Doing Family and Religious Belonging of Immigrants: Case Studies in South Italy

Abstract

The immigration and integration policies reveal the difficulty of the host society to institutionalize new models of social differences accompanying integration process. What happens when people of different cultures, values, religion live together? Immigrants who “arrive” continue their life in a place where they do not passively participate over time but become actors. Pressed by the hegemonic culture of the host society, immigrants do not cease to practice their religious and origin cultural expressions. Considering the impact of religion and origin cul¬tural values on public and private expression of differences, it is important to consider their role (between persistence and innovation), in the integration process. These dynamics have been analyzed in a research study on immigrants’ integration process in Palermo. Data show how assimilation’s immigrant (Empirically divided between Innovative or conservative) oscillates be-tween attitudes of rejection of the “new culture” and of defense of that of origin, through practices whose expression changes in the public and private sphere. The analysis, focused on super-conformism and ethnic persistence of the most numerous immigrant communities in the context of analysis (Islamic Ummah and the Indian Dharma) delineated the adapta¬tion declinations through syncretism and cultural contagions. Immigrants, schematically divided be¬tween conservative and innovatives, participate in the construction of a local model of integration in which immigrants, free to express their religious and cultural differences, tend to reduce their perception of minority.