• gastspreker Prof. dr. Jan-Kåre Breivik (Universiteit Bergen, Noorwegen)
• dinsdag 6 maart 2012

• gastspreker Prof. dr. Karsten Paerregaard (Universiteit Kopenhagen, DK)
• woensdag 2 mei 2012
• om 14:00hrs
• Guest Lecturer at Course (Prof. Dr. Christiane Stallaert) ‘Latin-America: from Colonisation to Globalisation’

BANDS OF BROTHERS. SAINTS, SPONSORSHIP AND FRATERNITY IN PERUVIAN MIGRATION

Karsten Paerregaard
University of Copenhagen

One of South America’s most famous religious icons is El Señor de los Milagros (the Lord of the Miracles) which is celebrated annually by more than one million people in Lima, Peru’s capital. Over the past three decades the country’s fast growing diaspora in the US, Spain, Italy, Japan and Argentina has made the Lord of Miracles the object of a global expatriation. Thus migrants in such cities as Madrid, Barcelona, Milan, Genoa, Rome, Milan, Los Angeles, New York, Washington DC, Tokyo, Kyoto and Buenos Aires organize religious brotherhoods and arrange annual processions to bring the El Señor to the streets or other public places. The lecture compares the strategies which migrants pursue to organize local brotherhoods of the Lord of Miracles in the US, Spain, Italy, Japan and Argentina and obtain permission from the local authorities to arrange processions in honor of the icon. It argues that the dispersion of this religious practice is part of a strategy which Peruvian migrants use to gain access to public spaces in the host country and thus legitimize their presence and claim legal and political rights as immigrants in their new country of residence. In theoretical terms, the lecture suggests that religion plays a critical role in migrants’ efforts to create transnational ties and construct diasporic identities.

The talk is based on a chapter in Paerregaard's latest book: Peruvians Dispersed. A Global Ethnography of Migration. Lanham: Lexington Books. 2008