The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion by John Hinnells

576â Religions in the modern world

Conclusion

The project of empirical mapping remains a crucial one. To cite the editor of this collection one last time, all students of Comparative Religion should seek to ‘get their hands dirty with religion’. Indeed, with its emphasis on the complex continuities and transformations of lived experience, the study of religion and diaspora has already played a significant, but rarely acknowledged, role in taking Religious Studies beyond the outdated World Religions paradigm. Nevertheless, as Hinnells (1997: 683) himself implies, compared to fieldwork based studies, theoretical discussions have not been taken up as vigorously as they might. For example, it is now much clearer that religion has become disembedded from, and can work against, ethnicity at least as much as it works with it (as it does with and against the nation-state). By way of conclusion, then, I want to argue that there is now an opportunity and a need for more intense theoretical reflection on the significant body of data that has been collected over the last twenty years or so.

Flood (1999) maintains that ‘after Phenomenology’, Religious Studies is at something of a theoretical and methodological crossroads and needs to engage more openly across disciplinary boundaries. Given the wide-ranging interest of other disciplines in migration, disapora and transnationalism, and the continuing salience of religion for these issues and related public policies, the study of religion and diaspora ought to be one area where the prospects for such engagement are good. However, it is striking that most of the literature considered here, whether produced by scholars of Religious Studies or the social sciences, still rarely theorises religion with the same level of sophistication as culture, hybridity, ethnicity and so on. Therefore while Religious Studies may begin to relocate in terms of broader disciplinary contexts it must also continue to export more sophisticated accounts of religion to those for whom such a task is less of a priority. Future success in this respect will involve building upon the empirical content of religion and thinking seriously about its relationships to other concepts discussed in this chapter. This could begin to reveal more clearly what work categories associated with religion ‘do’, that is, the ‘uses’ of religious symbols, discourses and practices in particular time-space configurations by embodied constituencies positioned very differently in terms of relations of power (Knott 2005).

Notes

1For other accounts of the Sikh diaspora see the relevant chapters in Ballard (1994), Hinnells (1997; 2010), Cohen (1997; 2008) and Coward et al. (2000), as well as Tatla (1999), Nayar (2004) and Dusenbury (2007).

2For an account of the Irish Catholic diaspora in England see Fielding (1993) and in America see McCaffrey (1997). See also O’Sullivan (2000).

3A number of other resources have been produced including a CD Rom, On Common Ground: World Religions in America, Columbia University Press, 1996 / 2000. See http://www.pluralism.org.

4A pre-publication version of Vertovec (2004) can be downloaded from http://www.transcomm. ox.ac.uk/ the site of the UK Economic and Social Research Council’s completed research programme on transnational communities.

5For the Jewish diaspora, historical and contemporary, see the relevant chapters in Cohen (1997; 2008) and Ter Haar (1998), as well as Barclay (1996), Kaplan (2000), Boyarin and Boyarin (2002) and Gilman (2003). See also the website of ‘Beth Hatefutsoth’, the Museum of the Jewish Diaspora, at http://www.bh.org.il.

6For online copies of his research on diaspora and migration, as well as materials on Buddhism in the West and Tamil Hindus in Germany, see Baumann’s homepage, http://www.baumann-martin. de/. See also Prebish and Baumann (2002) on Buddhism in the West.

Religion and diasporaâ 577â

7Ter Haar (1998) notes that the African diaspora in Europe, as opposed to America and the Caribbean, has had rather different experiences. On the former, see also Harris (2006). On the latter, see also the chapters in Hinnells (1997; 2010), as well as Pitts (1993), Murphy (1994), McCarthy Brown (2001) and Trost (2008).

8For a list of the Community Religions Project’s publications see http://www.leeds.ac.uk//trs/irpl/ crp.htm.

9Vertovec’s arguments are expanded in Vertovec (2000). For other accounts of the Hindu diaspora see the relevant chapters in Ballard (1994); Hinnells (1997; 2010), Coward et al. (2000), Alfonso et al. (2004) and Kumar (2006), as well as Burghart (1987) and Waghorne (2004).

