At home in the gurdwara? Religious space and the resonance with domesticity in a London suburb
2021; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 51; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/0048721x.2021.1916787
ISSN1096-1151
AutoresBarbara Bertolani, Sara Bonfanti, Paolo Boccagni,
Tópico(s)Anthropological Studies and Insights
Resumo'Home', as a special place and a set of practices that separate it from the rest, may 'scale up' to the public sphere, particularly among immigrant and religious minorities. Following this insight, we investigate the functional equivalences between domestic space and public, religious one, based on a case study of Sikh gurdwaras in Southall, West London. Besides their everyday function as hubs for spiritual and cultural connections with the Sikh home(land), gurdwaras reveal a parallelism with a private home in two respects: vertical domesticity – the forms of spatial and temporal thresholding that turn a house of worship into the home of the guru – and horizontal domesticity – the home-like routines underpinning community life in gurdwaras. This opens up a novel space to see temples as infrastructures for people's sense of home, and the reproduction of sacredness inside them as a form of homemaking.
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