Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Sikh gurdwara in Finland: negotiating, maintaining and transmitting immigrants’ identities

2010; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 2; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/19438192.2010.491301

1943-8192

Laura Hirvi,

South Asian Studies and Diaspora

Abstract As recent studies suggest, religious institutions play a crucial role in shaping immigrants' identities. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Helsinki, Finland among Sikh immigrants from Northern India, this article sets out to investigate the manner in which the gurdwara (Sikh temple) is involved in the process of negotiating, maintaining and transmitting immigrants' identities. By means of mapping out and analyzing the gurdwara's architectural as well as organizational structure, its foodways, and its role in transmitting religious as well as cultural traditions to Sikh youth, this article seeks to highlight the complex process underlying the (re‐)creation of immigrants' identities in a diasporic context. Keywords: Sikhreligionidentityyouthfoodtempleimmigranttransmission Notes 1. This information is based on a report of the Finnish Immigration Service, available at: http://www.migri.fi/netcomm/content.asp?path=8,2709,2740,2485,2739&article=3388&index=_&page=1 (accessed on 11 February 2009). 2. Finnish Immigration Service: http://www.migri.fi/netcomm/content.asp?path=8,2709,2717 (accessed on 1 April 2009). 3. Statistics Finland, see http://www.stat.fi (accessed on 1 April 2009). 4. The term 'community' refers throughout the text to the community constituted by those Sikhs actually visiting the gurdwara. See Baumann (Citation1996) for a critical discussion on the term 'community'. 5. Min (Citation2006) makes the same observation in his study on Hindu temples. 6. Hindi or Punjabi classes can be organized at Finnish schools provided that there are at least five students in one group, which seems to be rarely the case. 7. Most of the Sikh youth I talked to have to attend Finnish as second mother tongue classes. Even if their Finnish is good enough and the teacher allows them to take part in Finnish as the first mother tongue classes, they get a note in their school‐leaving certificate indicating that Finnish is actually – according to the Finnish education system's classification – their second mother tongue. 8. In her case study of Hindu women in Pittsburgh, Rayaprol (Citation1997) makes a similar observation when she writes 'Meeting as families in the temple helps parents concretize abstractions about Hinduism and Indian culture that they find difficult to explain to their children' (p. 67). 9. Chong (Citation1998) had a similar finding in her study on Second Generation Korean Americans, and Min (Citation2006) in his study on Indian Hindu immigrants in the USA.