SIGNATURE WORK
CONFERENCE & EXHIBITION 2023

This project explores the impact of state-initiated displacement on the formation and solidification of the Catholic fishing community in Shipai Township, Northern Kunshan, Jiangsu Province. The ongoing struggle of renegotiating their identity after being deprived of boats and nets which signify their nomadic lifestyle on the water as a fisherman for generations forces the community to reorient themselves in the state expectations. The fishing folks who underwent onshore displacements reinforce the significance of Catholicism as the remaining part of their identity and the tie to bond the community. Their resistance to counter the increasing state control on religions by incorporating their Catholic fishing community in a global context celebrating modernity and stressing the positive changes brought by the urbanization project, consolidates the uniqueness of the Catholic fishing community from the inland farmers and ensures their existence on the land.Situating the analysis in the religious and mobility history of the fishing villages, this project explores how the current Catholic fishing community reproduces their religious identity spatially and spiritually in the context of large-scale government-led displacement, where the fishermen and women have navigated through the boat confiscation initiated by the government under the name of river regulation, the tightening state control over Catholicism justified by the priority of combating the pandemic, as well as a stereotypical portrayal associated with low socioeconomic status and poor hygiene. This project argues that the fishing people domesticate the ‘precarity’ brought with the onshore displacement and peaked during the pandemic both by actively advocating Catholic doctrine aligning with the state discourse of ‘modernity’ and by reproducing religious practices to adapt to the urbanizing context.