Refugees and Religion - by Birgit Meyer & Peter Van Der Veer

About the Book

"This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Utrecht University and the Max Planck Society. Understanding religion from a material and corporeal angle, this book addresses the ways in which refugees practice their religions and convert or develop new faiths. It also evaluates how secular institutions in Europe frame and determine what is classified as religion according to the law, and delineate the limits of religious authority, religious practice, and religious speech. The question of nationalism and migration has been shaping the political landscape in Europe for more than a decade, resulting in a nationalist upsurge. This volume places the current trajectories of people from Asia and Africa who flee from conditions such as oppression and conflict, and who are seeking refuge in Europe in a broader historical and comparative perspective. In so doing, it addresses past experiences in Europe with the role of religion in both producing and accommodating refugees, in the aftermath of the Peace of Westphalia, World War II, and in the context of the Cold War."--

Book Synopsis

Understanding religion from a material and corporeal angle, this open access book addresses the ways in which refugees practice their religions and convert or develop new faiths. It also evaluates how secular institutions in Europe frame and determine what is classified as religion according to the law, and delineate the limits of religious authority, religious practice, and religious speech.

The question of nationalism and migration has been shaping the political landscape in Europe for more than a decade, resulting in a nationalist upsurge. This volume places the current trajectories of people from Asia and Africa who flee from conditions such as oppression and conflict, and who are seeking refuge in Europe in a broader historical and comparative perspective. In so doing, it addresses past experiences in Europe with the role of religion in both producing and accommodating refugees, in the aftermath of the Peace of Westphalia, World War II, and in the context of the Cold War.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 licence on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Utrecht University and the Max Planck Society.

Review Quotes

"This remarkably rich edited collection identifies and analyzes the ways in which refugees as well as the nation-states that either welcome or reject them draw on multiple religious traditions to make sense of their unsanctioned mobility. The authors demonstrate that refugee predicaments are not wholly defined by modern ideas of citizenship, belonging, and rights, and that religion is the canopy under which many debates about refugees and refuge find their richest idiom." --Arjun Appadurai, Goddard Professor in Media, Culture and Communication, New York University, USA

"A timely volume offering deeply embedded understandings of religion and refugees in the European context. With ethnographic precision and robust historical framing, the volume challenges secularist approaches with case studies that demonstrate the real-world power and effects of religion in host societies and within refugee groups alike." --Elizabeth McAlister, Professor of Religion & African American Studies, Wesleyan University, USA

"The question of refugees has not been extensively studied with particular attention to religion. Birgit Meyer and Peter van der Veer's edited volume addresses this gap with an excellent series of ethnographic and historically informed cases that cover multiple geographies and time-periods." --Efe Peker, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Ottawa, Canada

About the Author

Birgit Meyer is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Utrecht, The Netherlands. She is co-editor of Figurations and Sensations of the Unseen in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (Bloomsbury 2019) and co-editor of Bloomsbury Studies in Material Religion.

Peter van der Veer is Director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religion, Gottingen, Germany.