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IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF JESUS AND THE PROPHET: SOCIALITY, CARING AND THE RELIGIOUS IMAGINATION IN THE FILIPINO DIASPORA
Professor Pnina Werbner
Co-Investigator: Dr Mark Johnson

FINDINGS AND ACHIEVEMENTS

• FOOTSTEPS is a multi-sited study of a new diaspora centred on the international migration of Filipino women (Filipinas) who make up the majority of the 2 million Filipinos at work in the Middle East. It challenges a dominant scholarly and popular discourse that reduces these migrants to economically deprived, semi-educated maids to order who endure harsh working conditions and unjust legal regimes in order to remit a few meagre dollars to folks back home. Instead, the project has aimed to disclose the rich cultural and religious lives of Filipinas in the diaspora by studying them as pilgrims, tourists and cosmopolitan travellers who fashion identity and build communities and international networks across national borders and cultural boundaries. The fact that Filipinos are Catholics, Muslims or belong to new Protestant churches is an under-researched and under-theorised aspect of their lives as migrants.

• Our research has underscored the centrality of ritual, normativity, ethics and the religious imagination in Filipinas' migratory experience, and especially so when they work in places sacred to Islam or Christianity. We explore the role ritual performance and religion play in creating sociality, community and social networks, sometimes leading to religious conversion, and the way belief affects relations with hosts. The symbolic and experiential dimensions of belief are re-discovered, practised and reinscribed by migrants in a sacred landscape, while faith empowers women in negotiating status and identity within and beyond the workplace. Living in centres holy to Christianity and Islam affords migrant returnees with symbolic capital and sometimes affects their decision to work in particular countries, beyond economic considerations. Filipinas working as carers for the elderly construct their identity through notions of religious sacrifice and an ethos of caring and responsibility.

• The project has disclosed that caring for the elderly in their homes endows carers with dignity, status and independent decision-making power and contributes to a more inclusive and encompassing sense of 'home', diaspora, and family as transnational and multi-sited. The focus on religion and normativity determined the project's locations: Israel, Saudi Arabia, Europe (the UK) and the Philippines. There are over 30,000 Filipinos working in Israel as foreign workers. Most work as carers for the elderly, chronically ill and disabled. Recently overstayers have been brutally rounded up by police and expelled, either returning home or moving to Europe. Saudi Arabia is home to the largest overseas Filipino migrant community, numbering over one million, 10% of whom are Muslim Filipinos, many of them women, working as health professionals, as carers or domestic helpers. These countries are thus religiously significant for migrants. Christian Filipinos have historically imagined a 'national closeness' with Israel based in the strong Filipino ascription to Judeo-Christian traditions, while Saudi Arabia is the holy symbolic centre of Islam for Muslims in the Southern Philippines.

• Recent Filipina migration to the UK has added a further comparative dimension. The project has investigated how religion and caring mediate notions of an expanded sense of 'home', belonging, community, and activism. It found that religious congregations provide havens for new arrivals and/or migrants in distress, as well as for leadership and oratory, philanthropy and celebration. In sum, the research has challenged the stereotype of the powerless and impoverished cultural lives of Filipino migrant women, and critiqued the view that an open and creative engagement with other peoples and ideas is the preserve and privilege of cosmopolitan elites. It has contributed to the overall AHRC programme by providing new empirical data on this important global diasporic community and by advancing our understanding of gender and religiosity in a transnational context.

• Research in Israel and the Philippines by Liebelt disclosed the various dimensions of Christian Filipinos' shared encounters in 'the Holy Land' and the social and personal transformations those entailed. In Saudi Arabia, Pingol focused on the 'journeys' of conversion to Islam among significant numbers of Christian Filipinos', while experiences of pilgrimage on Hajj and Umra among born Muslims were studied by Johnson. Both attended to how these conversion and pilgrimage journeys impacted on Filipinos at home among both Muslim and non-Muslim compatriots. McKay followed a pilgrimage of UK Filipinos to a shrine in Norfolk and considered more widely the effects of diasporic religious and ritual practice on the formation of 'the translocal village'. Werbner considered the way in which Filipinos in the UK are in the process of forming 'community' through shared celebration and fiestas despite their wide dispersal across the country because of their preferred work in caring and nursing homes throughout the UK. She also interviewed 'Israeli' Filipinos recruited to the UK to work in Jewish care homes and attended some Iglesia Ni Christo services.

• A second set of questions related to notions of ethics and caring: how and when do experiences and narratives of caring as sacrifice become confirmed or altered through work? And in what ways does religion provide a language for negotiating relations of dependency and obligation, or asserting legal rights and responsibilities? Another unexpected feature disclosed was the length of time migrants remain in the Kingdom (without gaining the right to become citizens) and the variety of occupations they fill, including both professional work and self-employment. This introduced a class dynamic among Filipino diasporans not originally anticipated (see Johnson forthcoming, paper attached).

