The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion by John Hinnells

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Hendershot, Heather (2004) Shaking the World for Jesus: Media and Conservative Evangelical Culture, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hoover, Stewart (1988) Mass Media Religion: The Social Sources of the Electronic Church, London: Sage. Hoover, Stewart and Lundby, Knut (eds) (1997) Rethinking Media, Religion and Culture, London: Sage. Hoover, Stewart and Clark, Lynn Schofield Clark (eds) (2002). Practicing Religion in the Age of the

Media: Explorations in Media, Religion and Culture, New York: Columbia University Press. Hurley, Neil (1970) Theology through Film, New York: Harper & Row.

Jasper, David (1997) ‘On systematizing the unsystematic: a response’, in C. Marsh and G. Ortiz

Explorations in Theology and Film, Oxford: Blackwell, pp.235–44.

Jewett, Robert (1993) ‘St. Paul at the Movies’: The Apostle’s Dialogue with American Culture, Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press.

Johnson, Richard (1986/7) ‘What is cultural studies anyway?’, Social Text, 16, pp.38–80.

Johnston, Robert (ed.) (2007) Reframing Theology and Film: New Focus for an Emerging Discipline, Grand Rapids: Baker Academic.

Kreitzer, Larry (2002) Gospel Images in Fiction and Film: On Reversing the Hermeneutical Flow, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press.

Lefebvre, Henri (1961) Critique of Everyday Life, vol.II, London: Verso.

Lelwica, Michelle (2005) ‘Losing their way to salvation: women, weight loss and the salvation myth of culture lite’, in (eds) B. Forbes and J. Mahan Religion and Popular Culture in America , 2nd edition, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp.174–194.

Lovheim, Mia (2007) ‘Virtually boundless? Youth negotiating tradition in cyberspace’, in (ed.) N. Ammerman Everyday Religion: Observing Modern Religious Lives, New York: Oxford University Press, pp.83–101.

Lundby, Knut (2006) ‘Contested communication: mediating the sacred’, in J. Sumiala-Seppanen, K. Lundby and R. Salokangas (eds) Implications of the Sacred in Post-Modern Media, Göteborg: Nordicom, pp.43–62.

Lundby, Knut (ed.) (2009) Mediatization: Concepts, Changes, Consequences, New York: Peter Lang. Lynch, Gordon (2005) Understanding Theology and Popular Culture, Oxford: Blackwell.

Lynch, Gordon (2006) ‘The role of popular music in the construction of alternative spiritual ideologies and identities’, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 45(4), pp.481–8.

Lynch, Gordon (2007) Between Sacred and Profane: Researching Religion and Popular Culture, London: IB Tauris.

Lynch, Gordon (2009a) ‘Cultural theory and cultural studies’, in J. Lyden (ed.) The Routledge Companion to Religion and Film, London: Routledge, pp.275–91.

Lynch, Gordon (2009b) ‘Religious experience and popular culture: towards a new frame of enquiry’, in H. Zock (ed.) Religion and Art at the Crossroads, Leuven: Peeters, pp.71–84.

McDannell, Colleen (1995) Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

McDonald, Dwight (1957) ‘A theory of mass culture’, in B. Rosenberg and D. White (eds) Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, London: Collier-Macmillan, pp.59–73.

Marsh, Clive (2007) Theology Goes to the Movies: An Introduction to Critical Christian Thinking, London: Routledge.

Marsh, Clive and Ortiz, Gaye (1997) Explorations in Theology and Film, Oxford: Blackwell.

Martin, Joel and Ostwalt Jr., Conrad (eds) (1995) Screening the Sacred: Religion, Myth, and Ideology in Popular American Film, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Meyer, Birgit (2008) ‘Religious sensations: why media, aesthetics and power matter in the study of contemporary religion’, in H. de Vries (ed.) Religion: Beyond a Concept. New York: Fordham University Press, pp.704–23.

