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- Convenors:
-
Jin-Heon Jung
Alexander Horstmann (University of Bielefeld)
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- Format:
- Panels
- Location:
- SO-B487
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 14 August, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Stockholm
Short Abstract:
Building on the conversation between scholarship and disciplines, our panel explores the spatial location of religion in the flows and global chains of Diasporic migrant, refugee and religious communities as well as the difference that religion makes as a transformative force.
Long Abstract:
This panel invites scholars and practitioners for interdisciplinary discussions about the multilayered roles and efficacies of religion over the course of refugee-migrants' life trajectories and in the Diasporic political community. Intellectually innovative essays on refugee-diaspora communities in any continents are all welcome. Selected papers should demonstrate interdisciplinary approaches and comparative perspectives primarily based on empirical research on the transformative interactions with the divine among refugee-migrant individuals and Diaspora, religious institutions and networks, social movements and (inter)national organizations. In particular, contributors are encouraged to shed light on the ways religious mobilizations and religious strategies of place-making help refugees recover and reconstruct lives in exile and transnational during periods of despair. Papers should provide critical reflections on the ongoing tensions between the secular and the sacred, the national and the transnational, security and humanity. Further, this panel wants to examine the material, moral, imaginative, and utopian forces in the flows of the displaced through the lens of religion that exhibits a transformative power for people interacting with each other in terms of hospitality, self-help and healing. As such, our contributions should encompass the secular and sacred obstacles and aspirations that the refugee individuals' experience and envision through their life trajectories. Ultimately, this panel aims to cumulatively effect a paradigm shift in the approaches, perspectives, and practices on the potentials and limits of divine and humane interactions in the studies of refugee and religion.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 14 August, 2018, -Paper short abstract:
This paper offer an in-depth ethnographic study of a evangelical humanitarian organization helping in the remote frontier areas of Myanmar in emergency health care, and expanding its operations to the Nuban mountains of Sudan and to the Kurdish region of Iraq and Syria.
Paper long abstract:
Building on ethnographic fieldwork on humanitarian cultures in Karen state, Eastern Myanmar since 2007-today, this paper examines the vastly expanded mobility of displaced Karen villagers in the evangelical humanitarian movement Free Burma Rangers in the Thai-Burmese borderlands. While refugees are too often presented in the literature as victims, the article argues that by joining the mission, the Karen freedom fighters become ambassadors of a political ideology and evangelism. Bringing Christianity with them from their displaced homes, displaced Karen meet the evangelical humanitarian organization in the Thai refugee camps, train with them and supply the villagers left behind with emergency health care and religious messages. Funded by American free churches, the US military and resettled Karen communities in the West, the freedom fighters of the Free Burma Rangers mobilize people and resources all over the globe and expand their operations to the Kurdish areas of Syria and the Nuban mountains of South Sudan, thus getting involved into a global struggle between the perceived good and the evil.
Paper short abstract:
What does it mean for an asylum-seeker to have "genuine" faith? What does belief look like or sound like? Working with solicitors, people of faith, and asylum-seekers, I propose a sociolegal approach to complicate assumptions of belief and faith within the UK Asylum Tribunals.
Paper long abstract:
My work focuses on the English Asylum Tribunals, and the tensions within in cases of faith and conversion. Representatives from the UK Home Office focus on assessments of an asylum applicant's faith: is the asylum-seeker a "genuine" believer, or are those supporting the seeker "hoodwinked"? This "binary of belief" is problematized by the lived experiences of asylum-seekers, whose narratives contradict the bureaucratic assumptions of what genuine faith ought to look and sound like. My ethnographic research—taking place inside the Tribunals themselves, as well as in churches, community centers, and NGOs—with solicitors, people of faith, and asylum-seekers seeks to complicate discourses around conversion, belief, and legal status to remain. I consider asylum-seekers' own larger narratives, descriptions of belief, and complicated relationships to faith alongside the complexities of legal regimes.
How does one prove faith? How does a purportedly secular legal system measure religious belief? How are asylum claims supported by those from the community, whether previously asylum-seeker or not? How does faith exist as a factor for those who support asylum-seekers?
By applying a sociolegal lens to these questions, I ask further questions of the tensions found inside and outside the UK Asylum Tribunals.
Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses how participants of the Hizmet Movement in Brazil have mobilized Islamic history in order to deal with their new reality of forced migrants, after the 15 July 2016 coup attempt in Turkey and the ensuing crackdown on the Movement participants and institutions.
