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Becoming Pilgrims in the Holy Land: On Filipina Domestic Workers'
Struggles and Pilgrimages for a Cause in Israel
Claudia Liebelt
Online publication date: 24 November 2010
To cite this Article Liebelt, Claudia(2010) 'Becoming Pilgrims in the Holy Land: On Filipina Domestic Workers' Struggles
and Pilgrimages for a Cause in Israel', The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 11: 3, 245 — 267
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Becoming Pilgrims in the Holy Land:
On Filipina Domestic Workers’
Struggles and Pilgrimages for a Cause
in Israel
Claudia Liebelt
Filipino Christian care and domestic workers’ migration to Israel is a deeply
transformative process of embodied subjectification, imbuing their religious practice
with imaginative meanings rather than merely economic. Filipino pilgrimages to holy
sites in Israel sacralise the humdrum and sometimes demeaning realities of their work,
enabling them to transcend through performance the ‘migrant’ label assigned to them by
contemporary migration regimes in the international division of labour. Becoming
pilgrims (and tourists) in the Holy Land, migrants discover alternative life narratives,
which position them on a journey within a sacred geography at the centre of Christian
devotion, suffusing their movements along transnational networks and migration routes.
By interpreting Holy Land pilgrimages as dynamic and at times awkward encounters
with the sacred, inflected by Filipinos’ legal, social and economic status in Israel, I show
the creative fusion of pilgrimage, tourism and migration achieved by migrants in their
transnational journeys.
Keywords: Israel; Sacred Landscape; Filipino Migration; Pilgrimage; Catholicism;
Evangelical Christianity; Care And Domestic Work; Subjectivity
The present article explores Filipina
1
care and domestic workers’ pilgrimage journeys
and sanctifying encounters in Israel. As embodied performances, I argue that these
journeys transform symbolically and experientially the wider journeys embarked
upon by Filipinos in the migration process. Thus, the paper reveals the fusion of
pilgrimage, tourism and migration in a relationship that is deeply transformative and
affective. Contemporary pilgrimage, Coleman and Eade (2004, p. 18) suggest, should
Correspondence to: Claudia Liebelt, Chair for Social Anthropology, University of Bayreuth, 95447 Bayreuth,
Germany. Email: claudia.liebelt@uni-bayreuth.de
ISSN 1444-2213 (print)/ISSN 1740-9314 (online)/10/3-40245-23
#2010 The Australian National University
DOI: 10.1080/14442213.2010.511632
The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology
Vol. 11, Nos. 34, September December 2010, pp. 245267
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be analysed in the broader context of intensified global mobility. Framing pilgrimage
as a form of mobile performance, Coleman and Eade (2004) attempt to show ‘how
pilgrimage can provide opportunities to reflect upon, re-embody, sometimes even
retrospectively transform, past journeys’. But despite references to intensifying
circuits of mobility, the relationship between contemporary international migration
and pilgrimage as a transformative individual and communal journey is yet to be
fully theorised.
Migration movements have been associated with processes of actively sacralising
diasporic space: Catholic Italian immigrants sacralised the streets of Harlem in an
annual festa in honour of the Madonna del Carmine they imported from Polla (Orsi
1985/2002); Cuban emigrants make a pilgrimage to the shrine of ‘Our Lady of
Charity’, smuggled out of Cuba to Miami (Tweed 1997); Filipino migrants from Cebu
dance with their imported icons of Santo Nin
˜o in Auckland, New Zealand (Tondo
2010); and Sufi international labour migrants march through British cities,
sacralising the ‘land of infidels’while remaining devoted to the order’s sacred centre
in Pakistan (Werbner 2003). In contrast, the process of sacralisation through
journeying that I describe is one of discovering and then experiencing the sacred in
the land of migration. This, at times, implies a subjective (re)interpretation of the
journey as sacred ex post facto and therefore as a pilgrimage in the process of
becoming one.
Filipino migrants typically narrate their migration moves to Israel as the outcome
of both economic need and a desire to travel, to see the ‘beautiful places’depicted in
the Bible and experience the ‘holy land’familiar to them as Christians from early
childhood and thus imbued with emotion. Filipino migrants are pilgrims and tourists
not only in a metaphorical sense; they may regard themselves as such before they even
embark on their journeys and perform being tourists and pilgrims by travelling the
country collectively and relating to it creatively.
The relationship between pilgrims, migrants and tourists has been addressed
primarily in dyadic terms. One such dyad recognises the conflation of tourists and
migrants (Hall & Williams 2002): so-called ‘lifestyle migrants’are permanent
‘residential tourists’who converge on aesthetically attractive Mediterranean ‘non-
places’.
2
Both migrants and tourists travel, and both embody the current era of
accelerated transnational mobility. Deconstructing the modern ‘travel myth’, which
ignores the experiences of migrant servant companions of privileged cosmopolitan
travellers, Clifford (1997) suggests that ‘pilgrimage’offers an illuminating compara-
tive term for ‘subverting the constitutive modern opposition: traveller/tourist’
(Clifford 1997, p. 39).
This points to a second dyadic juxtaposition, that of pilgrimage and tourism.
These two forms of travel are seen by some as shading into each other: ‘a tourist is
half a pilgrim, if a pilgrim is half a tourist’(Turner & Turner 1978, p. 20). In his
article on the phenomenology of tourist experiences, Cohen (1979) asks under what
circumstances does tourism become a form of pilgrimage? Distinguishing five modes
of tourist experiences, he argues that the ‘existential mode’(Cohen 1979, pp. 18992)
246 C. Liebelt
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is phenomenologically analogous to pilgrimage (see also Cohen 1988). Cohen draws
on Victor Turner’s notion of pilgrimage as a liminal phenomenon or interlude,
enabling pilgrims to experience a sense of ‘communitas’in which secular structures
are erased (Turner 1974; Turner & Turner 1978, p. 230). Although, this idealised
vision fails to take account of competition and contestation at long-established
pilgrimage centres (Sallnow 1987; Eade & Sallnow 1991/2000), it is nevertheless the
case that, for Filipina pilgrims, pilgrimage is experienced as an uplifting moment,
transcending mundane social divisions and the often harsh realities that constrain
their daily lives as migrant workers.
