Sacred spaces and border crossing: Sinhalese dreams of a Sri Lanka-Sicily round trip

Abstract

The paper focuses on the metaphor of the saints’ body/border as a means to analyse the social field of the migratory flows between Sicily and Sri Lanka. The saints’ body is viewed as important on a symbolic-sacred level, but even more broadly as a centre of what migrants experience in the in-between space spanning ‘here’ and ‘there’: as living simulacra of a civic-religious cult that crosses borders, the saints’ relics function as a site of agency and a medium of communication. Far from a rigid and pre-established container that constrains migrants’ lives, the social field established by the flows between Sri Lanka and Sicily is an embodied and circular space forged in part through civic-religious practices that make migrants feel at home in the borders.