At home in the gurdwara? Religious space and the resonance with domesticity in a London suburb

Abstract

Home', as a special place and a set of practices that separate it from the rest, may 'scale up' to the public sphere, particularly among immigrant and religious minorities. Following this insight, we investigate the functional equivalences between domestic space and public, religious one, based on a case study of Sikh gurdwaras in Southall, West London. Besides their everyday function as hubs for spiritual and cultural connections with the Sikh home(land), gurdwaras reveal a parallelism with a private home in two respects: vertical domesticitythe forms of spatial and temporal thresholding that turn a house of worship into the home of the guruand horizontal domesticitythe home-like routines underpinning community life in gurdwaras. This opens up a novel space to see temples as infrastructures for people's sense of home, and the reproduction of sacredness inside them as a form of homemaking.

Domestic religion and the migrant home: The private, the diasporic and the public in the sacralization of Sikh dwellings in Italy

“…The scarcity of similar research elsewhere across the Sikh diaspora (except from Hirvi, 2016) makes it difficult to make comparisons or generalizations. In the UK case, with the Sikh population being concentrated in certain urban areas, local gurdwaras are an obvious and accessible option for daily prayer (Bertolani, 2020b; Bertolani et al, 2021). However, family prayers at home are equally critical to the transmission of religious identity (Ballard and Ballard, 1977; Singh, 2012).…”

“…Sikhism was effectively presented to the receiving society as a universal religion, one whose symbols were folklorized as harmless traditional objects (Bertolani, 2018; Gallo and Sai, 2013; Ferraris and Sai, 2014). On the inner side of the community, instead, day-to-day activities in gurdwaras have to do also with cultural reproduction, advocacy and welfare (Bertolani, 2020b); in fact, with forms of home-making (Bertolani et al, 2021). Nevertheless, there are fundamental differences between a Sikh house of worship and a Sikh family house.…”

“…In institutionalized Sikh spaces, all devotees are encouraged to participate in religious life through seva (free service) according to their capabilities (Canning, 2017). Nevertheless, women are mostly relegated to supposedly female tasks like cleaning and preparing food in more hidden spaces like the kitchen (Bains, 2020; Bertolani et al, 2021). Men, in turn, are more likely to be involved in food distribution and in the guru seva alongside the granthis .…”

Study on the Influencing Factors of the Spatial Distribution of Ancient religious sites in Inner Mongolia

“…Besides, religion is a relatively pure assembly, often for the purpose of increasing social capital resources, so religious sites are open and popular. It is a multi-functional place for cultural propaganda, religious dissemination, knowledge popularization and assembly organization [2]. The concept that some famous religious sites are called sacred sites or holy ground has always been an important aspect of some major religions in the world [3].…”

Knowledge Meals, Research Relationships, and Postqualitative Offerings: Enacting Langar (a Sikh Tradition of a Shared Meal) as Pedagogy of Doctoral Supervision

“…To highlight the vitality of relational experiences in pedagogies of supervision and to illuminate ideas and concepts for pedagogical transformation through a postqualitative initiative, in this paper, my co-researchers/authors (also my PhD supervisors) and I eschew the mundane and adopt a transformative approach, employing a methodological Lens of Langar - a Sikh cultural practice of shared cooking and consumption (Bertolani et al, 2021). In so doing, we resist replication of templated methodological frameworks and kindle our curiosity of exploring new ways of knowing and knowledge building.…”