ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that skin, encounters, hearing, and touching are all important parts of most religions. In the borderland religions, however, these characteristics are particularly relevant when nonborderland people are touched with them. In South Africa, Greenburg claims, ministries and churches reconfigure the spatial power between race and space. The ministries and the religious communities contribute to an increased spatial presence of the black refugee groups and persons in the public society. Greenburg's claim is that the implicit politics of xenophobia is spatial. The xenophobia aim is to displace people. According to Greenburg, on the one hand, the spatial politics of xenophobia is to reduce the spatial belongingness and force migrants to remain on the move, never growing roots in any one permanent space. On the other hand, Greenburg belongs to the group of scholars who think that religion has a capacity to take people back to safer and better spaces.
