ABSTRACT
In attempting to understand the migration and settlement of people around the globe, the concept of diaspora has proven crucial, proliferating not only in scholarly discourse but also in public and policy domains. And, as many people move, they bring along their religious beliefs, ideas, practices and objects, prompting renewed efforts to conceptualize ‘religion in motion’ (Vásquez 2008). Although diaspora first emerged as a religious concept – the Jews, exiled after the Babylonian capture of Jerusalem in the sixth century bce, constituted the ‘prototypical’ diaspora (Cohen 2008) – this initial understanding of their entwinement gave way in the 1960s and 1970s to more secular conceptualizations of diaspora. Taking the disentangling of diaspora and religion as its departure point, this chapter considers how the relationship between them has been approached, before turning attention to current conceptualizations both of diaspora and of religion which offer ways to think anew about their relationship. Adopting a processual understanding of both terms, it subsequently engages with the questions of how religious practices, discourses or objects might activate or deactivate diasporas; how they might connect or disconnect diasporic subjects with multiple others around them; and how they might be transformed in the process. These processes are addressed by exploring enduring issues of identification and belonging among diasporic co-religionists, and how they play out spatially and temporally – through practices and claims of territorialization and de-territorialization, and of continuity and discontinuity.
