Religion, Migration, Mediation: The Transnational Lives of Thai Religious Imaginaries in South Korea

Abstract

Research on religion and migration has often focused on institutions and belief systems, while overlooking how mediation links migrants, sacred objects, rituals, and religious imaginaries. This study advances mediation as a core analytic in religion–migration studies by examining the practices of ten Thai migrant students in South Korea through semi-structured interviews on Buddhist amulets, Hindu deity pendants, Catholic rosaries, merit-making, and the elevation of sacred objects. Guided by Meyer’s religion-as-mediation framework and Taylor’s concept of the social imaginary, the analysis shows that quotidian, embodied engagements with sacred objects mediate and materialize Thai Buddhist–Animist imaginaries in Korean settings, expanding, transnationalizing, and hybridizing them through encounters with the host environment. These practices not only sustain spiritual continuity, but also generate sacred transnational social spaces that bridge both the ontological divide between the human and the transcendent and the geographical divide between Thailand and Korea. Rather than being preserved through institutional affiliation, migrant religiosity is continually reconstituted through everyday embodied practices of mediation that render the sacred experientially real in the host society. By foregrounding mediation, this study offers a reconceptualization of migrant religion as an embodied, material, and world-making process—one through which migrants actively reimagine and inhabit sacred spaces across borders.

1. Introduction

The intersection between religion and migration has emerged as a significant area of inquiry across anthropology, sociology, migration research and religious studies. A growing body of scholarship demonstrates that religion operates not only as a source of continuity and stability in the midst of displacement, but also as a dynamic space of adaptation. Within the complexities of migration, religion contributes to identity formation, facilitates social integration, and sustains transnational connections. One recurring insight across these studies is that migrants often turn to religion to make sense of unfamiliar settings and reimagine themselves in a new land. Religious texts, practices, and communities serve as interpretive and affective resources through which dislocation is made meaningful, and identity is actively reconstructed in changing social environments (Boland 2020; Cadge and Ecklund 2007; Castillo Guerra 2019; Levitt 2004).

Another key theme in religion and migration research is the institutional role of religion in processes of integration. Religious organizations often provide critical forms of support to migrants—offering not only social networks and emotional care but also material assistance essential to survival and settlement (Bonifacio and Angeles 2010; Ebaugh and Chafetz 2000; Eppsteiner and Hagan 2016). However, these same institutions may also function as sites where cultural boundaries are drawn and reinforced. In multicultural contexts, they can inadvertently mark religious difference, thereby intensifying tensions and conflicts rather than facilitating integration and assimilation (Alba 2005; Casanova 2007).

In contexts of forced migration, religion frequently becomes a vital source of resilience. Refugees often rely on religious communities not merely for spiritual support, but as spaces where trauma, loss, and uncertainty are collectively processed and partially repaired (Ager and Ager 2016; Gozdziak 2002; Islam et al. 2022). At the same time, the religious commitments migrants carry with them do not remain static or private. Their presence and practices often reshape the religious landscapes of host societies, initiating new configurations of religious interaction, negotiation, and sometimes contestation (Adida et al. 2010; Knott 2016; Levitt 2007).

Furthermore, religion fosters transnational connections and networks, linking migrants to their home countries while generating transnational flows of social, economic, and spiritual resources that are essential for navigating their everyday lives in new environments (Brown and Yeoh 2018; Cherry 2016; Csordas 2009; Ebaugh 2004; Levitt 2003). Moving beyond institutional frameworks, recent scholarship on transnational religion emphasizes that religion is not merely believed, but also embodied, practiced, and woven into the routines of migrants’ daily lives. These studies foreground migrants’ lived experiences, highlighting the role of religious agency in sustaining cross-border ties and reconfiguring senses of belonging across national borders. Levitt (2003) illustrates how migrants engage in everyday religious practices—such as prayer, consulting religious leaders in their country of origin, and sending remittances to faith communities—through which spirituality and transnational affiliation are simultaneously enacted. Csordas (2009) introduces the concept of “portable practices” (p. 4) to describe rituals such as Muslim prayers or Buddhist meditation that are not confined to particular geographical locations or formal institutions, but are performed in ordinary spaces such as kitchens, dormitories, or workplaces. These practices transform otherwise mundane environments into temporary sacred spaces of transcendent and transnational connection. Their minimal infrastructural demands allow them to move fluidly across cultural and geographic contexts, adapting easily to new surroundings (Lucia 2018; Pathirage 2018). Brown and Yeoh (2018) argue that such adaptability is key to the transnational mobility and portability of religion, enabling migrants to integrate religious practices into the fabric of their everyday struggles, routines, and aspirations. Through these practices, migrants do not simply preserve a prior religious identity; rather, they reshape their religious lives in migrant contexts. Thus, transnational religion emerges not as a static belief system or rigid institutional structure, but as a flexible, embodied mode of practice and lived experience—one that interweaves the everyday, material, and spiritual dimensions of migrant life.

