ABSTRACT
The close relation between religion and migration is by no means a new phenomenon. Since the dawn of the discipline of history of religions, it has been at its very core to understand the changing religious worlds, where migration of people, ideas and practices quintessentially manifest religion as a human and cultural product in and across time and space. Focusing on migration as movement from one geographical area to another is thus one important approach to go beyond essentialist ideas of mono-cultural and mono-religious identities. However, historical parallels cannot explain away the fact that the relation between religion and migration has become even more important in the frames of modernity and globalization. The boom of recent years’ migration research (Vertovec, 2007: 962) is thus not coincidental, and it is natural that most research on religion has been conducted in the fields of sociology and anthropology of religion, relating also to other concepts such as diaspora, transnationalism, pluralism and acculturation (Cohen, 1997; McLoughlin, 2005; Kumar, 2006; Carnes and Yang, 2004; Ebaugh and Chafetz, 2004; Alba et al., 2008; Vertovec, 2004; Bauböck and Faist, 2010). The dynamics of religion and migrating cultures is encapsulated by focusing on the metaphor of routes rather than roots (Clifford, 1997).
