19
The Study of Diaspora Religion
Teachers of religion have for decades emphasized the importance of the study of ‘world religions’, partly because of the subjects’ own inherent importance, but also because of their relevance to Western society, especially in view of the fate that in recent years, as a result of migration, Hindus, Muslims and members of other religions live and worship in Western cities. Yet encyclopedias and introductory books continue to look at these religions solely in their old countries; any mention of them in the West has generally treated the Western groups as marginal to the main history and phenomenon of that religion. This section of the New Handbook (chapters 19-25) represents the first serous attempt to look at the Western forms of these religions as important in themselves and as showing something important about the Western societies they are found in, and to do so in a comparative international perspective. In recent years American universities have begun to engage in the study of black African, or Afro-Carbbean, religion, but these areas are rarely included in general introductions, are ignored by British universities, despite the size and significance of black groups in the UK, and are not (yet) part of the Australian scene. This section seeks to fill those lamentable gaps. Some preliminary remarks are necessary to explain the logic behind this new section of the book.
People have carried their religions around the globe for millennia, but this has become a far more common phenomenon since the middle of the twentieth century, partly because of improved travel and communications, and also because of the huge migrations which followed the Second World War. It has been an era of unparalleled international change and religions have been part of, and affected by, these changes. There have been countless studies of migrant groups in the West, but in the United States these have tended to focus on groups not particularly associated with the religions covered in part I of this book, and in Britain such studies have mostly focused on the problems of racial discrimination, housing, employment and welfare. Undoubtedly these are major issues, but this emphasis has had two consequences. First, it has meant that the migrant groups are seen almost wholly as ‘problems'; secondly, it has implied that their religion is something they left behind in the old count, whereas, as the following chapters make clear, recent studies and the migrants themselves often assert that they are more rather than less religious after migration. It is only in the 1990s that scholars have begun to write about the place of religion in these groups. The subject is, therefore, a new one. Certain consequences flow from this newness. First, there are major areas of great importance yet to be researched. Chapter 25 seeks to identify a few of these. Secondly, little headway has so far been made in developing broad theories about the impact of migration of non-Western religions to the West. Again, the concluding chapter attempts to point to some broad issues. Thirdly, the ‘technical’ vocabulary remains fluid, debated, sometimes not even thought through. This introductory chapter must include a preliminary account of some of the terms and the debates. Some of the opinions expressed below are my own, and others would argue differently. I have therefore used the personal expression ‘I think’ more often than academics are schooled to do, so that the reader may be alerted to which arguments are personal ones. But first it is necessary to explain the selection of topics.
Most religions have been associated with migrations; Judaism, Christianity and Islam are obvious examples for well over a thousand years. Europeans have migrated around the globe, as adventures, traders, imperial powers and missionaries. In recent centuries many have migrated to Australia, and numerous races have migrated to the United States of America. But a global history of religion in migration is not feasible in the size of book that is viable in this context. Some selection was, therefore, necessary. After much reflection, it was decided to focus on (1) the black African diaspora, because of its importance and previous neglect, and (2) migration from South Asia, or essentially what was termed the Indian subcontinent, the old British India, now divided into several nations, notably India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. This focus merits further justification. Whatever their modern differences, these countries have, in the past, formed some kind of unit, as part of the British empire, where one language (English) was common throughout, and governed, for better or for worse, by a common judicial and government system. Yet within this region there is an exceptional variety of religions, including Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Jains, Parsis, Buddhists (though these are few in number in modern times) and Indian Christians.
There is another aspect of what is meant by South Asian religion. Obviously Islam, Christianity and Buddhism are global religions, and Parsis typically do not see themselves as South Asian but ultimately as true Persians. Muslims, for example, might legitimately want to protest that in a real sense Islam is not a South Asian religion. It does, however, have distinctive and important South Asian dimensions, as do the other religions listed. This section focuses on those branches of these religions which have migrated to the West from South Asia. It is a pity that scholars generally have not engaged more in internal comparisons within the religions (a classic exception to this is Geertz [5], who compared Islam in Morocco and South-East Asia). Typically, scholarship on religions tends to view the traditions as monolithic wholes and anything that is different as deviant, or to labour in one small corner, ignoring the rest. My own personal opinion is that, just as ‘He who knows one, knows none’ (i.e. the study of any one tradition cannot be said to be the study of religion), so also the study of any one part of a tradition cannot be said to be a study of tat religion. The study of, say, Protestantism is not the study of Christianity. The first section of this Handbook looked at the religions in their old countries; here it examines them in migration, making comparisons both between countries and between religions.
