Rituals of migration: an introduction

ABSTRACT

This introduction presents a framework for the articles in the special issue Rituals of Migration. First, it provides an overview of studies of ritual and migration, highlighting the fruitfulness of exploring the two fields together and arguing for the use of ritual as a cultural prism on processes of continuity and change in migration. In light of these analytical approaches, the introduction continues by outlining and discussing the three major themes that crosscut the articles (the interrelations between change and continuity, processes of placemaking and lines of social differentiation), demonstrating how the articles can shed light on these issues.

KEYWORDS:

• Ritual
• religion
• placemaking
• immigrants
• Scandinavia

Introduction

Every year, thousands of Shia Muslims from Denmark and southern Sweden gather in the streets of Copenhagen to participate in the annual procession of Ashura. Marking the martyrdom of Imam Hussain in AD 580, this calendrical rite re-enacts a procession that originally went from Najaf to Kerbala in Iraq. Today it is performed by Shia Muslims all over the world. Internationally, the procession is perhaps best known from countries in the Middle East and Asia, where some groups of mourners flagellate themselves or cut their foreheads with knives. In Copenhagen, however, there is no public flagellation and no blood. Dressed in black, the men, women and children in the procession simply beat themselves symbolically on the chest and chant slogans like ‘Ya, Hussain’ to honour the Imam and mourn his death. Young Muslims walk along the procession, handing out flyers and readily explaining to bystanders in Danish what the event is about. Banners in Arabic and Danish praise the Imam, but they also include references to international human rights and other slogans that speak to a local audience, thus making the procession both local and global in scope.

The Ashura procession illustrates how religious rituals may become part of the process of migration. Shia Muslims in Copenhagen are mostly immigrants from Iraq, Iran, Lebanon and Afghanistan. Some seek to recreate a religious tradition from their places of origin, in which others will be participating for the first time. New actors may acquire important roles, and new meaning may be attributed to the event. A similar situation is discussed by Pnina Werbner in her analysis of the annual julus, a procession in which followers of the late Pakistani Sufi Shaykh Zindapir parade in their local Mancunian neighbourhood. Werbner argues that the procession is a way to ‘stamp the earth with the name of Allah’ (1996), as well as to sacralise and appropriate new territory and to make the Sufi brotherhood visible to other Muslims in Manchester and the broader non-Muslim public (see also Baumann 1992). Generally, the Ashura procession in Copenhagen and the julus in Manchester both show how rituals may be used to create a Muslim space, both literally, through Muslims walking the streets of their respective cities, and metaphorically, by their becoming actors in the migrant destination.

This special issue examines the (re)construction and performance of religious rituals among Christian, Hindu and Muslim migrants in Scandinavia, focusing not only on the practices of single migrants, migrant families or entire communities, but also on how states ritualise the naturalisation of new citizens. The aim of the special issue is twofold: to explore from a comparative perspective how rituals are affected by migration processes, and to show how a focus on ritual performance can provide new perspectives on the study of migration. In this introduction, we make an argument for reconsidering and theorising ‘rituals of migration’ as an important aspect of migration and mobility, a theme that, until now, has received too little scholarly attention. By enabling a productive conversation between ritual studies and the study of transnational migration, we suggest that ritual performance can be used as a ‘cultural prism’ to shed new light on processes of change and continuity in migration (cf. Löfgren 1993; Pedersen 2014).

The ethnographic cases in this special issue all come from Scandinavia. The aim of this regional delimitation is not to make our approach explicitly comparative, but to acknowledge that rituals of migration and the negotiations of belonging they involve are heavily influenced by the societies in which they take place. The three Scandinavian countries of Norway, Sweden and Denmark are famous for their so-called universal welfare states (Esping-Andersen 1990), their high income taxes and extensive re-distribution of economic means, and their high levels of state regulation and social intervention in the lives of their citizens. However, when it comes to the reception of newcomers who have entered Scandinavia since the 1960s and 1970s as labour migrants, through family reunification or as refugees, the three countries have chosen significantly different political trajectories. Whereas Denmark and, to some extent, Norway have been described as explicitly ‘monocultural’ and have promoted various national-conservative and protectionist policies, in 1975 the Swedish government chose the opposite trajectory by adopting an official ‘multicultural’ policy (cf. Hedetoft 2006a). In recent decades this has resulted in quite different structural and political possibilities for the establishment, legitimacy and visibility of immigrants’ religions and congregations in these three Scandinavian countries (Jørgensen 2006; Hedetoft 2006a, 2006b; Olwig 2011; Raudvere 2011). At the same time, all three countries are heavily permeated with a dominant Evangelical Lutheran Protestantism that affects how minority groups can practice and perform their different religions (cf. Nielsen 2011). Specific versions of Christianity tend to become normative and the ‘natural’ standard from which other religions and rituals are seen and evaluated. This obviously has an impact in terms of immigrants’ ability to appropriate places, construct belonging and navigate the institutional frames and cultural understandings of religion and ritual practices in the host society. Analysing cases from the Scandinavian region highlights how national contexts structure the relationship between the sacred and the secular and between majority and minority religions in specific ways (Saint-Blancat and Cancellieri 2014, 658).

