Материал: The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion by John Hinnells

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It is the solidarities resulting from re-traditionalisation that help groups to advance their own interests in competition with others in plural societies. In many liberal democracies, for example, such ‘fictions of unity’ have been useful in binding migrants and diasporas together periodically, both when they have sought to transmit their traditions and when they have addressed themselves to the state or wider society (Werbner 1991; Baumann 1996). Indeed, for both pragmatic and political reasons, one of the main vehicles for the public recognition of such groups, multicultural policy-making, has tended to promote the idea of ‘communities’, each with its own distinctive ‘culture’. Nevertheless, communities, whether ethnically, nationally or religiously marked, are routinely made up of complex individual differences, conflicting constituencies and relations of power that can silence women and young men especially. Indeed, as Anthony Cohen (1985) argues, it is only their ‘symbolic form’, and not their ‘content’, that is held in common. This means that the multiple interpretations and meanings attached to communal symbols by individuals can be reconciled.

Thus, as Gerd Baumann (1996; 1999) suggests, depending on the dynamics of any given context, and who one might be interacting with, people both routinely cross and dissolve, as well as re-make and fix the boundaries of cultural identity. Similarly, and with a more explicit concern for ‘a theory of religion that made sense of the religious life of transnational migrants’ (2006: 5), Thomas Tweed has suggested that ‘religions involve two spatial practices

– dwelling and crossing’ (2006: 7). Intimately bound up with making sense of human joy and suffering, whether in terms of everyday struggles or more cosmic horizons, religion, he argues, can be characterised in terms of both i) (re)orientation, constraint and boundary marking, as well as ii) exchange, mixture and transformation. It is to the study of religion and diaspora that I turn now.

Diaspora and the study of religion

In his New Handbook of Living Religions, Hinnells explains why he thinks the study of religion should take diaspora seriously. In terms of promoting the relevance of the study of religion per se, both to potential students and those who fund education at all levels, he insists that the challenges posed to plural societies by recognising religious and cultural differences have been tremendously important (1997: 1–2). Indeed, Hinnells argues that the presence of ‘world religions’ in global cities has raised the profile of religion generally, both encouraging new religious movements and reinforcing the public position of historic Christian churches in the West (1997: 845). However, despite this, and the fact that, contrary to many expectations, ‘migrants are more rather than less religious after migration’ (1997: 683), Hinnells observes that scholars of migration and diaspora in other disciplines have tended to overlook the significance of religion. Baumann, too, remarks that, ‘the history of religions was a real latecomer in making use of the diaspora term’ (2000: 323). Many in this area of the field have been reluctant to embrace a term that they still associate with Jewish Studies: ‘their caution was (and is) in many cases based on the knowledge of the term’s origin and soteriological coinage, stirring up various theoretical problems for a cross-cultural, generalised application’ (2000: 323).

Surveys of the literature on diaspora are unanimous in tracing the first discussion of contemporary diaspora religion to a slightly obscure publication by Ninian Smart (Baumann 2000; Vertovec 2004; Hinnells 2005). While Smart (1987) did not really differentiate religious homelands from ethno-national homelands or diaspora from globalisation, he underlined that, rather than assimilate or liberalise, even traditions characterised as essentially resistive

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of singular definitions such as ‘Hindu-ism’ tend to emphasise ‘universalising’ religious tendencies in a pluralising world. Self-conscious of difference – provoked by interactions with others, both with the state, wider society and a broader range of co-religionists – diasporas produce increasingly rationalised and homogenising accounts of their traditions. However, the study of diaspora was of only passing interest to Smart as was the empirical study of religion. Indeed, in the heyday of ethnic and migration studies, it was initiatives such as the Community Religions Project (CRP), founded in 1976 and based in my own department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Leeds, that were the real pioneers. Starting very much within the history and phenomenology of religions, the CRP’s first wave of publications were concerned mainly with descriptions of how the content of Hinduism, Islam and Sikhism was changing, having been transplanted overseas.8

With its emphasis on lived experience, the work of the CRP and its contemporaries outside the UK did begin to take Religious Studies beyond the World Religions paradigm. As Flood notes, this paradigm presents ‘constructed entities as if they are in some timeless realm (perhaps a realm of pure doctrine) outside wider cultural patterns and history (especially colonial history, the relation between religion and capitalism, and recently globalisation)’ (1999: 3). However, given a continued tendency to emphasise objective description over critical explanation, theoretical discussions from this period can still appear somewhat parochial. Highlighting the consonance between religion as a reified scholarly construct and its articulation in religious fundamentalism, Searle-Chatterjee (2000), for example, argues that the ethnographic tradition in both Religious Studies and Anthropology uncritically reproduced ‘Hindu-ism’ and other traditions as normative categories, isolating them from wider social and political contexts. A close re-reading of the writing in question suggests a more nuanced picture than she presents (McLoughlin and Zavos 2009). Nevertheless, in urging greater vigilance in analysing just how, by whom and for what purposes religious discourse is deployed, polemics like that of Searle-Chatterjee are reflective of a much broader theoretical move in the field since the beginning of the 1990s. Building to some extent on issues first raised by Smith (1964), but influenced too by postmodernist and postcolonial thought, many scholars of religion have sought to deconstruct the idea of ‘religion’ as a crosscultural and trans-historical phenomenon (McCutcheon 1997).

