Religion and Mobility in a Globalising Asia ― New Ethnographic Explorations

This volume examines the dynamic, mutually constitutive, relationship between religion and mobility in the contemporary era of Asian globalisation in which an increasing number of people have been displaced, forcefully or voluntarily, by an expanding global market economy and lasting regional political strife. Seven case studies provide up-to-date ethnographic perspectives on the translocal/transnational dimension of religion and the religious/spiritual aspect of movement. The chapters draw on research into Buddhism, Islam, Chinese qigong, Christianity and communal ritual as these religious beliefs and practices move in and across Singapore, Taiwan, China, Malaysia, Hong Kong, the upper Mekong region, the Thai-Burma border, the Middle East and France. With these diverse and rich ethnographic cases on translocal/transnational Asian religious practices and subjectivities, the book transcends the conventional nation-state centered framework to look into how mobile religious agents are redefining boundaries of local, regional, national identities and recreating translocal, transnational and interregional connectivity. In so doing, it illustrates the importance of promoting a dynamic understanding of Asia not just as a geopolitical entity but as an ongoing social and religious formation in late modernity.

This book was published as a special issue of the Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology.

Sin Wen Lau is a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity.

Nanlai Cao is an associate professor at the School of Philosophy and Institute for Advanced Studies of Religion, Renmin University of China in Beijing. He is the author Constructing China’s Jerusalem: Christians, Power, and Place in Contemporary Wenzhou (Stanford University Press, c2011).