Transnational Religious Networks

This essay reappraises the origins of French Quakerism based on new archival research conducted on both sides of the Channel. It identifies 34 Quaker missionaries in 17th- and early 18C France, sheds new light on the French reception of Quakerism and suggests possible connections with non-violent, charismatic movements in Languedoc.

Si les mouvements charismatiques et Églises (néo-)pentecôtistes, surtout celles dites de la « troisième vague », se situent aux périphéries des lieux de décision du christianisme œcuménique et du monde théologique académique, ils n’en représentent pas moins la partie la plus dynamique du christianisme mondial en termes de croissance – regroupant un quart de la population chrétienne mondiale, soit un chrétien sur quatre, et près d’un humain sur dix.
Pour évoquer les « nouvelles pratiques charismatiques » dans le champ de la guérison, nous n’adoptons pas ici le point de vue du théologien mais celui de l’anthropologue, réductionniste à dessein.
La porte d’entrée retenue est une manifestation religieuse de grande ampleur organisée le samedi 4 janvier 2020 à la salle du Zénith à Paris et ayant rassemblé 7000 personnes, pour l’immense majorité membres d’Églises pentecôtistes africaines et afro-caribéennes de la région parisienne. La salle avait été louée par une organisation missionnaire d’initiative congolaise, Casarhema, fondée en 2000 et animée par Liz et Blaise Manzambi un couple congolais entrepreneurs économiques et leaders religieux émergents. Destinée à l’origine à produire des artistes chrétiens congolais, Casarhema est devenue en 2007 une plateforme internet– chaîne chrétienne produisant et diffusant sur les réseaux sociaux et sur des espaces de télévision des émissions-magazines pour différents publics, et surtout des vidéos de nombreux prédicateurs et acteurs/actrices religieux. À destination d’abord de la diaspora congolaise, l’audience de Casarhema s’est étendue au fil des années à l’ensemble de la francophonie – principalement celle des diasporas africaines, abandonnant au passage l’usage du lingala, l’une des langues congolaises pour l’usage exclusif du français. Casarhema.fr atteint en 2020, un rayonnement mondial avec des dizaines de milliers de connexions hebdomadaires et quelques « antennes » sur le continent africain (Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroun, République démocratique du Congo). Le public est connecté depuis tous les continents. Structure d’initiative africaine, au modèle économique et religieux fortement innovant et ne bénéficiant d’aucun soutien financier extérieur (non plus de la nébuleuse missionnaire nord-américaine), Casarhema située au cœur de ces réseaux pentecôtistes transnationaux émergents, croisant réseaux réels et virtuels, témoigne d’une capacité de mobilisation insoupçonnée.(...) Le rassemblement du 4 janvier intitulé « Méga-rencontre de Gloire – Zénith (Paris La Villette)» avec en sous-titre «Jésus-Christ est la solution » apparaît dès lors comme un précipité au sens chimique de l’univers pentecôtiste globalisé entretenu au sein de ce réseau et de son ethos religieux.
Cette contribution présente et analyse quelques-unes des performances rituelles et discursives les plus significatives – parmi les discours, prières, paroles d’autorité, prophéties, chants, etc., générés ce jour-là par la douzaine d’intervenants presque tous de nationalité congolaise – et la dizaine de chantres – principalement des femmes – qui se sont succédés sur la scène du Zénith.
Après avoir montré comment la plateforme Casarhema, inscrite dans la dynamique d’innovation religieuse des Églises néo-pentecôtistes, fonctionne comme un lieu de régulation et de stabilisation de ces pratiques de la « restauration divine », nous analyserons le discours de cinq intervenants du rassemblement du Zénith identifiant à cette occasion les registres discursifs et symboliques qui structurent leurs performances.