Israel provides a fascinating case study for examining the triadic relationship
between migration, tourism and pilgrimage. First, Jewish immigration to Israel*
termed ‘return’or ascent (Hebrew ‘aliyah’) rather than (im)migration in state
language*has religious connotations, being a return to the geographical, political
and spiritual centre of the Jewish people, at least within the dominant Zionist
discourse. Even within secular Israeli discourse, the homeland, Eretz Israel, is a sacred
space to be continually remarked and appropriated, for example, by nature hikes
(Ben-Ari & Bilu 1997; Ben-David 1997). Holy Land pilgrimages and tourism were
already politically and economically significant well before the founding of the state
in 1948 (Cohen-Hattab 2004), so that in Israel/Palestine ‘the sacralization of places
through scriptural attributions and liturgical performance has been the common
currency of political claims to space, and textually directed movement through that
space has constituted visitors as pilgrims’(Feldman 2007, p. 135).
Shortly before 2000, approximately one-quarter of all tourists entering Israel
(approximately 700,000 people) was estimated to be Christian pilgrims (Collins-
Kreiner & Kliot 2000). The number has risen since, but remains contingent on the
degree of real or perceived security risk for travellers in the region.
3
Special
programmes, such as Nazareth 2000, have been developed to attract and
accommodate large numbers of Christian pilgrims (Cohen-Hattab & Shoval 2007).
Many of these pilgrims are short-term visitors from North America, Australia and
Europe whose pilgrimage performances, narratives and practices have been analysed
in several studies (Bowman 1991/2000; Collins-Kreiner & Kliot 2000; Feldman 2007).
Ignored, however, are the thousands of resident Filipino, Indian, Sri Lankan, African
and Latin American labour migrants who have entered Israel in growing numbers in
search of work since the 1990s. These now form a substantial part of the pilgrimage
flows to Christian holy sites in Israel and the Palestinian West Bank.
Although Filipino Christian migrants to Israel are unable to translate their
religious identity into legal citizenship claims, they do claim moral citizenship as
belonging to Christendom (Liebelt 2008) and, indeed, the significance of Israel’s
status as the Holy Land for Christian labour migrants to Israel has been recognised
(Kemp & Raijman 2003; Raijman & Kemp 2004; Sabar 2007, 2008; Willen 2007b).
Yet, the organisation, performance and meaning of pilgrimages for these migrants
remain to be explored. I assumed this task as part of a recent, 2-year fieldwork project
The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 247
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in Israel, in which I accompanied ‘foreign’migrant workers on their journeys through
the Holy Land.
Travelling the Holy Land: Pilgrimages for a Cause
Filipinos have been recruited to work in Israel since the mid-1990s, following a
government decision to support a shift of the geriatric care system from public
institutions and hospitals to care in private homes. As part of Israel’s growing
population of ‘foreign workers’, Filipinos are subject to a state-regulated employment
process that stresses the temporariness of their presence, restricting it to care giving,
mostly as ‘live ins’in the private homes of employers, 6 days a week (Kemp &
Raijman 2008; Willen 2007a). Despite their legal, social and political exclusion from
citizenship and belonging in Israel, Filipinos have succeeded in organising collectively
and appropriating their own spaces, especially in Tel Aviv, the metropolitan centre of
Israel’s coastal strip, where most migrant domestic workers are employed. In southern
Tel Aviv, tens of thousands of migrants come together to spend and celebrate their
weekly day off on Saturdays or Sundays, share rented flats, go shopping, organise
picnics in public parks, send remittances to family in the Philippines or attend
church.
Each weekend, travel agencies, Filipino magazines, regional associations and
church communities also organise pilgrimages to holy sites in Israel, promoted by
their organisers with posters, advertisements or flyers. Among these is the Catholic
lay group Pilgrimage for a Cause, whose pilgrimages, in contrast with many others
offered to Christian labour migrants in southern Tel Aviv, are non-commercial and
self-organised. Pilgrimage for a Cause was established by two Filipino migrants
employed in Israel as domestic workers who, in 1996, started organising pilgrimages
for Filipino coworkers to the holy sites in Israel and the Israeli-occupied Palestinian
West Bank. As a Catholic lay group, Pilgrimage for a Cause is affiliated with the
Franciscan St Anthony Parish Church in Jaffa, the church most heavily frequented by
and strongly associated with Filipinos in the Tel Aviv area. A priest from St Anthony
typically accompanies the pilgrimages as a spiritual guide. Initially, the lay group was
led by a priest of American origin who had transferred to St Anthony, Israel, after
being stationed in the Philippines for several decades. This priest became very
popular among local Filipino Catholics, not least because of his fluency in several
Filipino languages. By the time I started research on Pilgrimage for a Cause in
summer 2007, Father Malachy had died and been replaced by Father Benjamin, a
priest of Ghanaian origin. Both founders of the group had also left Israel and been
replaced by Yolanda,
4
who organised the pilgrimages with three other Filipina
volunteers.
The causes to which revenue from the pilgrimages is donated varies. As Yolanda
typically emphasises at the beginning of each pilgrimage, the revenue goes to ‘the
poor’in the Philippines. Thus, Pilgrimage for a Cause donated $1050 to help the
victims of the mudslide in Leyte in 2005, sent several hundred US dollars to support
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the victims of hurricane Katrina in New Orleans (the only non-Filipino project to
date) and supports a Catholic orphanage in Manila on a regular basis. The largest
single project of Pilgrimage for a Cause was the construction of a chapel in Yolanda’s
hometown in South Cotabato. There, as Yolanda likes to emphasise for new pilgrims,
the Catholic settlers from the northern Philippines (among them her own family)
have to take a tough stand against the local Muslim population. In 2007, the newly
consecrated chapel in South Cotabato was a source of pride among the regular
pilgrims. The volunteers put up pictures of the chapel’s construction in progress and
its first fiesta on the blackboards of both the church and the south Tel Aviv flat that
Yolanda shares with almost twenty other Filipina Catholics on her one day off each
week.
In contrast with some evangelical Filipino pilgrimage groups that contract non-
Christian tour guides for their pilgrimages or arrange meetings with residents at the
localities they visit, the trips arranged by Pilgrimage for a Cause are generally more
exclusively Catholic. Although each pilgrimage includes stopovers of ‘merely’
historical or tourist interest, such as beaches or nature reserves, the organisers
report that the highlight of each pilgrimage is a Catholic Mass read by the
accompanying priest at a site defined as sacred by the Church. During the Mass,
pilgrims are offered communion and given the opportunity to make financial
offerings, which are inserted into paper envelopes and dedicated to special occasions
or thanksgivings specified on the envelopes by the donors and subsequently read out
by the priest. The pilgrimages are structured by the Church’s liturgical calendar and,
whenever possible, take place during Christian holidays. Three pilgrimages in
particular stand out in size and significance from among the ten to twelve pilgrimages
organised by the group throughout the year: Palm Sunday and Good Friday in
Jerusalem, each marked by large Christian processions through the city, and
Christmas in Bethlehem (Figures 1 and 2). During these holidays, which, according
to Christian belief, mark central historical events of Jesus’s life, the pilgrims set out to
celebrate and commemorate these events at the very geographical site of their original
happening.
