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Paper short abstract:

Migration is a fertile ground for understanding how devotion connects the inner dimension of the ethical and religious subject to the wider social experience. I will focus on young Sri Lankan Catholics in Southern Italy, examining how devotion feeds civic responsibility and Self-making projects.

Paper long abstract:

Connections between devotion and the wider social context is perhaps more evident in the frame of migration. In a world that is not quite familiar, devotion provides for an alternative cartography of belongings.

Drawing on an ongoing ethnographic research, in this paper I would like to focus on the ethical and religious learning of young Sri Lankan Catholics in Italy’s southern region of Sicily (more precisely in the city of Messina). In particular, I will examine how devotion and the dense set of ritual practices enacted by the Sri Lankan Catholic community (one of the largest foreign communities in Sicily) combines the acquisition of inner ethical dispositions and social and civic responsibilities within the community - witnessed by the greeting “Jesu Pihithai” ("May Jesus bless you") - in the light of Sri Lankan current political scenario and the moral ambivalences brought by migration.

Rather than being rigidly “buffered”, the Catholic Self emerging from weekly Masses, pilgrimages to the main Sicilian catholic shrines, catechism and religious family education does not seem to assume a sharp distinction between the private realm of devotion and the needs for social and cultural reproduction of Sri Lankans living abroad. The religious subjectivity of young catholic Sri Lankans seems rather to extend the space and the role of devotion and ethical learning. Daily acts of worship and the adoption of moral behavior in every-day life trace complex projects of Self-making, balanced between the weight of social bonds and desire for transnational individual affirmation.