Between 2000 - 2007, I conducted research among different Christian communities (Roman and Greek Catholics, Baptists, Unitas fratrum, Apostolic Church and others) in Northern Bohemia, former Sudeten. I wanted to understand the process of the Church to get rooted in a region where people have to deal with two difficult pasts - the German era and the Communist era. Conceptualizing Church as a cultural global diaspora (Cohen 1997), I asked: How does religiousity or spirituality shape concepts of home and vice versa? How is Christian universalism reformulated in these places and how do local perspectives influence Christian understanding and belief? Based on longtime participant observation, interviews, and the analysis of documents, I describe some modes of glocalisation (Robertson 1995) of the Church such as the reference to the global ideology, the metaphorisation of a place or the involvement in a global net. These modes help to create new places in the borderland with the rewriting of history tending to include the German past and rather omitting the Communist past of this area.
In a methodological reflection of this fieldwork, I want to seek out ways to step out of local research (although concentrated on glocal aspects) and move towards a multiperspective research of Church as a global diaspora which connects many territorially dispersed local communities and individuals by means of religious ideology, symbols, and lifestyle choices via a collective imagination about what it means to be Christian (Appadurai 1996). Specifically, I aim to explore the research possibilities in regard to social network structures and media dialogical nets (Nekvapil, Leudar 2006).