Religious Placemaking and Community Building in Diaspora

Abstract

Community and loss of community have received much scholarly attention, whereas community formation and placemaking have been less well studied. Similarly, several studies have documented the role of religion in the lives of new immigrants, but little has been written about religious placemaking and community formation. Through an empirical study of a new immigrant group-the Hindus of Southern California-this article shows how religious placemaking helped build community. It details three salient components, namely, place planning and organization, place design, and place rituals, and also how these helped form and sustain community. It describes some challenges encountered and strategies used to negotiate, mitigate, or minimize them. In providing these delineations, it shows how religio loci and place nostalgia influenced and aided community building.

Creating transregional collective nostalgia: the organising role of Catholic parishes among Louisiana migrants in Great Migration-era Los Angeles

“…churches, temples, and synagogues), and the routines associated with them, help immigrants adapt to new environments and socialise the second generation linguistically, socially, and spiritually to identify with the immigrant ethnic community and stay connected to the homeland, its people, and its practices (Bankston and Zhou 1995;FitzGerald 2009;Levitt 2003;Mazumdar et al 2000;Mazumdar and Mazumdar 2009;Richards 2008;Warner 1993). Scholars argue that religious spaces and practices allow migrants to be connected to both sending and receiving places at once.…”

“…Migrants preserve attachment to their home countries by collectively and nostalgically remembering them while interacting in religious places located within enclaves (Levitt 2003;Mazumdar et al 2000;Mazumdar and Mazumdar 2009;Tweed 1997). Collective memory amalgamates community members' individual pasts and personal memories into a single shared set (Zerubavel 1996(Zerubavel , 1997.…”

A comparative analysis of perceptual and demographic predictors of sense of place dimensions in the State Mosques of Malaysia

“…Nowadays, religions have become more visible in different parts of the world, both in their institutional form and as an assertion of identity. The revival of religious ideologies in different societies and various regions is also reflected in the growing number of new places of worship, such as those built in the USA over recent decades (see Mazumdar & Mazumdar, , ). In fact, theories that claimed societies will secularize as they modernize have been seriously criticized and called into question (Haynes, ).…”

“…There are studies on houses of worship as environmental settings with an important role in the well‐being of people related to the psychologically meaningful activities that may occur at those settings (Herzog, Ouellette, Rolens & Koenigs, ). In addition to the restorative benefits of visiting overtly religious sites, the influences of religious place making have even been investigated on community buildings for immigrant minorities (Mazumdar & Mazumdar, ). Moreover, there are facts that distinguish the sacred context of places of worship from the most investigated instances of residential, commercial, and secular public settings.…”

Religion, art and creativity in the global city

“…Using creative and aesthetic means, immigrant faith communities seek to become visible (Saint-Blancat and Cancellieri 2014) and recognised urban constituencies (Kuppinger 2015). Such place-making includes activities range from individuals' efforts to remake or embellish their homes (interiors and exteriors), to the creation of neighbourhood spaces, activities, processions or celebrations, and the renovation, construction and embellishment of places of worship or other faith-based meeting spaces (Kuppinger 2017;Mazumdar and Mazumdar 2009). Houses of worship anchor new arrivals in cities and establish their positions as relevant nodes on the global map of their larger faith community.…”