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ABSTRACT
This article will discuss the meaning(s) of rituals among Sri Lankan Tamil Hindus in Denmark with special focus on the second generation. It will use Roy A. Rappaport's theory on ritual both as communication and as a basic social act, but it will also, in line with Jan Assmann and Hervieu Legér, understand the ritual as a storing place of collective memory. It will give a short outline of what can be called the institutionalisation but also the placemaking of the Sri Lankan Tamil Hindu tradition in Denmark, but the empirical focus will be on the chariot procession (Tēr), which attracts thousands of participants every year. The Tēr procession is an example of continuity and change. Continuity because the participants try to reproduce the ritual as they know it from Sri Lanka, however, changed so it fits into or communicates with the new setting.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Marianne Qvortrup Fibiger, PhD, is an associate professor at the Department of the Study of Religion at Aarhus University. Her work focuses on Hinduism in general (and in Denmark and in diaspora in particular), Śāktism, religious plurality and diversity, how notions and worldviews travel between East and West and on religion in cultural encounters. She has conducted extensive field research among Sri Lankan Tamil Hindus in Denmark and Sri Lanka and Hindus in Mauritius, India (Kerala, Orissa, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh), Kenya and England, and written articles on themes such as Hinduism and Wilderness, Śāktism in Denmark, Second generation of Hindus in diaspora and their relation to the Hindu tradition and the circulation of ideas between East and West.
Notes
1 Since Statistics Denmark, who register all newcomers to Denmark, do not take religious but only geographical affiliation into account, it is difficult to provide an exact figure when it comes to religious grouping. I have assumed that the percentage distribution is the same as in Switzerland, where about 87% of people with a Sri Lankan origin are Hindus.
2 It is not by coincidence I use the concept ‘tradition’ instead of religion. In my perspective, the concept ‘Hindu religion’ refers to what seems to relate to the idea of having a universal Hinduism with special features that encompass all Hindus in the world. From the point of view adopted in this paper, tradition is more local, emphasising that the Hindu tradition in Sri Lanka as well as everywhere else in the world, including Denmark, is a particular tradition formed by context.
3 Meaning that if this tri-polar interrelatedness is not there any longer, we cannot talk about a diaspora situation.
4 He is referring to the Sree Sithy Vinayākar temple in Herning. This is one of the two oldest of the eight Sri Lankan Tamil Hindu temples in Denmark and was consecrated in the year 2000.
5 This is also what I have noticed myself during my fieldwork in Sri Lanka.
6 These words were spoken by Avvaiyar, a poet who lived during the reign of the Chola dynasty in the tenth century. She is often pictured as an old, intelligent lady, and she wrote many poems that remain very popular even now and are included in school textbooks in Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka.
7 It is common for a Hindu to have 8–16 samskāras through his or her entire life from before birth until death. Name-giving rituals, the first feeding, the introduction to the Tamil alphabet, marriage and death samskāras are performed in the temples in Denmark in particular.
8 Roy A. Rappaport (1926–1997) has his theoretical inspiration from both semiotics (Peirce, Tambiah) and speech acts (Austin and Searle), as well as more classical anthropological theories such as those propounded in particular by Durkheim but also by Maurice Bloch, Van Gennep, Victor Turner and Radcliffe-Brown, and it is easy to inscribe his interpretation of ritual in a much wider perspective. Indeed, this is something he did himself in his ambitious book, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity, which came out posthumously in 1999. In this book, he defines ritual as ‘the performance of more or less invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances not entirely encoded by the performers’ (Citation1999, 24).
9 By liturgical order, he means a relatively invariant sequence of acts and utterances encoded by someone other than the performer himself (Citation1979, 191–194; Citation1999, 169–175).
10 He is inspired by Anthony Wallace (Citation1966, 237 ff).
11 It can also be understood as an extension of his allo-communication.
12 I have conducted more than 50 interviews as well as a great number of formal and informal discussions (especially in relation to temple festivals) with young second-generation Tamil Hindus in Denmark.
13 The stationary god statues are not lifted out of the temple and are replaced by mobile figures that stand on a particular altar each day. According to the South Indian regulations, they must consist of five different metals.
14 Most of the eight Sri Lankan Tamil temples in Denmark are dedicated to Murukan.
15 In Sri Lanka, the devotees would go to the sea when the god is sent away.