Paper long abstract:
The Hizmet community in Brazil is part of the Hizmet (or Gülen) Movement, a transnational Turkish Sunni Muslim movement with a missionary character, present in many countries worldwide. “Hizmet” means “service” and is a term used by the community’s members to refer both to the Movement itself and to the religiously motivated service in which they engage – a whole set of activities and practices, which includes religious performances but also different kinds of involvement in community building and in promoting their own idea of Islam. After the 15 July 2016 coup attempt in Turkey, the ensuing crackdown on the Movement participants and institutions has put them into a critical political, financial, and social situation inside and outside the country. In Brazil, members of the Hizmet community have interpreted the critical juncture as both proof of their being in the righteous path and a necessary step towards purification and closeness to God. In this context, conjoint efforts towards community building, as well as financial and emotional mutual support reinforce the sense of belonging, solidarity, and religious piety. This paper is based on two and a half years of ethnographic fieldwork with the Hizmet community in Brazil, and is centered on that period of transition, analyzing how members of the community have articulated Islamic history and the idea of hijra (Muhammad’s migration from Mecca to Medina in 622 A.D.) to deal with their new reality and migration experience.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines North Korean refugees' Christian encounters throughout their perilous migrations to South Korea, North America, and Europe in comparative perspectives. Based on ethnographic data, it discusses the intersections between the national and transnational aspirations.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines North Korean refugees' Christian encounters throughout their perilous migrations to and settlements in South Korea, North America, and Europe in comparative perspectives. It investigates how some of them become voluntarily or involuntarily converted to Christianity, and ordained as professional missionaries, while others are indifferent, critical to, or disenchanted from the religion in accordance with the host societies. Their conversion to Christianity is often depicted as a sacred signifier of the national evangelization in South Korean evangelical discourses, which consider North Korea as evil threatening the "God blessed" South and the United States. Such evangelical churches and missionary organizations have provided for the refugees the secret shelters in China, and the "Underground railways" through Southeast Asian countries to South Korea and other western countries. South Korean ethnic churches in western societies are so crucial that the individual refugees tend to rely on such co-ethnic community during the initial period of their resettlement. Given the fact that most North Korean refugees come to experience social discrimination in the context of South Korea, this paper compares the different roles and the effects of the churches that are successful or not in hosting North Korean refugees in England, Germany, Americas, and South Korea. Therefore, this paper discusses the intersections between the national and the transnational aspirations of the refugees.
Paper short abstract:
By taking into account the complexity of the fire-walking festival in La Réunion, this paper reflects on how this ritual cycle and the negotiation with the divine can be a way to be linked to the ancestors' migratory past, and how it can be a great resource for the transformation of one's life.
Paper long abstract:
La Réunion is a French overseas department situated in the Indian Ocean. Its society has been founded since the seventeenth century by multiple migrations which have led to a Creole universe. The Indian migration played a major role in the settlement, especially due to coolie trade. Indians bought to La Réunion their divinities, practices and myths. Among the religious rituals, there was the fire-walking festival in honour of Pandialy, a divinity better known in India by the name of Draupadī. This ritual cycle, grounded on mythology, lasts eighteen days during which practitioners commit themselves to the divinity and at the end walk barefoot on hot embers in order to obtain all kinds of well-being in their lives. The fire-walking festival has been on the rise and has become a strong symbol, not only to define the Hindu sphere, but it has also become a great emblem of efficacy.
Based on my ethnological fieldwork on the island, this paper questions firstly the place of Indian descendants in a Creole society, then it reflects on the ritual efficacy. Crossing the historical, mythological and performative aspects of the festival, it takes into account the individual's life trajectories. This paper finally suggests that fire-walking can take different meanings. By negotiation with the divinity and her story, the ritual can symbolically establish bridges with the migratory past, but also, by putting the self in danger walking through fire, it can be a resource of transformation to have a hold over one's life.
Paper short abstract:
The paper discusses experiences of how Christian love for Egyptian Coptic Christians in Egypt and Belgium translates into concrete moral behaviour, daily life choices and (de)political sensibilities, in the context of life as a minority group
Paper long abstract:
This paper concentrates on how Egyptian Coptic Christians experience Christian love in their daily lives as well as in their major life choices, especially migration and life in the new host society. Although Christian love has historically been subject of extensive literary and theological study, it has rarely been studied within anthropology. Copts have received much attention in the last decade as a contemporary religious, cultural minority in Egyptian Muslim majority society. Its (sometimes self-defined and sometimes given) characterization as a persecuted group has been an important part of this recent scholarship. Particular attention went to how a historical sense of persecution affects and transforms theological understandings and social life (Shenoda, 2010). Against this background, this paper examines how Christian love is experienced, how it shapes feelings of belonging and everyday morality and how it helps to cope with major life choices, in both the Egyptian and Belgian context.
Based on ethnographic observations, in-depth interviews and biographical research interviews conducted in 2016-2017 with Copts living in Egypt and in Belgium, this paper discusses how Christian love translated in concrete ways that mediated interactions with majority groups and helped to cope with hardships. It particularly engages with the fluid boundaries between secular and religious expressions of love. Love for God and for other humans are both seen as partaking in one divine love. At the same time, practicing this love offers concrete responses in moments of despair, hardship and doubt that arise in everyday life and social interaction.