To trace the particularly modern and Western location of the category of religion one must turn to post Reformation Europe, and especially the seventeenth century, when a substantive definition of natural religion amongst Deists and others opened the way for comparison of a presumed universal in human societies. Rationalised and compartmentalised, individualised and privatised, ‘religion’ as a reified discourse eventually emerged as an autonomous and bounded essence ‘segregated conceptually from power’ (Asad 1993: 28–9). This modern attempt to confine and domesticate religion reflected the powerful secularising ideologies and interests of the equally modern nation state within Europe (Van der Veer and Lehmann 1999). However, this new construction of ‘religion’ was also exported beyond Europe as part of the colonial will to power. By the end of the nineteenth century, fundamental social change had produced new elites and new public spheres espousing a neo-orthodox episteme which mimicked Protestant Christianity. The impact of such processes continues to be felt, perhaps even more intensely, in diaspora.

In the context of such thinking, some like Fitzgerald (2001) go so far as to argue that ‘religion’ should be abandoned for what he sees as more precise analytical categories associated with Anthropology and Cultural Studies. However, all categories and frameworks of study (including culture) are of course contingent. Nevertheless, scholarly analyses of

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‘religion’ must be reflexive and grounded in examining the ways in which discourses and practices associated with religious values, rituals, institutions and identities are actually used to both authorise and contest relations of power. In advocating such a realistic or ‘worldly’ model of religion, one which moves back and forth between detailed description of ethnographic contexts and theory, Sutcliffe (2004) highlight’s Knott’s emphasis on the importance of inductive rather than deductive reasoning. In an analysis which sees religion as deeply contextualised in the practice of locality and space, she examines how the category is produced both practically and discursively (2005: 81) and argues that the study of religion must always begin with particular locations. Stepping back from location to locality for the time being, however, what follows are some further reflections on Knott’s earlier work at the CRP, both in terms of: i) problematising the relationship between religion, ethnicity and identity and ii) mapping the various factors contributing to ‘new patterns and forms’ (1986: 10) of religion amongst migrants.

Religion, migration and ethnicity: research agendas for religious studies

[T]here have been relatively few accounts of migration and settlement in which religion has been described as having any significance for individuals and communities beyond its role in assisting them to organise, to reap material benefit or to enter dialogue or competition with the wider society … religions do perform these functions in many situations. However, they also have their own dynamics which, though related to social, political and economic contexts, are explained from within rather than from without (with recourse to their historical development, texts, value systems, ritual practices, socio-religious organisation etc.).

(Knott 1992: 13)

These comments represent a plea to religious studies scholars to be more active in the study of ‘ethnic minority’ religions, at least in part because the accounts of other disciplines have proved limited. Reflecting on the work of sociologists and anthropologists, Knott argues that ‘with a few notable exceptions, they have failed to provide plausible accounts of the role and significance of religions in the lives of the groups they have described’ (1992: 4–5). At the same time, she admits that, ‘The discipline of Religious Studies in Britain or elsewhere has not so far developed a coherent perspective on ethnicity’ (1992: 11). Knott suggests that this is partly because the study of migrant religion is still new to the discipline, as is the idea of taking the social context of religion seriously. As a result, social scientific assumptions about religion have often gone unchallenged.

In this respect Knott’s main concern is that the literature on religion and ethnicity generally fails to distinguish sufficiently between the two. Indeed, in some of the classic works on ethnicity in North American sociology, religion is often seen merely ‘as the passive instrument of ethnic identity’ or ‘in the service of ethnicity’ (1992: 12). For Knott, while there is no doubt that religion can operate in this way, such an approach has obvious limitations: ‘there are times when religion plays a more active role in the definition of an ethnic group’s identity and behaviour than many of these accounts suggest’ (1992: 12). Knott identifies the work of Hans Mol, a sociologist of religion, as of particular use here.

Revisiting his work today, Mol perhaps now appears too quick to generalise about the ‘essential function of religion’, its ‘most universal form’, ‘basic human needs’ and so on (1979:

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34). Nevertheless, in his notions of religion as the ‘harnesser of change’ and the ‘sacraliser of identity’, he clearly elaborates the remarks we have encountered so far about the significance of tradition:

Religion … seems to have more to do with an already established system of meaning, a stable tradition, an orderly delineation of a potentially disorderly existence. The essential function of religion cannot therefore be exhaustively summarized in terms of ‘creative change’. Rather religion in its most universal form seems to function as an antidote to change, or as the ‘harnesser’ of change. If religion then somehow is bound up with a basic human need for delineation, order, one may define it as ‘the sacralisation of identity’.

(1979: 34)

It directs the attention to the boundary maintenance of an embattled ethnic culture in a strange environment. Religion seems to be always bound up with the clearer delineation of a culture … it also provides … an island of meaning, tradition and belonging in the sea of anomie of modern industrial societies.