Meyer, Birgit and Moors, Anne-Lise (eds) (2005) Religion, Media and the Public Sphere, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Miller, Daniel (1998) A Theory of Shopping, Cambridge: Polity.

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Miller, Daniel (2008) The Comfort of Things, Cambridge: Polity.

Mitchell, Jolyon and Marriage, Sophia (2003) Mediating Religion: Conversations in Media, Religion and Culture, London: Continuum.

Morgan, David (1998) Visual Piety: A History and Theory of Popular Religious Images, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Morgan, David (2005) The Sacred Gaze; Religious Visual Culture in Theory and Practice, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Morgan, David (ed.) (in press) The Matter of Belief, London: Routledge.

Nava, Mica (1992) Changing Cultures: Feminism, Youth and Consumerism, London: Sage.

Partridge, Christopher (2005) The Re-Enchantment of the West: Alternative Spiritualities, Sacralization, Popular Culture and Occulture, London: Continuum.

Price, Joseph (2005) ‘An American apotheosis: sports as popular religion’, in (eds) B. Forbes and J. Mahan Religion and Popular Culture in America, 2nd edition, pp.195–212.

Schmidt, Leigh Eric (2002) Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion and the American Enlightenment, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Schofield Clark, Lynn (2005) From Angels to Aliens: Teenagers, the Media and the Supernatural, New York: Oxford University Press.

Schofield Clark, Lynn (2007) ‘Why study popular culture?’, in G. Lynch (ed.) Between Sacred and Profane: Researching Religion and Popular Culture, London: IB Tauris, pp.5–20.

Schofield Clark, Lynn (2009) ‘Mediatization and media ecology’, in K. Lundby (ed.) Mediatization: Concepts, Changes, Consequences, New York: Peter Lang, in press.

Stern, Richard, Jeffords, Clayton and Debona, Guerric (1999) Savior on the Silver Screen, New York: Paulist Press.

Storey, John (2003) Inventing Popular Culture, Oxford: Blackwell.

Sylvan, Robin (2002) Traces of the Spirit: The Religious Dimensions of Popular Music, New York: New York University Press.

Sylvan, Robin (2005) Trance Formation: The Spiritual and Religious Dimensions of Global Rave Culture, New York: Routledge.

Turner, Graeme (2003) British Cultural Studies: An Introduction, 3rd edition, London: Routledge. Vaneigem, Raoul (1967) The Revolution of Everyday Life, London: Rebel Press.

Ward, Pete (2002) Liquid Church, Carlisle: Paternoster Press.

Williamson, Judith (1986) Consuming Passions: The Dynamics of Popular Culture, London: Marion Boyars.

Suggested reading

Forbes, Bruce and Mahan, Jeffrey (eds) (2005) Religion and Popular Culture in America, 2nd edition, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Hoover, Stewart (2006) Religion in the Media Age, London: Routledge.

Lynch, Gordon (2007) Between Sacred and Profane: Researching Religion and Popular Culture, London: IB Tauris.

Meyer, Birgit and Moors, Anne-Lise (eds.) (2005) Religion, Media and the Public Sphere, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Morgan, David (2005) The Sacred Gaze; Religious Visual Culture in Theory and Practice, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Morgan, David (ed.) (2008) Keywords in Religion, Media and Culture, London: Routledge. Turner, Graeme (2003) British Cultural Studies: An Introduction, 3rd edition, London: Routledge.

Chapter 33

Religion and diaspora

Seán McLoughlin

Autobiographical out-takes: Irish Catholics and Punjabi Sikhs overseas

As an undergraduate student during the late 1980s, I encountered (what was still called) comparative religion for the first time. As part of the course, students were introduced to the religions and cultures of so-called ethnic minorities, especially South Asian heritage Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and Parsis. While preparing for end-of-term examinations, I remember very clearly a long, early summer’s day spent reading a study of migration from rural India. An educationalist’s account of the significance of family, home, language and religion for the children of Indians overseas, it explores ‘how far the social traditions of the Punjabi villages are being maintained in Sikh households’ (James 1974: 2).1 This early study of how religion and culture travel, how they alter and change as people move, mix and remake their lives in new settings, what they preserve, lose and gain, and the impact of all this on their identification with homes new and old, really captured my interest. Although, I did not consciously make such a connection at the time, I imagine now that it had much to do with my own sense of identity. As with so many people, in so many different places, during the modern period, my family history has been shaped by forces of international migration.

