Immigration, Community Formation, Political Incorporation, and Why Religion Matters: Migration and Settlement Patterns of the Indian Diaspora

Abstract

Because of the secularity of sociology, religion remains a relatively marginal field of study and the insights of the sociology of religion are generally ignored or overlooked within other subfields. But religion can be a force that deeply influences personal, community, and national life in nonobvious ways through shaping the social and political structures of society. Consequently, including an analysis of religion as a fundamental factor of social life could greatly enrich and even transform many subfields of sociology. In this essay, I focus on the sociology of migration and immigration, my area of research, and show how religion plays a central role in social, economic, and political processes surrounding migration. Drawing on case studies of migration and immigration of groups from India based on my research and that of others, I discuss how religion, through a variety of indirect and direct mechanisms, shapes migration patterns, remittance use, social incorporation into receiving societies, and forms of political mobilization.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 25 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.