The Sikh Gurdwara: Negotiating, Maintaining and Transmitting Immigrants’ Identities

The Sikh Gurdwara: Negotiating, Maintaining and Transmitting Immigrants’ Identities

Laura Hirvi (Visiting Fulbright Student, UCSB)
Tuesday, April 27 / 12:00 PM
Lane Room, third floor Ellison Hall

The lecture examines the experiences of Sikhs who migrated to Finland and California, and the impact that this event had on their lives and on the lives of their offspring. In particular, this study explores how Sikh immigrants integrate into the mainstream culture of their host country and how they fashion their identities during this process. The study focuses on Sikh immigrants from Punjab in India, who live in the metropolitan area of Helsinki, Finland. In order to evaluate the impact of context on how immigrants and their offspring negotiate their identities, the Finnish case is compared to the experiences and histories of Sikh immigrants in Yuba City, California.  Hirvi is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History and Ethnology at University of Jyväskylä, Finland and a Visiting Fulbright Student at UCSB’s Center for Sikh and Punjab Studies in the Department of Religious Studies.

Sponsored by the IHC’s Identity Studies RFG.