The ‘Western’ countries studied, Australia, Britain, Canada and the United States, also have a degree of similarity despite their diversity. There is a common language, a common dominant religious culture (Christian) and an approximately similar level of economic development. Three of the four countries even belong to one Commonwealth of Nations. This practical example of ‘comparative religion’ at work thus compares what has happened to a number of major religions in moving from one reasonably defined region into another group of varied, but not dissimilar, countries. To a certain extent, therefore, like is being compared with like. (Continental Europe was excluded because of its significant differences, for example in language, although such a comparison would be interesting.)
This comparison ca tell us much about the religions, about the ethnic groups which migrate and about the new countries into which the migrants bring their religions. In view of the number of and interest in studies of the Jewish diaspora it was tempting to include that subject; but it seemed wise, at this stage of research, to restrict the comparison to a tighter unit, especially when it already involves so many religions and such large countries and populations as those proposed. The material on the black African diaspora is occasionally used in the concluding chapter 25, but, for now, that has been left as a separate topic. Perhaps future editions of the book may extend the field of comparison, tough the range of options is huge. Not only might one include, say, East and South-East Asians in the West, but also one might address questions such as: ‘How similar are the sort of religious/ethnic issues involved in white migration to white areas, e.g. Swedish people in Australia?’ For the present, however, a comparative study of how even seven major religions have migrated to four important countries is an enormous undertaking in the study of living religion. Because living necessarily involves change, as does migration, the whole subject is one of central importance in the study of contemporary religion, albeit one that has been neglected.
South Asian migration is not simply a modern phenomenon. As Bilimoria shows in chapter 21, it has been suggested that South Asians migrated to Australia millennia ago. Archaeologists have established that there was trade between the Indus valley civilization and Mesopotamia and probably further west. Similarly, Indian traders have travelled to East Africa and throughout much of the Pacific for centuries. In the nineteenth century Indians were used as ‘the coolies of the empire’, being deployed in Africa, the Caribbean and elsewhere (see among others [9]). The twentieth-century South Asian diaspora is not something restricted to Australia, Britain, Canada or the US. There were, for example, more South Asians in South-East Asia in the 1980s than in Europe (including Britain); more in the Middle East, or Africa, than in America; more in the Caribbean than in the Pacific (see table 19.1). Although these figures indicate that in the 1980s there were 8,691,490 South Asians living overseas, the popular stereotype perpetrated in the Western media of overwhelming numbers of South Asians ‘swamping’ other countries is, as Clarke et al. [3] emphasize, entirely false, for it is estimated that there are 350 million Europeans living outside Europe. Thus, while less than 1 per cent of South Asia's population live outside South Asia, something like a third of Europeans populate other areas of the world. If any group of people have swamped others, then it is the Europeans who have been doing the ‘swamping’.
| Table 19.1 The South Asian diaspora, 1987 | |
| Country of residence | No. |
| South-East and East Asia | 1,862,654 |
| Europe | 1,482,034a |
| Middle East | 1,317,141 |
| Africa | 1,389,722 |
| Caribbean and Latin America | 957,330 |
| Pacific (Fiji, Australia, New Zealand) | 954,330 |
| North America | 728,500 |
a Of these, 1,260,000 were in the UK.
Source: C. Clarke, C. Peach and S. Vertovec, South Asians Overseas: Migration and Ethnicity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990, p. 2.