The purpose of the remainder of this introduction is to situate the articles in this special issue in a wider analytical context. We begin by arguing why it is relevant to explore rituals of migration. We then present three overarching themes that the articles deal with, namely the interrelations between change and continuity, processes of placemaking, and the issue of social differentiation.

Approaching rituals of migration

Within Europe, the growing interest in religion and migration seems to be closely connected to the influx and settlement of immigrants with a primarily Muslim background. A large number of studies thus investigate topics related to the presence of Islam in Europe, including questions of integration, veiling, the establishment of mosques and constituencies and processes of radicalisation. Likewise, migrant religions are often studied by focusing on religious leaders and spokespersons of congregations, organisations and transnational networks. Most attention seems to be given to the public and political dimensions of migrants’ religions, while fewer studies look at the subtle and private aspects of religious practices (Rytter and Olwig 2011). Moreover, despite the fact that rituals seem important in many aspects of migrants’ lives, researchers have given surprisingly little attention to the interrelations between migration and processes of ritualisation. In other words, there seems to be a lack of attention towards the ways in which rituals do not just relate to a former stage of life in the migrants’ places of origin, but also constitute an important dimension in their process of settlement in new living places. The articles in this special issue, therefore, seek to fill this gap by focusing on concrete religious rituals and practices in specific local settings.

One of the few comparative studies of ritual practices among migrants is Katy Gardner and Ralph Grillo’s (2002a) special issue on how rituals are performed by households and families across transnational space. Drawing attention to the micro-politics of religious practice, they argue that ritual performances may shed light on different aspects of transnational practices, including their organisation, their gendered dimension and the human and economic resources involved (2002b). The studies highlight how ritual performances become sites where notions of the proper family, appropriate gender relations, tradition versus modernity and relations between places are negotiated (Gardner 2002; Olwig 2002; Salih 2002). Due to their multifacted and multivocal nature, transnational rituals become arenas of contestation about wider issues such as ‘power, status and boundaries of community, identity, history’ (Gardner and Grillo 2002b, 187). The performance of rituals in one’s place of origin or place of residence thus also constitutes a claim to membership in a family or a broader community (Gardner and Grillo 2002b, 186; Olwig 2002; Salih 2002).

Whereas Gardner and Grillo shed light on rituals from a transnational perspective, Pedersen (2014) focuses primarily on the local implications of ritual practice. In her study of ritual performance and everyday life among Iraqi women in Copenhagen, she suggests that rituals may function as a ‘cultural prism’ through which to view notions of relatedness and relations to place that are not always apparent or explicated in daily life. Ritual performances constitute condensed forms of sociality that provide us with an insight into kinds of sociality that are otherwise less explicit (Sjørslev 2007), condensing norms, ideals and conflicts as well (cf. Löfgren 1993). In this way, by looking at the specificities of ritual performance, it becomes possible to acquire an understanding of migrants’ social organisation, processes of placemaking and (re)production of practice more generally. For example, a study of the calendrical rite of Eid al-Fitr (Pedersen 2014) highlights the challenges involved in reconstructing social practice in a setting in which the social context has changed from a majority to a minority situation and where an important extended family is missing. At the same time, this does not mean that migrants do not celebrate Eid al-Fitr. Rather, they construct a new tradition that both draws on well-known elements and includes new actors, new places and potentially new practices. Arguing for the interrelations between social relations, processes of placemaking and constructions of belonging to one’s place of residence, Pedersen thus shows how Iraqi women’s ritual performances are elemental in their negotiations of belonging. Performing religious rituals associated with a minority religion and one’s place of origin is not counterproductive to the process of settlement – on the contrary, it may be an instrumental element in processes of localisation (Pedersen 2014, 160f).