The growing emphasis on the embodied and everyday aspects of transnational religion closely aligns with what scholars have termed the “lived religion” approach (Ammerman 2007; McGuire 2008, 2016; Orsi 2005, 2010, 2012). This framework prioritizes the actual experiences of religious individuals over institutionally prescribed doctrines and practices. Rather than viewing religion through the lens of formal belief systems and institutional frameworks, it highlights how people enact, negotiate, and experience their spirituality in concrete, often improvised ways. As McGuire (2008) notes, lived religion focuses on “the actual experience of religious persons” rather than “the prescribed religion of institutionally defined beliefs and practices” (p. 12). This conceptual shift echoes broader social transformations that took shape in the late twentieth century, particularly the declining authority of religious institutions and the growing emphasis on individual autonomy in shaping spiritual life (Roof 1999; Warner 1993). These dynamics become especially pronounced in the context of transnational migration, where crossing borders often encourages migrants to reshape their religious narratives, practices, and identities. Migration can distance individuals from traditional institutions while opening space to explore, reinterpret, and “experiment with new forms of religiosity” (Brown and Yeoh 2018, p. 15). Migration thus not only disrupts established religious routines but also creates new environments for spiritual agency and innovation.

While the intersection of religion and migration has been widely explored, relatively little attention has been paid to what religious objects and associated rituals do in migrant contexts. This study seeks to address that gap by bringing into dialogue two complementary yet distinct strands of scholarship—religion and media studies, and religion and migration studies—proposing one possible way of conceptualizing the role of religious mediation and materiality in migrants’ lived experiences. In doing so, it foregrounds the analytical potential of Meyer’s (2013, 2020) concept of religion as mediation as a framework for understanding how migrants experience and reshape religion across transnational settings, especially in their engagements with personal sacred objects and associated rituals. Central to this argument is the claim that these objects and rituals not only symbolize faith but, more crucially, constitute practices of mediation that materialize and animate migrants’ religious imaginaries in transnational migrant contexts. While Meyer’s framework shares with the lived religion approach an emphasis on the embodied, experiential, and everyday dimensions of religion, it adds a distinct analytic layer by illuminating how migrants’ religious experiences are always and already mediated and shaped by what she calls sensational forms or material media, which include sacred objects, ritual practices, and sensory organs (Meyer 2013, 2020).

The remainder of this paper unfolds in four parts. The first section traces the historical development of religion and media studies, with particular attention paid to theoretical debates between mediatization and mediation, and situates Meyer’s theory within this broader scholarly context. The second section elaborates Meyer’s conceptualization of religion as a practice of mediation and places it in dialogue with Charles Taylor’s theory of social imaginaries, proposing mediation as the world-making process through which social imaginaries—whether secular or religious—are materialized, carried, circulated, and sensorily and collectively experienced as real. The third section presents a case study of Thai migrant students in South Korea, illustrating how their sacred objects and associated rituals simultaneously mediate and materialize Thai Buddhist–Animist imaginaries in a host society, thus enabling transnational connections and transcendent experiences. The final section discusses the broader theoretical implications of the religion-as-mediation framework, arguing that conceptualizing religion as constituted through material and sensory mediations offers a powerful lens for rethinking migrant religiosity as an active, embodied, and transnational process of sustaining sacred social worlds across borders.

2. Religion and Media

The academic study of religion and media began to take shape in the United States during the 1970s, although its earliest roots can be traced back to social-scientific research in the 1950s (Parker et al. 1955). One early strand was led by historians who examined the history of book and print culture, focusing on how religious texts and images circulated as forms of popular culture throughout early American history (Stout 1977; Hatch 1983; Nord 2007). A second strand, grounded in the effects model of mass communication theory, explored how religious messages had certain effects on audiences, often measuring reception and behavioral impact (Gaddy and Pritchard 1985; Gerbner et al. 1986; Hadden and Shupe 1988). A third line of research emerged among media and popular culture scholars who analyzed the rise of televangelism, where right-wing evangelical leaders in the U.S. utilized television to build mass audiences and establish themselves as media celebrities (Bruce 1990; Hadden and Shupe 1988; Peck 1993).

In contrast, religion received relatively little scholarly attention in early European cultural studies, which emerged in the 1960s through engagements with Marxism and structuralism. This tradition viewed culture as a terrain of struggle over meaning, representation, and ideology (Hall 1980, 1985). Although it opened space to examine religion as a cultural form, secularist assumptions embedded in the field’s intellectual history often marginalized religion as an object of serious inquiry (Morgan 2013). However, from the 1990s onward, the field of religion and media studies expanded rapidly across Europe, North America, South America, Africa, and Asia. International conferences, scholarly publications, and journals significantly broadened its scope and visibility (Morgan 2008). In the post-9/11 era, its relevance gained renewed urgency, as far-right religious actors became increasingly visible in the public sphere through strategic media engagement.1