The literature on transnationalism has largely tended to focus on first or second-generation migrants. Unlike the literature on plantation studies, this has resulted in a relative blindness to historical inequalities, particularly how these past inequalities going back more than 60 or 70 years or multiple generations, may affect the present in a transnational context. This article examines the growing phenomenon of interest in the transnational and local worship of ancestral tutelary deities (kula devam) among Malaysian Hindus. In doing so, it will specifically look at the role of caste identity in the emergence of transnational ritual and kinship networks. The paper argues that the performance of ritual worship of ancestral deities among Malaysian Hindus – part of a religious response to specific socio-economic changes that have occurred within the pressures of a capitalist, Islamised modernity – has been shaped by entrenched caste and class divisions in contrasting ways. The inequalities at the time of colonial labour migration and the differences between the landed mid-level (non-Brahmin) castes and the landless Adi Dravida “untouchables” or Dalits, seep into the present in the form of revitalisation of ritual-kinship links to Tamil Nadu among the former – a contemporary social sign of their “privileged lineage”. At the same time, the lack of economic progress and social ills suffered by the dispossessed in Malaysia, are seen by many Dalit interlocutors as a consequence of ignoring the requisite ritual worship of their kula devam in now often forgotten villages of ancestral origin.

This article starts with and proceeds from empirical observations about the ways international Isma ili students at two institutes for Islamic studies in London draw boundaries between religion and other spheres in their everyday life. According to these observations , students from Isma ili communities in Iran, Tajikistan, and Syria tend to make more explicit distinctions between a religious domain and a secular one in comparison with their Khoja coreligionists of East African descent. In order to explain this disparity, structural, ideological, and social conditions in their respective countries and communities are analyzed using the framework of multiple secularities. It is argued that while Isma ili communities in Iran, Tajikistan, and Syria have each internalized a motif of secularity from its broader national context, Khoja Isma ili communities have developed their own form of secularity, which can be described in terms of internal secularization. This article makes a contribution to the multiple secularities framework by extending its application to the transnational domain and to the analysis of secularity within religious communities. Furthermore, the article offers a comparative approach to the study the role of religion in global Isma'ilism.

This paper focuses on a transatlantic ritual collaboration which brought together Nigerian and Cuban Ifá priests in Havana in 2006. For the first time in Cuba, they performed together an initiation in an « African way », an initiative they considered as a « historical » event. As recent ethno-historical research has emphasized, the constitution and expansion of Cuban religious traditions of Yorùbá origin have partially relied on the often neglected self-conscious action of local charismatic leaders. During the 20th century, agents led ritual innovations and reforms driven by sustained reflections on the foundation and the evolution of their practices, which they shaped through a discontinuous dialogue with Africa and the Yorùbá world. However, there is still a lack of data on the practical forms of recent discursive and ritual exchanges directly established between African and Cuban initiates. In an ethnographical and narrative perspective, the study documents this endeavor as an aspect of contemporary micro-history of Ifá in Cuba as well as the personal stories of the Nigerian and Cuban agents who engaged in it. In particular, it stresses the deep reflexive processes in which the latter are involved.

This is a vivid and illuminating ethnographic account of an emerging force in contemporary Gambian social and religious life: the Tablīghī Jamā’at (TJ).  Through the prism of five detailed biographical narratives, Janson evokes the everyday lived experiences of TJ activists embedded in the socio-cultural matrix of the Gambia.  Her central objective is to dissect the ways in which youth, Islam and modernity – as distinct analytical concepts – intersect and coalesce in the lives of young Gambians seeking paths to piety through a contested arena in which tribal and reformist strands of Islam vie for primacy.  Sensitive yet scholarly, Janson’s presentation is laudable for the way in which her micro observations – the raw field data – are consistently sutured to broader theoretical frames and a comprehensive body of scholarship on the phenomenon of resurgent Islam in several international contexts.  What transpires is a multi-layered work of depth and texture that makes an important contribution to our understanding of the ways in which young women and men, inhabiting an ambivalent postcolonial space caught in the orbit of globalisation, appropriate and internalise religious experience.

In this the  chapter, I situate the six transnational organizations within the framework of globalization and reflect on how religious entities encounter today’s world. I first show the interplay between globalization and transnational movements and then look at six major trends that arise out of my study.

