The aim of this work is to discuss the religious life of the Kimbanguist community in Stockholm; more specifically, it analyses the ways in which religion (in particular Kimbanguism) allows the members of a small religious community, originated by migration, to maintain sense of belonging and to give meaning to their experiences. In order to do this, I focus on the concept of community to define the ways in which a group of people, embedded in a much wider social field, can be defined with this analytical term: community emerges as a social group whose members share a specific inventory of symbols; symbols include representations and narratives, but also practices, artifacts and images. I focus on religions as tools that allow not only to build sense of community, but also to give meaning to believers’ life and experiences: religions in particular play a central role both in structuring daily life and in interpreting extraordinary events, such as migration and the passages through the different stages of life. The Kimbanguist community in Stockholm is not considered only in its local dimension, but also the transnational connection to the main church in Democratic Republic of Congo: the two main dimensions of this connection are represented by the economic contribution provided by believers to finance the church’s project and, on the other hand, the travels to Congo and to the city of N’Kamba, that the members do.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:du-47203 |
| Date | January 2023 |
| Creators | Tenti, Marco |
| Publisher | Högskolan Dalarna, Institutionen för kultur och samhälle |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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