As the internet, smartphones, and social networking sites began to drastically penetrate into and transform religious individuals’ social interaction, meaning making, community building, and sharing of information and emotion, the increasing convergence of media and religion sparked extensive theoretical debates, particularly between mediatization and mediation approaches (Couldry 2008; Hjarvard 2011; Lundby 2009; Morgan 2011). Mediatization theory posits that as media saturate all domains of social life, institutions including religion increasingly adopt media forms and operate within media logics. Hjarvard (2008), a key figure in this school, argues that declining religious participation in Denmark reflects this saturation, noting that media now perform functions traditionally associated with religious institutions—offering moral guidance, spiritual meaning, and a sense of community. However, this perspective has drawn significant criticism. Lundby (2009) contends that Hjarvard obscures and idealizes media logic, as he fails to account for how it is embedded in concrete religious practices of media production and reception. Couldry (2012) likewise critiques mediatization theory as overly media-centric, arguing that no single media logic can account for the wide array of social effects its proponents claim. From a historical perspective, Morgan (2011) challenges the presentist orientation of mediatization theory, which assumes that religion has only recently come under the influence of modern media technologies. He argues that religious traditions have long been shaped by distinct forms of material mediation—epistles, icons, cathedrals, and printed texts—that played central roles in structuring both personal religiosity and collective religious life. These historical forms, he contends, were essential components through which religious communities imagined, experienced, and enacted their relationship to the divine.

Building on this critique, the religion-as-mediation perspective maintains that religion has never existed outside of media, but has always been constituted through them.2 This view rejects the notion that media are external additions to religious life, instead positing that mediation—via material forms, sensory registers, and ritual practices—has always shaped how the divine is collectively encountered, sensed, and experienced as real. As Morgan notes, such forms have historically functioned as media that bridge the ontological divide between the human and the transcendent. Hoover and Echchaibi (2023) similarly argue that modern media technologies do not introduce a fundamentally new relationship between religion and media, but rather alter the scale and speed of existing modes of mediation. This challenges the notion that digital media mark a decisive rupture in religious history. Instead, it underscores historical continuity across media epochs, while also attending to how new technologies reshape, amplify, or reconfigure pre-existing forms of religious mediation. Unlike mediatization theory, which assumes a growing connection between previously separate spheres of media and religion, the religion-as-mediation approach foregrounds their enduring entanglement, and conceptualizes mediation as both a constitutive element and a generative condition of religion itself.

3. Religion as Media

The religion-as-mediation approach draws significantly on the work of anthropologist Birgit Meyer, who has theorized religion as inherently mediated. Her framework emphasizes the material, sensory, and embodied practices of mediation through which the professed transcendent is produced, shared, and made perceptible within the domain of human bodily experience (Meyer 2006, 2009, 2011, 2012a, 2012b, 2013, 2020). Based on early ethnographic research on Ghanaian Pentecostal video films in the 1990s, Meyer led a broader anthropological project that examined how religious communities across Africa, South Asia, Brazil, and the Caribbean negotiate electronic mass media (Meyer 2004, 2009). The project revealed that modern media were not passively adopted, but strategically integrated into pre-existing religious conventions, including authorized objects and rituals that had long mediated access to the transcendent. This led Meyer to reconceptualize media not simply as modern technologies, but more broadly as “transmitters across gaps and limits” (Meyer 2014, p. 216). Her expanded definition moves beyond modernist assumptions that modern media technologies abruptly transform religion, instead locating them within a long-standing history of religious technologies and practices of mediation. For Meyer, media encompass a wide range of forms—bodies, objects, texts, images, rituals, architectures, and spaces—that mediate between the transcendent and human bodily senses, and further structure how individuals perceive, feel, and engage with the transcendent.3 She terms these as sensational forms (Meyer 2006, 2011, 2013, 2014, 2020); culturally authorized forms that orchestrate religious sensation and shape collective experiences of the divine.

Meyer thus proposes that religion should be studied “as a practice of mediation between humans and the professed transcendent that necessarily requires specific material media, that is, authorized forms through which the transcendent is being generated and becomes somehow tangible” (Meyer 2013, p. 8). Crucially, in her work Material Mediations and Religious Practices of World-making, Meyer (2013) frames mediation as a practice of world-making; a process through which individuals share collective meanings and imaginaries and thereby inhabit a shared social reality that is experienced as immediate, material, and real. “One cannot but turn to media”, she writes, “to understand social processes of sharing imaginaries, meanings, and values, of binding, bonding, and collaboration” (p. 5). In this view, mediation is not confined to religion but is central to the circulation and materialization of all forms of social imaginaries—whether secular or religious.

Although Meyer does not explicitly use the term, her account of mediation as constitutive of shared social experience invites engagement with Charles Taylor’s concept of social imaginaries, as it raises the question of how imaginaries become socially real (Taylor 2004; see also Gaonkar 2002). Taylor defines social imaginaries as “the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations” (Taylor 2004, p. 23). These imaginaries, as Gaonkar (2002, p. 10) notes, are “expressed and carried in images, stories, legends, and modes of address”—all of which may be understood as media. However, encountering these media is never automatic. As Couldry (2012) emphasizes, it is media-related practices, or practices of mediation, that make such encounters possible in the first place. Taylor’s account of social imaginaries thus necessarily points toward the question of the mediation and circulation of these imaginaries—how the imaginaries, and the images and texts carrying them, take form, circulate, and become socially operative. From this perspective, both Meyer and Taylor suggest that shared social life is not prior to mediation and circulation, but is brought into being through them.