The essay explores the parallels between the Republic of Letters and the so-called Invisible Church. Both communities arose from the desire to overcome the divisions brought about by the Reformation and the splintering of Protestantism into further confessions. Religious reformers and scholars thus shared similar universal goals: the betterment of society and the world. Central interests for both were history, biblical criticism and tolerance. International correspondence networks were the glue that held these virtual communities together and both relied on similar structures of patronage and communication.
After comparing the two communities in general, the essay analyses the correspondence of one sub-group within the Invisible Church, the Philadelphians, to illustrate how they used correspondence networks as a discursive space in ways that paralleled practices in the Republic of Letters. The Philadelphians, whose most important leaders in the German territories were Johann Wilhelm Petersen and Johanna Eleonora Petersen, had a massive impact on nonconformists from London to Zurich. The letters of the group show that the key doctrine of apokatastasis panton or universal salvation was worked out in a multi-party conversation in letters. The doctrine paved the way for a more „enlightened“ approach to religion that did not center on eternal damnation. The group’s correspondence also served as an alternative site of education for participants.
Finally the essay questions the way that historians have traditionally labelled some individuals as „scholars“ and others as religious „radicals“. Often these designations have mainly to do with the individuals‘ institutional status. „Radical Pietists“ who fled persecution and settled in North America provide an example. So long as they were in opposition to the German state church, they were labelled as fringe figures, but upon arrival in North America some could be re-categorized as „scholars“. In light of such contradictions and of the many overlaps between the two communities, the essay calls into question a strict division between the Republic of Letters and the Invisible Church.

An astonishingly large Christian coalition has emerged to protest the legalization of same-sex marriage in Taiwan, an alleged beacon for the promotion of gay rights in Asia. This article investigates how Taiwanese conservative Christianity, which had been politically inactive for decades, has publically mobilized itself since the early 2010s, particularly in reaction to the gay-rights movement. I examine how the shifting role of the state in Taiwan encouraged conservative Christians to stand up and speak against gay-rights issues. Transnational religious networks in East Asia facilitated Tai-wanese conservative Christianity's affiliation with a united and well-organized cross-denominational force targeting gay rights. Lately, religious entrepreneurs have emerged to integrate resources from business, politics, and academia that are necessary for political engagement. All these factors have contribute to this religious movement in the public sphere, a rarity in the Chinese world. I also analyze the ensuing secularist backlash: the anti-gay-rights movement is described as an anti-human-civilization movement in which charismatic leaders, portrayed as evil magicians, utilize a variety of strategies to deceive naive, ignorant believers. Keywords Conservative Christianity in Taiwan – public religion – same-sex marriage – secularism – transnational religious networks

The article studies the construction process of the Argentine-Uruguayan Hortus Conclusus sanctuary, inaugurated in Palestine in 1902. It focuses on the project’s diffusion and the construction of solidarity networks between Latin America, Rome and Palestine articulated by the Archbishop of Montevideo Mariano Soler. The central argument is that the case studied exhibits some particularities of the “global turn” of the Catholic Church in the Río de la Plata, which rather than being a passive recipient of congregations, images and devotions received from European “centers” of Catholic renovation, functioned as a dynamic space of appropriation and even universalization for many of these forms and images. This can be perceived by reconstructing the life of transnational agents and projects that linked different places in the world, amplifying the global consciousness of Catholicism at the local, national, and continental levels. Also, the article exemplifies how a Marian devotion was able to function as a symbolic space in service of political identities, and as a vehicle for (trans)national movements.
Link: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/NIXZQRNR83MKHJGY4MIJ/full?target=10.1080/14701847.2021.1998986

