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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2015

When Kālī speaks to me directly : Religious dynamics of Hindus Tamils in Paris

Résumé

In this paper, through the interaction between migration, religion and space, I will address the issue of a minority religion in city. It is important to note that, in recent years, migration and religion have increasingly intertwined to transform the urban fabric of many European locations. In fact, since the 1980s, refugees from Sri Lanka have been living in France and make up the largest Hindu group. In recent years this migration, and more generally the South Asian migration, has radically transformed the French social landscape, leading to an “excess of alterity” (Grillo 2010). One of the most significant consequences of new immigration flows has been a dramatic growth in religious diversity which offers a greater challenge to French secularism. As Banchoff (2011: 10) has remarked ‘the new religious pluralism poses difficult challenges to two basic democratic principles – minority protection and majority rule’. As such, Hinduism represents not just a minority religious tradition but a challenge to French laïcité. By analyzing the role of the temple as a community center I will illustrates how this assumed idea of the temple can be problematic in relation to the divergent roles and meanings that a specific religious space can hold for different groups. The move from temple invisibility to temple public is problematic. This dialectic visibility/invisibility might provide some information about the conflict within the “Hindu community”, particularly in term of leadership. Actually, this process of visibilization or invisibilization must be situated in a complex set of power relations: invisibility is a relationship between those who have the power to see or to choose not to see, and on the other hand, those who lack the power to demand to be seen. Between local (the street, the neighborhood) and global (the transnational migration flows linked to a refugee Diaspora), this is the relation to the space that constitutes the axis of this reflection where space will be considered as a medium of social relationships. This spatial analysis of religion will be useful to connect the understanding of the public presence of religious places with the study of the spatial dimension of religion. In particular it would be constructive to understand how religious places become imbricated within a wider network of relationships with other religious and secular places in the urban fabric through immigrant motilities in the city and through perceptions of neighborhood. At the heart of these reconstructions , we will analyze in particular the importance of the process of templeisation (Baumann 2009).

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Géographie
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Dates et versions

halshs-01118379 , version 1 (18-02-2015)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : halshs-01118379 , version 1

Citer

Anthony Goreau-Ponceaud. When Kālī speaks to me directly : Religious dynamics of Hindus Tamils in Paris. Hindus and Others in Sri Lanka and in the Diaspora, CEIAS et CERIAS, Feb 2015, Paris, France. ⟨halshs-01118379⟩
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