In this special issue, we are inspired by the notion of ritual as a ‘cultural prism’ to explore how a focus on ritual may shed new light on understandings of migration. Looking beyond processes within religious groups, the articles discuss the impact and significance of religious rituals in migrants’ processes of settlement in new countries and in maintaining relations with their places of origin. Since they approach the topic of migration and ritual from different perspectives, the articles do not share a specific definition of ritual. However, they all perceive rituals as ‘ongoing, dynamic processes’ rather than as ‘static cultural events’ (cf. Gardner and Ralph 2002b, 183), and as a means to create new connections and relations between ritual practitioners and their local surroundings, whether in the temple, the church, the Sufi brotherhood or the national community. In this respect, all the articles seem to suggest that rituals of migration are not only concerned with ‘being and belonging’ (Levitt and Schiller 2004) but also with ‘becomings’ (Deleuze 1995; Kapferer 2004; Biehl and Locke 2010).

The variety in the authors’ approaches to ritual underlines how ritual analyses can shed light on migration processes in numerous ways. The articles revolve around many of the same themes, but through their various frames of analysis they all emphasise different aspects of rituals and what ritual practice entails. A dominant perspective in this collection of articles concerns the performance of rituals. Rather than looking at the symbolic or semiotic meanings of rituals, this analytical approach highlights their embodied doings and the social interaction involved in the production of meaning. Several articles also pay particular attention to strategies of ritualisation (Bell 1992) in which certain acts become endowed with ritual meaning, while social relations are simultaneously ritualised. For instance, the articles show that, through ritual, individual bodies become citizens (Damsholt), locals (Grønseth), couples (Woźniak-Bobińska), true believers (Rytter) or community (Fibiger) and church members (Sparre and Galal).

Another shared approach concerns the sensory experience of ritual. While this generally seems to have received little attention in ritual analysis, rituals are often experienced through senses of sound, smell, taste and touch that not only make them bodily experiences, but also invoke memories and imaginations (Leistle 2006; Sparre and Galal 2018). Ritual sensation and effervescence can be important on the individual level, as well as constitutive of a transnational spiritual family (Rytter) and the transitional experience of being inscribed in a national community (Damsholt).

The final perspective that we want to mention here views rituals as communicative events. While a focus on embodied performance and communication may sometimes appear as fundamentally different perspectives, they share the question of ‘what sorts of meanings and effects are created and communicated through physical actions and spoken words’ (Strathern and Stewart 1998, 237f.). In this way, performative and communicative approaches are not necessarily mutually exclusive frames of analysis, but may rather be seen as concerned with different performative phases of ritual (Strathern and Stewart 1998, 237). Inspired by Rappaport’s (1999) theory of ritual as communication, Marianne Fibiger draws on his concepts of auto- and allo-communication to investigate the importance of ritual’s communicative effects in a migration setting. Here it seems particularly important to look at the ‘outer communication’ (Fibiger’s term) involved in ritual as well. Likewise, weddings (Woźniak-Bobińska), funerals (Grønseth) and citizenship rites (Damsholt) are examples of events where spectators are equally important recipients of ritual messages.

All in all, the toolbox of ritual theory allows us to investigate processes of migration from different angles that each highlight certain kinds of dynamics and experiences. The special issue explores questions such as: How are processes of change and continuity negotiated through ritual? What are the transformative potentials of religious rituals? How may religious rituals facilitate inclusion or exclusion in different social fields? In what ways do rituals connect, reconnect and disconnect people and places in transnational social fields? The articles examine these salient questions by focusing on three overarching themes that are vital to the process of migration and are also key issues in studies of ritual performance. These concern (1) the interrelations between change and continuity, (2) processes of placemaking and (3) lines of social differentiation.