Valaskivi and Sumiala (2014) reinforce this perspective, stating that “society is held together (Latour 2005) by the social imaginaries (Taylor 2002) created and maintained through circulation. In short, without the circulation of ideas, items, emotions, and/or people, no shared experiences—and thus no community—can exist” (p. 231). This theoretical convergence among the cited theorists reflects a shared understanding that social realities—whether religious or secular—are not pre-given or static, but are continuously constituted through practices and technologies of mediation. In developing her theoretical framework, Meyer (2009, 2013) clearly draws on Anderson’s (1991) notion of imagined communities and Latour’s (2005) conceptualization of the social as crafted through associations between human and non-human actors. Through these engagements, she challenges the implicit assumption that the religious and the secular world operate according to different logics. Instead, both realms are equally grounded in practices and technologies of mediation through which social imaginaries (Taylor 2002, 2004)—whether secular or religious—are circulated, materialized, and made experientially real (Valaskivi and Sumiala 2014). Within this theoretical constellation, mediation is not conceived as a mere channel of transmission, but as a generative and constitutive condition that enables the very formation and experience of social worlds.

Building on this theoretical grounding, Meyer applies the notion of mediation specifically to the religious domain, offering a nuanced account of how the transcendent—while inherently invisible—becomes materially and sensorially real through practices of mediation. For instance, the transcendent exists within and as part of religious subjects’ imaginaries before it is mediated through what Meyer (2013, 2020) terms sensational forms or material media. When these imaginaries are mediated—through embodied engagements with these sensational forms such as texts, objects, spaces, and rituals—the transcendent is materialized and made experientially accessible within the domain of human bodily and sensory experience. Although the relationship between mediation and materialization is here articulated in temporal terms (“before” and “after”) for the sake of explanation, Meyer emphasizes that they are in fact co-constitutive and mutually entangled. As Appadurai (2015) argues, mediation produces materiality as an effect of its operations, while materiality simultaneously conditions the very possibility of mediation.4 The practices of mediation—and their concurrent materialization—of secular or religious imaginaries enable collective experiences of secular or religious realities. This social view of mediation allows Meyer to conceptualize religion not merely as a system of beliefs, but as a domain that delineates the boundary between the human and the transcendent while also teaching, regulating, and transmitting practices and technologies of mediation that bridge this divide. Through such practices and technologies, religion provides the means by which the transcendent becomes experientially accessible in the immanent, material world. For Meyer (2009, 2011, 2013, 2020), religion is, at its core, constituted by the practices and technologies of mediation that bring the invisible into the realm of bodily and sensory experience.5

Conceptualizing religion as mediation allows scholars to move beyond the so-called “Protestant bias” subtly embedded in many modern studies of religion (Asad 1993; Keane 2007). In Mediation and Immediacy, Meyer (2011) delineates two key assumptions that structure the Protestant imaginary of religion and media. First, Protestantism tends to view religion as essentially immaterial and transcendent, while construing media as inherently material—thereby producing a binary opposition that positions religion and media as ontologically distinct and even incompatible domains. Second, it privileges the notion of an unmediated, direct encounter with the divine as the ideal form of religious experience, treating it as ontologically prior and superior to experiences that are facilitated through material media such as sacraments, images, or rituals.

This Protestant imaginary continues to inform the widely used notion of “mediated religion”, which often rests on the implicit assumption that religion originally exists in a pure, pre-mediated form. According to this view, mediation is understood as a secondary or even corrupting process that distances believers from the essence of religion. Material media, in this framework, are perceived not as constitutive of religious experiences but as distortions or obstacles to it. Meyer’s theorization of religion as always and already mediated directly challenges this essentialist and hierarchical distinction between immediacy and mediation. From her perspective, what may be perceived by religious insiders as an immediate and authentic encounter with the divine can, from an analytical standpoint, be understood as the effect of specific material media, sensational forms, and embodied practices of mediation (Meyer 2020). In doing so, she calls for a reconceptualization of religious experience not as a transcendence of the material, but as fundamentally shaped by it.

Recognizing the constitutive relationship between immediacy and mediation, spirituality and materiality, and religion and media enables a more nuanced exploration of how religious objects and associated rituals operate as material media and practices of mediation. In the context of transnational migration, this framework helps us examine how religious imaginaries circulate across borders and acquire new meanings and functions for migrants through material mediation of religious objects and associated rituals that occur in an unfamiliar context. Religious objects and embodied rituals, in this view, do not simply preserve personal faith or cultural tradition; rather, they shape and intervene in migrants’ everyday negotiations of transnational space and identity, offering both continuity and adaptability within their social and spiritual lives across borders.

4. Thai Migrants’ Religious Objects and Rituals in South Korea

To illustrate the analytical value of the religion-as-mediation framework in the context of transnational migration, this section examines the case of Thai migrant students in South Korea and their engagement with religious objects and rituals. I first outline the religious landscapes of Korea and Thailand, which provide essential context for understanding the lived religious experiences of these migrants in Korean society. Korea’s religious landscape is characterized by competition and pluralism (Baker 2016), in which Protestantism (20%), Catholicism (11%), and Buddhism (17%), along with Confucianism and Shamanism, constitute a complex multi-religious environment where no single religion holds a dominant position (HRC Opinion 2023). Protestantism holds a particularly visible and contested position within this landscape, especially due to the disproportionate influence of conservative Protestant churches in education, media, politics, and thus public discourse. Despite this visibility, Korean Protestantism is often viewed negatively in broader society. It is often seen as a pre-modern, uncivilized Other that fails to adopt modern and liberal civic values, and thus hinders South Korea’s full modernization (S. S. Kim 2021), while frequently associated with hatred against minorities, disrespect for other religions, and aggressive proselytization (Yang 2012), including toward migrants. Protestant attitudes toward migrants, however, are ambivalent. Migrants are viewed as potential targets for conversion, but also as others who might threaten South Korea’s national–religious identity through communization or Islamization (S. H. Lee 2023; H. J. Kim 2017). As will be discussed later, Thai students commonly report having been approached by Protestant missionaries, and often recall these experiences negatively or describe efforts to avoid them.

