Familielivets skyggesider: Religiøs genforhandling af transnationale steder og relationer

Abstract

This article discusses how and why some Pakistani migrants after forty years in Denmark experience various kinds of occult attacks, such as kala jaddu (sorcery), supposedly perpetrated by relatives in Pakistan who envy their success and prosperity. The emerging suspicions of occult intervention add transcendental qualities to the existing transnational social field stretched out between Pakistan and Denmark /Europe. The article suggests that the combination of distinct social mobility, on-going intergenerational negotiations of what it means to be and do family, along with the massive securitization of Muslim immigrants after 11 September 2001 have created a fertile ground for suspicions and conspiracies of occult attacks within and between migrant families. Finally, the article urges researchers of Islam to pay more attention to how religious technologies and imaginaries are used (and abused) to organise and reorganise family life and kinship networks.