The interrelations of change and continuity

The dynamics of change and continuity is a key issue in ritual studies. Classical studies of rituals have explored the ongoing process of ritualising social relations, the capacity of rituals to manage transitions for individuals and groups, and the generative power inherent in rituals to create new meanings and emerging structures (e.g. Van Gennep 1960 [1909]; Turner 1969; Bell 1992; Durkheim 1995 [1912]; Kapferer 2004). Rituals may thus be inherently transformative. At the same time, other studies have highlighted the ways in which rituals extend across time. For instance, rituals are often performed whenever it is necessary to (re)construct the social order, and they can be important elements in the maintenance of traditions (Myerhoff 1984). Their repetition and regularity provide a sense of continuity (Connerton 1989). In particular, calendrical rites may fuse linear time with cyclical time, historical time with social time, because the present reality of the rite is conflated with historical events and narratives (cf. Bell 1997, 105; Schierup and Ålund 1986, 205). In general, rituals and ritualisation have the double capacity to make claims about continuity, repetition and re-enactment while also forging transitions and transformations. One telling example is how devoted Muslims within the Sufi tariqa (path) called Naqshbandi Mujaddidi Saifi in Copenhagen strive to re-enact and emulate every aspect of everyday life outlined by the sunna (example, ‘tradition’) of the Prophet Muhammad in order to change themselves into pious Muslims, respectable sons and husbands, and engaged citizens in Danish society (Rytter 2016).

In the context of migration, it is the dialectic of continuity and change or imitative re-enactment and transformation that is important, with rituals and what might be thought of or represented as ‘tradition’ being used to negotiate and perhaps assert new identities and status (Gardner and Grillo 2002b, 187). It is not unusual that a new setting requires – or allows – a new form of social organisation (e.g. Levitt 2001). This may involve rituals being performed in different places, at different times or in different ways than before. For example, in the Scandinavian countries, states and municipalities often grant financial support to associations and other civil-society activities, and many immigrant (religious) groups thus become established as cultural associations which have to live up to the administrative requirements of associational bureaucracy (see Raudvere 2011; Simonsen 2011). In a similar vein, Marianne Fibiger (2018) describes how the establishment of a Sri Lankan Hindu Tamil religious community in Denmark involves a process of ‘templeisation’, that is, a process of moving religious observance and ritual practice from the home to the temple. At other times, ritualisation in a new setting may include new participants and provide new actors with influence or authority (Werbner 1990; Pedersen 2014, 105ff). Some even gain a role as ‘ritual experts’ who can guide others to perform various kinds of rituals ‘the proper way’ (Venhorst et al. 2013; Rytter 2014). Following Anne Sigfrid Grønseth’s article (2018) about the work-related accident and sudden death of a Tamil refugee in northern Norway, we might even suggest that religious practitioners need ritual experts. Grønseth shows how the innovative creation of an eclectic ritual becomes an ad hoc way for these Tamils to conduct a proper burial and deal with the ghost of the deceased migrant. Similarly, Pnina Werbner describes how the recreation of a moral universe requires the ritualisation of new local social relations among Pakistani migrants in Britain (1990, 153ff.).

Changes involve not only social organisation, but also meaning. It is therefore important that ritual practices among immigrants are not seen as mindless reconstructions of former practice. Instead, it is necessary to explore the ways in which new meanings and forms of expression are interrelated with former ones (Metcalf 1996, 7). The process of migration and settlement in new socio-cultural environments often cause migrants to reflect on the significance, validity and performance of specific religious practices. What used to be an unquestionable ‘natural’ aspect of everyday life suddenly becomes a daily, monthly or annual event that establishes boundaries around specific religious practices and communities and a division between insiders and outsiders. Such renewed awareness and interest in religious practices often result in ongoing discussions and negotiations in relation to the authenticity of religious practices and ritual performances (see Levitt, Barnett, and Khalil 2011). However, when rituals can be produced and reproduced in a migration context, they are often assigned new meanings and significance and tend to become integrated into personal biographies, family networks and religious communities in novel ways. The paradox of such ‘invention of tradition’ (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983) is that claims of authenticity in the migration context often involve the ascription of radically new practices and meanings.