Like the Punjabi Sikhs described by James, I grew up with a strong sense of religious and cultural distinctiveness. In a small market town in the English Midlands I did not experience the overt hostility often shown to people of colour. However, against the general context of John Paul II’s papal visits and a civil war in the North, growing up in a nationalist family from rural Ireland ensured a very ambiguous sense of belonging to Protestant England. My early life and socialisation in the 1970s and 1980s revolved around various Catholic institutions: a church with an Irish parish priest; three schools staffed mainly by Catholic teachers; and a social club where the navvies drank and Irish bands played folk ballads about rebellion and the migrant’s sense of opportunity and loss. A deep connection with Catholic Ireland was reinforced by visits home every summer and the regular arrival, from across the water, of St Patrick’s Day cards and religious paraphernalia from rosaries to relics. Broader but less intense links were maintained with ‘the Yanks’ (unfamiliar Irish-American relatives) who arrived periodically for weddings and funerals and Catholic missionaries who returned from India or Africa to raise funds and remind us that the poor would eventually be sending missions back to us.2 The latter, in particular, pointed beyond attempts to reproduce and encapsulate Irish Catholic tradition in an alien setting, attempts that could not resist broader and more organic processes of cultural exchange and translation. My local community included some

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Catholics who were not Irish – Italians, Poles, Yugoslavs, even one or two Africans and Pakistanis – and, as a teenager especially, I was acculturated to increasingly commodified and globalised forms of English working class popular culture (mostly music and football).

Deciding to study theology and religious studies at university opened up more cosmopolitan experiences. In multi-racial, multi-cultural, multi-faith Manchester I found myself embracing the diversity of the city both intellectually and emotionally and my intended focus on Christian theology was soon dropped in favour of comparative religion. Towards the end of a vacation spent packing eggs back in Nottinghamshire, inter-railing around Europe, and meeting my future (English, non-Catholic) wife, I was also given the chance to spend one week studying religion more intensively in the field. John Hinnells, Professor of Comparative Religion in Manchester at the time, had arranged for a small group of interested students to practise what John always preached, that is, ‘get your hands dirty with religion’. We would stay at a United Reformed Church under the supervision of the resident minister, someone who was actively engaged in multiand interfaith work in the West London suburb of Southall.

Doing comparative religion in ‘chota (little) Punjab’

Southall, perhaps like parts of Houston, Washington DC or Northern California in the United States (Jurgensmeyer 2002: 3), is one of any number of the world’s ‘chota (little) Punjabs’. It is seen by some as a ghetto and by others as the busy, if slightly tatty, capital of South Asian Britain (Baumann 1996: 38). In 1991, just a few years after my stay, the decennial national census suggested that around 60 per cent of Southall’s 61,000 population were of South Asian heritage (1996: 48). Sikhs are the largest single religious grouping in the town, representing around 40 per cent of the population (1996: 73). Like so many Chinatowns or Little Italys in today’s global cities, institutions, organisations and businesses owned, and run, by people who trace their cultural heritage overseas have transformed the ecology of Southall’s main streets. As well as gurdwaras (Sikh temples), mandirs (Hindu temples) and Muslim mosques, there are numerous Asian grocers, pubs, butchers, video and music stores, jewellers, curry houses, sari shops and the offices of Des Pardes (Home and Abroad), the largest Punjabi language newspaper in Britain. Southall, then, is what anthropologists sometimes call ‘institutionally complete’ – it is a home abroad to all things South Asian. Because of this, the town is a magnet for Asian families and visitors from the rest of England. It has even featured heavily in so-called ‘Asian cool’ movies, such as Bend It Like Beckham (2002).

