Presentation abstracts

Frank Ngo
Pilgrims of the peripheral – Centers and peripheries between Japan and Christendom

Pilgrimage shares many traits with tourism, and much of the anthropologies of the two realize both forms of mobility draw from one another to fulfill religious, economic, or leisurely ends. In this paper I inquire what social changes come about when Japanese Catholic students partake in movement between Japan and the rest of the Catholic world. They may move as pilgrims, tourists, sometimes both, but are animated by their consciousness of an institution-wide Catholic identity.

I contextualize the movement of Japanese Catholic students in historic attempts of the Catholic Church to evangelize Japan as well as contemporary attempts in the New Evangelization project. Mobility to and from the center of Catholicism – Europe – is intended to open or deepen religious possibilities for the students. I look at how pilgrimage and the touristic element of authenticity are key to making claims to the Christendom the New Evangelization seeks to revive.

Keywords: Catholicism, center-peripheral, pilgrimage, Christendom, New Evangelization

Alice Yeh
The migratory vocation: risk and divine authentication at the airport border   

This paper explores the themes of risk, rationality, and religious calling as they emerge in the moral and migratory trajectories of Chinese Catholics. I focus in particular on the narrative of a Chinese priest passing through a Canadian airport en route to the United States. How has the confessional politics of Catholic identitarianism been mobilized into religious callings, first from the village to the city and later from China to overseas Chinese communities? As parishioners and priests alike are “at risk” waiting – whether for the reunion of underground and government-affiliated churches, for greater religious freedom, or for divine agency to move toward its end – they increasingly entangle moral and economic forms of capital, framing upward or international mobility as the solution to spiritual and ecclesial risk. Building on fieldwork conducted in Hangzhou and New York in 2018, I show how risk as conceived by Chinese Catholic immigrants (and would-be immigrants) functions as an ironically state-centric indicator of moral mobility.

Keywords: risk, migration, transnational China, Catholicism

Iris Pakulla
Mobility in mining landscapes: the case study of Khanbogd  

In the Southern Gobi mining belt ​of Mongolia, the presence of one of the world’s biggest copper and gold mine, the Oyu Tolgoi (turquoise hill)​, has triggered a process of resourcification (High, 2010) and land dispossession resulting in the unfolding of sedentarisation. Paying attention to the material and immaterial ways in which mobile pastoralists’ trajectories are being altered, regulated, and obstructed, this paper elaborates on “constellations of mobility”. These refer to entanglements of historical patterns of movement, narratives about mobility, and mobile practices (Cresswell, 2010) that emerge, change and coexist in Khanbogd. While elaborating on discontinuities and new spatial boundaries, the discussion opens up to herders’ experiences of displacement.

Keywords: Gobi Desert, mobile pastoralism, mining, constellations of mobility, discontinuities, frictions

Joy Xin Yuan Wang
Silence and care: Taiwanese immigrants in Singapore

Everyday life is the space of all forms of concealments- little lies that keep life going, erasures that allow us to start again, feints that trick us into thinking that life is bearable. In this paper I aim to discuss one of these forms of concealment.  Through drawing on Clara Han’s (2012) reading of Veena Das (2007) notion of the ‘moral energy of silence’ I explore how it is through the silencing of the self  that another – a child, a parent, a friend – might move through life encumbered; and how silence as a space of half truths and partial knowledge is generative of imaginative possibilities that turn troubling memories into material for ethical affordances. I do so by exploring the constellations of speech and silence of a group of Taiwanese migrants in Singapore whose lives dovetailed both fleetingly with the exodus of 1949; and more substantially and concretely with the 28 years of Martial law that lasted from May 1949 to July 1987.

Keywords: silence, care, migrants, memory

Philippe Thalmann
Pious subjectivities, entertainment and mobility in Saudi Arabia
TBC

Keywords: Arabian Peninsula, youth, piety, entertainment, aspirations

Aude Franklin
Constructing family and kinship ties – The case study of refugees from Democratic Republic of Congo in Kampala (Uganda).

This paper explores the making of family and kinship ties in mobility context, building on a six-month fieldwork conducted in the domestic spaces of Congolese refugees in Kampala (Uganda). Rather than considering the family as a core of solidarity, I will question it as an actualization, a group that depends on the adherence and investment of its members to make it last, despite the strong external and internal constraints that pressure families. I will do so by focusing on Milka, Esther and their children household and describing the specific responses they mobilize to ensure their economic stability, physical security and existential balance.

Keywords: family, kinship, situation(s) of mobility, Uganda, Democratic Republic of Congo