So far the terms ‘migrants’ and ‘religion in migration’ have been used. But that vocabulary is unsatisfactory. In the four countries under discussion there are important, substantial and obviously increasing numbers of second- and third-generation South Asians. They clearly are not migrants. Equally, their religion, Hinduism, Islam or whatever it may be, is not in migration. It is now part of the respective national scenes. My own preference is for the term ‘diaspora religion’. That term has generally been associated with Jews outside Israel, but it is applicable to the religion of any people who have a sense of living away from the land of the religion, or away from ‘the old country’. In some senses, therefore, Christianity is a diaspora religion, but the Catholic and Protestant churches flack-led churches are perhaps different) are so indegenized in the West that they do not really have a sense of living away from the country of the religion. For them the ‘Holy Land’ may be a place of pilgrimage, but it is not the centre of the religion in the same way as, for example, India is for Hindus or Jains, or Punjab is for Sikhs. Similarly, Islam in Pakistan and Bangladesh, while distant from the land of pilgrimage, is not perhaps a diaspora religion in that these nations are, and see themselves as, Muslim countries. One feature of a diaspora community is that it is not only away from the old country, but is also a minority phenomenon. To a certain extent the diaspora experience for Muslims in the West is of an ethnic diaspora, the experience of Pakistanis, or of smaller groups such as Gujaratis, away from the old country. In what follows, ‘diaspora religion’ indicates a religion practised by a minority group, conscious of living in a culturally and religiously different, possibly hostile, environment, away from the old country of the religion It is a convenient term, though not one without difficulties [4]. The alternatives, such as ‘migration’, do an injustice to the people who wish to see themselves not only as Muslims or Pakistanis but also as Australian, British, Canadian or US citizens. The question of identity is one which will recur.
A much used, and abused, term in this subject is ‘race’. From the days of empire, and of Hitler's Germany, this term has been used to imply a biologically determined set of fixed characteristics, genetically conveyed, marking out different groups and establishing a hierarchy of peoples. The quest for racial ‘purity’, however, has not been confined to Europe. American attitudes to blacks and Australia's ‘white as snow’ policy, which excluded all non-whites from the continent [6], have been as racist as the Europeans. But ‘race’ remains part of scholarly, as well as popular, vocabulary and is used to indicate groups which are treated as if they were biologically different, in their organization, or by their exclusion of other, or which are marked out by outside societies as biologically distinctive for exclusionary motives. It is a term fraught with dangers because of its lack of ‘hard’ scientific justification and the social ills with which it has been associated [1; 7; 8]. In much modem political discussion the old biological racism is replaced by a cultural racism which argues that certain groups should be excluded, or restricted, because their culture is (allegedly) incompatible with that of the rulers.
Another common term that requires questioning comment is ‘ethnic(ity)’. In common practice it has come to be associated with coloured, or black, minorities, or ‘Third World’ peoples, for example in department stores selling ‘ethnic jewellery’. Most academics use ‘ethnicity’ to refer to a sense of cultural distinctiveness, with culture taken to include both secular and religious features, a consciousness of a specific history or of common origins, possibly language; it is a consciousness of identity worked out in a sense of distinctiveness from, if not hostility to, others. Whereas race alludes to (alleged) biological differences, commonly ethnicity alludes to perceived cultural distinctiveness. But which boundaries people draw around themselves may differ from one context to another. To give a personal example, in one context I may define myself as a Derbyshire person, or as English, or British, or European (and in others as male, or by profession, age or hobby). ‘Ethnics’ is a term generally used to describe ‘others’, but we all have our own ethnicity. The phrase ‘ethnic minorities’ has become code for African or Asian, or coloured minorities, but that is not a reasoned, or reasonable, use of the term. Sometimes the idea of perceived deprivation is associated with ‘ethnic minorities’, but usage remains inconsistent. Many groups who have a sense of common history and language and a sense of deprivation are not in practice referred to as ethnic groups – Derbyshire people have all these features and commonly feel deprived by the government in London of resources and consideration! What is happening in practice, and illegitimately in my opinion, is the substitution of ‘ethnic minorities’ for ‘coloured black races’.
