Introduction: Religion and Belonging in Diaspora

Abstract

This special issue of Diaspora looks at a classic form of identity— religion—as it presents itself across space and time. Much historical and ethnographic work over the course of the last century has explored religious identity among bounded—or even unbounded—communities, but recent concerns (both scholarly and political) with the challenges of global mobility have led to new investigations into the complex dynamics of religion in sustaining, creating, and sometimes complicating connections across dispersed populations. Indeed, religion is one of the most prominent idioms through which diasporas come to produce shared consciousness, and shared practice. This volume is a way in to the problem of understanding how religion accomplishes the deep sense of belonging that it so often elicits, and how it is that religious life can bring about solidarity even when communities are not limited to one location. Neither a religion nor a diaspora is a clearly defined or finite category, however, as either is mapped out in human experience. In all their regional, religious, and historical variation, the six articles that follow show how religions and diasporas produce each other: in these cases, religious life is premised upon dispersion—and global, networked connectedness depends upon the enduring links of shared religious action. In particular, the articles in this volume ask why and how religion is deployed for the sake of communities that identify transnationally, or globally, or extra-locally, and address the terms of its engagement. Understanding the relationship between religious formations and global networks returns us to a critical nexus of belonging: religion—public and private; individual and collective; in European capitals and in African ones; in Asian contexts and in Middle Eastern ones—lays the groundwork for human attachments across space. As communities move, religions change: this observation should be no surprise to social scientists or historians attendant to the natural Diaspora 19:1 (2010) / published Fall 2016