Saggioro/Religious Super-diversity,6.Migration, Religious Super-diversity, and Cohabitation: Notes from Ethnographic Research on the Sinhala Community in Messina (Sicily)

The nexus between religious super-diversity, conflict and peace-building is particularly fitting to the recent history of Sri Lanka. Besides the civil war, which ended in 2009 after 13 years, religion, cohabitation, and conflict are all relevant issues. It could not be otherwise, given the high density of the Sri Lankan religious landscape, which is composed of some of the most widespread religions in the world: Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity. I will propose some reflections starting from ongoing ethnographic research on the Sri Lankan Catholic and Buddhist communities living in the Sicilian city of Messina. Religious super-diversity will be assumed in relation both to the hosting society and to the Sinhala community itself, confronted with dynamics of interaction and cohabitation abroad. I will examine how religious super-diversity is transposed onto the migration phenomenon; how it interacts with and how it is re-shaped within the hosting context. Does the migration experience make differences more marked or, rather, does it reconcile differences pro- moting cohabitation? How does the relation between migration and super-diversity intervene into religious statuses? Does it make identities more rigid or flexible?