The performance of a Tamil funeral in northern Norway, mentioned above, is one example of this (Grønseth 2018). Faced with the sudden death of a Tamil worker, the local Tamils struggle to arrange a funeral which lives up to the demands of the Tamil-Hindu religion without knowing the details of the rite and without a Hindu priest being available. At the same time, they make a conscious effort not to appear too strange in the setting of this Norwegian village. The specific situation causes them to negotiate gender relations, religious interpretations and transformations within the group, while also providing them with an opportunity to demonstrate their sense of belonging to the local community. Funerals and other life-cycle rites such as childbirth, baptism, takliif and weddings are ‘vital conjunctures’ (cf. Johnson-Hanks 2002) that may urge migrants to reflect on, renegotiate and question notions of identity, affiliation and belonging both locally and transnationally (see also Gardner 2002; Olwig 2002; van der Pijl 2016). As such, existential or categorical transitions and radical changes in life trajectories are often characterised by uncertainty and insecurity, but they also open up new horizons of possibility and potentiality.

Processes of placemaking

The performance of ritual is also a way of making place. As studies in anthropology and geography have argued, places are social and cultural constructs (Certeau 1984; Massey 1994; Olwig 2007), their meanings being constructed through social interaction over time. Placemaking through rituals entails several elements. From a religious perspective, the performance of rituals may constitute a way of sacralising space. The Hindu Tamil Mahotsava or the Sufi Muslims in Manchester (mentioned above, Werbner 1996) are examples of public processions that both ‘take place’ and ‘make place’ (cf. Knott 2005 in Saint-Blancat and Cancellieri 2014, 646). Physically, symbolically and spiritually, they ‘anchor’ the presence of the religious group in a particular place, to which they inscribe a new moral geography (Werbner 1996; Garbin 2012a, 426–428). This kind of ‘religious placemaking’, as Garbin (2012b, 401) terms it, is also a way of appropriating place. When the Shia Muslims walk through Copenhagen on the annual day of Ashura, they claim their place as members of Danish society. Filling the streets and the soundscape, they make themselves visible and require recognition as local actors (cf. Garbin 2012a; Saint-Blancat and Cancellieri 2014, 646). In this way, the ritual speaks not only to those who participate, but also to the spectators and ‘significant others’ in the surrounding society (Baumann 1992). Sometimes ritual performers may wish to demarcate themselves from these ‘others’, while at other times they may intend to highlight commonalities and ‘non-foreignness’. However, public processions and rituals are always multivocal. Anthropologist Kublitz (2010) reports on a ritualised political protest that followed the publication of ‘the Danish Cartoons’ in 2005. She attended a public procession where a couple of thousand immigrants of Arab and Muslim backgrounds walked in the centre of Copenhagen shouting Islam er fred (Islam is peace), but due to the acoustics of the narrow street it sounded more like Islam er vred (Islam is angry). This misperception serves as an illustrative example of how the intended audiences of ritual and ritualised actions do not always perceive the events as expected.

Placemaking can also be carried out through more mundane, less spectacular activities in semi-public or private spaces. Focusing on the ‘rather unnoticed’ rituals of Sunday Communion among Middle Eastern Christians in Denmark, Sara Lei Sparre and Lise Paulsen Galal (2018) show how the church comes into being through sensory communication and bodily practices. Sensorial experiences such as smelling incense, tasting bread or listening to spiritual music allow churchgoers to connect with God, their own religious community and the ‘homeland’ at one and the same time, hence relocating the participants in both time and space.

The ‘homeland’ that Sparre and Galal refer to is both a concrete place and an abstract religious space. In his analysis of the Sufi zikr (‘commemoration of God’) ritual in Denmark, Mikkel Rytter (2018) shows how rituals may also contribute to the ‘re-invention of origin’. Introducing the term of ‘religious mobility’, Rytter discusses the forms of mobility that followers of a Danish branch of the global Naqshbandi Sufi tariqa (‘path, order’) undergo as they become salikeen, travellers moving up the ladder of spiritual insights and initiation. For the devoted practitioners, religious visits to living and dead Sufi masters in Pakistan contribute to a re-invention of the Pakistan these young men otherwise know from their parents’ generation. This example highlights how religious rituals can become ‘virtual spaces’ (Kapferer 2004) of innovation where alternative identities can be imagined and new horizons for the future can start to take shape.

