Материал: The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion by John Hinnells
556â Religions in the modern world
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.
Religion, media and cultures of everyday lifeâ 557â
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
Religion and diasporaâ 559â
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.
560â Religions in the modern world
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