Korean Buddhism occupies a distinct position within the country’s religious landscape, balancing its monastic traditions with the demands of a capitalist consumer economy. While a few major ones such as Bongeunsa Temple and Jogyesa Temple are located in central Seoul, most temples remain in mountainous areas outside urban centers. This spatial arrangement reinforces the perception of Buddhism as a religion not only associated with seclusion, meditation, and spiritual cultivation, but also with the preservation and transmission of traditional Korean religious and cultural heritage (Cho 2010). Since the 1990s, however, Korean Buddhism has undergone a process of urbanization and popularization in response to the expansion of consumer culture and the service economy (Yoon 2007; Joo 2011). In particular, temples began opening their spaces for activities such as organic markets, weddings, and funerals to better meet the needs of urban populations (Yoon 2007). Under neoliberal conditions, they have increasingly been branded and consumed as healing spaces for rest and introspection—functioning as spiritual sanctuaries amid the pressures of city life (S. S. Kim 2017). Nevertheless, in contrast to Thailand—where temples are easily accessible and deeply embedded in everyday religious life—Korean Buddhism remains relatively spatially distant and monastic in character. As will be discussed, this spatial inaccessibility significantly reshapes the religious engagement of Thai migrant students in Korean society.

Although nearly half of the Korean population (51%) self-identifies as having no religion (HRC Opinion 2023), characterizing South Korean society as secular might be questionable, given that Koreans’ social imaginaries—including those of the non-religious—appear to be deeply interwoven with Confucian and Shamanistic worldviews. As A. E. Kim (2000) notes, quasi-religious Confucian values continue to influence Koreans’ interpersonal relationships and social norms. Practices such as shamanistic rituals, fortune-telling, and Tarot remain prevalent in Korean popular and everyday culture. They are not only consumed as entertainment in popular legacy and digital media (J. Lee 2022; Sim et al. 2023; Park 2007, 2008), but also commonly sought out—even among adherents of major religions such as Protestantism, Catholicism, and Buddhism—during moments of personal hardship, crisis, or life transition. These practices permeate almost all aspects of Korean consciousness (A. E. Kim 2000; J. Lee 2022; Ha 2024). The widespread prevalence of such practices in Korean society enables Thai migrant students to avoid cultural discomfort when using sacred objects brought from Thailand in everyday life, and even encourages them to seek out Korean shamanistic objects when needed.

This cultural familiarity—especially with the shamanistic rituals, fortune-telling, and Tarot that permeate Korean everyday life—resonates with Thai religious culture. It is inherently hybrid, shaped by the historical convergence of Animism, Hindu–Brahmanism, and Theravāda Buddhism. Although over 95% of Thais self-identify as Buddhists, everyday religious practices typically intertwine Buddhist rituals, Hindu deity worship, and Animistic belief systems (Agarwal and Jones 2018; Srichampa 2014). These hybrid practices are informed and animated by Thai Buddhist–Animist social imaginaries, which encompass a wide array of spirits—known as phi (ผี) in Thai—believed to inhabit specific objects, places, and individuals in Thailand. As Kitiarsa (2012) observes, these spirits remain present in the everyday lives of Thai people, continually manifesting through diverse ritual practices and material forms.

Various religious objects such as Buddhist amulets, spirit houses, portraits of Thai kings, and monk-blessed talismans are not only integral to everyday practices, but are also deeply embedded in Thailand’s socio-economic and spiritual landscape. These objects are believed to embody supernatural power, providing protection, prosperity, and well-being against uncertainties regarding education, career, love, and health in a capitalist society (Kitiarsa 2008). The commodification of religious objects intensified during Thailand’s economic boom in the 1980s and 1990s, and witnessed the emergence of a rapidly expanding middle class that increasingly sought immediate spiritual solutions rather than relying on the gradual accumulation of merit through traditional Buddhist almsgiving (Phongpaichit and Baker 1998). This shift fueled the demand for spiritual services offered by spirit mediums, astrologers, magic monks, and Hindu–Brahmanic priests, rather than by authorized Buddhist monks. By the mid-1990s, it was estimated that Thai people were spending approximately THB 20 billion annually on spirit-medium services (Kitiarsa 2008, p. 138). The commodification of religious objects and supernatural mediation, emerging during this period, has become a defining feature of contemporary Thai religiosity and continues to shape the lived religious experiences of Thai migrants in transnational contexts.

