Contenu du sommaire : Migrations et transformations des paysages religieux

Hinduism in the Mauritian Landscape : transfer and appropriation Mauritius is a young nation born from a plantation society and many migratory movements. The Mauritian nation was built on the demographic majority of the descendants of Hindu indentured labourers. This Indo-Mauritian community defends its legitimity to represent and govern the nation, but also its specificity comparing with other Mauritian communities. Slavery and the rupture with roots as crucial to a Creole identity are replaced by the Indian heritage supposedly brought and preserved by Indian labourers. Between a Creole Hinduism (born from contact between cultures in a plantation society context) and temptations to trace its roots back to India, the Hindu community in Mauritius managed to locally anchor its religious practices, which I study through the invention of Mauritius as a Hindu territory and the appropriation of public space through the ever-growing number of religious sites.

Spirits without homeland ; an analysis of the “religion of travel” in the Cape-verdian islands From the discovery of the islands in the 15th century, the Cape Verdean spirituality builds itself on a double movement where the forced conversion of the African slaves to Catholicism goes together with the Europeans' familiarization to the African systems of thoughts. In the course of the centuries, this crossbreeding creates a popular catholic imaginary where the “finado” – the spirit of the deceased – settles as one of the society's cements. By its symbolic control on the fate of these migrants' families stuck between here and there, the spirit of the deceased becomes the common denominator between the native and the migrant, the young and the elderly, the popular and the intellectual, the Catholic and the Protestant, the continental and the islander, the African and the European. Whether he's “wandering” – inferior – or “luminous” – superior –, the spirit of the deceased is also the entity convoked in the Christian rationalism in order to re-create link. It is not surprising as this spiritualistic doctrine born in Brazil in 1910 has spread abroad mainly through the Cape Verdean Diaspora. Its "irradiations" and sessions of psychic “cleansing” and “duplication” directed to the whole world, make it a delocalized spirituality, able to connect the human fates beyond the geopolitical borders.

“Axé Ilê Portugal” : Migratory routes and Afro-Brazilian religions in Portugal The relation between migration and religion in the transnationalization of Afro-Brazilian religions in Portugal is mainly due on the return of Portuguese who had emigrated towards Brazil and on Brazilians' immigration in Portugal. In this paper, I shall analyze the migratory routes of the initiates as well as the forms of their influence within Candomblé and Umbanda in Portugal. The re-interpretations of these routes are built by drawing from Brazilian and Portuguese national imaginaries, but also from the own logics of Afro-Brazilian religions. Within the practice in Portugal, the migration also provokes ritual negotiations and creations finding legitimacy and meaning in the light of Afro-Brazilian religious logics and Portuguese representations. We shall then see how the relation migration/adaptations participates in the reorganization of a transnational imaginary of Afro-Brazilian religions, which is appropriate and specific in the Portuguese context in which it takes place.

From Guatemala to the United States : the cult of Maximon. Between Mayan world and international migrations In Guatemala, Maximon is a figure with several faces who was born in the encounter between mayan and catholic worlds. His worship, limited at an area, a culture and an ethnic group until the 80's, is now taken in a process of trans-localization. It spread out under various ways in the whole country – even among the urban halfcaste population – but also in Mexico and the United States of America, following the guatemalan immigration. This paper propounds a reflection about the national and international dynamics of this worship, about its changes and its new meanings, and also about the identity claiming. After a fieldwork in the city of Los Angeles, we will see how this worship has taken a new individual and syncretic dimension, how he moved off the mayan world and takes a new signification for latino-american immigrants.

Between the “Occidental” and the “Indian”. An ethnography of the ayahuasca shamanism itineraries binding Europe and America The following text explores a particular aspect of religious practice and migration. Shamanism presents itself today as a multi-sited landscape, painted by regular movements of ritual experts and practitioners and by the continuous diffusion and reconfiguration of practice. These transcontinental travels and settlements influence the local communities and lead them to rethink and adapt their own practices of internal and regional use. The transcontinental version of shamanism presents an organizational continuum that withholds, allows and reproduces a set of itineraries that binds, on a national and international scale, the territories of the socalled “ethnical” shamanism and its urban adaptations. In fact, this continuum rests on the encounter of national and international “urban shamanisms” that structure themselves by looking at the “indigenous” as a revalued and ultimate resource-location. By addressing the shamanic expertise classified as “knowledge” in this particular context, we shall question its influence on the national and international social hierarchies that originated from colonization.

Globalization of Virgin of Urkupiña ? Religiosity, popular festivities and urban territories of the Bolivian migrants, from Buenos Aires to Madrid The aim of this article is to analyze the processes of reproduction, circulation, adjustment, and territorialization of the religious devotions in the urban spaces. The devotion to the Virgin of Urkupiña, born in Cochabamba (Bolivia), is one of more important expressions of popular Bolivian piety that has spread in several cities of the world where there are Bolivian migrants. In this article, we compare the religious practices of the Bolivians in Buenos Aires and Madrid ; it has been applied qualitative methods (observation, field notes, interview, newspaper and internet) with an important fieldwork. This confrontation will allow us to interrogate, simultaneously, the religious practices in the circulation between origin and destination, between the South and the South, the South and the North, but also the ways by which the migrants constructed their territorialities in the metropolis.