This paper focuses on a ritual 'innovation' - the initiation, in 2004, of a woman in Cuban male Ifá priesthood (or iyanifá initiation) - and on the conflict it implies among practitioners of Ifá religion in Cuba. Based on detailed empirical data collected between 2004 and 2006 among the main group involved, called Ifá Iranlowó, but also its main rival (Asociación Yoruba) and other ordinary religious groups, the article argues that the current expansion of Cuban religions of Yoruba origin and that of the West-African religions they originated from are actually a key element in our understanding of such ritual innovations and discurses, apparently anchored at a local level. The strategies of legitimization and delegitimization at stake in this conflict can only be understood if we consider their resonnance in a global context, the connections Cuban priests maintain today with foreign practitionners as well as the complex relationship to the notion of “tradition” they result in. Recently, these elements and the changes they amount to have had a tremendous impact on the Afro-Cuban religious field especially in its constant tendency of fragmentation.

Though some headway has been made in research into the transnational nature of immigrant Pentecostal communities, most of this research has taken place within a European and African context. A synthesis of this research produces four 'tensions' that are typical in approaching these transnational communities: global versus local identities; reverse-mission rhetoric versus asylum reality; ascetic versus prosperity ethics; and integrative aims versus marginal locations. This ethnographic study of five immigrant Pentecostal communities in the inner core of Boston identifies that these four tensions are useful for understanding these communities in the context of the United States, albeit with some modification. Additionally, the article concludes by offering an additional tension that should be considered in the study of transnational Pentecostal communities.

Este artículo trata de los viajes del obispo uruguayo Mariano Soler por Medio Oriente y de las principales obras a los que estos dieron lugar. El interés recae en examinar los puntos de intersección entre representación orientalista y discurso ultramontano. Se argumenta que estos viajes y relatos responden a una lógica «glocal»: la defensa del catolicismo en el Río de la Plata y su globalización en América Latina. En este sentido, lo «global» y lo «local» convergen en la obra de Soler para hacer de Oriente un lugar simbólico desde donde combatir la cultura anticlerical y reafirmar el catolicismo ultramontano. La experiencia de Soler nos permite profundizar en la construcción de un imaginario ultramontano en América Latina y su capacidad para relacionarse con otros centros de referencia más allá de Roma. / The article studies Uruguayan bishop Mariano Soler’s travels through the Middle East and the main works they gave rise to. Its purpose is to examine the intersections between orientalist representation and ultramontane discourse. It argues that these travels and texts respond to a «glocal» logic: the defense of Catholicism in the Río de la Plata and its globalization in Latin America. In this sense, the «global» and the «local» converge in Soler’s works, making the Middle East a symbolic place from which to counter anti-clerical culture and reassert ultramontane Catholicism. Soler’s experience allows a more profound understanding of the construction of an ultramontane imaginary in Latin America and its capacity to relate to other centers of reference beyond Rome.

Co się dzieje w polskich organizacjach Kościoła rzymskokatolickiego poza granicami kraju? Organizacje te muszą działać w społeczeństwach pluralistycznych i wielokulturowych, o znacznym stopniu sekularyzacji, w których o wiele bardziej powszechne niż w Polsce są idee równości płci i emancypacji. Czy otwierają się na nowe egalitarne wzory, czy też konserwatywnie okopują i zamykają? Książka „Ponad granicami...” to próba zrozumienia, w jaki sposób, kto i dlaczego zmienia wzory płciowe w organizacjach Polskich Misji Katolickich w Anglii, Belgii i Szwecji. Autorki analizują praktyki, które służą podtrzymywaniu, gruntowaniu tradycyjnych podziałów płciowych, jak i różne subwersywne akty oporu migrantek i migrantów, które modyfikują segregację płciową, a nawet ją podważają. Pokazują również, że w sytuacji migracji, kiedy różnica płciowa zostaje wyeksponowana i tym bardziej palące staje się jej ponowne zdefiniowanie, rosną w siłę męskie religijne mobilizacje. Książka podsumowuje badania terenowe z lat 2016–2018, w trakcie których Autorki rozmawiały z wieloma świeckimi i konsekrowanymi działaczkami i działaczami PMK w Anglii, Belgii i Szwecji.