10While my search for ‘diaspora religion’ at Amazon online bookstore (24 March 2009) produced 247 results (compared with 106 in 2004), ‘transnational religion’ produced just 47 (compared with 20 in 2004). Of that 47, most were still studies of the more ‘universalising’ traditions, especially Islam and Christianity (mainly Catholicism in America, Europe and China, as well as Pentecostalism in Africa and Latin America). On Latin American Christianity, for example, see Tweed (1997) and Vásquez and Marquardt (2003).

11For Muslim heritage diasporas and transnational Islam, see chapters in Ballard (1994), Hinnells (1997; 2010) and Coward et al. (2000), as well as Metcalf (1996), Mandaville (2001), Haddad and Smith (2002), Werbner (2002) and Cesari and McLoughlin (2005).

12This comparison, minus its Australian dimension, where developments are at an earlier stage, is further developed in Coward et al. (2000). Elsewhere, Ter Haar (1998) attempts a smaller scale mapping of Africans in Europe (Germany, Britain and the Netherlands) and Vertovec (2000) Hindus in the Caribbean and Britain.

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578â Religions in the modern world

Eriksen, Thomas H., 2001, Small Places, Large Issues: An Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology, London, Pluto Press.

Fielding, Steven, 1993, Class and Ethnicity: Irish Catholics in England 1880–1939, Buckingham, Open University Press.

Fitzgerald, Timothy, 2001, The Ideology of Religious Studies, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press.

Flood, Gavin, 1999, Beyond Phenomenology: Rethinking the Study of Religion, London and New York, Cassell.

Gilman, Sander L. 2003, Jewish Frontiers: Essays on Bodies, Histories and Identities, London, Palgrave Macmillan.

Gilroy, Paul, 1991, ‘“It Ain’t Where You’re From, It’s Where You’re At …”: The Dialectics of Diasporic Identification’, Third Text, 13, pp. 3–16.

Gilroy, Paul, 1993, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, London, Verso. Gilroy, Paul, 2000, Between Camps, Harmondsworth, Penguin.

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Harris, Hermione, 2006, Yoruba in Diaspora: An African Church in London, New York and London, Palgrave Macmillan.

Hervieu-Léger, Danièle, 2000, Religion as a Chain of Memory, Cambridge, Polity Press.

Hinnells, John R. 2005, The Zoroastrian Diaspora: Religion and Migration, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

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McCarthy Brown, Karen, 2001, Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn, Berkeley, University of California Press (updated and expanded edition).

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Tölölyan, Khachig 1991, ‘The Nation State and its Other: In Lieu of a Preface’, Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, 1: 1, pp. 3–7.

Trost, Theodore L. 2008, The African Disapora and the Study of Religion, London, Palgrave Macmillan. Tweed, Thomas A. 1997, Our Lady of the Exile: Diaspora Religion at a Cuban Catholic Shrine in Miami,

New York, Oxford University Press.

Van der Veer, Peter and Lehmann, Hartmut 1999, Nation and Religion, Princeton, Princeton University Press.

Vertovec, Steven, 2000, The Hindu Diaspora: Comparative Patterns, London and New York, Routledge. Waghorne, Joanne P. 2004, Diaspora of the Gods: Modern Hindu Temples in an Urban Middle-Class World,

Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press.

Werbner, Pnina, 1991, ‘The fiction of unity in ethnic politics’, in Werbner, Pnina and Anwar, Muhammad (eds) Black and Ethnic Leaderships, Routledge, London, pp. 113–145.

Werbner, Pnina, 1997a, ‘Introduction’, in Werbner, P. and Modood, T. (eds) Debating Cultural Hybridity, London and New Jersey, Zed Books. pp. 1–26.

Werbner, Pnina, 1997b, ‘Essentialising Essentialism, Essentialising Silence’, in Werbner, P. and Modood, T. (eds) Debating Cultural Hybridity, London and New Jersey, Zed Books, pp. 226–254.

Werbner, Pnina, 2002, Imagined Diasporas Among Manchester Muslims, Oxford, James Currey Ltd.

Suggested reading

Alfonso, Carolin, Kokot, Waltraud and Tölölyan, Khachig (eds) (2004) Diaspora, Identity and Religion, London and New York, Routledge.

Edited collection with some contributions by leading scholars of diaspora including a number of chapters on religion and religions.

