Paper short abstract:

How do immigrants perceive death and dying and incorporate them in their religious worldviews? Using as case study the example of immigrants from Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde in Portugal, this paper will deal with the multiple levels that death touches upon, especially the religious ones.

Paper long abstract:

In spite of the interest that the recent status of Portugal as an immigration country arises, some important issues dealing with immigrant´s states of suffering and death, have hardly been dealt with. How do immigrants perceive death and dying and incorporate them in their religious conceptualizations of the diaspora? For immigrants, death is a reality that often conditions the relation with the home country. Death is thus here looked upon as a process, which involves specific emotional states and triggers the use of rituals in order to cope with the unavoidable distress, acquiring more complicated aspects when away from home. Using as case study the example of immigrants from Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde in Portugal, this paper will deal with the multiple levels that death touches upon, from the symbolic and religious ones to the more practical ones. Death is one realm in which a transnational approach is mandatory; it entails an intense circulation of material goods and wealth, but also of highly symbolic significant universes which circulate along with the goods and the people: the corpse, but also the spirits and the relations with the other world that people brought along into the diaspora situation.