Finding Tactics and Making Space: The Individuals and the Communities

Abstract

In this chapter, we focus on international migration from the perspective of the migrants themselves, examining the different tactics and ways of space making they deploy. We begin with the religious lives of individual migrants, first providing a theoretical presentation of how religion can be understood as an individual yet social phenomenon. Migration changes the social structures of a person’s life in many ways and, as a social phenomenon, religion is likely to go through similar drastic changes in connection with migration. Consequently, we need to know more about religion as a social structure and the function of it. Then we demonstrate how migrants’ religious lives can be understood by addressing the issue of religious practices, how people’s religion relates to integration and, finally, how religious beliefs may be a motivating factor in developing active citizenship.