Lines of social differentiation

It has become a truism that ritual performances can create various kinds of communitas (Turner 1969) among practitioners. Through bodily and spiritual participation, ritual participants may come to feel as one since, at least for a while, lines of hierarchy and social differentiation become irrelevant within the ritual sphere. Yet, whether public or private, rituals are multivocal, including for their participants (Kapferer 1984; Schieffelin 1985). While the latter may share a common experience, the meanings they attribute to the ritual may not be the same. Applying these perspectives to the study of migration, it seems vital to explore how migrants negotiate the practices and meanings of ritual. Investigating who participates, where rituals are carried out and how they become connected to questions of identity may contribute to deconstructing the sometimes taken-for-granted notion of community that is frequently used to denote groups of co-ethnics identified by their common origin. As Karen Olwig (2009) shows in her analysis of a funeral among Caribbean migrants in Britain, different kinds of moral, social or historical community may emerge situationally, but lines of differentiation (such as age/generation, social status, time of living abroad, etc.) may equally become visible in the social organisation of the ritual. What from the outside appears as a well-established community of migrants may, from an internal perspective, be contingent, contested and negotiated (Pedersen 2014, 115). Along similar lines, a number of studies have shown how rituals can also be used to create and contest notions of identity and belonging to communities or places. Religious institutions are controlled by different groups and are often the centre of various struggles for control, authority and power, which results in a tension between cooperation and conflict among believers (cf. Ilkjær 2008). Likewise, migrants may use religious rituals in negotiating notions of family relatedness (Olwig 2007; Rytter 2013) or in the creation of home and affiliations in migration settings (Salih 2003; Pedersen 2014).

In this respect, religious rituals constitute an entry to discussing processes of intergenerational transmission and the ongoing negotiation of gender positions and intergenerational authority. The centrality of gender to the performance of rituals – and vice versa – is obvious in a range of studies (Van Gennep 1960; Werbner 1990; Pemberton 2005; Pedersen 2011; Groes-Green 2013). Looking at the articles in this special issue, it is apparent that all the rituals they discuss are gendered in one way or another, either because they are practised by one sex only (Rytter) or because gender relations are negotiated through their performance. This is most specific in Grønseth’s discussion of the fate of Bala’s young and vulnerable widow and in Woźniak-Bobińska’s discussion of gendered expectations of what constitutes a ‘real’ woman and man in wedding preparations and ceremonies among Assyrians and Syriacs in Sweden.

Concerning the issue of generation, the sociologist Karl Mannheim famously stated that each generation inhabits different ‘locations in history’ that form its own perspectives, habitus and comprehensions of the world (Mannheim 1972 [1952]). Several recent migration studies have emphasised how two generations may have radically different experiences of growing up in different places around the world (Werbner 1990; Levitt 2001; Olwig 2007; Levitt, Barnett, and Khalil 2011; Rytter 2013; Pedersen 2014). However, the word ‘generation’ has a double meaning, being not only a noun referring to ‘a generation’, but also ‘to generate’ in its verbal form (Whyte, Alber, and van der Geest 2008). The articles in this special issue demonstrate the significance of rituals in generating new practices, perspectives and meanings between the different generations of migrant communities.

For example, rituals may signify different notions of belonging to different age groups. Marta Woźniak-Bobińska (2018) describes how the maintenance and change of Assyrian and Syriac marriage traditions in Sweden constitute a point of contention between the older and younger generations. Woźniak-Bobińska also discusses how struggles over status involving couples and families can be an intimate part of engagements and wedding traditions. This often involves conspicuous consumption and other kinds of displays of wealth and power that may reveal hierarchical differences between the families involved. In general, rituals and ceremonies like weddings may serve as antagonistic opportunities to ‘show off’ wealth and success in the new migrant communities, where families make claims to new positions and identities (see Werbner 1990; Rytter 2011).

