Beyond Home and Return: Negotiating Religious Identity across Time and Space through the Prism of the American Experience

Abstract

To understand the social fields with which the children of immigrants actually identify, we interrogate the multiple sites and sources which Gujarati-origin Indian American Hindus and Muslims draw upon to construct their religious identities. We find that our respondents create religious selves by combining their imaginings of their parents’ religious upbringing with their own real and imagined experiences of religious life in the US, India, and other salient places around the world. They also incorporate real and perceived understandings of US religious traditions in four broad patterns which we call American-centric, Indian-centric, global-secular and global-religious. But while they adopt these various stances, they do so from their positions in the US. The circulation of religious ideas, practices and objects is filtered through uniquely American cultural structures and traverses uniquely American organisational channels.

Key Words:

• Immigration
• migration
• transnational
• religion
• assemblage
• culture

Acknowledgements

Research for this paper was originally funded by the Ford Foundation, with additional funding from the Wellesley College Faculty Research Fund. Thanks to Russell King, Kim Knott, Loren Landau, Thomas Blom Hansen, Diana Wong, John Eade, Peter Mandaville, Courtney Bender and David Smilde for their comments on earlier versions of this paper.