Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the organization of temporality in religious healing through dreams and visions of Kabyle immigrants in France, which prompted their conversion from Islam to Christianity. More broadly, the paper shows how memory works over time and space in processes of religious change.

Paper long abstract:

How do religious conversion testimonies featuring dreams and visions reveal different experiences of time, in particular, disruption, but also non-binary transformations? What do religious transformations and shifts in locality and lifestyle mean for memory in the organization of temporality? This proposed paper explores the organization of temporality in religious healing through dreams and visions of Kabyle immigrants in France, which prompted their conversion from Islam to Christianity, as conveyed in testimonies and life histories. Drawing on data from field research in and around Paris and its suburbs, there is analysis of the convert immigrants' lived experiences of transformation over time as shaped by entering new religious and psycho-social spaces. More broadly, the paper seeks to show ways remembering and forgetting work over time and space in processes of religious and psycho-social change in complex cases of both conversion and immigration, when there is, it is argued, an intertwining of disruption and continuity in both time and space. Remembering and forgetting, rather than mutually exclusive, together are part of how these immigrants forge new meanings in their temporal, spatial, and psycho-social religious healing from their experiences of tensions with the post-colonial state and political violence in Algeria and experiences of economic precarity and social discrimination in France. Visions and dreams illustrate the co-determination, co-constructedness, and multifunctionality of psycho-social conversion, space, and time.