immigrants.

Faith on the Move

Faith on the Move
Author: Fabio Baggio
Publisher: Ateneo University Press
Total Pages: 39
Release: 2008
Genre: History
ISBN: 9715505570

"The essays in this anthology were first presented as papers in the conference, "Faith on the Move: Toward a Theology of Migration in Asia," July 14-15, 2006, jointly organized by the Scalabrini Migration Center, Episcopal Commission on Migrants and Itinerant People, and the Maryhill School of Theology." --Book Jacket.