With all this on the doorstep, and briefed with a little local knowledge, I was encouraged to go out into Southall and simply do comparative religion. I should attempt to produce, in outline, my own religious map of the area, visiting places of worship and community organisations, observing and talking to people as best I could about such matters as:

•â the background to, and history of, their migration;

•â the remaking of their congregations and places of worship, as well as associated beliefs and practices;

•â the influence of diverse religious movements, organisations and their leaderships;

•â the impact of social status, gender and generation;

•â the extent of public recognition and multi-cultural/interfaith relations in a plural setting;

•â and, finally, the consequences of continuing links with the Indian subcontinent and beyond.

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Looking back now, there was a danger of becoming a comparative religion tourist and unreflectively consuming the difference and exotica around me. After all, why should people want to talk to me, what did I have to offer and could I possibly hope to give anything back? Nevertheless, somewhere in between the fear and the exhilaration of awkwardly made dialogues and connections, I was able to reflect that, given a general concern to reaffirm religious and cultural identifications while all the time adapting to new circumstances, something that set them apart from the (ir)religious ethnic majority in Britain, the people of South Asian heritage I had met in Southall probably had much in common with the parents and grandparents of the O’Sullivans, Passaseos and Heidukewitschs I had been to school with. Nevertheless, the whiteness of the latter kept the option of assimilation open in a way that was not true for the former.

Where do we go from here? Reflections, definitions and overview

My experiences as a Catholic of Irish heritage, and those of Southall Sikhs of Punjabi heritage, provide just two ethnographic snapshots of a diverse and complex global phenomenon, which, since the 1980s has increasingly been described in terms of the term diaspora. The examples I have given locate both me and my academic career firmly in England, however diasporas are, of course, everywhere. In the United States, for example, the Pluralism Project at Harvard University has sought to map the changing religious landscape of America since the early 1990s. As the director of the project, Diana L. Eck (2002) argues that diversity is now a feature of ‘Main Street’ USA.3 In Boston, The Pluralism Project has documented the history of 13 traditions and interfaith groups. One of the most prominent and long-standing of these is, undoubtedly, Irish-American Catholicism. Between 1820 and 1920, a massive 4.5 million people left poverty and famine in Ireland for life in a modern American city in the making. Dominated by the New England Protestant establishment, Boston in the nineteenth century was nevertheless increasingly the home of Italian and other Catholics from Southern and Eastern Europe, as well as Jews and Orthodox Christians. Today, Irish Catholics in Boston are themselves part of the establishment, but they still share something of a transnational tradition with newcomers, such as the Vietnamese who have arrived in the city since the Immigration Act of 1965. While Irish Catholics in Boston and the English Midlands have quite different histories, I have no doubt that many of the themes in my story would still have much resonance there.

Whether taken in America or in England, my snapshots are intended to give a certain depth and texture to a topic that is very much concerned with the living religions of real people. Therefore, just as my own account reveals something of who I am and where I’m coming from, I hope readers will be prompted to reflect on how they and their families, or the neighbourhoods, cities and countries in which they live, have been impacted by diaspora. At its best, the study of religions and cultures should always provoke us to ponder the risks and rewards of learning about ourselves as we encounter the difference of others. Moreover, as we are beginning to see, diaspora is by no means confined to the experiences of people of colour or the visible minorities who have migrated from Asia, Africa and the Middle East in the post-war period. Discussions that mention both Irish and Vietnamese Catholics in the same breath, never mind Punjabi Sikhs, may be rare. However, such studies are beginning to emerge as Peggy Levitt’s (2007) comparison of Irish, Brazilians, Indians and Pakistanis in America illustrates. Her work teaches us that diverse diasporas do share many continuities

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of experience for all their differences. Indeed, what remains perhaps most interesting are the outcomes of ‘our’ interactions in a globalised world, whoever ‘we’ may now be.

