Incense and holy bread: the sense of belonging through ritual among Middle Eastern Christians in Denmark

ABSTRACT

This article investigates how two Middle Eastern Christian churches in Denmark are constructed as particular sensorial spaces that invite attendees to participate in and identify with specific times and spaces. As with other Christian groups, rituals of the Sunday mass constitute a highlight of the activities that confirm the congregations’ faith and community, but for members of a minority faith, these rituals also serve other functions related to identification and belonging. Inspired by a practice-oriented [Bell, Catherine. (1992). Ritual Practice, Ritual Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press] and phenomenological approach to place-making [Cresswell, Tim. (2002). “Introduction: Theorizing Place.” In Mobilizing Place, Placing Mobility: The Politics of Representation in a Globalized World, edited by Ginette Verstraete and Tim Cresswell, 11–32. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi B.V.] through sensory communication [Leistle, Bernard. (2006). “Ritual as Sensory Communication: A Theoretical and Analytical Perspective.” In Ritual and Identity: Performative Practices as Effective Transformations of Social Reality, edited by Klaus-Peter Köpping, Bernhard Leistle, and Michael Rudolph, 33–74. Berlin: LIT Verlag; Pink, Sarah. (2009). Doing Sensory Ethnography. London: Sage], the article examines constructions of religious identity and belonging through ritual practices. The findings stem from fieldwork carried out in 2014–2015 and are part of a larger cross-disciplinary study of Egyptian, Iraqi and Assyrian Christians in Denmark. We argue that in various ways, the ritual forms a performative space for memory and belonging which, through bodily practices and engagement with the materialities of the church rooms, creates a memory that reconnects the practitioners with places elsewhere. More specifically, we argue that the Sunday ritual facilitates the connection with God and the eternal, a place and time with fellow believers, and a relocation to remember and re-enter a pre-migration past and ‘homeland’.

KEYWORDS:

• Ritual
• Middle Eastern Christians
• migration
• memory
• Denmark

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 See https://arts.st-andrews.ac.uk/dimecce/.

2 This article is based on data from 26 individual qualitative interviews and five focus group interviews, of which two included some Chaldeans.

3 We use the term ‘homeland’ to stress the feeling of belonging to the country of origin without ignoring that immigrants and their descendants may at the same time also have feelings for – in this case – Denmark as a homeland. To stress the relativity of the term, we use the inverted commas. Another reason for using the term is that the interviewees make use of it to connote their relationship with their country of origin.

4 See also our elaboration of the meaning of religious place-making in a recently published article (Galal et al. 2016).

5 In general, all figures concerning Middle Eastern Christians in Denmark are uncertain. They are based on estimates by the congregations themselves as well as by Danish ecumenical actors as there are no official statistics available.

6 For the communion, only one loaf of bread is sanctified, while the rest is shared with the entire congregation after the service has finished (Preston 2004, 199).

7 Accessed August 30, 2015. http://www.coptic-cairo.com/culture/music/music.html.

8 During the ecclesiastical year the Coptic Orthodox Church and the Assyrian Church of the East have several periods of fasting from animal products.

9 Assyrian is a term used by community members for the dialects of Neo-Aramaic which they speak.

10 We were presented with these concepts and ideas in the paper ‘The Diasporic Condition’ given by Ghassan Hage at the conference ’Middle Eastern Christians in Diaspora: Past and Present, Continuity and Change’ at University of St Andrews, Scotland, 26–27 May 2015.

11 In Iraq before 2003, minority languages like Assyrian Neo-Aramaic could only be practiced and taught in churches and private homes. While these languages are now recognised in the Iraqi constitution as regional languages, recent attacks on Christians and other religious minorities bear witness to the practical reality that in certain areas languages other than Arabic can only safely be practiced in secrecy.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement no 291827 as part of the HERA Joint Research Programme (www.heranet.info).