From the early 1970s until 2011, the Syrian shrine town of Sayyida Zaynab flourished as a minor centre of Shiʿi learning. It predominantly served Iraqi Shiʿi refugees, but also temporary visitors from Iran and the Gulf countries. The seminaries viewed it as their responsibility to draw in transient Shiʿa and turn them into students and loyal followers of important marājiʿ al-taqlīd or Shiʿi legal scholars who mainly reside in major centres of Shiʿi learning, such as Najaf, Karbala and Qom. While the seminaries in Sayyida Zaynab aimed at strengthening institutional affiliation among lay Shiʿa, they concurrently aided the questioning of authoritative religious edicts and opinions emanating from Iranian and Iraqi centres of learning and produced local religious authorities. This article examines two spheres in which central authority was challenged in the shrine town of Sayyida Zaynab. First, it was contested in seminaries where students and teachers debated legal rulings, and second, in contested public Muharram practices such as self-flagellation processions and the showing and selling of recorded laṭmiyyāt, which are chants performed during ritual mourning gatherings.

Concepts of diaspora concerning related factors of social transformation have been investigated with respect to religion and attempts to preserve ethnic identity in society without abandoning group identity. The main objective of this study is to examine the ethnic and religious narrative of the Yārsānis in diaspora and how the dynamics of religious transformation become apparent in a description of diaspora. Reference will be made to the theoretical framework developed by Steven Vertovec and Peggy Levitt on diaspora, transnationalism, and migration in their relation to religion. The article follows two major theoretical premises: How Yārsānis' changing attitudes in new cultural settings necessitate adaptations that affect their religion and culture, and the effects of integration in Sweden due to the ritual encounters between Yārsānis and the, apparently, " secular " Swedish values. How do these new contexts create open space for narrating " Yārsāni-ness " ?

Honorable Mention, International Studies Association (ISA) Religion and International Relations Book Award.

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The Islamic University of Medina was established by the Saudi state in 1961 to provide religious instruction primarily to foreign students. Students would come to Medina for religious education and were then expected to act as missionaries, promoting an understanding of Islam in line with the core tenets of Wahhabism. By the early 2000s, more than 11,000 young men from across the globe had graduated from the Islamic University. Circuits of Faith offers the first examination of the Islamic University and considers the efforts undertaken by Saudi actors and institutions to exert religious influence far beyond the kingdom's borders. Michael Farquhar draws on Arabic sources, including biographical materials, memoirs, syllabi, and back issues of the Islamic University journal, as well as interviews with former staff and students, to explore the institution's history and faculty, the content and style of instruction, and the trajectories and experiences of its students. Countering typical assumptions, Farquhar argues that the project undertaken through the Islamic University amounts to something more complex than just the one-way "export" of Wahhabism. Through transnational networks of students and faculty, this Saudi state-funded religious mission also relies upon, and has in turn been influenced by, far-reaching circulations of persons and ideas.

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"Michael Farquhar presents a must-read study of a critical Saudi institution and the role it plays in exporting the Wahhabi message. Thoroughly researched and analytically acute, this book incisively unpacks larger issues of religious dissemination and its links to wealth and authority, as well as the understudied but defining influence of religious intellectuals and changing social technologies." (James Piscatori Australian National University)

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"Nowhere have I read a more lucid, accessible, and well-researched book on education, migration, and the Wahhabi mission. Circuits of Faith complicates our conventional wisdom with new interpretations and perspectives. Both critics and sympathizers with Wahhabiyya will find their stereotypes challenged." (Madawi Al-Rasheed, Middle East Centre The London School of Economics and Political Science)

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"Michael Farquhar has done an excellent job researching and writing this book. Its highly diverse sources―ranging from university curricula and information about salaries to books about theology―make this a great contribution to the literature on Saudi Arabia. It fills a gap in our understanding of the dissemination of Wahhabism and nicely complements the great work already done by scholars such as Madawi al-Rasheed." (Joas Wagemakers Journal of Islamic Studies)