In the ritual devotions and processions, Pilgrimage for a Cause forms part of a
massive stream of pilgrims, including thousands of local Christian residents, migrant
workers from West Africa, Latin America, Sri Lanka and India and tourists from all
over the world. For example, on Christmas Day, 25 December 2007, almost twenty
coaches left St Anthony for Bethlehem, nine of them organised by Pilgrimage for a
Cause.
5
Other pilgrimages are booked by thirty to ninety participants and are accom-
modated in one or two coaches. These are contracted from a fairly regular group of
drivers, Arab men from Jaffa, some of whom have become well acquainted with the
regular pilgrims. The pilgrimages start early in the morning from St Anthony’s.
Seating is arranged by Yolanda, with some of the regular pilgrims and Father
Benjamin sitting in the front rows and those who have signed up together for the
pilgrimage sitting next to each other wherever possible.
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Filipino pilgrims typically participate in these pilgrimages as small groups of
flatmates, friends or relatives, who pool money for soft drinks and cook the food to
be consumed during the journey together the previous evening. During the year of
my research, there was a handful of regular pilgrims. Most had been in Israel for 1 or
2 years, had just finished paying back the often considerable loans taken out to come
to Israel and wanted to visit every ‘important’holy site at least once before possibly
turning illegal and being forced to leave Israel within 4 or 5 years of their arrival.
6
Others join the pilgrimage to fulfil a vow to visit or pray at a specific site during
significant moments in their lives, such as before leaving Israel, for healing, the
graduation of children whose education one has paid for or the fidelity of partners far
away.
Once the coaches leave St Anthony’s, volunteers collect the ticket fee (Israeli New
Shekel (NIS) 60100; approximately US$1626), introduce newcomers to Pilgrimage
for a Cause and present the pilgrimage schedule. If the accompanying priest is on the
coach, he reads out explanations from a guidebook (Walking in His Footsteps), which
he usually carries during the pilgrimages. Although Yolanda sometimes uses a similar
book, I never saw other pilgrims using guidebooks. Some, however, take along
printouts with information from the Internet about the sites they will visit. In
contrast with evangelical pilgrimages, I never saw anyone carrying a Bible. This
underlines the experiential and embodied nature of the anticipated encounter with
the sacred. A prayer is said shortly after the coaches leave Jaffa. Sometimes the
pilgrims listen to tapes of Christian music and sometimes they recite the rosary,
murmuring the prayer while flipping the beads of their prayer chaplets between their
fingers. With the exception of the annual Night Vigil in Abu Ghosh on the night
before Easter, all pilgrimages are day trips and usually take place on Sundays, the day
Figure 1 Photograph by Claudia Liebelt.
250 C. Liebelt
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off for Filipina domestic workers in Israel. All destinations are within easy reach of Tel
Aviv, with few more than 4 hours away.
Although Pilgrimage for a Cause is clearly a Filipino group, not all the pilgrims are
Filipinos. Apart from Father Benjamin (and obviously the anthropologist) each trip
includes a small number of non-Filipinos, among them Israeli husbands or
boyfriends, as well as Sri Lankan or Indian migrant workers. The latter typically
receive much attention from the Filipino pilgrims, who question them about their
countries of origin, their working conditions in Israel and their religious practices,
comparing them with their own experiences. Owing to the presence of these
‘foreigners’, most conversations during the pilgrimage take place in English.
Even without having previously seen the holy sites, every pilgrim appears to have
great hopes, dreams and images about them. The sheer resonance of names like
‘Bethlehem’,‘Nazareth’or ‘Jerusalem’creates an ambience of joyful tension and
excitement in the coach, especially among the newcomers, who often recall their
Figure 2 Photograph by Claudia Liebelt.
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disappointment at their first sight of the Holy Land, materialised as the boring and
unattractive residential blocks in which they worked or the shabby streets, noise and
pollution of southern Tel Aviv, where they socialised on weekends. In the coach, the
hope hovers that the profanity of Tel Aviv is to be left behind, and soon one will see
and touch the real Holy Land, the pastoral, sacred and ancient land one knew about
as a Christian since early childhood, read about in the Bible and dreamt of for so
long. Others on the coach have been to the holy sites before and are now returning*
for example, to the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem*as so many do, armed with new
requests and vows, transformed once more through their ongoing stay in Israel.
In writing about the pilgrimage practices of Greek Orthodox, English and Irish
Catholics as well as international evangelical Protestants in Israel, Bowman (2000)
comments on the stress on ‘textuality’in Christian Holy Land pilgrimages. For
Catholic pilgrims, the image transmitted through the Bible is important, not the
place; surprisingly, pilgrims in his observation did not display strong emotions at
particular holy sites, in contrast with their more emotional expressiveness at other
times, such as during the Mass held after visiting such sites (Bowman 2000, p. 115f).
It became clear during my own research that Filipinos’encounters with the holy at
the different sites were at least as diverse as the sites themselves: at times deeply
emotional, at times apparently indifferent. During holidays, the holiest Christian sites
in Israel and the Palestinian occupied territories, such as the Church of the Nativity in
Bethlehem where, according to Christian doctrine, Jesus was born or the Holy
Sepulchre in Jerusalem, where Jesus is believed to have been crucified and buried
before resurrection, are crowded with hundreds of pilgrims pushing forward to reach
the holy site. The police and local guards tell pilgrims to move on, keep silent and to
not take pictures. Church guards at the sites appear to be especially annoyed with
Filipinos, reprimanding or even pushing them aside for not dressing modestly
enough, failing to switch off mobile phones, taking pictures or happily chattering
even at the holiest of holies. In the crush of humanity, pilgrims are happy if they
actually manage to reach and touch a holy site for just a few seconds or take a picture
to prove they were there.
Hardly surprisingly, then, and perhaps in accord with Bowman’s observations,
pilgrims appeared more emotionally touched after rather than during the actual visit
to the significant holy sites at the height of the festive season. In contrast, Pilgrimage
for a Cause travellers lingered on, prayed and displayed far more emotion at less
frequented and less well known holy land pilgrimage sites. Nowhere was this as clear
as during the annual Christmas pilgrimage to Bethlehem, where, after visiting
the Grotto of the Nativity, which was extremely crowded, the group moved on to visit
the Grotto of the Lady Mary. Located beneath a small Franciscan Church in a little
side street off central Manger Square, the Milk Grotto, as it is commonly known,
offers a calm repose from the city’s Christmas bustle. According to both Catholic and
Muslim traditions, the irregularly shaped grotto hollowed out of white limestone
marks the spot where Mary, while nursing Jesus in hiding before the Holy Family’s
flight to Egypt, dropped some milk, which subsequently turned the stone of the
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grotto a whitish colour. According to local Catholic belief, scrapings from the stones
mixed in drinks or placed under the mattress, in combination with regular recitation
of the rosary, boosts the quantity of a mother’s milk and enhances women’s fertility.
