Diasporic Encounters, Sacred Journeys: Ritual, Normativity and the Religious Imagination Among International Asian Migrant Women

Abstract

This volume draws together recent ethnographic research that challenge conventional assumptions about Asian women's international migration. Whereas the dominant scholarly narrative construes these female migrants as hyper-exploited and compliant workers, we focus on the way migrants challenge their abjection in the alternative spaces they create and in which they live richly complex religious and social lives. Although shaped and constrained by the migration context, overseas female migrants, we argue, nevertheless create alternative worlds of fun, piety and rights activism. Their social lives are not solely structured by marginality, nor are their salient relations exclusively transnational. Rather, in their diasporic encounters, migrants creatively engage with the places and landscapes where they live and labour, sharing conviviality with others like themselves through ritual performance, pilgrimage journeys, mobilisation for rights, religious worship and new intimate relationships. The articles assembled here bear witness to this expansive sociality by disclosing how ritual performances, pious practices and transgressive acts in the diaspora engender novel forms of belonging, enable collective action and defy persistent stereotypes of docile bodies.

Migrant Domestic Workers in the Middle East

“…As Moors et al (2009, p. 158) point out, "In order to find privacy domestic workers have to leave the employer's home and move into the public." This resonates with the research findings on migrant domestic workers in other parts of the world, which documents the multiple ways in which migrant domestic workers physically occupy public spaces in the destination countries-parks, shopping malls, restaurants, and churches (see, for example, Yeoh and Huang, 1998;Lan, 2003;Werbner and Johnson, 2011). As several of the authors in this book discuss, these public spaces are where domestic workers are able to build or find their own "private spheres" in which to relax and be themselves in the company of friends and sometimes partners.…”

“…While a dominant public and media discourse has tended to focus on the abuse and rights violations of migrant domestic workers in the Middle East, scholarly research is increasingly being positioned beyond this frame (e.g., Frantz, 2008;Moors et al, 2009;de Regt, 2010;Werbner and Johnson, 2011, Fernandez, 2011, and Sabban, 2012. This book brings together the work of a group of scholars in anthropology, sociology, international studies, and development studies researching the diversity of migrant nationalities (from, among others, the Philippines, Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka, India, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Benin) in equally varied Middle Eastern contexts (Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Israel, and Yemen).…”

Transnational families, religious participation and gender dynamics: Filipino, Sao Tomean and Indo-Mozambican immigrant women in Lisbon, Portugal

“…As noted by authors discussing geographies of religion (Shin 2007;Hopkins 2009;Johnson and Werbner 2010), the different ways in which gender and religious experiences are mutually constituted and influence migrants' options and strategies towards family life remain insufficiently examined. Migrants' capacity to redefine strategies and meaning stems from an intersection of gender with class, education, ethnicity and religion.…”

Mobilities of Return: Pacific Perspectives

“…These observations are then applied to an investigation of how resources and experiences from the contexts of migration influence community development in the native place and the economic and social ecology of places that supply migrants. In addition, I draw upon the accumulated anthropological research on Amis culture and society (Chen 1987(Chen , 1989Hsu 1991;Huang 1991Huang , 2005aHuang , 2005bLiu et al 1965;Suenari 1983;Yuan 1969), and in particular analysis of family and kinship networks, cultural practices and values (Yeh 2009a(Yeh , 2009b(Yeh , 2012(Yeh , 2013(Yeh , 2014 to provide a more nuanced understanding of Amis migration, balancing political and economic variables with personal and cultural variables (Johnson and Werbner 2010).…”