Writing Religion in British-Asian Diasporas

1. Writing Religion in British-Asian Diasporas Seán McLoughlin (University of Leeds) & John Zavos (University of Manchester)

2. 1) Introduction / Overview • Critical perspectives on ‘religion’ in academic texts writing British-Asians • City vignettes + key processes in reconstruction & recognition of ‘religion’: • Religious Reconstruction in Urban Contexts: Re-location & Universal-isation, Fusion & Fission • Religion, Multiculturalism & the Local/National State • Religion & Multi / Trans-local Imaginaries • Demotic Resistance: folk religioning & hybridising popular multi-cultures

3. 2) The Category of Religion • Sociology Anthropology Cultural Studies: • 1970s & 80s: Political economy of immigration, race / culture / nation & urban ethnicity • 1990s & 2000s: Diaspora hybridity transnational consciousness, flows & cultural production • Religious Studies: • 1980s & 1990s empirical mapping & religion / ethnicity • 1990s modern secular construct ‘segregated from power’. Study culture & power. Particular temporal/spatial locations. • Religion in Postcolonial British-Asian Cities: • Global religioscapes. Diasporic & transnational. Universal & local. • Dominant & demotic discourses - dual discursive competence • The Secular State, Multiculturalism & Religion

4. 3) Religious Reconstruction in Urban Contexts • Birmingham - Nishkam & Sikh values. Planning, volunteering, self-sufficiency. Dynamic tension origins & diaspora. Multifunctional centre. Enterprise, well-being, heritage & multi-local ICT. • Leicester - elaborate public ritual / festivals. Vaisnavite garba at Navratri - religious, gendered, adaptive, multi-local, commodified spaces but also caste specific. • Cityscapes most tangible signs of relocation & adaptation • Fusion & fission during soujourning & later institutionalisation • What religioning travels?Continuity & transformation, ritual abbreviation & expansion, in local & universal traditions • Innovation / objectification of new vernaculars in transmission • Struggles for power, authority & leadership: gender, class, generation, caste, kin, denominations

5. 4) The State & Public Recognition of Religious Identities • Bradford - from AYM to BCM, the story of ‘race relations’ in the city • Manchester - Religious education as a language of cohesion • ‘Encorporation’: the state writes religion as community identity • The language of ‘faith’ and ‘community cohesion’ • Birmingham - the development of religious institutions, from the unmarked terrace to multicultural icons • Planning religious institutions in the multicultural milieu, a narrative of developing public recognition • Erasing localised practice • dominant voices and discourses in the construction of multiculturalism and religion

6. 5) The multilocal and the translocal in the religious imaginary • Birmingham - Guru Nanak Nishkam Seva Jatha and the Nishkam Centre for Excellence, Soho Rd, in a network of institutions (Birmingham, Kericho, Amritsar) • resisting postmodern dislocation through spiritual location (re. community cohesion and faith relations) • refracting globalisation through the multilocal • Dominant voices, dominant discourses • Birmingham: ‘getting in touch with my spiritual side’ in the context of the Bosnian war • ‘turning the world inside out’ to ‘say something about the world today from a position that is not centred on the West’ (McLoughlin) • Translocality/religion as an alternative moral space…

7. 6) Demotic Resistance: • Tower Hamlets - Baul singer, lacking institutional support / wider funding in UK ... But new cultural forms. Communications technology & commodification e.g. qawwali. Roots & routes? • Birmingham - from kirtan to bhangra. Tension. Bhangra semi-autonomous folk / pop cultural space. Dance & self-spirituality? ‘Religion’ & culture versus pan (Br)Asian spirituality? Memory, resources, generation. Fusion now = matter out of place? • Challenge to discrete bounded religions & category itself. • Non-institutionalised domestic, women’s & children’s spaces? Ethnography of melas? • More or less institutionalised ‘in-between’ traditions: Valmikis, Ravidasis, Baba Balaknath, kismetic pirs

8. 7) Re-thinking religion in the localities of the project Recognising narratives of British Asian religiosity: • A tale of transplantation (the ‘nostalgia for culture’) • Fusion-fission-fusion • Boundaries, separation and cohesion • From the margins to the centre

9. 7) Re-thinking religion in the localities of the project • Nye: ‘a theoretical approach that assumes religious and cultural identities to be situational, based on syncretic and hybrid processes of construction and innovation, and that manifestations of a particular religious tradition within a particular multicultural context will give rise to certain religious forms’ • Knott: ‘an investigation of particular, local spaces provides a different perspective on the location of religion to those approaches which take ‘World Religions’ and generic religious categories and dimensions as their objects of study’ • Carrette: ‘a location for understanding a regime of knowledge-power’ • Unwritten narratives and transgressive forms of ‘religion’ • Using locality to decentre the category?