(1979: 37)

For Mol, religion, as a resource with which to mark ethnic identity, offers something that other cultural stuff cannot. Backed by sacred authority, religious boundaries would seem to provide more universal, and so less readily negotiable, vehicles for the articulation of distinctiveness than those associated with the customs of particular peoples and places. According to Mol, the function of religion is at least as much to do with an ‘orderly delineation’ and ‘harnessing of change’ as opposed to ‘creative change’, a comment we might relate, once again, to the contrast between twin processes of tradition and translation, dwelling and crossing, discussed earlier. However, as has been suggested already, the reproduction of a ‘stable tradition’ is always a creative act; hence the emphasis on retraditionalisation. To say the same thing in a new context is always to say something different (Baumann 1996, 1999). Nevertheless, Mol’s work very effectively underlines the fact that an emphasis on tradition among many migrants, at least initially, represents no simple ‘refusal to change’, as sometimes suggested, but rather a dynamic adaptation strategy in the undeniable face of change.

If Mol’s emphasis is on the function of religion in contexts of migration, elsewhere Knott (1986) argues that religious studies scholars must also be attentive to what happens to its specific content in such circumstances. ‘How does a religion and the religiousness of its people change in an alien milieu? How are they different from their parent traditions in the homeland?’ (1986: 8). Further to this empirical ‘comparative religion exercise’ (1986: 8), Knott has proposed a framework, which begins to ‘map’ the range of factors that might contribute to ‘new patterns and forms of religious behaviour, organisation, experience and self-understanding’ (1986: 10). This has been much cited and elaborated; for example, Hinnells (1997) produces a ten-point framework and Vertovec (2000: 21–3) goes even further, reminding us of a seventeen-point framework he and others first devised back in 1990. In any case, Knott’s factors can be summarised thus:

1‘Home traditions’ – (i) the nature of the religion itself (e.g. its universality or ethnic particularity) and (ii) the nature [and impact] of other cultural factors such as language, customs, food and dress, etc.

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2‘Host[land] traditions’ – cultural, political, legal, educational, welfare, immigration and settlement procedures [e.g. the status of religion in the public sphere].

3‘Nature of migration process’ – from the homeland or other migration contexts [e.g. people who are ‘twice migrants’]; are migrant sojourners or settlers, economic migrants, exiles or refugees?

4‘Nature of migrant group’ – religious and ethnic diversity, group size, geographical dispersion, division and cohesion (origin, history of settlement, caste and kinship, [social class and educational background]).

5‘Nature of host response’ – social attitudes [discourses and practices] rather than cultural traditions, e.g. racism, attitudes to assimilation and integration, ecumenism.

For Knott, it is the complex relationships between these different factors that begin to explain the sheer diversity of expressions and trajectories of religions in contexts of migration. As well as choosing ‘to standardize their beliefs and practices, to reject their “little” traditions at the expense of their “great” traditions’ (1986: 13), religious individuals and communities may opt for, ‘Increased traditionalism, new sects, unlikely religious unions, conversion and mission’ (1992: 10). All form part of the remaking of religious traditions in new contexts. Looking to the future, Knott argues that ‘the Religious Studies approach … [is] in great need of unleashing’ (1986: 13). However, in the 1980s and early 1990s, the project of mapping the evolution of religious continuity and transformation had only just begun. In our penultimate two sections we trace how such agendas for the study of migration and ethnicity in religious studies has developed, first in theoretical terms and then in more empirical terms.

Theorising religion and diaspora: ‘ethnic’ and ‘universal’ traditions?

In general, I would argue that religions can provide additional cement to bind a diasporic consciousness, but they do not constitute diasporas in and of themselves … an overlap between faith and ethnicity is likely to enhance social cohesion … [but] The myth and idealization of a homeland and a return movement are also conspicuously absent in the case of world religions. Indeed one might suggest that their programmes are extraterritorial rather than territorial … On the other hand … spiritual affinity may generate a bond analogous to that of a diaspora.

(Cohen 1997: 189; my emphasis)

The question of whether a particular tradition, or religions in general, can properly be described in terms of diaspora has been one of the more obvious theoretical issues to occupy scholars in the last decade or so. Cohen’s discussion quoted here from the first edition of Global Diasporas is immediately reminiscent of the social scientific conceptions of religion, migration and ethnicity examined by Knott (1986, 1992). In the same way that religion ‘reinforced ethnicity’, Cohen suggests that religion provides ‘additional cement’ to diasporas and ‘is likely to enhance social cohesion’. In the second edition of his book, Cohen (2008) does adopt a more flexible approach to the definition of diaspora, one which can now include ‘religious diasporas’ as an example of deterritorialised diasporas with ‘atypical’ imaginings of ‘home’. However, diaspora remains essentially an ethno-national phenomenon, something to do with peoples and places and ‘theorizing the connection between religion and diaspora is [still] fraught with uncertainty’ (2008: 153).