Author Description

Mobile Bodies, Mobile Souls engages the complex relationship between family, religion and migration. Following '9/11', much research on migrants in western societies has focused on the public and political dimensions of religion. This volume starts out 'from below', exploring how religious ideas and practices take form, are negotiated and contested within the private domain of the home, household and family. Bringing together ethnographic studies from different parts of the world, it explores the role of religious ideas and practices in migrants' efforts to sustain, create and contest moral and social orders in the context of their everyday life. The ethnographic analyses show how religious practices and imaginaries both enable engagement with new social settings and offer a means of connecting and reconnecting with people and places left behind. Offering a comparative perspective on the varying ways in which religious practices and notions of relatedness interconnect and shape each other, the book sheds new light on a comtemporary global world inhabited by mobile bodies and souls.