RELIMIGRANTILLES. Religion, migration: French Caribbeans in the Hexagon

This project investigates how religion – understood as beliefs, practices and institutions – shapes the experience of migration among French Caribbeans living in the Hexagon (Ile de France). It aims at examining the complex relationships of religion, migration and race within the French national space.

The literature on French Caribbean migrations pays little attention to religious practices and belonging, which nonetheless play a specific role in many French Caribbeans’ daily lives. Additionally, religion is a good vantage point to explore the tensions between universalistic ideals and experiences of racism within French citizenship. Religion directly contributes to individual and collective identity projects, while intersecting with other forms of social categorization, such as race, class, generation or gender. This project investigates such issues through a comparative and transversal lens, by exploring a variety of religious field sites and by bringing back the social into the study of religion.

The project unfolds along three complementary lines of inquiry:

• First, it illuminates how religion is reconfigured through migration from the French Caribbean overseas departments (Antilles) to the French Hexagon. The study focuses on the impact of social conditions of arrival on religious practices and analyzes the role of religious belonging in experiences of integration and discrimination. By paying attention to children who were born and raised in the Hexagon, it also identifies the modalities of religious transmission across generations in migratory contexts.
• Next, the project aims at analyzing the extent to which religious disaffiliation or affiliation (to majority Catholicism, Protestantism, Evangelicalism, Messianic Judaism, Islam, etc.) affects the way French Caribbeans are perceived and racially categorized in French society, along with their own understanding of citizenship and French Caribbean history. The investigation also looks at the positions French Caribbeans occupy within such religious spaces and the place that is given to them within religious institutions, in terms of (in)visibility, access to positions of authority and processes of intra-religious categorization, recognition and stigmatization.
• The French Caribbean population living in Ile de France is finally characterized by significant “transregional” circulations across French overseas departments and the Hexagon. The research seeks to explore the religious discourses and religious actors that move across these various spaces, and their impacts on families, religious spaces, collective memories and religious transformations.

Our methods are mostly qualitative, relying on ethnographic observations and individual or collective interviews. Such qualitative data is supplemented by quantitative analysis using the surveys Trajectories and Origins and Migration, Family and Aging, conducted by Ined in 2008 and 2010, and whose second editions are currently under way. The qualitative survey is divided into two phases: one main fieldwork in the Ile de France region, followed by a complementary field work in Guadeloupe and Martinique. Family relations, specifically parents and siblings, are our main entry point to the field: it is by following family threads that the investigation will move from the French Hexagon to the French Caribbean. The methodological focus on families helps understand migration, memory and identity in both intimate and fluctuating ways that take shape in family narratives – and silences. 

This work benefits from the financial support of the French Collaborative Institute on Migration, coordinated by the CNRS under the reference ANR-17-CONV-0001.

Duration: January 2022-December 2024

Photo: Yannick Fer and Olivier Fer