Noting the continuing significance of religious objects and rituals in the everyday lives of middle-class Thais, this study conducted in-depth interviews with ten Thai migrant students in Korea between October and November 2024.6 Each interview, lasting approximately 90 min, was conducted in English or Korean with Thai translation assistance, and took place in quiet cafés or study rooms in Seoul. The semi-structured interviews explored a range of topics, including participants’ religious beliefs, ritual practices, personal sacred objects, spiritual communities, and migration experiences. Basic demographic and contextual information about the interviewees is provided in the table below (

Table 1. The list of interviewees.

	Sex	Age	Length of Stay in Korea (Months)	Religion	Religious Objects
A	F	Early 30s	9	Non-Religious	Ganesha images on smartphone and iPad
B	F	Mid 20s	24	Non-Religious	Buddhist Amulets
C	F	Early 20s	11	Protestant	Cross necklace, Tarot cards 1
D	F	Mid 20s	10	Buddhist	Buddha statue necklace
E	F	Mid 20s	15	Buddhist	Small Buddha statue
F	F	Early 20s	9	Buddhist	Buddha statue necklace
G	F	Mid 20s	9	Buddhist	Luang Pu Thuat amulet 2
H	F	Mid 20s	10	Non-Religious	Ganesha necklace
I	M	Mid 20s	9	Catholic	Rosary beads, Catholic prayers, framed Virgin Mary icon
J	F	Mid 20s	9	Buddhist	Buddha beads bracelet, Tarot cards, Ganesha card

¹ Tarot cards are identified as religious objects because the interviewees perceive them as a spiritual medium—rather than a tool for psychological reflection—through which divine beings respond to their questions and concerns as they navigate their migrant lives. ² The Luang Pu Thuat amulet is a revered Buddhist amulet in Thailand, associated with Luang Pu Thuat (หลวงปู่ทวด), a highly respected 16th-century Thai monk known for his miraculous powers and deep wisdom.

).

Despite their diverse religious affiliations, all interviewees shared a common upbringing in Buddhist familial environments, where at least one parent actively practiced Buddhism and regularly visited temples. Some participants distanced themselves from Thai Buddhism during adolescence (Interviewees A, B, H), while others converted to different faiths—Interviewee C became Protestant under her grandmother’s influence, and Interviewee I converted to Catholicism while attending a Catholic school. However, across these varying affiliations—Buddhist, Protestant, Catholic, or non-religious—all interviewees carried personal religious objects while living in Korea. These objects were often gifted by family members, who saw them as mediators of protection and prosperity during migration (Interviewees D, G, H). Others acquired items such as Buddhist amulets, rosary beads, or Tarot cards from Thailand, Korea, or Taiwan, using them for ritual practice (Interviewee I), spiritual guidance (Interviewee B), or to invoke good fortune in scholarships or part-time jobs (Interviewees K, B).

Interviews reveal that these religious objects are not merely symbolic but are significantly integrated into migrants’ everyday lives and practices. Some students carry sacred objects on their bodies throughout the day. Interviewee K keeps a small Ganesha image card in her bag, explaining that simply knowing it is there—even without seeing it—brings her comfort (Figure 1). Interviewee G wears a Luang Pu Thuat amulet daily and recalled the distress she felt when she lost it, which only subsided once her mother sent a replacement from Thailand (Figure 2). Similarly, for Interviewee H, wearing her Ganesha amulet necklace has become second nature—akin to wearing a watch, noticeable only in its absence (Figure 3). She incorporates the amulet into her morning routine by performing a wai (ไหว้; prayerful bow) before putting it on.

These sacred objects are significantly involved in practices of mediation that simultaneously mediate and materialize Thai religious imaginaries—Buddhist, Hindu-Brahmanic, or Animist—within migrants’ everyday lives. Buddhist amulets and statues are believed to embody protective power; Interviewee K, for instance, trusts that her amulet “always grants some protection” if properly revered. The Luang Pu Thuat amulet channels the monk’s protective influence even in Korea, linking its wearer to a broader Thai Buddhist cosmology regardless of geographical location. Likewise, the Ganesha pendant worn by Interviewee H anchors Hindu–Animist imaginaries, wherein specific deities safeguard individuals based on their birthdays. Gifted by her father as a lifelong protective talisman, the pendant materially embodies Ganesha’s presence in Korea, continuously sustaining its spiritual protection throughout her migrant experience. These personal religious objects serve as what could be called portable material media (Csordas 2009; Meyer 2013), carrying, materializing, and operating migrants’ religious imaginaries across borders. Through Buddhist amulets, monk statues, or Hindu deity pendants, migrants enact everyday practices that give tangible form to intangible spiritual forces—such as the Buddha’s compassion, the protective presence of deities, or the aura of revered monks. These practices sustain Thai religious imaginaries within the material, spiritual, and affective fabric of migrants’ daily lives in Korea.

