A Bottle of Oil, Two Birthday Cakes, and Some Victory Signs: Assembling a Trans-semiotic and Trans-sensory Birthday in a ‘Migrant/Ethnic Church’

The aim of the chapter is to understand whether so-called migrant/ethnic churches, a type of worship space closely linked to migration, can be considered peculiar ‘translation zones’ (Cronin & Simon, Introduction: The City as Translation Zone. Translation Studies, 7(2): 119–132, 2014) and, if so, to understand what motivates them to operate as such. To recover a more holistic understanding and help decrease the risk of discrimination, the chapter aspires to make more visible the entanglement between the ethnic, the religious and the social dimensions, as well as the relationships between the origin, the host and the global context. To do that, I present a case study of an African Pentecostal church in Spain, focusing on a birthday celebration, as a key practice in the life of the religious communities in diaspora. Recognizing the limitations of the socio-anthropological approach alone, the chapter proposes a transdisciplinary methodology that combines socio-anthropological and translingual analytical tools.