PNINA WERBNER – MIGRATION AND THE SACRALISATION OF NEW HOMES

As transnational migrants settle in a new country, they transplant and naturalize cultural objects, performances and categories, not simply because this is their tradition or culture, but because as active agents they have a stake in particular aspects of their culture. ‘Culture’ as a medium of social interaction confers agency within a field of sociality and power relations. Against the essentialist critique of community and culture, this essay suggests that in conferring agency, the performance of culture creates a field of transaction and relatedness; second, that culture as performance, in being embodied, contains inescapable experiential force; and finally, that culture as a discursive imaginary of selfhood, identity, subjectivity, and moral virtue constitutes a field of power. The domestic rituals that immigrants celebrate in distant and alien places are thus usually elaborated with cultural images and objects derived from their homelands. This transfer of images from one cultural context to another is an evident feature of the migration process. It enables migrants to sacralise their new homes through events that involve nurture and sociability within the home and which bring together newly emergent circles of trust forged in the migration context: kin, friends, and neighbours. The present essay discusses such rituals comparatively across different migrant groups settled in different countries.

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