1st Edition
Diasporic Journeys, Ritual, and Normativity among Asian Migrant Women
The power of embodied ritual performance to constitute agency and transform subjectivity are increasingly the focus of major debates in the anthropology of Christianity and Islam. They are particularly relevant to understanding the way transnational women migrants from South and South East Asia, Christians, Muslims and Buddhists, who migrate to Asia, Europe and the Middle East to work as carers and maids, re-imagine and recreate themselves in moral and ethical terms in the diaspora.
This timely collection shows how women international migrants, stereotypically represented as a ‘nation of servants’, reclaim sacralised spaces of sociality in their migration destinations, and actively transform themselves from mere workers into pilgrims and tourists on cosmopolitan journeys. Such women struggle for dignity and respect by re-defining themselves in terms of an ethics of care and sacrifice. As co-worshippers they recreate community through fiestas, feasts, protests, and shared conviviality, while subverting established normativities of gender, marriage and conjugality; they renegotiate their moral selfhood through religious conversion and activism. For migrants the place of the church or mosque becomes a gateway to new intellectual and experiential horizons as well as a locus for religious worship and a haven of humanitarian assistance in a strange land.
This book was published as a special issue of the Asia-Pacific Journal of Anthropology.
Introduction Mark Johnson and Pnina Werbner
Part 1: Spiritual Sojourners and Religious Journeys
(a) Ritual and Performance
1. Popular Religiosity and the Transnational Journeys: Inscribing Filipino identity in the Santo Niño Fiesta in New Zealand. Josefina Tondo (PhD Candidate, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Canterbury, New Zealand)
2. Becoming Pilgrims in the ‘Holy Land’: On Filipina Domestic Workers’ Struggles and Pilgrimages for a Cause Claudia Liebelt (Research Institute of Law, Politics & Justice at Keele University, UK)
3. Activism at the Altar? Faith-Based Networks as Social Capital Among Sri Lankan Domestic Workers in Jordan Elizabeth Frantz (Social Anthropology, London School of Economics and Political Science)
(b) Experiences of Conversion and ‘Difference’
4. Muslim Belongings and Becomings: Migrant Domestic Workers and Islamic Da’wa in Kuwait Attiya Ahmed (Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for International and Regional Studies, Georgetown University, Qatar)
5. Political Ties and Religious Differences: Foreign Domestic Workers in Hong Kong Nicole Constable (Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh, USA)
(c) Religious Institutions as Havens
6. ‘Maddad ya om al-awagez’: the Spiritual and Material influence of Religion on the Experiences of Local and Foreign Domestic Workers in Egypt Amira A. Ahmed(Professor, School of Social Science, Media and Cultural Studies. University of East London)
7. The Catholic Church in the Lives of Irregular Migrant Filipinas in France: Identity Formation, Empowerment and Social Control Asuncio Fresnoza-Flot (Unité de Recherche Migration et Société, URMIS, Université Paris 7 Denis Diderot)
8. Intimate desire: Sri Lankan migrant women and the ‘Christian’ State - from Sri Lanka to Lebanon Monica Smith (PhD Candidate, Department of Geography, National University of Singapore)
Part 2: Ethical claims, Intimacy and the Limits of Normativity
9. Diasporic Dreams, Middle Class Moralities and Migrant Domestic Workers among Muslim Filipinos in Saudi Arabia. Mark Johnson (Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology, Department of Social Sciences, University of Hull)
10. Bodies and Bodies! Offerings for the Here and Now and the Hereafter Alicia Pingol (Lecturer, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, School of Social Sciences, Ateneo de Manila University)
11. "They think we are just caregivers": the Ambivalence of Care in the Lives of Filipino Medical Workers in Singapore Megha Amrith (PhD Candidate, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge)
12. A transnational pig: Generating cosmopolitan subjectivities within the indigenous Filipino diaspora Deirdre McKay (Senior Lecturer in Social Geography and Environmental Politics, Earth Sciences and Geography, Keele University)
13. Afterword Martin Manalansan IV (Associate Professor of Anthropology, Asian American Studies, University of Illinois)
Biography
Pnina Werbner is Professor of Social Anthropology at Keele University.
Mark Johnson is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at The University of Hull.