Baumann, Martin (2000) ‘Diaspora: Genealogies of Semantics and Transcultural Comparison’, Numen, 47, (3), pp. 313–337.

Key journal article by a specialist setting out some of the meanings and uses of the term diaspora in historical and contemporary aspects of the study of religion.

580â Religions in the modern world

Cohen, Robin (1997) Global Diasporas: An Introduction, London, Routledge.

Essential overview of the various types of diapsora, both historical and contemporary, with significant updating in terms of approaches to the subject matter for the second edition in 2008.

Hinnells, John R. (ed.) (1997) The New Penguin Handbook of Living Religions, London, Penguin Books. Perhaps the first introduction to the study of religion to include chapters mapping key patterns and trends in the study of ‘diaspora religion’ across various traditions and regions. A third edition with new chapters on diasporas in the West will be published in 2010.

Knott, Kim and McLoughlin, Seán (eds) (2010) Diasporas: Concepts, Identities, Intersections, London, Zed.

Comprehensive collection of concise articles by world-leading and new scholars on all aspects of the study of diaspora including key concepts, multi-disciplinary approaches, trans-regional case studies and new directions for research.

Kumar, Pratap (ed.) (2006) Religious Pluralism in the Diaspora, Leiden, Brill.

Edited collection notable especially for its contributions on Chinese and Japanese-Brazilian disaporas.

Levitt, Peggy (2007) God Needs No Passport: Immigrants and the Changing American Religious Landscape, New York and London, The New Press.

Accessible study of diverse aspects of transnationalism in the everyday cross border religious lives, practices and identities of Brazilian, Indian, Irish and Pakistani immigrants.

Tweed, Thomas A. (2006) Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, Harvard University Press.

A new, challenging, theoretical approach to the study of religion informed by an emphasis on transnational flows of migration.

Vásquez, Manuel A. and Marquardt, Marie F. (2003) Globalizing the Sacred: Religion Across the Americas, New Brunswick, NJ, Rutgers University Press.

Study of transnational religion in the USA and Latin America which also provides a very useful bridge between contemporary cultural theory and the study of religion.

Vertovec, Steven (2004) ‘Religion and diaspora’, in P. Antes, A. W. Geertz and R. Warne (eds), New Approaches to the Study of Religion: Textual, Comparative, Sociological, and Cognitive Approaches, Berlin and New York, Verlag de Gruyter.

Probably the most comprehensive synthesis of key patterns and trends in the literature on religion and diaspora by one of the most prolific experts in the field of migration studies.

Glossary

A

A Common Wordâ an open letter sent on 13 October 2007 by 158 Muslim leaders and teachers to Pope Benedict XVI and major Christian leaders throughout the world.

Academic or scientific enterpriseâ any organized approach to understanding a set of data that involves a sizeable group of people over a sufficiently long period of time that permits them to gain an identity from it.

Academic theologyâ seeking understanding, knowledge and wisdom in relation to questions theology raises, pursued through engagement with a range of academic disciplines.

Accommodationist (semi-) â a person or institution who finds it expedient to adapt to the opinions or behaviour of another, for example, a religious movement seeking survival by adjusting their views and activities to prevailing political realities.

Ahrimanâ the Middle Persian form of the older Angra Mainyu, the destructive evil spirit in Zoroastrianism.

Allegorical interpretationâ an interpretive practice in which the literal meaning of a text is taken to be a vehicle for the spiritual or moral level that represents the primary meaning of the text. Characters and events in the literal text are assumed to have a one-to-one correspondence to the higher symbolic meaning.

Analytic psychologyâ the name that Carl G. Jung gave to his own school of psychotherapy, to differentiate it from Freud’s psychoanalysis.

Anglicist-Orientalist Controversyâ a debate occurring mainly (though not exclusively) in Britain in the early to mid-nineteenth century over the direction British imperial policy should take with regard to the cultural and educational transformation of India under British rule. The Anglicist position, most famously taken by Thomas Babington Macauley, promoted Anglophone education and the promotion of English and European literature as the medium for the creation of a class of an Anglicized Indian elite, whilst the Orientalist position (exemplified by figures such as Warren Hastings) strongly advocated the promotion, study and exploration of Indian languages and literature.

Anthropocentrismâ treating only human beings (as opposed to, say, all of life) as having moral value.

