Nicola Mooney is an associate professor of social, cultural, and media studies at UFV. She holds a master’s degree in museum studies and a PhD in anthropology with a collaborative designation in ethnic, immigration, and pluralism studies. Mooney has been teaching at UFV for 12 years, and previously taught at Trent and Wilfrid Laurier in Ontario, and Mount Allison in New Brunswick. She is the author of ***Rural Nostalgias and Transnational Dreams: Identity and Modernity Among Jat Sikhs, and is currently working on her second book. Her work focuses on Sikhism and Punjabi culture.
What made you want to pursue a career in anthropology?
Anthropology is something that I was fascinated with, even as a child. I was that freakish person who knew when I was 10 years old what I thought would be cool to study in university, and that never went away. I think I saw religious studies as being really aligned with anthropology. If I had to classify myself as an anthropologist, probably one of my primary designations is anthropology of religion.
What attracted you toward studying Sikhism and Punjabi culture in particular?
So the background is that 20 years ago, when I did my PhD fieldwork, I had been recently married to a Punjabi immigrant. And although I thought I would do a PhD with a museum focus, I realized after I’d been in the program for a couple of months that this was a perfect opportunity to go into field research. So I went and did the standard anthropological route, doing 18 months of fieldwork in India while living with my various in-laws. One of the outcomes of that study was the idea that middle-class urban Punjabis, and particularly Jatt Sikhs seemed especially driven to go abroad from India, with Canada as one of their favoured destinations.
In part, what I was tracing out were identity questions, and how this group identifies in a place where you’ve had British colonialism, independence, and division of the region in 1947 with partition, the 1984 [anti-Sikh riots]. You’ve all of a sudden become a nationalist political target to be a Sikh. So particularly after 1984, there was a wave of Punjabi migration of which my husband was a part, and that really encouraged me to look at that identity question.
I understand that you’ve been working on a project having to do with international student migration. Could you tell me a little about that?
I’m basically looking at why [Punjabi] students are coming here, because they’re kind of continuing that thing that I saw 20 years ago. Why are they still going overseas? What are the push factors now? And the pull factors, for that matter? Anthropological studies are small, and I would love to go out and interview a thousand international students at UFV, but because they’re interview-based, I just don’t have the resources to do that. But I do think that by doing a kind of qualitative research project, maybe what we get is some enrichment of our understanding of international student issues. Universities all across the country have a large number of Punjabi students taking up the opportunity to study in Canada so I really want to look at why they’re coming, and what’s their first experience here. If the idea is you’re leaving India to create a home somewhere else, although your home may always be India at some level, how quickly do you come to feel at home in Canada? Is it easier for you to come when you’re 20 years old than when you’re much older? I’m really interested in what that experience of coming here is.
What other projects do you have in the works?
Actually, I’m just about to publish a small study on the intersection of caste and gender in the Sikh community. Sikhism is a religion that prides itself on being egalitarian, and Sikhism’s founder, Guru Nanak, was born 550 years ago last November. I had a couple of different invitations and opportunities to think about a question that was germane to that anniversary, and I chose to approach it from the perspective of, “If Guru Nanak’s legacy is that he established an egalitarian religion, why is it that these inequalities are persisting?” I’m trying to provide a kind of opening explanation; it’s not a complete picture, but I’m trying to open up the conversation about why it is that there’s still this inequality.
Another piece I’m working on has to do with the Sikh tradition of langar, which is the communal kitchen. It’s one of the embodied practices of Sikhism that displays that equality, and it’s held up as an example of, “Okay, well we’re maybe not getting it right on gender, but we get this right.” But one of the things that I’m noticing is what’s happening to that practice in the encounter with the capitalist framework. Many people no longer have large families and labour resources that they can call on to come together and provide a langar, so they actually are going to places like restaurants and getting it catered. But it adds a layer of complexity, and status is starting to creep in, and there’s other things that are coming in with the capitalization of this traditional religious practice.
What would you recommend to someone interested in studying religion at UFV?
ANTH 130 is one of my favourite courses to teach. I mean, I love them all, but I find that that’s where my anthropology and my religious studies comes together, and it’s very rewarding for me.
I would actually love for us to develop a program in religious studies. One of our issues here [at UFV] is always faculty capacity; we have to work within government set parameters, and so it’s difficult. But those are my retirement goals: when I leave, I’d love for us to have a major in anthropology and a program in religious studies.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Image: Sam Young/The Cascade
Photo: Nicola Mooney