Before going any further some basic definitions are also in order. Steven Vertovec, for example, suggests that diaspora, migration and transnationalism are three separate, but related, terms. As such, scholars and students alike should seek to distinguish between them more carefully:

Diasporas arise from some form of migration, but not all migration involves diasporic consciousness; all transnational communities comprise diasporas, but not all diasporas develop transnationalism.4

(2004: 282)

For Vertovec, migration involves movement from one place to another, the challenges of relocation having prompted people throughout the ages to reconstruct or remake their lifeworlds in new contexts. Migrants also very often form a minority, marked out from the ethnic majority in terms of ‘race’, language, culture and/or religion, as well as residential, educational and employment patterns. So, while diaspora also suggests dispersal from a homeland, Vertovec insists that it should be defined principally in terms of the continuing consciousness of a connection, real or imagined, to that homeland and a distinctive community of coethnics in other parts of the world, although not all migrants develop such consciousness. In the present age of accelerated globalisation, time and space are compressed with increasing intensity and extensity by advances in communications technology to such an extent that people increasingly experience the world as a global village or a single place. Under these conditions diasporas can become trans-national, in the sense that social, economic, political and cultural circulations or flows between the homeland and its diasporas become part of the fabric of everyday life. However, this was not always the case historically and diasporas may have struggled to maintain contact and communication with the homeland while still imagining a sense of connection to it.

In the first half of this chapter, then, I will explore in more detail how the study of diaspora has evolved and developed historically and how it can be mapped both in terms of different types of diasporas and some characteristics they seem to share in common. As we shall see, the term diaspora has a long history associated with the dispersal of ancient Jewry and, more recently, people of African descent as part of the far-reaching consequences of slavery. Nevertheless, the term’s high profile in contemporary scholarship must be contextualised in terms of changing patterns of international mobility and developments in postmodern and postcolonial theory. Thus, as well as seeking to move beyond common-sense definitions of important related concepts, my overall emphasis is on a key contrast in the formation of cultural identity between twin processes of translation, intermixture and re-negotiation on the one hand, and re-traditionalisation, or maintaining boundaries of cultural distinctiveness, on the other.

In the second half of the chapter I show how the study of diaspora has impacted the study of religion. Ninian Smart (1987) is identified in current genealogies as the first to use the term. However, this should not obscure, as it sometimes does, that the roots of a distinctive research agenda for religious studies in this field actually lie in the early empirical and ethnographic work of scholars working on migration during the 1970s and 1980s. A key concern of that pioneering literature was to unpick the relationship between religion and ethnicity, as well as the factors affecting the transformation of transplanted religion. I

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continue by exploring the question of whether religions can truly be considered diasporas, reflecting on the utility of the distinctions that are sometimes made between so-called ‘ethnic’ and ‘universal’ traditions. However, I maintain that it is the mapping of empirical patterns and trends that stands as the field’s major achievement in the last decade or so. By way of conclusion, I argue that the study of religion and diaspora – like the study of religion per se – should pay greater attention to critically analysing the different types of work done by the category ‘religion’ in differently configured locations.

Babylon and beyond: the study of diaspora

In the first edition of Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, editor Khachig Tölöyan (1991), argued that the new surge of popularity in diaspora studies had been accompanied by a decisive shift in focus for the field. In fact, as Robin Cohen (2008: 1) has argued in the second edition of his excellent survey, Global Diasporas, up to four phases of recent development can now be identified. For more or less 2,000 years the term diaspora was used mainly in relation to the ‘prototypical’ Jewish diaspora. However, from the 1960s and 1970s this usage came first to be extended to others with experiences of large-scale scattering due to homeland traumas. Then, second, during the 1980s, diaspora also came to encompass those groups hitherto identified as immigrants, ethnic minorities, exiles, expatriates, refugees, guest-workers and so on. Indeed, many members of such groups embraced the term, too, most likely because it had more positive overtones than some of these other terms. From the mid-1990s, Cohen highlights what he sees as a third phase in which postmodern and postcolonial critiques of the term deconstructed, re-appropriated (and sometimes rejected outright) the necessary relationship between, and scholarly focus upon, ethno-religious communities and their homeland origins. For some this also marked an unhelpful ‘dispersal’ of the term to encompass literally any far-flung collective – gay, deaf, digital, terrorist and so on (Brubaker 2005: 4). For others, an overwhelming emphasis on cultural identity in this new work distracted from the realities of political economy and the continuing power of the security-conscious state to regulate citizenship (Kalra et al. 2005). However, in the present fourth phase of ‘reflective consolidation’, Cohen remarks that the field has gone some way to acknowledging the validity of these critiques, most especially in terms of the more metaphorical and deterritorialised interpretations of diaspora as what Brah has called ‘a homing desire’ (1996: 179).