The trace of absences and returns : Prints of migration on mexican religious landscape The relationship between religion and migration has been mainly analyzed from the receiving communities' point of view. Whether focusing on transnational religions from main multicultural metropolises or analyzing mig rants' ability for adapting religious practice in their new life space, emphasis is usually placed on arrival contexts. Using statistic and ethnographic evidence from the Mexico-United States migratory field, in this paper we analyze the consequences of migration intensification through a Mexican religious landscape. We argue that migration traces can be observed on at least three different levels : the relationship between migratory networks and the acceleration of religious diversification , the relevance of religious practice in the reorganization of migrant life space, and finally the transformation of religious diversity perception as well as attitudes of religious tolerance or intolerance.

The new religious figures of african migration in Cairo Since the late 1980s, the Egyptian capital became a stopping-off for a lot of sub-Saharan migrants. Initially from Sudan and the Horn of Africa's countries, their origins are currently diversified. Their socioeconomic, cultural and religious profiles are more varied. Whether they are Christians or Muslims, it's not rare that beliefs and religious experiences become a real spiritual and material resource, sometimes a vocation, during their prolonged transit time. In this context, we can suggest that sub-Saharan migrants instigate an original religious market in Egypt. With recurrences observed in their religious journey, we can now identify a new figure in the African migration : the religious migrant. This figure raises fundamental questions on religion-migration relation like the position of migrant in the host society, of transnational religions and religious networks in migratory processes, the way that migrants' religious practices reconfigure themselves during the migratory journey, as well as the role of religious journeys in the homecoming.

Religious alterities, migrations and identity constructions in Argentinean, Paraguayan and Brazilian border The article analyzes the migration in the area of Misiones, from an specific perspective : the study of religious groups. This place is located northeast of Argentina, bordering Paraguay and Brazil in an area called “Triple Frontera”. Historically, the presence of migrant groups that cross that border has led to different cultural, economic, political and religious exchanges. The social landscape of each bordering area has been and is strongly influenced by cultural and religious national identities but it is also marked by the exchange of languages and traditions, cultural influences and religiously hybrid practices. Derived from the analysis of an extensive fieldwork – since 2004 to the present- the article focuses on the stories and images about the “other” (religious, ethnic, national). The processes of construction of socio-religious identity were largely sustained by the play of differences and identities between hegemonic Catholicism and European Protestant Christianity. Today they are challenged by the presence of Pentecostal Evangelism and, especially, by the emergence in the region of a confession experienced as “radically different” : Islam.

Kola cults in colonial Africa : trajectory and appropriation of a religious phenomenon Amongst the healing rituals which had a considerable success in colonial Africa, kola cults spread from the Gold Coast to Togo and Dahomey, where they integrated vodu universe. The kola nut is an essential element in these healing rituals, so they are often grouped together under the generic name Goro, Gorovodou (Goro means kola in hausa) but are also referred to as Atikevodou (medicine) or Tron. Their success did not please the Christian missionaries, who described the phenomenon in a series of monographs. In 1926, Monseigneur Auguste Hermann, vicar apostolic of the Lower-Volta, was the first to denounce the arrival of Kunde, “still known as Atike or Goro” in British Togo. Monseigneur Cessou, vicar apostolic of Togo, took an active interest in its diffusion throughout the French part of Togo between 1928 and 1934. The colonial administration was equally concerned by the spreading of the cult, and closely observed its followers before the Second World War. Behind what colonial authors unanimously name Goro lies a much varied reality and several divinities as Kunde. Current analyses, essentially the work of anthropologists, are rare. Our objective is to describe the trajectory of kola cults and their incorporation into vodu order, insisting on the ritual dedicated to Kunde. The movements of this cult (both geographically as well as symbolically) are difficult to comprehend given that its ritual seems to have been constituted by an aggregation of various influences (Christian, Vodu, Muslim). It is precisely this trajectory and this appropriation which we will concentrate on. If the capacity to borrow and innovate is not a phenomenon which came into being during the colonisation, then this case of religious recomposing poses a problem within the colonial context. Both the nature and intensity of human and material networks, new borders, the Evangelical action of certain missionary groups, the social disorganisation and the political rivalries which came with colonialism, all had an influence on the constitution of these kola cults and their success.

Protestantism in migration : between Cook Islands and New Zealand Since the 1950s, the Cook Islands – a Polynesian State in association with New Zealand – have experienced a dramatic growth of internal migration – from the remote islands to the main island Rarotonga – and international migration : in 2006, 20,000 Cook Islanders lived in the Cook Islands and 58,000 in New Zealand. This article examines the impact of these migrations in terms of religious beliefs and practices, church organisation and cultural identities. In New Zealand and in the Cook Islands, migration takes place in a religious context characterised by a strong diversity, especially within Protestantism. This diversification of the religious offer raises the issue of “authenticity” of religious and cultural practices. It also implies new questions about the institutional management of religious pluralism.