Pnina Werbner - Diasporic Journeys, Ritual, and Normativity among Asian Migrant Women

This volume draws together recent ethnographic research that challenges conventional assumptions about Asian womens international migration. Whereas the dominant scholarly narrative construes these female migrants as hyperexploited and compliant workers, we focus on the way migrants challenge their abjection in the alternative spaces they create and in which they live richly complex religious and social lives. Although shaped and constrained by the migration context, we argue that overseas female migrants nevertheless create alternative worlds of fun, piety and rights activism. Their social lives are not solely structured by marginality, nor are their salient relationships exclusively transnational. Rather, in their diasporic encounters, migrants creatively engage with the places and landscapes in which they live and labour, sharing conviviality with others like themselves through ritual performance, pilgrimage journeys, mobilisation for rights, religious worship and new intimate relationships. The articles assembled here bear witness to this expansive sociality by disclosing how ritual performances, pious practices and transgressive acts in the diaspora engender novel forms of belonging, enable collective action and defy persistent stereotypes of docile bodies.

Christian Filipinos colonise space dancing through the streets of New Zealands cities with their sacred icons, lovingly imported from home (Tondo 2010). Their compatriots in Israel craft new selves through embodied encounters with the divine in pilgrimage sites in the Holy Land (Liebelt 2010). Buddhist Sri Lankan women undertake ritual vows at Catholic shrines in sacred places in Jordan (Frantz 2010). South Asian women in Kuwait embark on new spiritual journeys, converting from Hinduism and Christianity to Islam as the ambience of daily devotional practices is reflexively embraced (Ahmad 2010). Indonesian and Filipino women in Hong Kong who choose religious conversion renegotiate connections to home while they collectively press for greater rights abroad and expand their cosmopolitan horizons through labour activism (Constable 2010). New Muslim Filipinas in Saudi Arabia grapple with the ethics and morality of second marriages and intimate relationships while following the path of the Prophet and juggling commitments to their transnational families (Pingol 2010). Sri Lankan women migrants in Lebanon pursue erotic adventures as gender outlaws beyond the normalising constraints of state, religious and other international institutions (Smith 2010). Siblings in the virtual village that stretches from Mountain Province in the Philippines to Hong Kong and beyond contest the morality of traditional ritual sacrifice, with religious differences threatening to rupture transnational family relationships (McKay 2010). In Paris, Filipino women reanimate the church as a sacred centre in a secular Parisian cityscape (Fresnoza-Flot 2010), whereas in the central Coptic church in Cairo migrant women of different faith backgrounds migrating into Egypt from Africa and Asia form ecumenical congregations that provide mutual succour and support (Ahmed 2010). Professionals in Singapore and Saudi Arabia consolidate their middle class status as they confront the global image of Filipinos as a nation of servants, while affirming the moral superiority of their religious, class and national identifications as Christian and Muslim Filipinos, respectively (Amrith 2010; Johnson 2010).