‘The word “diaspora” is derived from the Greek verb speiro (to sow) and the preposition dia (over)’ (Cohen 1997: ix). While the ancient Greeks thought of this ‘sowing over’ mainly in terms of migration and colonisation, in an authoritative contribution on semantic genealogies, Martin Baumann (2000: 316) insists that any suggestion that the term is of non-Jewish origin is ‘fanciful’. For ancient Jewry, diaspora had the negative association of exile. Nevertheless, Cohen maintains that trauma and victimhood should not be unduly emphasised in conceiving diaspora, arguing that others who have lived ‘at home abroad’ can be categorised neither as victims (nor as colonists). As the experiences of peoples settled in specific places at specific points in time vary significantly, Cohen (1997: x; revised 2008: 18) produces a typology of diasporas, each exemplified by particular ethnic groups:

•â victim diasporas (e.g. Jews, Africans, Armenians, Irish, Palestinians);

•â labour diasporas (e.g. Indians, Chinese, Japanese, Turks, Italians, North Africans);

•â imperial diasporas (e.g. British, Russian and other colonial powers);

•â trade diasporas (e.g. Venetians, Chinese, Japanese, Lebanese, Indians);

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•â deterritorialised diasporas (e.g Caribbean peoples, Roma, Sindhis, Parsis, Muslims and other religious diasporas).

In fact, Cohen insists that Jews cannot only be regarded as a victim diaspora. At different times in history, they have been successful labour, trade and deterritorialised diasporas (1997: xi). Given the variety subsumed by the term, he judges ‘a grand overarching theory … impossible’ (1997: xii). Nevertheless, building on the earlier work of others, Cohen still finds it important to develop a list of what he regards as diasporas’ common features (1997: 26; revised 2008: 17). This is reproduced here in a somewhat abbreviated form:

1dispersal from a homeland to two or more foreign regions;

2or, expansion from a homeland in search of work, trade or empire;

3a collective memory and myth about the homeland;

4an idealisation of the ancestral home and collective commitment to it;

5a return movement; even if this is only vicarious or based on intermittent visits home;

6a strong and long-standing ethnic group consciousness of distinctiveness, for example, in terms of its common cultural and religious heritage and the belief in a common fate;

7a troubled relationship with host societies, suggesting a lack of acceptance or possibility of further calamity;

8a sense of empathy with, and co-responsibility for, co-ethnics elsewhere;

9the possibility of enrichment in host countries tolerant of pluralism.

While Cohen and many others suggest that it is no longer necessary to take Jewish experiences as the only paradigm of diaspora, it is clear that Judaism still has a pivotal place in diaspora studies.5 Of course, Jews were made captives and exiles after Jerusalem was captured by the Babylonians in the sixth century bce and thereafter the idea of ‘Babylon’ became synonymous with oppression and exile in an alien land. However, as both Cohen and Ter Haar (1998) remark, even as the displaced Jews ‘remembered Zion’, there was eventually opportunity and creativity in Babylon as many made their home there. Indeed, ‘the Jewish communities in Alexandria, Antioch, Damascus, Asia Minor and Babylon became centres of civilisation, culture and learning’ (Cohen, 1997: 5). The term ‘diaspora’ itself became widely ‘used in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures explicitly intended for the Hellenic Jewish communities in Alexandria (circa third century bce)’ (Braziel and Mannur 2003: 2). Yet, as Baumann notes, ‘surprisingly, the Hebrew words for “exile”, “banishment” and “deportation”, gola and galut, were not rendered into Greek by “diaspora”’ (2000: 316).6