Most Filipino pilgrims are initially unaware of the local tradition and customary
practice and Father Benjamin, the priest who explained it, sounded rather sceptical,
but they embraced it spontaneously. Soon, pilgrims were kneeling down all over the
grotto, praying with their eyes closed, one hand touching the white stone, lighting
candles, dropping money into the boxes as offerings, eager to scratch little pieces
from the rock and later buying sachets of its powder in the adjacent church shop. The
walls of this shop are covered with letters and pictures of smiling families and babies,
many of them Filipino, giving testimony to what they believe is the healing power of
the site. Later on in the bus, it is the charm and miracles of the little Milk Grotto
rather than the Grotto of the Nativity that the pilgrims talk about. As I learned
during a pilgrimage to Bethlehem shortly before Christmas 2007, several women and
two Filipino couples had signed up for this pilgrimage in order to pray for fertility at
the Milk Grotto rather than visit the Grotto of the Nativity, which they had already
visited the previous year. Hence, although the Grotto of the Nativity is still the most
featured stop of the Christmas pilgrimage tour, and Filipino Catholics are still clear
about it being among the most important sites one has to visit while in the Holy
Land, actual practices during the pilgrimage privilege less known sites.
In choosing their pilgrimage destinations, the Filipina organisers have their own
cultural agenda, which, at times, goes beyond the guidance of the accompanying
priest. This became clear, for example, during the regular September pilgrimage to
Nazareth. In 2007, the group visited and celebrated Mass at the Catholic Church of
the Annunciation in Nazareth, which was believed to have been erected on the site of
Mary’s childhood home and the annunciation of her pregnancy with Jesus. Guided by
Father Benjamin, the group then walked around the Old City, into Jesus’childhood
synagogue, also stopping at the request of the pilgrimage organisers at the Orthodox
Church of the Annunciation, built above the site believed to be Mary’s Well. After this
visit, a lunchtime picnic was held in the nature reserve at Zippori, right next to the
assumed birthplace of Mary. Taking place in September, the Catholic month of the
Feast of the Birth of Mary, this pilgrimage was clearly motivated by the widespread
and fervent devotion to the Virgin Mary among the pilgrimage organisers and
Filipino Catholics more generally (cf. De la Cruz 2009; Wiegele 2005, pp. 123ff). For
several years, with the exception of Christmas in Bethlehem, no pilgrimage of the
annual cycle was more popular among Filipino Catholics in Tel Aviv. The Pilgrimage
for a Cause visits include less well known sites that do not feature prominently in the
travels of Holy Land tourist pilgrims (like Zippori, Mary’s Well or the Milk Grotto).
For them, the sacred geography of the Holy Land is intimately known and much
expanded beyond the standard itinerary of short-term visitors; theirs is a privileged
access to the deeper, more hidden sanctity of the land, as they were keen to point out.
Rather than being either emotional or ‘textual’, as implied in Bowman’s (2000)
analysis of Holy Land pilgrimage, the encounter of Filipino pilgrims’with the sacred
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at pilgrimage sites is initially awkward and tentative. Coming to a holy site for the
first time, most Filipino pilgrims lack knowledge not only of its topography, but also
of proper conduct and customary local practice. They are taken to sites they have
never even heard about, as well as to sites they have heard about all their lives but
have imagined as altogether different. In order to engage with the sacred after the
shock of the initial encounter, they either have to rely on what others (the priest,
guards etc.) tell them to do, copy what they see others do or creatively adapt their
own devotional practices to the situation. In many places, Father Benjamin provides
the clue as to what to do. During one pilgrimage to Elijah’s Well in Jericho, the priest
mentioned that ‘people say the water has purifying power’and the pilgrims almost
immediately started touching the water, washing their arms and faces in it and filling
their water bottles with it. In other places, practices are indirectly suggested. For
example, in the church at Mary’s Well in Nazareth, during one pilgrimage the
Orthodox priests refused entrance to Father Benjamin in his Franciscan frock, but the
display of pencils and little slips of paper beside the well made perfectly clear what
was commonly done. The pilgrims fervently started writing messages and requests to
the Virgin Mary, hiding them in the cracks between the well’s stones. Filipino
pilgrims also apply customs used at shrines in the Philippines, such as rubbing
objects (little amulets, handkerchief or pictures of relatives, which they carry in their
purses) onto the tombstone displayed at the entrance to the Holy Sepulchre. Finally,
they copy Jewish practices at the Jewish holy sites they visit, such as the Wailing Wall
or the site traditionally believed to be the Tomb of David in Jerusalem, where pilgrims
spontaneously start moving like the Jewish devotees praying next to them or, at the
Wailing Wall, walking away from it backwards in order not to show their backs to it
disrespectfully and writing little notes to be hidden in the cracks between its massive
stones (see Figure 3).
7
Figure 3 Photograph by Claudia Liebelt.
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The encounter with the Holy Land’s political topography during the pilgrimages
sometimes produces confusion, uncertainty and awkwardness, especially if the group
crosses into the occupied territories (see Figure 4). On the way to Bethlehem, under
the administrative and military control of the Palestinian National Authority,
pilgrimage buses have to pass through a checkpoint that resembles a highly secured
international border. Some pilgrims, visibly upset, asked the organisers, ‘Are we going
to Palestine now?’,‘Will they check our passports?’,‘Is it safe to go there?’During one
of three Bethlehem pilgrimages that I accompanied in December 2007, the Israeli
border police demanded that the pilgrims get out of the coaches in order to pass the
security checkpoint one by one. The pilgrims whose residence or work permits had
expired instantly feared that their passports would be checked (which they were not)
and that they would be deported. Having joined the pilgrimage despite their illegal
status in Israel because they believed it to be under God’s protection, their confidence
now waned quickly. Passing the checkpoint that day, they were clearly anxious,
nervous and sweating, some mumbling prayers while walking on.
