ABSTRACT
Scholarly languages in disciplines across the social sciences and humanities struggle to accommodate these differences, frequently validating Heisenberg's old contention that the tools that are used to study qualify the results of empirical inquiry. Social scientific imperatives of abstraction and generalization attempt to capture and model migration trends in languages of laws, rules, patterns and predictability. Tensions between notions of equality and difference structured both academic and public interrogations of emergent British multi-culturalism in the late twentieth century. Others argued for the development of a particularly British model of multiculturalism that recognized cultural differences within singular polities, drawing on experiences of migration internationally. The study of religious faith as an associational form competes for attention, as well as intersecting, with other forms of migrant sociality. It is certainly the case that the overwhelming focus of the study of migrant and diasporic lives has until recently underplayed the significance of devotional links in most of Europe and North America.