The political dimensions of rituals have been highlighted in classical studies emphasising the importance of the ritual clown whose actions mollify latent conflicts and rupture among hunter-gatherers (Turnbull 1965), or the intermediate position and ritual importance of the leopard-skin chief in settling disputes, feuds and war among Nuer cattle nomads (Evans-Prichard 1962 [1940]). Others have discussed the communicative aspects and affect of rituals and public ceremonies in international politics (Kertzer 1988), or the political dimensions of citizenship ceremonies and ritual initiation and the inclusion of new citizens that more and more countries initiate (Verkaaik 2010). Such rituals of the naturalisation of new citizens institutionalise the construction of belonging. Based on an ethnographic study of citizenship ceremonies in six different countries, Tine Damsholt (2018) compares the obligatory naturalisation ritual in Australia with the voluntary ceremony in Denmark. She argues that, while such ceremonies do not seem to have much practical or legal significance, their aim is to transform the migrant into a loyal citizen. By making the naturalisation process a personal and material event, they emotionalise citizenship. In the Danish case, there seems to be a paradoxical relationship between the inclusive political rhetoric of the ceremony and the much more exclusive rhetoric in daily public and political life. Nevertheless, official state-sanctioned rituals are not only meant to induce identity and involvement in new citizens; the annual public ritualised ceremony (with flags, songs, handshakes and oath swearing) is also a way for the nation state to celebrate and recreate itself as an imagined community and nation (see Kertzer 1988; Anderson 1983; Durkheim 1995 [1912]; Kapferer 2011).

Concluding remarks: a new research agenda?

Presenting six studies of ritual practices and performances in different migrant groups in the three Scandinavian countries of Sweden, Norway and Denmark, this special issue outlines a promising research agenda that combines insights from migration studies and ritual studies. By using ritual as a ‘cultural prism’ to look at religious practices and ritual performances among migrants, it becomes possible to explore aspects of migrants’ everyday lives that have otherwise remained underdeveloped, been left out of sight or simply ignored. In this respect, the suggested focus on ‘rituals of migration’ not only provides new insights, it also raises numerous new research questions.

Based on the six articles in the special issue, we have emphasised three overall themes as particularly relevant. First of all, rituals are significant in their rhythms and temporalities regarding the change and transformation of migrants’ everyday lives in their new destination. The innovative dynamics of religious rituals seems to offer experiences of connection and continuity, even when they are established, performed or reinvented in new socio-economic and political settings. Secondly, rituals seem significant in placemaking and appropriating new territory. Due to their innate flexibility and multivocality, rituals become a means to create new identities and notions of belonging in various ways in different religious communities. Finally, we suggest that rituals are significant in articulating, constructing and contesting communities and congregations. We note that it is not only migrants who use rituals to delineate the religious community, group or network, but also the receiving welfare states, and that majority religions may also use rituals as a means to include (and exclude) newcomers. As such, all six articles of this special issue discuss how rituals have the potential to craft new identities and statuses, and how ritual spaces and performances are often contested and interpreted in various ways by different practitioners and audiences. In the context of migration studies, a focus on rituals of migration can highlight how the process of settlement and constructions of belonging to a new place of living take place from an angle that emphasises migrants’ own perspectives and actions more than the perspective of the host society or political discourses of integration. The perspective may also be used to question taken-for-granted notions of static ethnic communities and the unreflexive reproduction of so-called traditional practices, or the widespread assumption that migrants’ social practices are not in any way affected by cultural and social conditions in the surrounding society. As a result, studying specific ritual performances opens up much larger questions and perspectives.

However, the six studies presented in this special issue obviously only focus on particular aspects of ‘rituals of migration’. Future research might pay attention to other issues, for instance, the significance of non-religious rituals or participation in cross-cultural rituals for processes of placemaking and negotiations of change and continuity; the role of rituals in establishing and maintaining transnational networks; and how rituals may be mediated and communicated via new forms of social media and thus gain importance in all kinds of current migration processes.

In general, by focusing on ‘rituals of migration’, we suggest a comparative research agenda aimed at studying the role and importance of rituals in migration processes, despite practitioners’ different religions, forms of cultural and symbolic capital or specific histories of forced or voluntary migration. It is a research approach that explores the creative potential of rituals to craft new identities, communities and notions of being, belonging and becoming. However, it is also an agenda that should include the structural, legal and socio-economic conditions offered to migrants’ religious and ritual practices by the receiving nation states. Studying religious rituals within a migration setting thus sheds light on the ways in which the structural relations and state institutions of the majority society come to affect the ritual performances of minority groups. This special issue offers a humble beginning for this research agenda, hopefully encouraging others to grab the torch and explore ‘rituals of migration’ around the world.

Acknowledgements

This special issue is based on papers that were first presented at the panel ‘Rituals of migration’ which formed part of the Nordic Migration Conference in Copenhagen, August 2014. We would like to thank the colleagues who helped us review papers in the first phase of preparing this special issue and the JEMS reviewer who provided very constructive criticism at the final stage of our work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.