Filipinos often refrain from voicing strong political opinions about the Israeli
occupation of the Palestinian territories and the so-called Middle Eastern conflict, but
the more constrained lifestyle in Palestinian cities, the checkpoints, political graffiti
and high concrete wall of the Israeli West Bank barrier visible during many
pilgrimages provoke curiosity, empathy and some political debate among Filipino
pilgrims.
8
Most Filipinos make sure to at least document the pilgrimage as accurately
as possible. In 2004, in my first encounter with Filipino pilgrims, when digital
cameras were not yet widespread, many brought single-use cameras specifically for
the pilgrimage. In 2008, practically all Filipino pilgrims brought along digital photo
cameras and many used a camcorder (if not their own, then one they had borrowed
for the day).
Figure 4 Photograph by Claudia Liebelt.
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Pilgrimage is also about connecting people and sacred places via objects that travel
in sacred exchange (Werbner 1998). Thus, pilgrims acquire objects at the sites they
visit, filling up water bottles with water at the Sea of Galilee, Jordan River or Elijah’s
Well, collecting little rocks on the Mount of Temptation and picking palm leaves and
sprigs of olive trees in Jerusalem (see Figure 5). Holy Land souvenir shops and street
vendors are never far from the more popular tourist sites and Filipino pilgrims are
typically ready to buy devotional objects, illustrated books on the Holy Land,
handicrafts with Palestinian embroidery, soft toy camels, dates etc. (see Figure 6).
Figure 5 Photograph by Claudia Liebelt.
Figure 6 Photograph by Claudia Liebelt.
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Specific things are bought at each site*dates and cosmetics at the Dead Sea, for
example, and devotional objects in sanctified Christian places like Bethlehem,
Nazareth or Jerusalem. Like other tourists, many also use the pilgrimage to Jerusalem
to buy gold jewellery in the Arab market of the Old City, where numerous jewellers’
shops display the Philippines national flag as well as pictures of Filipino customers in
their shop windows and where some vendors have picked up phrases in Tagalog. If
the pilgrimage stops in the Palestinian occupied territories, Filipinos often go grocery
shopping because prices are much cheaper there than in Tel Aviv.
While still on pilgrimage, Father Benjamin is asked to bless the devotional objects
the pilgrims acquire. If there has been an opportunity to buy these objects before
Father Benjamin celebrates Mass, these are put on the altar to be blessed: Mass during
pilgrimage is often read from behind a large pile of rosaries, crosses, Bibles and
religious icons. Pilgrims take it for granted that the blessing mediated by the priest is
especially powerful if it is given at a significant holy site, where God is especially close.
These objects travel back to the Philippines, where they are proudly presented and
displayed as ‘a cross from Holy Jerusalem’or ‘an icon from the Holy City of
Bethlehem’. Apart from employers’hand-me-downs and groceries, it is Holy Land
souvenirs that fill migrants’balikbayan boxes (‘return to one’s homeland’box) to
their families, strengthening social ties, proving one’s ongoing moral commitment
and devotion, while also transporting stories of migration and pilgrimage. Placed on
walls and altars, these objects and the stories attached to them remind returning
migrants of their journeys, while fuelling the imagination of the Holy Land in those
who will never leave and those who have yet to depart.
Finally, the Pilgrimage for a Cause always also incorporates joyful interludes and
practices not directly experienced as holy. Pilgrim/tourists board and dance on boats
in the Mediterranean after visiting Elijah’s cave in Haifa, visit the theme park ‘Mini
Israel’after celebrating the Pentecost in Jerusalem’s Old City, float on the water of the
Dead Sea after visiting the Mount of Temptation in Jericho and ride camels or dress
up as Palestinians*services widely provided in the car parks adjacent to tourist sites.
The pilgrimage organisers agree that, apart from bringing people ‘closer to God’,
there also has to be a ‘fun’aspect to each pilgrimage, thus providing spiritual
refreshment from physically demanding, stressful and tedious working weeks.
Organisers make it clear that these apparently secular activities form an integral
part of the spiritual experience of the pilgrimage. Accordingly, in January or
February, Pilgrimage for a Cause visits Mount Hermon, the site of Israel’s only ski lift
on the Northern Golan Heights (see Figure 7). Timed after the snowfall rather than
by the liturgical calendar, the entire group goes sledding for hours before moving on
to the one holy site of the pilgrimage, the Banyas waterfalls. Not marked by any
church building or sign, this is nevertheless a significant site for Roman
Catholicism*the ancient Caesarea Philippi, where Jesus called his disciple Peter
‘the Rock’and promised him the keys of the kingdom of God, hereby founding
(according to Catholic doctrine) the institution of the papacy. When, in 2008, the
priest was unable to join the Golan Heights pilgrimage, it took place without the
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usual celebration of Mass. Instead, the group gathered on a meadow beside the idyllic
waterfalls, listened to information about its religious significance provided by one of
the organisers, read out of an issue of the Filipino magazine Manila Tel Aviv, then
sang Christian songs accompanied by a guitar and, finally, recited the rosary. Having
a picnic and chatting in the mild sun of early spring, and still excited after what for
many had been their first experience of snow, some Filipino pilgrims jokingly told
me: ‘Now you can see. We come here to work, but really, we are tourists!’, a joke I
heard again and again during pilgrimages.
It was during moments like these that elements of the spirit of communitas, which
Turner argues pervades Christian pilgrimages as ‘liminoid’or ‘quasi-liminal’
phenomena (Turner 1974, p. 182), becomes most obvious: as the predominantly
female Filipino pilgrims, many of whom hardly knew each other, experience these
moments of relaxation and happiness together, they also generously share the food
they have brought along, exchange jokes and stories about their employers and work
routines in Israel and confide their hopes and hardships of migration to each other.
Antistructural moments such as these erase their profane identities as racialised
migrant labourers and single them out as people who have accomplished a spiritual
journey. As they then sit in the buses on the way back to Tel AvivJaffa gazing at the
landscape passing by, the exhausted pilgrims collectively make sense of Israel,
comparing it to the Philippines and other countries they have been to, reflecting on
its position in the Western world and the Middle East and wondering about their own
roles and options within it. As the bus approaches Tel AvivJaffa, so does the profane
routine of their work in Israeli private homes. Pilgrims now start worrying about not
returning to their work places on time as the bus sets off late or becomes caught up in
a traffic jam. However, the pilgrimage organisers are quick to reassure pilgrims that,
‘after all our sacrifices today, we are blessed by the Lord and nothing can harm us’.
Figure 7 Photograph by Claudia Liebelt.
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Filipina migrants’narratives and understandings of Holy Land pilgrimage go
beyond the weekend outings they occasionally engage in, rather than simply being set
apart from their everyday lives as care and domestic workers in Israeli private homes
as the reference to communitas may suggest.