• The issue of rights also reflects on a third set of key questions concerning the changing conception of 'home'. Certainly, the research in the different sites highlighted the establishment of conviviality and community in the diaspora forming homes away from home. Our website presents a film, two slide shows and other 'products' which illustrate this feature, and are important outcomes of the research, particularly because of the previous stress on abjection, exploitation and marginality in much of the literature. The work in Saudi Arabia also demonstrated how conversion to Islam opens up a potential new space for shared national belonging with born Muslim Filipinos who, in their home place, are regarded and often regard themselves as belonging to a separate nation (see Johnson and Pingol attached).

• Two international end-of-award conferences in the UK (Keele) and Philippines (U. of Philippines, Manila) with additional British Academy support. Two sessions were at major international conferences: A further workshop on 'Homes, Celestial Homes & Homes away from Home' was co-convened by Liebelt at Ben Gurion University. Altogether the team have presented some 30 papers to academics and non-academics at conferences in the UK and across the world, in Capetown, Dubai, Manila, Riyadh, San Francisco and Tel Aviv. That includes plenary presentations by the PI and CI at the joint CRONEM/AHRC DMI conference at the University of Surrey.

• Three single-authored books are in press/progress, plus four edited volumes, fourteen journal articles and four book chapters. The four edited volumes include a special issue of Ethnos on the 'Aesthetics of Diaspora' (co-edited by Werbner and Johnson with contributions by Werbner, Liebelt and Johnson); a special issue of South East Research on 'Mediated Identities, Diasporic Lives: Situating Filipinos & Philippine studies within a Translocal Space' (edited by Johnson and McKay with contribution by Liebelt) and a special issue of the Journal of Middle Eastern Women's Studies (edited by Johnson, Moors and de Regt with contributions by Pingol and Liebelt).

• Among the three book chapters completed (one in German) is a co-authored essay by the team summarising key aspects of the research in a major new collection edited by Kim Knott and Sean McLoughlin arising out of the AHRC Diaspora, Migration and Identity Programme. We produced two photo exhibitions for display at our end of award conferences, including a catalogue version of the exhibitions that was circulated at various conferences.

• This project has been the first to investigate and theorise comparatively the relation between gendered diasporas and the religious imagination among Christian and Muslim Filipino migrants. Moving beyond economistic portrayals of Southeast Asian migrant women as an exploited labour diaspora, our research has disclosed the importance of Christian and Islamic devotional practices in creating sociality and in processes of community formation. We found that diasporic imaginings of 'home' are inspired by religious allegories, while migrant subjectivities are shaped by their immersion in sacred landscapes. Religion imbues an ethics of affective labour and provides a language for managing working relationships. Methodologically, this has been the first comparative study of Christian and Muslim Filipino migrants working in Israel and Saudi Arabia, returnee migrants and their families in the Philippines, and onward migrating women from the Middle East to the UK.

• The comparative and multi-sited design of the project has enabled us to evaluate the impact of different social, cultural and legal settings on migrants' diasporic experiences. Highlights The project disclosed that living and working at the holy centres of their respective faiths helps mitigate the hardships of exile and difficult working conditions for migrants. Thus Muslim Filipinos talk about their labour in Makkah and Madinah as work whose reward is both in this life and in the hereafter. Christian Filipino pilgrimages to holy sites in Israel sacralise their humdrum daily lives, enabling them to transcend the degrading 'migrant' label assigned to them. As migrants 'discover' sacred landscapes known only through scripture they gain new knowledge and cultural capital back home. Religious and cultural events, the research found, provide regular opportunities for migrant workers who are often highly dispersed (as in the UK) or isolated (especially in Saudi Arabia) to celebrate, gossip, joke and seek advice and mutual aid in the company of co-religionists and fellow Filipinos. Religious activities also enhance connections to home in diaspora.

• The research has also disclosed that shared religious practice draws together co-religionists from other countries and from disparate localities in the Philippines. Membership in a universal community of believers provides a language of shared ethics across social divisions. This is especially important for lone female migrant workers who have little recourse to employment, residential or citizenship rights. Though their legal status is better, 'Israeli' Filipina workers in Manchester expressed nostalgia for the warmer relationships with their employers and families in the Israeli context as against the more bureaucratic and hierarchical relations in care homes in the UK. In sum, the research was important in showing the way that religion shapes the gendered experiences of labour migrants. Even as it produces disciplined bodies, it also facilitates social networking and provides symbolic resources for negotiating a sense of virtuous selfhood, belonging and cultural citizenship in the context of migration.