Thai migrants’ self-contained and non-coercive devotional practices—rooted in hybrid and inclusive Thai religious imaginaries—sharply contrast with the overt, confrontational proselytism of Korean Protestantism. The predominantly Protestant environment of many university campuses in Korea compels students to regularly encounter such proselytizing practices. These encounters are frequently framed by interviewees as disrespectful and, at times, deceptive. Interviewee B, for instance, recalls being approached by street evangelists outside the Seoul Queer Parade even while “dressed head-to-toe in rainbow colours”, noting how they “always come up and ask, ‘Do you believe in God?’”—blatantly ignoring her visible LGBTQ+ support. She concludes that repeated encounters have “forced” her to think of Korean Protestantism “in a negative way.” Similarly, Interviewees C, H, and J all described language exchange invitations that turned out to be Bible study later, interpreting the tactic as “insincere” (Interviewee C) and “fearful” (Interviewee J). These narratives suggest that interviewees interpret unsolicited evangelism not merely as religious outreach, but as a violation of normative social reciprocity—what Intachakra (2012) refers to as khwam-krengjai (ความเกรงใจ), or considerate self-restraint toward others’ feelings, a deeply embedded Thai interactional norm. Contrasted with their own portable and non-coercive devotional practices, such moments reinforce a perceived boundary between an inclusive, hybrid Thai religious imaginary and a Korean Protestantism regarded as exclusivist, confrontational, and socially intrusive. These experiences may serve to reaffirm the inclusiveness of their own religious culture and identity, while simultaneously deepening their affective identification with Thai religious imaginaries.

This affective attachment to Thai religious imaginaries is not only emotional, but also spatially enacted in daily life. Many interviewees grew up in households with dedicated sacred spaces, such as family shrines or altars, and regularly visited Thai Buddhist temples, where they engaged in devotional practices before sacred Buddhist statues. In Korea, however, these spatial and devotional practices are reshaped to accommodate the transient living conditions of migrant students and the relative inaccessibility of Buddhist temples. Unlike in Thailand, where temples are easily accessible and embedded in everyday religious routines, Korean temples are experienced by Thai migrants as spatially—and spiritually—remote. This distance reshapes their religious engagement in two interconnected ways.

First, for many students, temple visits become occasional, rather than habitual as in Thailand, motivated primarily by sightseeing (Interviewees B, D), photography (Interviewees F, J), or stress relief (Interviewees I, J). In the absence of parents who would typically accompany them on customary family visits to temples, students with already tenuous Buddhist commitments—particularly Interviewees A, D, F, and H—report a further decline in ritual practice and belief, or even a turn toward non-religiosity. The distance of temples in Korea is experienced sensorily and spiritually as well. While some students appreciated the “simplicity” (B, D), “quietness” (D), and “peacefulness” (I) of Korean temples, they also found that the sensational forms of Korean Buddhism—its architecture, rituals, and material objects—significantly limited deeper spiritual connection and experience. Interviewee C remarked on the absence of familiar religious rituals: “[In Thai temples] you light candles and incense, place them, make a wish. But here [in Korea], there’s none of that. You just go, look around, and that’s it. You leave”. She added, “Korean temples usually focus on meditation… it just felt completely different from Thailand. It didn’t feel like the Buddhism I know”.

Second, many students, facing limited access to temples, construct small-scale sacred sites within their living spaces, and turn to personal religious objects as central tools for reshaping spiritual continuity in Korea. A widely shared practice involves placing sacred objects—including, in one case, even Tarot cards (Interviewee K)—on elevated surfaces, carefully ensuring that nothing is positioned above them (Figure 4 and Figure 5). According to Thai religious tradition, sacred items such as Buddha statues, amulets, and spirit houses (ศาลพระภูมิ; Saan Phra Phum) must be placed above eye level to preserve their sanctity, while mundane objects and human bodies should remain lower. This practice of vertical differentiation reflects deeply embedded Thai Buddhist–Animist cosmological hierarchies, wherein divine or sacred beings occupy higher spatial positions relative to profane or lower beings (Kitiarsa 2008, 2012). Regardless of formal religious affiliation, interviewees continue to engage in these spatial and devotional practices, which function as embodied rituals of reverence and as practices of mediation that sustain and materialize their religious imaginaries within the host society. The practice of elevating sacred objects not only preserves their spiritual efficacy, but also mediates and materializes Thai Buddhist–Animist cosmologies in transnational spaces. Through the reenactment of this spiritual and spatial order abroad, migrants maintain a tangible and experiential continuity between their inherited cosmologies and their lived realities in Korea.

In the absence of formal altars brought from home, migrants recreate localized sacred spaces by placing religious objects on high shelves within their Korean living spaces. These objects are especially engaged during moments of homesickness, academic stress, or fear of unfamiliar spirits. Through such practices, Thai migrant students transform both their personal spaces and religious objects into sensational forms or material media (Meyer 2013, 2020), in and through which Thai Buddhist–Animist cosmologies can be carried, mediated, materialized, and activated within their everyday lives in Korea. These practices of placing sacred objects on elevated surfaces sustain connections to spiritual beings and to broader Thai Buddhist–Animist social imaginaries, where spiritual, material, and human realms are inextricably interwoven (Kitiarsa 2008, 2012). Notably, even Interviewee I, a Catholic, and Interviewee C, a Protestant, maintain the practice of placing sacred objects—such as rosaries and cross necklaces—on elevated shelves, despite the absence of such doctrinal prescriptions in Christianity (Figure 6 and Figure 7). This suggests that Thai Buddhist–Animist imaginaries continue to subtly shape and animate migrants’ engagements with sacred objects and associated rituals, operating beneath and across their formal religious identities.

