Permalink : http://hdl.handle.net/2115/5760

Asylum is a socio-historical phenomenon which is highly thought-provoking when developing an anthropological study on relationality to the other of a society. This ethnographic study focuses on church asylum(Kirchenasyl)in contemporary German society. Church asylum in the postmodern era means the protection of a foreign refugee threatened with deportation within the property of a church community. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the meaning of church asylum for its practitioners from their own terms of reference. In order to locate the research question,I give an overview of the historical transformation of asylum. Set against this context, I describe in outline a case of church asylum. Among several analytical points, one aspect of contemporary church asylum, i.e. hospitality to strangers, is theoretically examined in detail. Results reveal that certain practitioners of church asylum articulate a unique type of self-perception. They reported that they rediscovered their own or their church communityʼs nature as refugee or stranger through personal contact with refugees during church asylum, and this emergent self-perception enhanced their primary reason to receive foreign refugees:a local church community that receives a stranger defines itself as a stranger. This type of compassionate hospitality represents a questioning of state sovereignty over the acceptance and exclusion of a refugee. It also implies a transnational imagination that enables community members to connect themselves to foreign refugees going beyond their imagined national identity.