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"Circuits of Faith is the definitive work on the Saudi-backed expansion of Salafi-Wahhabism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. With great subtlety and intelligence, Michael Farquhar explores how Saudi state interests, material capital, and institutional logics inform and harness a growing trans-local religious economy. A rich and impressive book." (John Chalcraft The London School of Economics and Political Science)

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"Overall, this is an outstanding, engaging and very clearly argued work that goes a long way in putting the study of transnational Islam on a sophisticated theoretical footing. Farquhar does not neglect the important issue of power but manages to show that even a missionary project as lavishly funded as the IUM faces real limits to its global influence and is in no position simply to dictate a hegemonic discourse. The book's accessible style should make it attractive for students and specialists alike." (Simon Wolfgang Fuchs Bulletin of the School for African and Oriental Studies)

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"Michael Farquhar expertly traces the Saudi state's use of the Islamic University of Medina (IUM) to facilitate state-driven dawa, or proselytization, which he dubs 'fundamentally a political project' (p.9). While other writers, particularly those in the Western media, have tended toward the use of alarmist rhetoric about the systematic and targeted spread of Wahhabism by the Saudi government, Farquhar comprehensively details the history of the IUM and of the state's nuanced relationship with its mission of dawa...Farquhar's conclusion is an important contribution, both in terms of its academic and policy consequences." (Courtney Freer Middle Eastern Studies)

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"Circuits of Faith expands the horizon of scholarship on Wahhabism, which often remains bounded by the nation-state in scopeIn the process of posing the question of Wahhabism's material conditions, Farquhar transforms the possible answers that might be given. Instead of asking what Wahhabism is, he focuses his analysis on the intellectual relations that compose Wahhabism as a discursive practice (by no means singular or unified in its approach) and the material migrations that make possible its spread. This focus on actors, networks, institutions, and the forms of interaction that connect them allows for more nuanced engagement with such a complex historical phenomenon. In this way, Michael Farquhar's Circuits of Faith is a most welcome contribution to the field." (Micah A. Hughes Maydan)

This article offers a preliminary analytical framework for the study of one of the main forms of global expression of
religious movements in the contemporary scenario and its specific impact on the public sphere: the involvement of
networks of social and political activism at translocal, trasnational and global levels. This is done through the analysis of the relationship between religion and globalisation, with particular attention to Christian groups, stressing two sets of processes: first, the dynamics of visibility and latency within these experiences; and second, the convergence between processes of minoritisation and imbrication of local and global (which will be developed though the concept of glocalisation). The study will be conducted as a comparative analysis of existing networks between Brazil, Argentina and the United Kingdom.

This paper explores media-techniques of conversion among Arabic speaking Christians along the Nile. Their practices build up on and intensify long existing religious dynamics of missionization (through migration and re-migration of evangelical Christians) and conversion (from existing religious communities into new, transnational movements) and are formed around narratives of modernisation. In past and present Christian proselytizing has articulated universal aspirations that are to be realized in situ through the differentiation between believers und unbelievers. The demand to make a complete break with the past is emphasized by the use of media (books and more recently the internet) and formats (like a creed) that are seemingly removed from the modifications of time and space. Exploring the various strategies and media-practices of Christian proselytizing along the Nile through time, this paper offers a more detailed analysis of a recent prophetic movement and its territorialisation strategies in the context of the founding of the state of South Sudan.

Este trabalho apresenta um marco preliminar de analise para compreender uma das principais formas de expressao global dos movimentos religiosos no cenario contemporâneo e seu impacto especifico na esfera publica: a insercao em redes de ativismo social e politico em escala translocal, transnacional e global. No que se segue, isto sera feito a partir da problematica da relacao entre religiao e globalizacao, destacando-se, particularmente, dois conjuntos de processos: primeiro, a dinâmica entre ostensividade e invisibilidade nestas experiencias; e segundo, a conjuncao entre processos de minoritizacao e de imbricacao entre local e global (que enfocaremos a partir do conceito de glocalizacao). O estudo sera conduzido como uma analise comparativa das redes existentes entre o Brasil, Argentina e Reino Unido. Normal 0 21 false false false ES-AR X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Tabla normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-s...

