My dissertation study expands on my research on Indian immigrant families conducted for the CELF project and focuses on the socialization of children and youth in Punjabi Sikh immigrant families. I examine how Sikh experiences, post-9/11, have shifted their understandings of religion and ethnicity in American society and mobilized their efforts to manage difference in their everyday lives.

Research for the dissertation was carried out over a three-year period, focusing on family life and temple activities in the Los Angeles area. I also spent one month in India, for which I received a grant to interview the extended family members of some of the families in my study. Upon returning I began participant observation at a local Gurdwara (Sikh Temple) and Sunday school in which parents and teachers in the Sikh community engage the children in an intensive program of religious studies and cultural apprenticeship. Gurdwaras (Sikh temples) constitute a critical site for Sikh socialization and offer camp programs and Sunday School classes to local families. Most of the twelve families who participated in my study attend the local gurdwara as well as a Punjabi Sunday School where I videorecorded classes in Punjabi language, music and dance, and discussion classes on religious issues. I also recorded a camp program for three consecutive summers in which the teachers serve as youth mentors for the students. In their discussions of Sikh life and religious issues, the teachers address some of the challenges faced by the children in their everyday lives. My analysis of communicative practices employed analytical frameworks from the language socialization paradigm and ethnography of communication. In their activities with family members, peers, and teachers, children in the Punjabi Sikh community are mentored into ways of speaking and feeling about the world.

My study analyzed the specific practices that participants engage in that result in the ongoing development of children’s understandings of Sikh history, religious ideas, and strategies for the future. I examined the ways parents, teachers, and peers model communicative stances and behaviors and how these practices are reproduced, reformulated, or resisted by the younger or less knowledgeable participants. For example, one social issue of great significance for children is school bullying, particularly of boys due to their turbans. The Gurdwara program includes classes in which teachers give students role-plays of bullying situations to perform before the class. The teachers then initiate discussions that help students problematize anticipated threats, model effective verbal strategies to counter bullying and articulate their Sikh identity. The communicative features of these discussions reveal moral stances toward Sikh teachings as they apply to appropriate responses to bullying for Sikh children. I also analyzed the structure and content of parent and child narratives, paying particular attention to how such features as temporality, causality, and affective and evaluative stances, construct past life experiences and frame future concerns. By drawing from cultural and linguistic anthropological theory and research methods, along with person-centered interviewing, my dissertation provides insights into participant perspectives as well as an analysis of individual, family, and community practices related to the cultural and religious socialization of Sikh children.