582â Glossary

Anthropic principleâ the principle, sometimes utilized in cosmology and astrophysics, that life (especially embodied conscious life) existing in a universe will impose certain conditions that significantly restrict the physical properties of that universe.

Anthropologyâ more generalized, comparative and theoretical reflection on culture and human behaviour.

Antireductionismâ concept used by many phenomenologists insisting on irreducibility of the religious and opposing reductionistic approaches that reduce religious phenomena to non-religious explanations.

Apophatic theologyâ an approach to speaking about the divine which involves the claim that the nature of the divine is beyond all linguistic forms of expression, hence the best way to speak about the divine is to say what it is not. A key aspect of many mystical traditions and literature (cf. Cataphatic/Kataphatic theology).

Autonomyâ generally used in the study of religion to indicate that it is not wholly dependent on the techniques and methods of other fields and disciplines; in the strong sense of the term, it suggests that the scientific study of religions and religious phenomena transcends the ‘integrated causal model’ that ties together the other natural and social sciences.

B

Behaviourismâ a school of academic psychology, greatly exercised by considerations of strict scientific method, that limited itself to the measurement of behaviour, to the exclusion of all considerations of mind and thought.

Bharatiya Janata Partyâ radical right wing political party in India.

Bracketing (epoché) â phenomenological suspension of preconceptions and judgements about what is real behind phenomena or appearances.

C

Cataphatic/Kataphatic theologyâ speaking about the divine using positive or affirmative attributes, to be distinguished from apophatic theology.

Charismaâ the special gifts giving an individual influence.

Civil religionâ the interpretations, dramatizations and ritual enactments of a nation’s vision of its calling and shared ultimate values. The concept goes back to Jean Jacques Rousseau and was further developed by Émile Durkheim and more recently by Robert Bellah in the US context.

Clinical psychologyâ a specialization within academic psychology that is concerned with psychotherapy; the techniques of cognitive behavioural therapy are favoured.

Cognitive scienceâ interdisciplinary research into how the brain and its functions (mind) produce just the kinds of mental representations that it does.

Commentaryâ an explanatory, critical or scholarly exposition of a text.

Glossaryâ 583â

Communityâ the symbolic aggregation of diverse individuals and constituencies in terms of their contested affiliation to a social group.

Comparative religionâ the cross-cultural study of forms and traditions of religious life.

Comparative theologyâ a development within Christian (and especially Catholic) theology of religions which seeks to bring familiar Christian texts into a dialogue with texts from another religious tradition.

Comparativismâ the study of ways religious data are similar to, or different from, each other.

Confessional theologyÂâ theology pursued according to the belief and practice of a particular religious community or ‘confession’ of faith.

Consumerismâ psychological and social state in which buying commodities promises personal happiness and virtue.

Copernican astronomyâ the theory that the sun rather than the earth is at the centre of the orbits of the other planets; put forward in On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (1543) by Nicolaus Copernicus, and developed further by Galileo Galilei in the seventeenth century.

Cosmological argumentsâ arguments for the existence of God in which certain alleged facts about the world (its coming to be, its being contingent, etc.) are used to infer a cause beyond the world, namely God.

Cosmologyâ study of the universe including space, time and humanity

Cosmopolitanismâ multiple, criss-crossing, affiliations which transcend narrow ties; openness and tolerance to others including a capability to mediate in-between traditions based on a sense of belonging to humanity as a whole.

Counterintuitiveâ anything that violates ordinary expectations about the world or aspects of the world.

Creationismâ a term for the general belief that the world has a supernatural Creator; during the later twentieth century it became particularly associated with religiously motivated anti-evolutionary movements.

Crossing and dwellingâ key terms in Thomas Tweed’s theory that point to the way in which religions enable people to cross territorial, corporeal and cosmic boundaries but also settle and make homes.

Cultâ until the 1970s, sociologists used the term ‘cult’ to indicate either a culturally innovative religious group or one that is loosely organized and ephemeral. However, the label came to be used – mainly by psychologists – to designate authoritarian groups that used ‘mind-control’; the Anti-Cult Movement fostered the idea that ‘cults’ are dangerous. In response, most sociologists now use the term ‘new religious movement’ instead.