Filipina Migrants’ Subjective Transformations and the Making of Sacred
Geographies
I heard Aida’s narrative of coming to Israel for the first time during one of the
Pilgrimage for a Cause journeys. Following a visit to Capernaum and Tabgha, two
highly significant sites for Christianity linked directly to Jesus’s life and teachings, and
an early morning church service with Father Benjamin on the shore of the Sea of
Galilee, Aida stepped forward on the coach, switched on a microphone and ‘shared
her testimony’. She had come to Israel in 1997 after working in a factory in Taiwan for
2 years, leaving behind her newborn son, whom she was forced to support as a single
mother. During her stay in Israel back then she attended church and even joined two
or three pilgrimages but, as she recalls, ‘I did not pay attention. During the
pilgrimage, I concentrated on the view, I did not attach any meaning to my life’.
Instead, she took on part-time cleaning or babysitting jobs on Sundays, even though
this risked prosecution, in order to earn as much as possible.
In 2004, she was arrested by the Israeli Migration Police due to her illegal status as
a part-time domestic worker and deported to the Philippines. Fifteen months later,
she was on her way to Israel again alongside eleven other Filipinos, guided by an
agent who promised to arrange entry despite her earlier deportation. During a
stopover in Hong Kong, the Israeli authorities sent back three of the group because it
was discovered they had been deported previously from Israel. Surprisingly, Aida was
let through even though, she emphasised, she did not change her name or use false
documents. ‘I see this as a miracle,’she said, ‘a blessing, God’s will that I return to the
Holy Land for a mission’. Her becoming an activist for Christ during the time I met
her in 2007 was clearly part of that mission. Thus, in the summer of 2007 she not
only joined the organising team of Pilgrimage for a Cause, but on Friday nights also
led a Filipino Block Rosary Crusade procession with the icon of Mama Mary through
the streets and Filipino homes of southern Tel Aviv. In sharing her testimony that day,
Aida hoped to encourage others to ‘attach meaning’to their lives, become active
Catholics and realise how lucky and privileged they were to be in the Holy Land, ‘able
to walk’, so she said, following a common metaphor, ‘in the footsteps of Jesus’.
A couple of pilgrimages and rosary crusades later, Aida told me that like many
Filipina migrants in Israel she had applied for work in Canada within the caregiver
programme. From then on, whenever we went to one of the many religious events we
attended together, she asked me to document her speeches, readings and pilgrimage
activities so that she had something to present to the priests and Filipino Catholics in
Canada. ‘Once they learn about my role in the Holy Land,’she reasoned, ‘they must
give me a leading position in the Church there’.
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As her story illustrates, Filipina migrants who become the breadwinners of their
families and face the predicaments of domestic work are engaged in a deeply self-
transforming journey. This journey may last for decades and take them to a number
of destinations, arriving in Israel after Hong Kong, the Gulf States or Taiwan or, like
Aida, returning to Israel after a previous deportation and hoping to migrate on to
Canada or the European Union. Typically, Filipinos’narratives of migration were
imbued with religious language or came to be so during the migration process. Aida
narrated her second coming to Israel as a miracle of return, a blessing and a mission.
Others come as part of their religious commitments in the Philippines, especially if
they are evangelical Christians or consider themselves to be Christian Zionists or
Jews. Following a popular Filipino conceptualisation of female migration, most
interlocutors used the notion of ‘sacrifice’to describe their reasons and experiences of
migration.
Against the background of the predicaments they face as foreign migrant domestic
workers and sole women far from their loved ones, Filipinas construct their
migration process as a meaningful and virtuous moral career. To many, domestic
or care work in Israel becomes an act of devotion, agreeable to God or even Christ
like. Reflecting on the ordeals she had faced in caring for an employer who repeatedly
treated her in a humiliating and abusive manner, one of my evangelical interlocutors,
Sandra, told me: ‘At first I thought Israel is a Holy Land and the people are holy
but...I could never imagine that there are also hard people to deal with!’Like many
Filipina migrants, Sandra*an urban, middle-class woman who gave up a responsible
position in a Manila department store to come to Israel*found her situation as a
migrant domestic worker extremely difficult. She was separated from her family,
including a 9-year-old daughter, and felt lonely and looked down upon as an
apparently poor, uneducated foreigner from a third-world country. However, this did
not mean that her faith weakened. Instead, she sought comfort and refuge in her
personal worship. She felt that she was especially close to God in Israel and as a carer
of ‘God’s own People’. From reading the Bible, studying Hebrew and praying during
the long, boring afternoon hours at her workplace when her employer rested or slept,
Sandra said she derived a sense of calm and even happiness. Eventually, she came to
regard the injustices and hardships of her work as trials of her trust in and love for
God.
Filipino evangelicals are overrepresented in Israel due to evangelising in the
diaspora and the attraction of Israel as a destination country for Christians
proclaiming pro-Israeli attitudes and emphasising the Jewish roots of Christianity.
They typically view being in Israel as part of a project of becoming proper Christians.
For them, the term ‘Christian’seems to signify an almost unattainable cultural ideal.
Throughout their stays in Israel, women become increasingly devout or ‘born again’,
gain strength from their faith or, alternatively, lose their uncritical belief in religious
doctrines and rhetoric while discovering their own spiritual truth. Their stay in Israel
not only allows Filipino Christians to obtain intimate access to highly esteemed
spiritual knowledge, such as Judaism and Hebrew, but also enables them to undertake
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a Holy Land pilgrimage. Rebecca, who had risen to the position of a pastor in her
Filipino evangelical church community in Tel Aviv, reflected on her experiences in
Israel the week before she returned to the Philippines:
But, you know, our first motive [here in Israel] is to work in the church, to serve
here in His land. So that’s the only main purpose*to see the Holy Land at
the same time, if we can ...There’s a lot of pastors and Christians [who] want to
see the Holy Land. The rich people in the Philippines, they spend a lot of,
thousands of pesos, thousands*even millions, because they have children to bring,
husbands*in order to do a pilgrimage. But for us, but for us, we work, at the same
time we earn money, and we can go around and see the...you know, where Jesus
walked. We touch, we see, we step on the holy sites. And it is, you know, to serve
the Lord here in Israel, it’s really a blessing and [now] I want to go back to the
Philippines and I will bring all the blessings from Israel. (Interview with Rebecca, 15
October 2007)
Unlike the rich Filipino pilgrims, who typically stayed for short periods of time,
and with whom migrants come into contact only during church activities, religious
Mass events or celebrations organised by the Philippine embassy in Israel, Filipina
domestic workers were there long enough to establish their own sacred geographies in
the Holy Land. These sacred geographies are guided by both official maps of
Christian holiness and those they create collectively and individually. Following in
Jesus’s (and Mary’s) footsteps, all of my interlocutors took part in collectively
organised or individual pilgrimages to Jerusalem, Nazareth, Bethlehem, the Galilee
and the Sea of Galilee. They acquired blessings from ‘touching’,‘seeing’and ‘stepping’
on these sites, in Rebecca’s words. Apart from the holy sites, the women also obtained
blessings from the powerful religious leaders, miracle workers and elite pilgrims who
were stationed in or regularly toured the Holy Land, such as Pope John Paul II in
March 2000 and Pope Benedict in May 2009, Brother Eddie, the founder of the
Filipino evangelical mass movement Jesus Is Lord, in 2005, and a number of
American tele-evangelists like Benny Hinn or Morris Cerullo. Numerous pictures of
these VIPs hanging on the walls of migrants’shared flats or returnees’homes in the
Philippines, signatures in their Bibles or objects blessed indicate how Filipina
domestic workers integrated them into their religious activities in the diaspora and
found them much more approachable than ‘at home’.
