Paper short abstract:

In South Africa's post-apartheid era, new waves of migrants from South Asia, and North and East Africa have settled in Fordsburg, a suburb located on the western periphery of Johannesburg's city centre.

Paper long abstract:

Animated by the 'nature of contemporary diversity (see Vertovec 2010: 87), and the politics of space (Painter 2008; Campbell 1998), this paper examines how the religious lives, expressions, and rituals of international migrants explain the production of space, and the (re)positioning of ethnic and religious groups in the city. Drawing on original empirical research and historical data, we argue that international migrants are physically and spiritually shaping the spaces in which they live and work, and that this process helps to explain their power and position in In South Africa's post-apartheid era, new waves of migrants from South Asia, and North and East Africa have settled in Fordsburg, a suburb located on the western periphery of Johannesburg's city centre. Many of these migrants are Hindu or Muslim and the symbols, structures and sites of their worship and faith are evident in the physical and spiritual landscape of Fordsburg. Drawing on the literature on the production and power of space, we show how the religious lives, rituals, and expressions of new migrants have engaged and transformed physical and meta physical space, that is the nature of form and order in Fordsburg, Johannesburg. The ability to influence, and shape the physical space in which they live, or on the contrary, to be subverted within the territories, that is to be subjected to the social, political and spatial order which they inhabit we argue, demonstrates the position and power, or lack thereof, of migrants in communities.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the structuring of a house church in a globalising China. Drawing on the concept of scale, it argues that a focus on the house church as a localised site of resistance obscures the ways in which Christianity is globalising in China.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the structuring of a house church in a globalising China. I draw on ethnographic research conducted in Shanghai and focus on the processes through which a group of overseas Chinese Christians structure a network of house churches. The Christians I discuss are senior executives working in multinational business corporations circulating in the region for work. Drawing on the concept of scale, I demonstrate how this overseas Chinese house church negotiates state regulations and transect city, national and global scales. In doing so, I argue that a focus on the house church as a localised site of resistance obscures the ways in which Christianity in China is globalising and the extent to which religion is a part of a state-driven project to build a modern Chinese nation.

Paper short abstract:

I explore how Amis religious practices in urban areas replicate familiar homeland landscapes in new places of settlements and open a space for affirmation of a shared religious tradition. Observations on these practices can also open interesting discussion about the new religious developments in Taiwan.

Paper long abstract:

The harvest festival, rife with meaning and value, began to flourish in Taiwan when the Amis migrated to other parts of the country. Although the duration, hosting methods, meaning, and values of the city- and joint-type festivals differ from original-type harvest festivals, Amis migrants actively participate in the city-type harvest festivals and intertownship joint harvest festivals. In addition to practice their traditional rituals, Amis migrants also annually conduct the feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary and Catholic Aboriginal Day in metropolitan areas. This paper explores how Amis religious practices in urban areas replicate familiar homeland landscapes in new places of settlements and open a space for affirmation of a shared religious tradition and identity. These religious practices provide stability and ground in the process of settlement and adjustment often experienced as displaced and unstable. They also play a significant role in the ongoing transformation of space into a meaningful place of home. In addition, observations on these innovative religious practices can also open interesting discussion about the new religious developments in Taiwan, including incorporating many traditionally non-religious elements and developing a much larger scale than ever before.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how people in exile negotiate the obligation to remember deceased family members who endured tragic and untimely death. Focusing on North Korean refugees in Japan, the paper shows how performing ancestor worship is an act of faith that moves to heal and forgive the wounds of the past.

Paper long abstract:

The communally experienced, violent, and tragic deaths of countless people during the DPRK famine (mid 1990s-early 2000s) meant that North Korea has become a nation of wandering ghosts. North Koreans in exile, those who have escaped across the Sino-Korean border and made their way to South Korea and Japan, are faced with the challenge of maintaining ties to their deceased kin, without residing on ancestral soil. Maintaining ties with deceased family ensures a link to the past and a means of reaching for stability during times of uncertainty.

Fieldwork with North Korean refugees in South Korea and Japan gave me insight into the practices by which these links are created and recreated in the domestic arena. I argue that the ancestor worship practices of North Koreans in Japan are acts of faith through which migrants heal and seek forgiveness for the betrayal or abandoning their ancestors. For persons haunted by tragic spirits, ancestral rites help negotiate feelings of guilt, regret and sorrow, and reinterpret the relationship with their ancestors from a narrative of betrayal to one of reconciliation and renewal.

In on-going communality and commensality with the ghosts of the dead, North Koreans in exile actively engender spaces for family reunion in the process of making home away from home.

Paper short abstract:

This research attempts to explore how Truku Pentecostal morality uses highly refined discourses of “weakness” and temptation by devils as a cognitive framework to cope with the uncertainty of a marginalised life in modern Taiwan.

