Self-Cultivation and Domestic Reconfiguration in Migration

A Heuristic Ethnographic Case Study

Abstract

This article examines how religious practices come to function as practices of self-cultivation – understood as concrete, repeated forms of work through which a subject acts upon herself and gradually transforms her relation to herself. The analysis is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted among Romanian migrants in Belgium, within an Orthodox context, and focuses on the case of Ioana, a young woman who has lived in Belgium since childhood. The death of her grandfather in Romania triggers a reconfiguration of her religious practices in the domestic space.  

The study draws on a qualitative methodology combining participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and a micro-ethnography of domestic space, with particular attention to the relation between objects, spatial organisation, and everyday practices. In this article, transnational mourning is approached as a situation marked by a rupture in ritual mediation, in which access to collective infrastructures of mourning becomes limited.

The analysis is structured around three interrelated dimensions: the writing of a double letter during the funeral, the reorganisation of domestic space through the constitution of a hybrid agencement of religious and self-presentation objects, and the establishment of a daily routine of reading and prayer. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of technologies of the self (Foucault, 1988), Talal Asad’s perspective on religious discipline (Asad, 1993), and Birgit Meyer’s material approach to religion (Meyer, 2012), the article develops a processual analysis centred on the articulation of practices, objects, and spatial arrangements.

The argument is that, in the absence of fully accessible collective ritual infrastructures, domestic space can become a site for the relocation of religious practices. Within this space, the articulation of writing, spatial arrangement, and repetition forms a mechanism of self-cultivation through which a moral subject is progressively shaped. The article contributes to the study of religion in migration through its focus on practice, material mediation, and the agencements in which objects become operative.