Carrying Religion into a Secularising Europe

2010 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Wood
Keyword(s):  
Volcanic Eruptions ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Local Contexts ◽  
Complex Picture ◽  
Secular Society ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Ethnographic Analysis ◽  
Second World ◽  
Recent Cohort

Migrants to Europe often perceive themselves as entering a secular society that threatens their religious identities and practices. Whilst some sociological models present their responses in terms of cultural defence, ethnographic analysis reveals a more complex picture of interaction with local contexts. This essay draws upon ethnographic research to explore a relatively neglected situation in migration studies, namely the interactions between distinct migration cohorts - in this case, from the Caribbean island of Montserrat, as examined through their experiences in London Methodist churches. It employs the ideas of Weber and Bourdieu to view these migrants as 'religious carriers', as collective and individual embodiments of religious dispositions and of those socio-cultural processes through which their religion is reproduced. Whilst the strategies of the cohort migrating after the Second World War were restricted through their marginalised social status and experience of racism, the recent cohort of evacuees fleeing volcanic eruptions has had greater scope for strategies which combat secularisation and fading Methodist identity.

scholarly journals Reimagining Asia: Indian and Australian women crossing borders

2018 ◽  
Vol 53 (04) ◽  
pp. 1183-1221
Author(s):  
HEATHER GOODALL ◽  
DEVLEENA GHOSH
Keyword(s):  
Western Europe ◽  
Chinese Women ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Women's Movements ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
World War ◽  
Local Contexts ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Second World

AbstractThe decades from the 1940s to the 1960s were ones of increasing contacts between women of India and Australia. These were not built on a shared British colonial history, but on commitments to visions circulating globally of equality between races, sexes, and classes. Kapila Khandvala from Bombay and Lucy Woodcock from Sydney were two women who met during such campaigns. Interacting roughly on an equal footing, they were aware of each other's activism in the Second World War and the emerging Cold War. Khandvala and Woodcock both made major contributions to the women's movements of their countries, yet have been largely forgotten in recent histories, as have links between their countries. We analyse their interactions, views, and practices on issues to which they devoted their lives: women's rights, progressive education, and peace. Their beliefs and practices on each were shaped by their respective local contexts, although they shared ideologies that were circulating internationally. These kept them in contact over many years, during which Kapila built networks that brought Australians into the sphere of Indian women's awareness, while Lucy, in addition to her continuing contacts with Kapila, travelled to China and consolidated links between Australian and Chinese women in Sydney. Their activist world was centred not in Western Europe, but in a new Asia that linked Australia and India. Our comparative study of the work and interactions of these two activist women offers strategies for working on global histories, where collaborative research and analysis is conducted in both colonizing and colonized countries.

Selvon, Samuel (1923–1994)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas S. Davis
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Second World War ◽  
George Lamming ◽  
World War ◽  
East Indian ◽  
Samuel Selvon ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
The Guardian ◽  
Second World

Samuel Selvon was a Trinidadian writer whose vivid portraits of daily life in both the Caribbean and post-Second World War England garnered international acclaim. Selvon’s episodic storytelling, vernacular narration, and stylistic inventiveness have led critics past and present to classify his writing alongside both his modernist predecessors, and his postcolonial contemporaries. Selvon was born in Trinidad in 1923 to an East Indian father and an Anglo-Scottish mother. In his own words, he grew up as a ‘Creolized West Indian’. He worked as a wireless operator for the Royal Naval Reserve during the Second World. After the war ended in 1945, Selvon relocated to Port of Spain and began his early forays into journalism, contributing to The Trinidad Guardian and serving as the fiction editor for The Guardian Weekly. Selvon’s early stories and sketches, now collected in Foreday Morning, demonstrate his early preoccupation with the details of everyday life, a preoccupation that cuts across his writings. In 1950, somewhat disenchanted with what he called the ‘very complacent and easy going’ Trinidadian life, Selvon migrated to England on a boat that also carried the Barbadian novelist George Lamming.

The Novel in English in the Caribbean to 1950

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leah Rosenberg
Keyword(s):  
English Language ◽  
West Indian ◽  
Second World War ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Caribbean Immigrants ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Second World ◽  
Literary Phenomenon

This chapter explores English-language novels in the Caribbean. The West Indian novel was seen as a post-Second World War literary phenomenon, the creation of male authors who, born in Britain's Caribbean colonies, began arriving in England in the 1950s as part of a larger wave of Caribbean immigrants. Despite the diverse origins and perspectives of the Anglophone Caribbean's many writers, several dominant themes emerge. West Indian novels comprised a spectrum of direct, indirect, partial, and unwitting deviations from and challenges to English literary genres and ideologies. Novelists were particularly engaged with the ideologies of race and domesticity and the closely linked genre of romance. Nearly all West Indian novels of the nineteenth century were romances featuring elite West Indian heroes who excelled their English counterparts in domestic and civic virtue, while the twentieth century saw the emergence of literature that so revelled in social and sexual disorder that it constituted anti-romance.

scholarly journals Ruderal Ecologies: Rethinking Nature, Migration, and the Urban Landscape in Berlin

2018 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 295-323 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bettina Stoetzer
Keyword(s):  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Urban Landscapes ◽  
World War ◽  
History Of ◽  
Train Tracks ◽  
Botanical Research ◽  
Ethnographic Analysis ◽  
Second World

Engaging with a series of human–plant encounters in Berlin, this article explores possibilities for rethinking the heterogeneity of urban life in the ruins of European nationalism and capitalism. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and revisiting Berlin’s postwar history of botanical research, I develop the concept of the ruderal and expand it for an anthropological inquiry of urban life. The term ruderal was originally used by Berlin ecologists after the Second World War to refer to ecologies that spontaneously inhabit disturbed environments: the spaces alongside train tracks or roads, wastelands, or rubble. Exploring Berlin as a ruderal city, I direct attention to the often unnoticed, cosmopolitan, and unruly ways of remaking the urban fabric at a time of increased nationalism and ecological destruction. Tracing human–plant socialities in encounters between scientists and rubble plants, in public culture, and among immigrants and their makeshift urban gardens, the lens of the ruderal directs ethnographic analysis toward the city’s unintended ecologies as these are produced in the context of nation-making, war, xenophobia, migration, environmental change, and contemporary austerity policies. Attending to ruderal worlds, I argue, requires telling stories that do not easily add up but that combine environmental perspectives with the study of migration, race, and social inequality—in the interest of mapping out possibilities for change. This framework thus expands a recent anthropological focus on ruins, infrastructure, and urban landscapes by highlighting questions of social justice that are at stake in emerging urban ecologies and an era of inhospitable environments.

Kirche im Zeitalter der Säkularisierung

2008 ◽  
Vol 52 (5) ◽  
pp. 5-11
Author(s):  
Lucian Hölscher
Keyword(s):  
Interreligious Dialogue ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Secular Society ◽  
Open Relationship ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
Second World

Abstract The article discusses the beginning and the end of the »age of secularisation«: Differening from other definitions it argues for a late beginning after the Second World War and an early end by the mid-1980s. The age of secularisation is characterised by an open relationship of the churches to secular society - the exact character of which, however, was much disputed among reformers and conservatives within the churches. By the mid-1980s this openness began to be replaced by a more self concerned attitude of the churches, which today causes some problems for the interreligious dialogue

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