Cultureâ the diverse skills, ideas and practices acquired and developed by human beings as members of society in different contexts; a key source of both human similarity and difference.

584â Glossary

D

Dabru Emet (from the opening Hebrew words of Zechariah 8.16, ‘speak truth’) â a brief statement of eight theses produced by Jewish theologians in the USA, and signed by many more, commenting on the current state of Jewish–Christian relations (published in the New York Times on 10th September 2000).

Darwinismâ taken loosely, any modern evolutionary theory, more properly the theory of evolution by natural selection as elaborated in Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859).

Deathscapesâ with ‘necrogeography’, a key term in the geography of religion signifying the way in which rituals of death and dying mark and change the landscape.

Demographyâ the statistical study of the characteristics of human populations.

Denominational geographyâ a branch of the geography of religion that focuses on the distribution and movements of Christian or other religious denominations and on the landscapes they produce.

Diasporaâ meaning ‘scattering’ or ‘sowing’, a term that refers to the movement of people away from their places of origin, and to the way in which those people retain real or imagined connections with such places.

Doctrinal religiosityâ a mode of transmitting religious knowledge as a coherent set of shared beliefs or doctrines maintained by a strong, hierarchical leadership. Such coherently formulated sets of orthodox teachings allow for their widespread transmission by authorized teachers and missionaries and for the relatively faithful reception and retention of such knowledge through routinized instruction that encodes its content in the semantic memory of followers.

E

Ecotheologyâ transforming basic religious ideas in the light of the environmental crisis and concern for non-human forms of and conditions for life.

Eidetic vision (intuition of essences, eidetic reduction) â phenomenological insight into the necessary and invariant features, essential structures and meanings, of phenomena.

Embodimentâ having a bodily form.

Environmental crisisâ human-caused devastation of species and environment on earth. Environmental justiceâ connection between social justice issues and environmental issues.

Environmental racismâ disproportionate effect of environmental pollution on racial/ethnic minorities.

Erastianismâ a view developed by Thomas Erastus that the state should be supreme over the church, even in ecclesiastical matters.

Ethnicityâ the symbolic organization of boundaries of communal difference marked by signifiers such as language, custom and/or religion, often to advance group interest.

Glossaryâ 585â

Ethnographyâ empirical research on particular cultures/peoples/regions conducted through fieldwork and participant observation.

Ethologyâ the study of animal behaviour.

Evangelicalâ a Christian who believes that one must be ‘born-again’ by accepting Jesus as one’s saviour to attain salvation and that a Christian is obliged to ‘evangelize’, that is, to spread the ‘good news’ (Greek evangelion)of Christ’s death and resurrection.

F

Fatahâ a major and relatively moderate nationalist Palestinian political party, founded in 1954. It is the largest faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and a supporter of the government in the West Bank.

Figural interpretationâ a method of biblical exegesis in which one historical figure or event (usually in the Old Testament) is taken to signify not only itself but also a later figure or event (usually in the New Testament); also called typological interpretation.

Functionâ the recurrent need that religion, once it arises, continues to fulfil. Religion lasts as long as it fulfils the need at least as well as anything else.

Functional definitions of religionâ conceptualizations that define religion according to its individual and/or societal purposes, for example, its capacity to produce social integration or experiences of self-transcendence. Functional definitions contrast with substantive definitions of religion, which define religion according to characteristic features including, for example, belief in higher powers or its organization in churches.

Fundamentalismâ fundamentalism refers to claims of religious groups to literally ‘return’ to the basic principles of a religious tradition. This usually implies an emphasis on patriarchal structures of authority and social morality, and strict control of the female body.

G

Gender ideologyâ is the mystification of social relations so that they appear to be based in, and derived from, nature.

Gender performanceâ is derived from the work of Judith Butler and speaks to how humans in multiple social and cultural locations perform, or act out without critical thought, what are believed to be normative and natural modes of femaleness/femininity and maleness/ masculinity.

Gender/sexâ is a formation of a concept that understands both gender and sex to be social constructs, but furthermore insists that gender is the primary category that informs and shapes what has been understood as biological sex.

Geography of religionâ the study of religion and its effect on landscape, environment and population movements.

Globalizationâ the effects of time–space compression allowed by communications technologies such that the world is increasingly experienced as a single place.