Rather than just obtaining blessings, Filipina domestic workers in Israel also
engage in active sanctifications in at least three ways. First, they sanctify space in
Israel that is not defined as holy, such as southern Tel Aviv, Filipinos’central space for
sociality on weekends. This area is often described as Israel’s Gomorrah within
Filipino church communities*a socially segregated space within the city polluted by
heavy traffic, with visible forms of drug abuse and prostitution. Filipinos sanctified
this area of southern Tel Aviv with Catholic block rosary crusades, such as Aida’s, and
the opening of evangelical churches, such as Jesus Is Lord, within the neighbourhood
that hoped to ‘bring light to the heart of darkness in Israel’an often quoted saying
in this church. Second, their sanctification efforts were directed at their Jewish
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employers by praying over them and hoping to ‘share the gospel’with them. Finally,
Filipina domestic workers have sanctified their own lives by taking care of ‘God’sown
People’, recognising and fulfilling religious duties, reading the Bible at their
workplaces (like Sandra,), taking part in training seminars and rising in the hierarchy
of their church like Rebecca or volunteering in lay groups like Pilgrimage for a Cause.
Viewed against this background, the notion of the Holy Land or Palestine pilgrimage
as ‘the prototype or archparadigm of axiomatic Christian values’(Turner & Turner
1978, p. 163) acquires a new meaning: rather than the actual visit to holy sites, it
encompasses the entire experience of living in Israel. Filipina pilgrims followed in
Jesus’s footsteps not simply topographically, but also in a deeper, transformative,
performative and embodied sense of becoming.
Conclusion: Becoming Pilgrims in the Holy Land
Pilgrimages imply a threefold renewal: apart from a renewal of spirit, pilgrims also
undergo ‘a renewal of personhood through contact with the sacred, and a renewal of
community through the bearing of what has been in contact with the sacred centre
home into the structured, mundane world’(Werbner 1998, p. 95). Filipino migrants’
pilgrimage practices and sanctifying efforts are deeply transformative, affective and
embodied performances. They constitute a metonymic relationship with the sacred in
that the Filipino pilgrims have to touch, walk and inhabit sacred ground, breathing
its air and drinking its water. Moreover, these transformations are tied to a sacred
exchange in that ‘[d]uring pilgrimage, pilgrims shed their mundane persona, often
through metonymic giving to the poor or at a sacred site, while they return bearing
symbolic substances imbued with the sacred power of the ritual centre’(Werbner
1998, p. 95). Thus, the donation to charity projects in the Philippines and elsewhere
by Pilgrimage for a Cause, the shopping for Holy Land souvenirs and the bringing
back of devotional objects from Israel connect people and places. Although during
pilgrimage tours pilgrims did not bring material objects as offerings to holy sites, they
nevertheless made (sometimes significant) financial donations at them, in banknotes
rather than in coins, and in dollars rather than the weaker currency of Israeli shekels.
These offerings are tied to requests for the health and well being of loved ones back
home, the extension of visas etc. Within the context of migration, the objects they
bring back function to sustain and create social ties and intimacy across distance and
beyond national borders. They help to raise the status of migrants as Holy Land
pilgrims, even for on-migration or after their return to the Philippines. Objects
acquired at pilgrimage sites are not simply mementos or souvenirs, but bits of the
sacred, sacralising the places they are subsequently brought into contact with. They
also help migrants narrate their journeys as tourist adventures and pilgrimages, rather
than tales of denigrating experiences of domestic work, restrictive visa regulations
and racism abroad.
The Holy Land in this context is not simply a destination country of migration that
Filipina migrants leave after their contracts expire, but it also has an affective force, a
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transformative capacity. Filipinos who move to Israel as migrant care or domestic
workers typically know about and share the interpretation of Israel as the historical
centre of Christian faith, but generally do not conceptualise their migration as a form
of pilgrimage. However, in the process of staying on, their moves are often
reinterpreted as bearing a previously hidden or unconscious spiritual significance.
They explore Israel devotionally, engage in pilgrimages to holy sites and step in the
footsteps of Jesus, as both Aida and Rebecca emphasised, thereby continually
validating the land as a sacred centre. Migration in this context can be interpreted as a
pilgrimage in that it constitutes a journey that becomes imbued with sacredness, not
least because it ‘ends up’*for some interlocutors rather accidentally*in a place
where religious institutions and discourses, as well as holy sites and people, are
ubiquitous and omnipresent. The dominant concepts of pilgrimage as a liminal
performance (in Turner’s sense) on the one hand and as a movement towards a
sacred centre (following Eliade 1959) on the other are brought together here in a
dynamic relationship.
Filipino migrants’continuous sanctifying efforts and the performance of
pilgrimages to holy sites become necessary for many of them, not least because their
experiences of Israel are described as disappointing; that is, not ‘holy’as expected.
Subject to the predicaments they face as live-in care and domestic workers, most
Filipinos spend their working weeks in rather unattractive residential neighbour-
hoods in the coastal area and their day off work in the poor and shabby (‘sinful’)
urban space of southern Tel Aviv. Pilgrimage as performative journey constitutes an
affective spatial transformation for them, from urban neighbourhoods to the beauty
of the mountains of the Galilee or Jerusalem at dawn, the vastness of the desert or the
immersion in the blue of the Mediterranean or Dead Sea. As Navaro-Yashin (2009)
has analysed with regard to the ‘ruinated’landscape of northern Cyprus, one could
speak here of a deeply affective space; that is, a space generating emotions and, for the
pilgrim, possessing an emotive energy in and of itself.
