Believing in Migration: Religion, Ethics and Identity Among Sinhalese in Southern Italy
摘要
This chapter focuses on Sri Lankans living in Southern Italy, particularly in the Sicilian city of Messina, where the Sri Lankan community is mainly composed of Sinhalese of the Catholic faith. Drawing on ongoing ethnographic research, I consider how religion and ethics shape mobility projects between Sri Lanka and Italy. In particular, I take into account how devotional and ritual practices create a repertoire of ethical orientations that affect the ways in which the faithful respond to events in their everyday lives. I argue that the religious sphere and the ritual setting crafted by the Sinhalese in Messina not only serve to reveal and claim their presence in the Italian “host” context but are the foremost means of moral guidance through which they give shape to a distinctive Catholic and Sinhala identity pattern used to forge community belonging in the context of transnational mobility.