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Religions
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Anthropological Perspectives on Diaspora and Religious Identities
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Anthropological Perspectives on Diaspora and Religious Identities

A special issue of Religions (ISSN 2077-1444).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 April 2024) | Viewed by 2178

Special Issue Editor

Prof. Dr. Andre Levy

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Ben-Gurion University, Beer-Sheva 84105, Israel
Interests: from an anthropological perspective on the concepts of "diaspora"; ethnicity; Moroccan Jews

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue invites papers that juxtapose three fields: anthropology, diasporas, and religious identities. This juxtaposition can shed light on the intriguing tensions between movement and sedentarism and accompanying concepts such as “strangeness” and “commonsense”.

Anthropology’s trademark, fieldwork, involves distancing anthropologists from their commonsense world, allowing for insights to be gained from the discomfort and challenges of strangeness.

In the same vein, the anthropological study of diasporas—that is, of those socio-cultural groups that are “out of place”, and whose very being is built upon an existential sense of strangeness—can provide a critical perspective on the common sense of their “hosting” societies.

As against these two unsettling fields, we position religious identity that supposedly “establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations…” (Geertz 1965) in individuals and socio-cultural groups.

By bringing these three fields into a conversation, we hope to offer rich and refined understandings concerning the complex and dynamic relationships between movement and sedentarism, strangeness, and common sensuality. We expect that these new understandings will relate to both the observing anthropologist as well as the observed socio-cultural groups. In addition, we strive to collect articles that are both ethnographically varied and theoretically provoking, so that ethnographies from different parts of the world will question the very concepts that are at the heart of this Special Issue.

I look forward to receiving your contributions.

Prof. Dr. Andre Levy
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Religions is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • religious identity
  • diasporas
  • anthropology
  • commonsense
  • strangeness
  • movement
  • sedentarism

Published Papers (2 papers)

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17 pages, 2280 KiB  
Article
Celebrating Fifty Years of Jewish Pride: An Autoethnographic View on Queerness, Diaspora and Homeland in an American Gay Synagogue
by Elazar Ben-Lulu
Religions 2024, 15(5), 550; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15050550 - 29 Apr 2024
Viewed by 418
Abstract
Anthropologists of religion are preoccupied with questions of identity, community, performance and representation. One way they cope with these concerns is through a reflexive examination of their ethnographic positionality in the field. This provides an opportunity to engage not only with “the other”, [...] Read more.
Anthropologists of religion are preoccupied with questions of identity, community, performance and representation. One way they cope with these concerns is through a reflexive examination of their ethnographic positionality in the field. This provides an opportunity to engage not only with “the other”, but also to explore their own identities and background. This article presents an autoethnographic analysis of Pride Shabbat, a special service held in June to celebrate the intersection of Judaism and queerness. The service took place at Congregation Beit Simchat Torah (CBST) as part of their 50th-anniversary celebration. Since the 1970s, CBST has been known as the largest gay synagogue in the world and provided diverse religious and spiritual services to the Jewish LGBTQ+ community. Based on my participation in this specific event in June 2023, I draw distinct differences between the Israeli Jewish LGBTQ community and the American Jewish LGBTQ community, such as issues related to ageism and multigenerational perceptions within the gay community, the internal dynamic for gender dominance, as well as diverse trajectories of queerness, religiosity and nationality. Symbolically, contrary to the common perception that the diaspora looks to the state of Israel for symbolic and actual existence, this inquiry sheds light on the opposite perspective; the homeland (represented by the ethnographer) absorbs and learns from the queer Jewish practices and experiences taking place within the diaspora (the American Jewish LGBTQ community). This is an opposite movement which reveals the cracks in the perception of the gay community as a transnational community, as well as the tense power relations between Israel and American Jewry. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Anthropological Perspectives on Diaspora and Religious Identities)
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Review

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9 pages, 232 KiB  
Review
The Religious Which Is Political: Revisiting Pnina Werbner’s Imagined Diasporas and Beyond
by Claudia Liebelt
Religions 2024, 15(3), 319; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15030319 - 06 Mar 2024
Viewed by 1048
Abstract
Dedicated to the memory of Pnina Werbner, this essay revisits Werbner’s ethnographic and conceptual work on the relationship between diaspora and religion through a close reading of her book on Imagined Diasporas among Manchester Muslims and her later engagements with the concept of [...] Read more.
Dedicated to the memory of Pnina Werbner, this essay revisits Werbner’s ethnographic and conceptual work on the relationship between diaspora and religion through a close reading of her book on Imagined Diasporas among Manchester Muslims and her later engagements with the concept of diaspora with respect to religion and the background of her work on African and Filipino labour diasporas in the West. It argues that many of Werbner’s insights remain pertinent today, not least because in many European contexts Muslim-background citizens and non-citizens remain excluded from full belonging and are still forced to engage in constant perspectival manoeuvring similar to Werbner’s earlier interlocutors. While the notion of diaspora has lost much of its earlier conceptual verve, in its Werbnerian reading, I argue, it may still offer a scholarly tool for analysing the multiple imaginations, belongings, and ambiguities of migrants’ and religious minorities’ self-representations and complex lives. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Anthropological Perspectives on Diaspora and Religious Identities)
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