Diasporic Journeys, Ritual, and Normativity among Asian Migrant Women by Pnina Werbner Mark Johnson

Author:Pnina Werbner, Mark Johnson [Pnina Werbner, Mark Johnson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138376960
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2018-08-10T00:00:00+00:00

Debate and Critique

Sarah’s request provoked a village-wide response, with Sarah’s Hong Kong-based friends—members of the St John’s congregation— taking up her cause. I watched Sarah’s video together with Nora, Darcy and Elvie in Central. They described Luis’s refusal as ‘hard-hearted’ and ‘closed-minded’. They also made these comments in text messages and voice calls to Luis, Sarah and others across Haliap. They accused Luis of an unbrotherly kind of ‘stinginess’—an attempt to pull himself and his household away from Haliap community networks towards his church connections. Sarah’s friends made four point. First, there was no ritual held when Luis and Sarah’s mother died. Even though she was Iglesia, neglecting Ifugao ritual disrespected her kin, friends and ancestors who remained Catholic and ‘pagan’. This was a claim of the precedence of indigenous consociality and its cultural value—funerals being for the living—over that of the new Protestant churches and the constraints they placed on their adherents. Making this claim, Sarah’s friends argued for the primacy of kin obligations over non-local faith. Second, because Sarah had donated a pig for Luis’s engagement ritual, he had an obligation to give back in kind when asked, an obligation that came before his personal religious beliefs. Third, Sarah was asking Luis only for money and it should be Sarah’s decision how she should spend it. This argument separated an exchange of use-value for a cultural debt from the ways a creditor may then choose to invest the repayments. And, finally, Sarah’s friends observed that because the ritual would not be held in Luis’s house, the Iglesia could not take any action against him. Thus, Luis could not claim that he was really endangering his own stature within the Iglesia. Sarah’s friends has thus decided in advance that Luis’s refusal could not be founded in any reasonable self-interest, but in his determination to create distance between himself and his sister.

Nora explained to me:

Here in Hong Kong, we learn that you do not have to be the same to go together. You just have to respect other customs and give them their place. That is how our thinking must be if we will join many peoples and faiths here, and how we should adapt if we will transfer again to a new place. Now, in Haliap, we should practice both Iglesia and fogwa.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.