Paper long abstract:

This paper seeks to address the ways in which Pentecostalism constructs, in its adherents, a worldview through the refinement of belief in devils. Scholars, like Meyer (1999) and Robbins (2010), note the tendency for Pentecostals to demonize pre-Christian cosmologies in relation to their Pentecostal world view as a foil against which to continually define the present. My research, conducted among Truku Pentecostals in Taiwan, attempts to extend this framework and explores how Pentecostal morality uses highly refined discourses of "weakness" and temptation by devils as a cognitive framework to understand the human responses to the arduous conditions of life in an indigenous Taiwanese community.

Before colonisation Truku lived high in the central mountain range of Taiwan. However as their territory was colonised they endured dramatic social change as they were forced to leave their mountain homelands and settle on the coastal plains in communities arranged by the colonising powers. This displacement from the mountains undermined the terrestrial basis of traditional Truku cosmology as this cosmology was entirely imbedded in the very landscape of the mountains itself. Simultaneously Truku suffered a number of epidemics that could not be assuaged by their traditional beliefs. These conditions contributed to the mass conversion of Truku people to Christianity/Pentecostalism.

Under these conditions Truku incorporated their traditional belief-system into their new Pentecostal beliefs as evil and demonic. In this combined cosmological order Truku elaborate ideas of devils and weakness in ways that enable them to cope with the uncertainty of a marginalised life in modern Taiwan.

Paper short abstract:

Sri Lankan Catholic priests develop a deep spiritual connection to Italian parishioners. This congenial relationship is based on the emphasis placed by Asian seminaries on pastoral training, and on a kind of reciprocity by which spiritual guidance is repaid with hospitality towards foreign clergy

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the experiences of Sri Lankan Catholic priests who work in Italy, especially focusing on the distinct care that they place on reaching out to the communities that they work with. Through fieldwork conducted in Sri Lanka and Italy, I analyze how South Asian priestly vocations are strongly inspired by the conviction that missionary work and pastoral care are the central component of religious life. Such an approach is contrasted with the more "professional" training of European clergy who retain a strong sense of personal space, privacy and distance from the laity. As a consequence of this different methodologies, European laities often see in foreign priests a more honest and genuinely disinterested way of living the priesthood. I argue that while missionaries care for the spiritual well-being of the parishes they work with, receiving communities also "give back" by placing particular care in welcoming and embracing foreign priests who often struggle with the language and culture of European Catholicism. A reciprocal relationship emerges in which the spiritual guidance and full-time dedication that migrant priests offer is acknowledged with hospitality and warmth. Moreover, reproducing a similar phenomenon as that confronted by European missionaries in South Asia a century earlier, foreign priests are generally perceived to be exempt from local tensions and interests, in this way highlighting their spiritual commitments and underplaying mundane attachments.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the religious transformation among Indonesian Muslims living and working in Hong Kong.

Paper long abstract:

Religiosity of oneself may become different in various places including hometown and new residence they belong to. In regard to the practices of religiosity in hometown, there is a number of socio-cultural restrictions people may face, while in a new residence, opportunities and challenges are also influential. Based on a fieldwork in Hong Kong in 2012, this paper highlights the religious transformation of Indonesian Migrant Muslims living and working in Hong Kong. This country has transformed many Indonesian Muslims into different new identities at least from their physical appearance in public. Face-veil and short pants have become two different extreme points which colored their life. This paper examines how self-transformation has created a renewed person in terms of becoming more 'religious' with many forms of piety (Mahmood 2005) on the one hand, or more 'hedonistic' on the other due to spatial displacement.. Including in this issue, this paper also has a look at how opportunities and challenges in a new place have transformed a migrant into different personalities in terms of religiosity. As parts of religious transformation, issue of gender (Robinson 2000), agency (Avishai 2008), identity, marriage (Nisa 2013), and origins will become a substantial part of the discussion.

Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on the anxieties of a particular Sufi community in Northwest China who fear the moral decline of their lineage in a country that they perceive to be, at times, "materialistic, chaotic and vulgar."

Paper long abstract:

Since the 17th century, Sufi communities in China have pursued an imported religiosity in a foreign setting - an existence which has come with a unique set of moral challenges. They have had to sustain a religious identity in the face of both changing orthodoxy amongst the Chinese Muslim community, and oscillating degrees of tolerance from the Chinese state. As the historian Jonathan Lipman has noted, the contradictions amongst Islamic groups in China, internal and with one another, "represent symbolically the difficulties of being both Chinese and Muslim" (Lipman, 1997:92). These difficulties continue to varying degrees today. This paper focuses on the anxieties of one particular Sufi community in Northwest China - a branch of the Qadiriyya named Guo Gongbei. Some amongst the community fear the moral decline of their lineage in a country that they perceive to be, at times, "materialistic, chaotic and vulgar." It explores both their concerns and their responses to the historical and contemporary challenge of being, to borrow a phrase from Lipman, 'familiar strangers' in a changing moral landscape.