• One of the most important achievements of the project was the broadening of networks of scholars working on issues of ritual and religion, normativity and ethics in the Filipino diaspora worldwide and more broadly, among Asian women international migrants. This network has included several very promising young doctoral students and postdoctoral scholars. Second, it has more specifically brought Filipino scholars into the circle currently engaged in addressing issues of ritual performance and religious pilgrimage in diaspora, strengthening the debates on normativity, gender and ethics, and extending the social and geographical scope of studies of Filipino migrants. Significantly, we have been able to draw much of that new work together both in the main project publication, the edited double issue of TAPJA, and in the other three edited collections that various team members are editing and contributing to. The project has clearly set an agenda which has been regarded as significant by other scholars in this field, and has added importantly to the theorisation of religion and diaspora, which is currently of growing interest to international migration scholars.

• The Footsteps project has not only made distinctive contributions to the study of international female Filipino migrants by focusing on a heretofore almost entirely ignored aspect of their diasporic lives, namely religion. It has also made significant and ongoing contributions to the scholarly literature on new diasporas, opening up questions for research in the field in relation to gender relations, transnational social formations and global religiosity. The academic impact of our research will continue to grow through an expanding list of publications (out, in press and forthcoming), including several key edited collections that not only feature work from the team but that also draw on the work of other leading international scholars whom we have brought on board to contribute to the larger project. That impact will be further secured through the completion of a series of single authored monographs at various stages of preparation.

• The footsteps project has brought together interdisciplinary resources and drawn on innovative methodological research tools. The interdisciplinary nature of the project team - comprised of anthropologists, a sociologist and a human geographer - was complemented by interdisciplinary conferences featuring scholars working on international migrant women from within and across a range of disciplinary and subject areas, including media studies, law and theology (both Islamic and Christian), as well as that of anthropology, sociology and geography. We are committed to creatively employing the use of visual methodologies in our respective field sites. In addition to written outputs, we have put together an exhibition consisting of self-portrayals of migrants' lives as seen in their own eyes, in one case through pictures they themselves have taken. A feature film by Liebelt documenting the experience of returnee migrants will be completed in July 2010, the trailer for which can be viewed online via our website. Additionally, Liebelt has also made a film of a pilgrimage trip to Bethlehem, which can be viewed online via our website. The website and report also include two slide shows on celebrations in the UK and Saudi Arabia with commentaries, to convey visually the sociality of Filipinos in Saudi Arabia and the UK.

• Though not the primary impetus for the research, we have worked to facilitate a dialogue on domestic caring with user groups including caring agencies and migrant organisations. User groups, including activist and migrant organisations, were included and participated at both final project conferences in the UK and the Philippines. The former conference at Keele included a round table discussion session entitled, "Critical Reflections on/from Policy, Practice and Advocacy" with critical reflections and interventions by representatives of Kalayaan, a UK based NGO focused on the rights of female domestic workers and from the Social Policy Research Centre at Middlesex University.

• Though the majority of the outputs are focused on contributing to the academic study of international migrant women, other outputs, such as film, are intended to reach a much broader audience potentially including that of identifiable user groups. We believe that in time, as greater emphasis is placed in academia on the wider dimensions and dynamics of migrant women's lives, and as those insights generated by our research are taken up and taken on board by user groups, the impact of the research will be become evident, and will enable a more considered and informed approach to mobilising and facilitating women's considerable creative resources in working to change their lives and conditions of employment.

• There are a number of significant new and ongoing further researches arising from the project. McKay's fieldwork in London has resulted in a successful funding bid for a project entitled, Everyday Objects: the making and unmaking of Filipino crafts as art'. Growing out of the work in Saudi Arabia follow up research on the relation between middle class Muslim Filipinos in Saudi Arabia and the emergence of the 'Young Moro Professionals' is ongoing. The YMP is an international network of young, well educated Filipino Muslims many of whom have family connections and backgrounds both in the Middle East and in the Southern Philippines. They are not only challenging traditional Muslim leaders in the Southern Philippines but also seeking to forge new business and political alliances often with Christian Filipinos in metropolitan parts of the Philippines. Much of that ongoing work is currently being conducted through personal connections via the internet and through the Tausug Network (a virtual network of diasporan Muslims from Western Mindanao). Further funding sources are being sought to continue that project in the Philippines and elsewhere including the Middle East and Sabah. Pingol is currently working on a new and related project with Itaru Nagasaka of Hiroshima University on Children of OFWs. She is co-applicant on a proposal Confining Structures, Alternative Spaces: Filipino Migrant Workers Negotiating their Cultural and Social Citizenship submitted to Gender and Citizenship in the Information Society, an Asia-Wide Research Program coordinated by IT for Change.

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