Religions and migrations, diasporas, displacements and transnational processes

Abstract (English)

Following migrations, displacements, and the establishment of diasporas, ethnic enclaves, and transnational communities, religions move and circulate. The difficulties, suffering, and traumas that come with relocations and resettlements in migration, refugee camps, exile and diasporas encourage people to turn to religion for solace and hope, rekindle their faith, and establish or fortify religious communities. People travel for spiritual reasons, to learn, experience, and get initiations. They are frequently moved by an interest in “traditional” and “authentic” lifestyles, alternative and traditional medicines, and psychedelic experiences. Transnational processes and the dissemination of information, ideas, worldviews, imaginaries, values, materialities, and priests—facilitated by the internet—are also ways that religions grow and proliferate.
All these processes are intertwined and favour contacts, hybridisations, negotiations, conflicts and creativity in the religious field, as well as adaptations to new natural, social and spiritual territories, and to individual and collective needs.
This panel aims to gather ethnographic, theoretical and methodological contributions on the various ways that the religious sphere intertwines with a range of mobilities (of people, materials, ideas, imaginaries, and worldviews).
In particular, the panel addresses the following questions and related issues: how transnational religions and communities evolve; how displacements favour continuities and changes in the religious field; how tourism, books, films, music, social media and the internet favour the circulation and spread of religions; how spiritual search is experienced through physical and virtual circulations; how people create personal bricolages after navigating through different religions, spiritualities, experiences, and physical and virtual spaces; how mobilities favour the creation of hybridizations, and interreligious and interritual territories; which imaginaries, worldviews, values and affect emerge in migrant communities, refugee camps, residences for asylum seekers and virtual communities; how religions help migrants and refugees negotiate and configure identity, belonging, well-being, meaning and relation with otherness; how transnational religions transform current social and political relationships and favour new ones; how religions encourage social and cultural interaction or reinforce isolation, national or religious identities, and the formation of enclaves; how religions aid in overcoming the hardships and suffering that come with displacements; how religions help to create or to find a “home” after displacement; how religious search intersects with a search for healing or a deeper relation with nature.