Fourteenth International Conference on Religion & Spirituality in Society

Abstract

The paper suggests that the alienating nature of the mobility process for marginalized and colonized bodies from the Global South and the general culturally specific and inward-looking, non-sensitive towards migrants’ sensibilities, engender ways local migrant religions accompany the migratory movements and become pivotal in the settling process. The migrant religions serve as the symbols of familiar identity, ethos for negotiating placemaking, models of and for contesting alienating structures and negotiating dominant imposition or labels, and as presence in dominant religious spaces in the host land. The paper is based on fieldwork research among members of the Church of Pentecost—a Ghanaian migrant church in Sydney, Australia. The church, popular among Ghanaian migrants globally, is known for its appeal to their sensibilities and concerns—It is found in over 150 nations. The paper asks why migrant Christians carry their local churches into the host lands where Christian churches are already prevalent. The phenomenon leads us to Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic violence and invites us to explore the profitability of its use as a tool in understanding how the symbolic alienation of migrants informs the accompaniments of their local religions in the migration and settling process. Also, I engage Clifford Geertz’s notion of religion as a cultural symbol to demonstrate how the Ghanaian local Pentecostal symbols serve as models of and for the migrants’ contestations, negotiations, and placemaking in Australia.