In fifty years, who will be here? Reflections on globalisation, migration and spiritual identity

Abstract

This paper focuses on the significance of debate within and beyond religious communities over faith representation in relation to globalisation and migration. It analyses ways in which globalisation affects forms of religiosity and spiritual identity, among the young and their elders in religious communities, using two case studies: one from Islam and one from Buddhism.

It argues that the issues presented by globalised communication and migration will have a major effect on young people as they assume shifting identities in a changing world. It examines cross‐generational tension and change and underlying trends related to forms of capital that produce these. Within this, questions of what informs conversion will be analysed. In conclusion it suggests that the modernising agenda pursued by capitalist democratic societies is likely to be insufficient to ensure that religious communities will commit themselves to social cohesion, because this has to be more intimately related to forms of capital and provide religious communities with a sense of proactive, rather than reactive, purpose. Indeed, the pressure to modernise may be counterproductive, in causing fractures within these communities, if it results in a weakening of leadership and religious identity and disaffection of the youth.

For the next generation and those who might find themselves here in fifty years time there needs to be a willingness to dialogue from a position within which national and religious identity are not estranged and within which the latter has not been emaciated by the former. This we might call a position in which ‘spiritual capital’ can be aligned with the other forms of capital required for a meaningful sense of citizenship.

Keywords:

• spirituality
• capital
• modernisation
• democracy
• migration
• religious identity
• globalisation

Notes

1. Bourdieu speaks of capital as ‘what makes the games of society – not least the economic game – something other than simple games of chance offering at each moment the possibility of a miracle’ (Bourdieu 1986, 241). He continues, ‘Capital … takes time to accumulate … And the structure of the distribution of the different types and subtypes of capital at a given moment in time represents the immanent structure of the social world, i.e., the set of constraints, inscribed in the very reality of that world, which govern its functioning in a durable way, determining the chances of success for practices.’

Modernisation and modernity relate back to the Enlightenment project. As Lakeland writes, it ‘is a matter of assessing the import of what the Western world inherited from the Enlightenment … The Enlightenment gave us the autonomy of human reason, the notion of human rights, and the struggle for a just and equitable society. At the same time, it is largely responsible for the markedly individualistic cast of “developed” Western society and implicated in the anomie and social disintegration that accompanies development’ (Lakeland 1997, 13). Against the backdrop of this description it becomes clear why some religious groups, especially in the context of migration, find themselves in difficulty with regard to the preservation of identity. An empirical study that throws light on this is Sanjay Suri’s Brideless in Wembley: In search of Indian England. However, modernisation is also a global phenomenon and a useful study in that respect is Pankaj Mishra’s (2006) Temptations of the West.

2. Bourdieu (1986) describes social capital as ‘the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to … membership in a group … The volume of the social capital possessed by a given agent thus depends on the size of the network of connections he can effectively mobilize and on the volume of the capital (economic, cultural or symbolic) possessed’ (Ibid., 248–249).

The relevance of this description within the context I am presenting is that such resources, membership and agency will be accumulated, within the host culture, to the extent that the minority group accedes to the norms that the host culture demands. This disempowers the minority group to the extent that it lacks the representational power to negotiate these norms, which, in turn, evidences a lack of social capital.

3. Here Paul Foot’s volume, The Vote, offers a valuable historical perspective from the Levellers to the Pankhursts. He charts the progressive dissatisfaction of the disenfranchised as the vote was withheld from the non‐propertied classes by parliament as a form of repression. The context is different but remains relevant to capital today. We now have both a national and globalised arena in which ethnicity and religious adherence of a broader kind is affected. If stability is retained through repression you have to be careful that the loss afflicting the many doesn’t reach a critical insurrectionary mass (Foot 2005).

4. Telephone conversation with Yasin Rahim, Khoja Shia community, 3 May 2006.

5. Grand Ayatollah Sistani is the Ayatollah the Khoja Shias follow for guidance. The fatwa becomes the ruling to be followed.

6. Martin Jacques’ observations in ‘We are globalised but have no real intimacy with the rest of the world’ are prescient here (2006, 24). He writes:

Has the effect of globalisation been to promote a less respectful and more intolerant attitude in the west, and certainly on the part of the US, towards other cultures, religions and societies? This contradicts the widely held view that globalisation has made the world smaller and everyone more knowing … In short, globalisation has brought with it a new kind of western hubris … At the heart of globalisation is a new kind of intolerance in the west towards other cultures, traditions and values … The idea that each culture is possessed of its own specific wisdom and characteristics … born of its own individual struggle over thousands of years to cope with nature and circumstance, has been drowned out by the cry that the world is now one, that the western model – neoliberal markets, democracy and the rest – is the template for all … The net effect of all this is a lack of knowledge of and respect for difference … the western reaction to the remorseless rise of the non‐west will be far from benign.

7. Politically, of course, the connection between poverty, repression and extremism has been recorded by historians repeatedly at what we might call a macro level. For example, the Iranian Shia revolution was successful because it was propagated on the basis of the Shah being a repressive ruler representing western interests and denying the Shia Islamic heritage of Iran as well as impoverishing his citizens economically. The success of the Shias in this respect relied on other groups in Iran also being willing to identify with and unite in their cause. In this study I am seeking to investigate how such a momentum can emerge at a micro level in a globalised environment.