Transformations and Navigations of Ethnoreligious and Cultural Identity and Belonging among Kabyle Immigrant Converts to Christianity in France

Abstract

This article concerns diasporic Kabyle converts to Christianity in France, exploring how these immigrant converts, a Berber/Amazigh people, former Muslims originally from Algeria, North Africa, critically reflect on, revise, and debate their understandings of their conversion to Christianity and express a complex set of transformations and navigations of identity and belonging. Addressed here is a form of conversion from one world religion to another in contexts of migration and sociopolitical change. The analysis traces the changing imagery used by converts in sermons, interviews, sociality, and informal and guided conversations in response to shifting circumstances in both Algeria and France. These transformations show how Kabyle converts “juggle” multiple aspects of their lives, relations, and cultural backgrounds and, more broadly, suggest how these experiences might contribute contextual nuances to anthropological explorations of conversion, symbolism, and interstitionality. In effect, I argue, converts deal with continuities with their Islamic past by reframing them as cultural. Specific examples include converts’ images, attitudes, and practices pertaining to growth, fertility, sowing and reaping, eating, and fasting—in particular, their debates over fasting during Ramadan. These images, I show, act as signifying processes, a medium through which converts critically reflect on their position in France as interstitional in some contexts and as culturally Kabyle in other contexts. The evidence reveals conflicts, debates, and dilemmas, but also reconciliatory peacemaking efforts in converts’ uneasy situating between Berber/Amazigh opposition to Arabization policies back home in Algeria and diasporic opposition to Islamophobia and racism toward immigrants in France. More broadly, the article contributes to discussions of rupture, discontinuity, and continuity in the context of conversion in the anthropology of religion.