NINA GLICK SCHILLER University of New Hampshire and Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology AYS ¸E C ¸A ˇ GLAR Central European University THADDEUS C. GULDBRANDSEN Plymouth State University Beyond the ethnic lens: Locality, globality, and born-again incorporation ABSTRACT Migration studies have focused attention on ethnic institutions in global and gateway cities. This ethnic lens distorts migration scholarship, reinforces methodological nationalism, and disregards the role of city scale in shaping migrant pathways of settlement and transnational connection. The scale of cities reflects their positioning within neoliberal processes of local, national, regional, and global rescaling. To encourage further explorations of nonethnic pathways that may be salient in small-scale cities, we examine born-again Christianity as a means of migrant incorporation locally and transnationally in two small-scale cities, one in the United States and the other in Germany. [ethnic lens, city scale, immigrant incorporation, transnational, methodological nationalism, religion, Christianity, migrant incorporation, Germany, United States] When Heaven’s Gift, a Nigerian-born migrant who had recently settled in Manchester, New Hampshire, invited us to visit his “home church” to hear him preach, we were not sure what to expect. As soon as we arrived at the storefront that housed the Lord’s Outreach Church, however, we realized that, in fact, we had a very clear idea of what we would see. We expected a Nigerian or, at least, African congregation. To our surprise, we found that almost all of the congregants were white, and their dress and battered faces bore witness to the harshness of working-class lives. Heaven’s Gift and his Nigerian wife, Elizabeth, sat off to the side, not as guests but as part of the leadership of the congregation. Both were dressed in their Sunday best, he in a suit and tie and she in a good dress and churchgoing hat. A white minister conducted most of the service, accompanied by a small group of musicians, one of whom was a Ghanaian with a Harvard degree and a good job. When it was time for the sermon, Heaven’s Gift preached to his fellow congregants, moving many to high emotion and then calling on them to come forward and be healed. Many did so, and at his touch they silently fell to the floor in a state of trance. 1 M oments of nonrecognition constitute one of the strengths of ethnographic fieldwork, as is recognized in the develop- ment of grounded theory (Burawoy 1991:9; Glick Schiller 2003; Schensul et al. 1999). The research team that visited the Lord’s Outreach Church had an expectation about the composition of the congregation based on the prevailing assumption that immigrants live and worship within distinct “ethnic communities.” This assumption had structured the initial proposals for the research de- scribed in this article, although in previous work both Glick Schiller and C ¸aˇ glar had contested the facile use of concepts of “ethnic community” AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 33, No. 4, pp. 612–633, ISSN 0094-0496, electronic ISSN 1548-1425. C  2006 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, www.ucpress.edu/journals/ rights.htm.