Domestic religion and the migrant home: The private, the diasporic and the public in the sacralization of Sikh dwellings in Italy

Abstract

Migrants’ home, as a notion and a set of related experiences and locations across countries, is subject to an increasing research interest. Little of it, however, has looked at their ways to circulate and emplace religion, through portable beliefs, artifacts and practices, as a form of homemaking. Likewise, little of the debate on home and migration has explored the home not just in terms of housing conditions or material cultures, but as an infrastructure for migrants to reproduce their collective identities through religion. We contribute to fill these research voids with a case study of “domestic religion” among Sikh immigrant families in Northern Italy. We specifically analyze the religious practices whereby some migrants, building on certain objects and ways to use the domestic space, turn ordinary dwellings into meaningful homes. Their ways to “sacralize” the home though temporary or permanent infrastructures of religiosity illuminate changing uses and meanings of home. Moreover, they reveal the critical interdependence between the home and the public and diasporic spheres of religion. This opens up a potentially very rich field for research on the lived experience of domestic space, showing how religion (re)shapes the home, and the home (re)shapes religion, across immigrant groups and life course positions.

Do Objects (Re)produce Home among International Migrants?

“…These findings resonate with Tyaynen-Qadir's (2016) analysis of altars as sites of family belonging created by so-called transnational grandmothers between Finland and Russia. In some immigrant communities, these infrastructures are also instrumental to reproduce forms of 'domestic religion' (Bertolani and Boccagni 2022). Such patterns of domestic decoration operate as reminders of the past homes' material cultures, no less than of the dwellers.…”

Introduction: home and migration - setting the terms of belonging and place-making on the move

“…4. Exceptions includeMazumdar and Mazumdar (2004),Wilkins (2019),Bertolani et al (2021) andBertolani and Boccagni (2023).…”