In his fine ethnography of Nigerian Muslim Hausa pilgrims who settle in Sudan
while going on a pilgrimage to Mecca, Yamba (1995) analyses pilgrimage as having
become a paradigm of everyday life for pilgrims. Even though the Hausa have long
formed villages, engaged in debt relationships with local people and many are born
and die in Sudan, they continue to regard themselves as pilgrims. Pilgrimage for them
‘provided the total context for daily life; it became the ruling metaphor for life, so to
speak, generating social action within a process in which the striving for the
pilgrimage to Mecca was constantly renewed’(Yamba 1995, p. 182). Similarly, for
Filipino migrant domestic workers in Israel, pilgrimage becomes the ruling metaphor
for their lives there. Being pushed into the shabby urban spaces of southern Tel Aviv
and demeaning care and domestic work, although unwilling to give up hope, Filipina
migrants continually seek to discover the real Holy Land, because there has to be
more to it than that that meets the eye upon arrival.
These multiple transformations take place in a geopolitical context, which allows
most Filipinos to move as ‘migrants’rather than as ‘pilgrims’or ‘tourists’. During
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weekend tours throughout Israel, Filipina care and domestic workers are temporarily
able, through performance, to transcend the category of ‘migrant’that the
international division of labour and the Israel migration regime assign them.
However, this transcendence is fragile. Just as many women who dream of visiting the
Holy Land have to ‘disguise’themselves as migrant workers in order to be allowed to
cross nation-state borders in the first place, their precarious position in Israel
constantly pushes them back into the position of ‘migrants’. During their Holy Land
travels, this becomes clear at moments such as the crossing of checkpoints.
When confronted with other Christian short-term visitors or ‘rich’Filipino
pilgrims, migrants come to ‘realise’their privilege of being in Israel. Although those
pilgrims pay a huge amount of money to experience Israel and see the holy sites, as
Rebecca and many others pointed out, Filipino domestic workers not only earn
money during their stay, but also acquire deeper insights. Upon this realisation,
which some described as a life-changing moment, women came to view their lives as
structured by a divine plan, ‘recognising’God’s will to bring them to the Holy Land.
Women came to see their lives as unfinished projects of becoming Christians, being
fully committed to caring for weak, sick and elderly Jews. Especially during religious
holidays and pilgrimages in the strict sense of the term, amidst tourists and short-
term pilgrims from all over the world, they felt they were the real Holy Land pilgrims.
In narrating themselves as tourists or pilgrims with a mission, and in being
recognised as such by vendors, tour guides and other pilgrims along the way, Filipina
migrants transcend, at least temporarily, their position as third-world workers at the
bottom of the social hierarchy in Israel. I agree with Yamba that such a phenomenon
cannot be described anthropologically as either as a strategic move or as a form of
mystification (Yamba 1995, pp. 188f). Instead, it is a form of subjectification, a
performative reconstruction and renewal of personhood and subjectivity. Seen from
this standpoint, religion does not simply empower migrants: it is an ontology that
gives Filipino migrant domestic workers an idiom in which they can sense reality and
organise comfort, solidarity and compassion, something that transforms them from
those who do the dirty work into morally superior beings*in this case, into
Christians.
Acknowledgements
The research for this article took place from 2007 to 2009 in the framework of a large
Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) grant, namely the ‘Footsteps’project
(principal investigator Pnina Werbner, funding code AH/E508790/1), which formed
part of the Diasporas, Migration and Identities programme and based at the
Universities of Keele and Hull (UK). It also profited from earlier research on Filipina
care workers in Israel (20037) supported by the Max Planck Society’s Minerva
Foundation, the Friedrich-Ebert Foundation and the Institute of Social Anthropology
in Halle. Earlier versions of the article have been presented at the 2009 AHRC
Diasporas, Migration and Identities Programme/Cronem Conference and the
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Diasporic Encounters, Sacred Journeys Conference at Keele University (June 2009).
The author is grateful to Mark Johnson, Alicia Pingol, Deirdre McKay and, most
importantly, Pnina Werbner, whose substantial comments and insights have been
crucial for this article.
Notes
[1] In several places I use the term ‘Filipina’instead of the gender-neutral adjective ‘Filipino’in
order to stress the female-gendered aspect of this account. In Israel, over 90 per cent of care
and domestic workers recruited from the Philippines are female, as were almost all my
interlocutors.
[2] For reviews of this literature, see Benson (2009), Benson and O’Reilly (2009) and Holert and
Terkessidis (2006).
[3] The number of visitors plummeted after the outbreak of the second Palestinian uprising in
2000. In 2007 and 2008, pilgrimage to the Palestinian occupied territories boomed, with an
estimated two million foreign visitors crossing the border from Israel in 2008 and the
Palestinian Authority’s Minister of Tourism expecting 40,000 visitors for Christmas in
Bethlehem (cf. Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2008; Ha’aretz Service and Reuters 2008).
[4] The names of all Filipino interviewees have been changed.
[5] This constituted a sharp decrease from the more than twenty coaches organised by Pilgrimage
for a Cause alone before 2002 and was due to the launch of a massive deportation campaign of
illegal labour migrants, many of them Filipinos, by the Israeli government.
[6] In Israel, employment permits in the nursing sector and*legally tied to these*residence
permits for foreign workers must be extended annually and can be prolonged for a period of
up to 51 months (4 years and 3 months). Since June 2004, migrant care workers have been
able to prolong their permits beyond 51 months provided they meet a number of specific
criteria (Gilbert & Krieger 2004). My research showed that due to bureaucratic hassles,
employers’ neglect and frequent contradictory institutional practice, migrants were typically
‘illegalised’ within the first years of their stay in Israel and subsequently threatened with
deportation.
[7] Although the Pilgrimage for a Cause group stumbled into the Tomb of David rather
accidentally (because it was housed in the structure where, according to Christian tradition,
the Last Supper took place on the night before Jesus’s crucifixion), the Wailing Wall was a
popular pilgrimage destination for Filipinos, some of whom travelled there individually
throughout the year; they commonly called it the Wishing Wall.
[8] Catholic Filipinos often met and sometimes befriended Arab or Palestinian Catholics in their
local church communities in Israel and typically seemed more sympathetic towards
Palestinian issues than evangelical Filipino Christians, especially if they regarded themselves
as ‘Christian Zionists’ (cf. Kemp & Raijman 2003). However, it is important to note that
Filipinos’ political positionings in Israel are too complex to be understood through religious
affiliation exclusively.
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