ABSTRACT Catholic priests and advanced seminarians in Sri Lanka often describe their entrance to the seminary as the response to a strong spiritual calling that they could not ignore. Young seminarians offer more ambiguous narratives, where a combination of material anxieties, local cultural traditions and individual aspirations, encourage them to consider joining the clergy. This article examines how seminaries highlight aspects of religious formation where vocational discernment and the authenticity of one's calling are left for later stages of formation. Emphasizing aspects of career mobility, graduate studies overseas and missionary work, seminaries provide an attractive alternative for prospective priests in Sri Lanka. I argue that there is no contradiction between the spiritual dimensions of religious vocation and the material aspirations of seminarians. Although ethical dispositions emerge and replace the mundane impulses that initially attract young men to the seminary, material incentives are never completely eliminated from the vocational map of seminarians.

DEADLINE EXTENDED UNTIL JANUARY 20: Panel Abstract: In the field of studies of spirituality outside institutionalized religions, the categorization of 'New Age' (or a New Age Movement) has recently been undermined by scholars suggesting that it would be more suitably termed 'spirituality'. This category reflects an emic conceptualization; in fact, few of those who might be considered New Agers actually label themselves as such; they rather call what they do 'spirituality'. However, concerns remain over whether the term 'spirituality', which has much broader analytical connotations, can be used in this way, and whether it should be singular or plural. In this panel, we address this issue by asking whether there is such a thing as 'global' spirituality, exploring the ways in which spirituality is defined through cross-cultural and transnational perspectives. To this end, the panel aims to gather papers illustrating how spirituality is conceived and practised in different places around the world by means of ethnographic analysis. It seeks to illuminate differences and similarities in the ways in which spirituality is unfolding in various locations. Ethnography has a crucial contribution to this endeavour because it provides detailed descriptions of how spirituality is lived through in everyday practice. Mobility and transnationalization are key aspects that we propose to explore in the debate upon the scholarly categorization of 'spirituality'. Therefore, we invite papers presenting ethnographic cases that tackle one or more of the following topics, particularly those that compare different cultural contexts:-Transnational forms of spiritual practices-Spiritual healing and holistic therapies-Relationship between humans and spirits-Relationship between spirituality and religion-Spiritual tourism and mobility-Methodological challenges.

Since the 1990s, Afro-Cuban religion such as santería and Ifá have been undergoing a significant expansion. A growing number of American and European foreigners visit the island for initiatory or ritual purposes. Based on a detailed ethnography stemming from a field study conducted during the 2000s (mostly in Havana), this paper offers an extensive overview of this phenomenon, focusing on its effects on the ritual and discursive practices of Cuban santeros and babalaos (santería and Ifá priests). After considering the internal logic involved in the construction of a priest’s career, it examines how the integration of foreigners influences the interactional construction of religious statuses and the development of specific relationships to oneself and to others in connection with local ‘empowerment’ rationales. Two levels of analysis are distinguished: that of the ‘common’ initiates and that of erudite and/or politicized ‘elite’ groups. Both highlight not only the rivalries at play in the Afro-Cuban religious field, but also the intense critical and reflexive attitude that santeros and babalaos maintain towards their own practice, as well as some of the innovative logic inherent to this world but intensified by this new situation. In particular, the paper argues that the bonds Cuban priests establish with foreigners—through ritual kinship or through increasingly numerous ceremonial collaborations with initiates from abroad—constitute an additional component in the micro-conflicts that ordinarily pervade religious practice and can, on a larger scale, have an influence on the power relations that create oppositions between different ‘elite’ groups (some of them deeply committed to projects of ritual ‘reform’). While adopting a predominantly micro-political interpretation, the paper also considers the ritual implications of these dynamics, in particular through reflecting on the innovative and reflexive rationale which are a constituent part of these practices.