Despite the integration of post-Babylonian Jewry, then, and the opportunity to travel to Palestine and Jerusalem as pilgrims, the thrust of the neologism remained unfavourable but was also deeply theological. Diaspora was ‘an integral part of a pattern constituted by the fourfold course of sin or disobedience, scattering and exile as punishment, and finally return and gathering’ (Baumann 2000: 317). In Rome, Antioch and Corinth, the early Christian church adopted theological notions of diaspora from Judaism, though altering ‘its soteriological meaning according to Christian eschatology’ (2000: 319). Before Christianity became fully institutionalised as the state religion of Rome in the fourth century, the nascent community saw itself as a travelling and wandering people, spreading the Gospel and awaiting the Kingdom of God. Interestingly, use of the term diaspora also reappears much later in Christian history to describe both the Protestant and Roman Catholic religious minorities created in the wake of shifts in the religious allegiance of states during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation (Baumann 2000: 20).

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Before the 1960s, then, the study of diaspora was largely confined to more traditional approaches to Jewish (and to some extent) Christian studies. However, notably for the study of religion, Baumann suggests that much of this scholarship was ‘historically descriptive’ (2000: 320) and even now demonstrates little interest in, or even awareness of, the sort of theory or comparison that occupies many other scholars today. In other academic circles, the study of diaspora first came to prominence in African studies during the 1950s and 1960s although it took until the mid-1970s for this interest to mushroom (2000: 321). At a time of African states’ postcolonial independence from Western powers, diaspora thus became associated with the racialised politics of remembering the transatlantic slave trade.7 Clearly, a number of parallels with the Jewish experience could be made, including the appropriation of biblical symbolism to give expression to the experience of living under oppression in ‘Babylon’ or the emergence of modern religio-nationalist return movements such as Rastafarianism (see Cohen 2008: 132–3). Notably, it was from African studies, too, that the term diaspora entered the contemporary social sciences and humanities. During the 1980s and into the 1990s, for example, Cultural Studies scholars with a personal interest in the experiences of migrants of African descent from the Caribbean such as Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy were at the forefront of postmodern and postcolonial critiques and re-appropriations of the term diaspora. In what follows, I provide an outline of these ideas and point forwards towards their implications for the study of religion.

Diaspora and the global postmodern: cultural identities, translation and re-traditionalisation

Hall (1992: 304–5) argues that while globalisation continues to reproduce uneven power relations between ‘the Rest and the West’, its impact on cultural identities in postmodernity has actually been contradictory. With the old certainties and universal claims associated with post-Enlightenment thinking in crisis, the seemingly stable narratives of identity associated with the nation-state have been undermined by telecommunications technology and consumer capitalism, as well as international migration. At the same time, because the global postmodern has heightened consciousness of difference and relativised the discreteness of all cultures, it has also given rise to a defence of particularistic identities including those once thought to have been entirely displaced and superseded by modernity (Hall 1992: 304). Hall suggests that contemporary cultural identities oscillate between reactive attempts to reinstate the boundaries of local, ethnic, national or religious community and a further outcome of globalisation, that is, greater cultural hybridity. He draws a neat contrast between tradition and translation; whereas tradition represents the attempt to imagine a sense of ongoing continuity with a memorialised past, translation suggests a more self-conscious embrace of the uncertainties and possibilities of greater cultural intermixture and fusion.