The terms ‘acculturation’, ‘assimilation’ and ‘integration’ are often used unthinkingly. In this book acculturation is used to indicate a peon's acquiring the characteristics of another culture, e.g. Hindus in the US internalizing certain values, norms or ideals from the majority population. But it must be stressed that this is not a simple process. It is common for a person to take on some features of the culture (e.g. language, political or economic values) but not others (e.g. family values). People may also acculturate differently at different times; they change as they go through life, and may act differently in different company. Acculturation is not, therefore, a simple process. Assimilation is generally used to indicate a broader range of features than acculturation, suggesting the dropping of features of the old tradition in becoming similar to the majority population. But again, the phenomenon is not simple. Individuals or groups may assimilate the dominant tradition in some aspens of their lives and not others, and this may change with the passage of time. It would be wrong to assume that any one group assimilates uniformly. Integration is perhaps at the opposite end of the scale from assimilation and indicates simply the observance of laws and social requirements (e.g. attending school between certain ages or paying taxes) to respect the laws of the country (on these and other related terms see [2]).
Community is another term meriting comment. There is rarely a clearly defined entity corresponding to this term. Hindus, Muslims, etc. in any of the four countries are likely to have their own divisions – by region, say Gujarati or Punjabi, Pakistani or Bangladeshi (as well as Arab or Indonesian, or black Muslims); by language or class/caste; by ‘sect’, or as devotees of a particular figure. Even as small a community as the Zoroastrians have numerous internal groupings, Indian, Pakistani, East African or Iranian, and of course many would asset that they are Australian, British, Canadian or American. There is, therefore, no such thing as the jain, Hindu, Sikh etc. community in any of these countries, any more than there is a unitary Christian or Jewish community. What there is, is a sense of ‘us’ as opposed to ‘them’, non-Hindus, non-Parsis, etc. Although ‘the community’ is a myth, it is, like most myths, a powerful concept.
Other terms that have been popular, but are now seen as mistaken, are ‘host’ (and implied ‘guest’) communities. This is inappropriate thinking, for second and further generations are hardly any longer ‘guests’, and the people who are actually hosts to any newcomers are rarely members of the wider society, but rather the existing members of the local Hindu, Muslim, etc. groups. It has also been argued, reasonably, that it is unhelpful to refer to ‘waves’ of migration, because of the fears, however unjustified, that term triggers in the minds of wider society of being ‘swamped’.
The words ‘black’ and ‘white’ are not as clear as they appear. Some people use ‘black’ to mean ‘coloured’ and therefore under the label ‘black’ include not only people of African descent, but also people from Asia. The logic, it is argued, is that all suffer from prejudice because they are ‘not white’. My own opinion is that subsuming all non-whites under one label fails to do justice to the distinctiveness of the diverse cultures. It also ignores the tensions that have existed between Asians and black Africans, for example throughout East Africa in the 1960s which triggered the policies of Africanization and the subsequent migration of Asians from the region. Black/Asian conflict has also arisen in the West. Furthermore, defining people simply in terms of their relationship to ‘whites’, I think, fails to define them in their own terms. But the term ‘white’ is also an oversimplification. It generally means people of European descent, but even in Europe that is not a clear concept as one considers nations further east of the Mediterranean. Despite the moves towards European union the internal divisions are considerable, even between neighbouring countries, for example Britain and France. The complexities of ‘white’ meaning ‘of European descent’ are even greater when discussing Australia, Canada and the US.
‘East’ and ‘West’ are also much abused terms. What is East or West depends on where one stands. Britain is east of the US, which is east of Australia. In this context West is a convenient umbrella term for the four countries under discussion because of their shared language, religion and culture, but as a geographical term it is meaningless.
Language, however necessary, is a very imprecise tool.
Bibliography
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2 CASHMORE, E. ELLIS, Dictionary of Race and Ethnic Relations, London/New York, Routledge, 1988; 2nd edn repr. 1991
3 CLARKE, C., PEACH, C., and VERTOVEC, S., South Asians Overseas: Migration and Ethnicity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990
4 CLIFFORD, J., ‘Diasporas’, Cultural Anthropology, vol. 9, no. 3, 1994, pp. 302–38
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