Contemporary genetics has shown that there are no separate ‘racial’ groups within humankind. In fact, the arguments of nineteenth-century ‘scientific-racism’, which maintained that there was a hierarchy of ‘races’ among the people of the world, each with their own hereditary characteristics, are entirely false. Nevertheless, it is still very common to find the suggestion that there are more or less innate, timeless and elementary cultural, as opposed to biological, differences between certain peoples, communities and civilisations (see, for example, Huntington 1993). In general terms, earlier anthropological theories of culture did tend to essentialise it as something unified and undivided in this way. The diverse skills, ideas and practices acquired and developed by human beings as members of social groups

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(Eriksen 2001), it was often reduced to a list of unchanging traits and customs contained by the structures and boundaries of a given society. However, rather than a characteristic people have, today culture is understood more dynamically by anthropologists as a practice, something all people are in the continuous process of making and remaking (Baumann 1996, 1999). Indeed, in an age of deterritorialised or ‘travelling’ culture (Clifford 1994), any necessary linkage with place has been broken, while identities – self-identifications shaped and modified dialectially and contextually in relation to the ascriptions of others – are viewed as highly contingent, plural and criss-crossing (Hall 1992).

As migrants cross the borders of contemporary nation-states, then, they come to dwell in what postcolonial literary theorist, Homi Bhabha (1994), describes as an in-between, interstitial or third space. In the words of author, Salman Rushdie, this is where ‘newness enters the world’ (Bhabha 1994: 227). In his argument that ‘It ain’t where you’re from, it’s where you’re at’ (1991), Gilroy joins Bhabha and Rushdie in a clear retort to definitions of those labelled as ‘immigrants’ or ‘ethnic minorities’ as within the nation but not of the nation. Here, diaspora theory disavows a preoccupation with connections to the homeland becoming instead ‘a critique of discourses of fixed origins’ (Brah 1996: 179–80). Rather than being ‘caught between two cultures’, second and third generation identifications cannot be confined by assumptions about ‘roots’ because their more or less skilful multicultural navigation of identity actively improvises novel ‘routes’ (Gilroy 1993; Clifford 1994; Ballard 1994).

In such work, then, there is a desire to escape not only from the outsider exclusions of hostland racisms and nationalisms but also from insider attempts to resist marginalisation with nostalgic appeals to cultural and religious authenticity. Certainly Gilroy’s (1993; 2000) preference has ultimately been for a convivial cosmopolitanism which includes a capability to mediate ‘between camps’ based on a sense of ‘planetary humanism’. However, while there is no doubt that diaspora theory during the 1990s offered a timely reminder that cultural identity is inevitably hybridising, its treatment of tradition was often much less nuanced. More productive was the work of several anthropologists including Pnina Werbner who maintains that ‘cultures evolve historically through unreflective borrowings’ (1997a: 4). It is this unconscious hybridising that makes the everyday integration of new ideas and practices possible. Therefore while amongst jet-setting intellectuals and artistic elites there is a more intentional and playful celebration of hybridity, a more organic and unintended hybridity tends to characterise the lives of the diasporic masses. Exposed to the inequalities and exclusions of the world’s global cities, cultural difference and intermixture can for them be experienced in terms of crisis, alienation and doubt (1997a: 12).

Moreover, while we all have multiple identities, a politics that seriously challenges the uneven distribution of power and resources between majorities and minorities, has not emerged from the endless shifts of hybridity (Asad 1993). We must all speak from somewhere and, as Werbner again argues, being heard requires an act of prioritising, of naming and ‘re-presenting’ oneself (1997b: 228). For many migrants, it is in a selective return to aspects of their own ‘chains of memory’ (Hervieu-Léger 2000) and social networks that many have discovered the moral resources to restore certainties in the face of translation and organise political resistance to exclusion (Hall 1991: 52–3; Werbner 1997a: 21). So, what anthropologists call ethnicity is never a simple or conservative reproduction of shared homeland custom, language or religion. Rather, with our interest in religion to the fore, what we might designate ‘re-traditionalisation’, signals a dynamic, deeply contextual reorganisation of culture in novel settings to construct symbolic boundaries vis-à-vis others so as to enhance group distinctiveness.