Beyond the mediation of sacred objects, transnational religious continuity is also sustained through embodied ritual practices. Ritual acts such as merit-making serve as additional means by which migrants maintain spiritual and familial ties across borders. Among the interviewees, it was common for parents in Thailand to perform merit-making rituals on behalf of their children residing abroad. For example, while Interviewee G lives in Korea, her parents regularly conduct birthday offerings at a Thai temple to ensure continued blessings, thereby maintaining both religious and familial traditions despite geographical separation. Interviewee G vividly recalls these rituals as central to her upbringing, emphasizing how her parents’ practices continue to spiritually animate her migrant life. Meanwhile, Interviewee K instinctively engaged in a merit-making act by offering donations upon encountering a collection box at a Korean temple, despite its non-Thai setting. This spontaneous adaptation highlights how migrants mediate and materialize their religious imaginaries by reconfiguring familiar religious practices within new transnational contexts.

Engagement with familiar rituals in unfamiliar spaces emerged as a recurring pattern among interviewees. Several described performing customary Thai rituals to acknowledge local spirits when entering new environments in Korea. For instance, Interviewee H prays before sleep when staying in hotels or unfamiliar residences, believing that this gesture signals respect to resident spirits and invites protection from malevolent forces. Similarly, upon moving into a new dormitory in Seoul, Interviewee G silently addressed the spirit of the space, affirming her benign intentions and assuring it that she posed no harm. Notably, Interviewee I, a Catholic, engages with his rosary (Figure 5) in ways that reflect enduring Thai Animist imaginaries, wherein spirits (ผี; phi) are believed to inhabit specific places, objects, and people (Kitiarsa 2012). He carries his rosary when relocating, describing it as a source of comfort and protection in unfamiliar environments perceived as inhabited by unknown spirits. These examples suggest that Thai folk rituals and Buddhist–Animist cosmologies continue to shape migrants’ lived experiences even across formal religious affiliations and national borders. In the absence of physical spirit houses or Thai temples, portable practices (Csordas 2009)—such as performing a wai (ไหว้) before putting sacred objects on or verbally greeting unseen spirits—serve as embodied mediations that materialize Thai religious imaginaries in new contexts. Through such acts, migrants transpose their cosmologies transnationally, sustaining spiritual continuity and asserting religious and cultural belonging in unfamiliar landscapes.

Religious objects do more than reflect underlying belief systems; they shape how migrants experience, navigate, and inhabit their transnational lives in host societies. For most participants, sacred objects serve as sources of emotional support, continuity of identity, and social connectivity, helping to mitigate the challenges of displacement. Interviewee B, for instance, actively seeks and collects Buddhist amulets during her international travels across Taiwan, Japan, and Korea. These amulets reflect not only her personal aspirations—such as academic achievement and career advancement—but also her transnational mobility. She believes that “purchasing amulets from globally recognized Buddhist temples” enhances their protective efficacy, offering reassurance and emotional grounding in her migrant life. Similarly, Interviewee G describes her Luang Pu Thuat amulet as integral to her sense of self, affirming that it makes her “feel safe” and supported wherever she resides. Sacred objects also facilitate social bonding among co-migrants. Interviewee C shared her experience of connecting with a fellow Thai Protestant student in Seoul through her cross necklace, which visibly signaled her religious identity.

Religious objects sometimes foster cultural learning and adaptation in a host society as well. Like Interviewee B, Interviewee K also purchased Korean sacred objects—such as a bracelet and Tarot cards—from Bongeunsa Temple, noting that the items were not merely spiritual but also culturally meaningful (Figure 8). As she explained, “I didn’t want to spend my money to have more Tarot cards, but it was like Korean, and it also has the Korean meaning … So I was like, if I bought it, I can also study about Korean culture.” Her account suggests that the acquisition of Korean spiritual items may operate simultaneously as a form of spiritual mediation and a mode of intercultural engagement, thereby blurring the line between religious practice and cultural learning. The significant presence and use of sacred objects—acquired not only from Thailand but also from Korea—in Thai migrant students’ everyday lives are made possible within a broader social landscape in Korea, where spiritual practices such as shamanistic rituals, fortune-telling, and Tarot are normalized and popularized. The popularization of such practices in Korean society helps Thai migrant students feel at ease incorporating sacred objects from Thailand into their daily lives, and even motivates them to explore and adopt Korean sacred items when appropriate. Engagement with both Thai and Korean sacred items in migrants’ everyday lives in Korea reflects not only the hybridization of sacred objects from different national and religious traditions within their own religious imaginaries, but also a meaningful participation in the host society’s spiritual and cultural landscape through the process of learning and adaptation.

Ultimately, these objects and associated ritual practices exemplify what Meyer (2020) conceptualizes as material media and practices of mediation, which Meyer (2013) describes as acts of world-making. They connect migrants who share religious traditions, bridge the here-and-now with imagined transcendent realities, and weave lived experience within the material world into broader sacred religious imaginaries. In short, these mediation practices generate sacred transnational social space. Rather than merely preserving inherited traditions, these objects and practices mediate and materialize Thai religious imaginaries in Korean society, making migrants’ everyday lives and spaces simultaneously transcendent and transnational (Csordas 2009). Importantly, this process often entails the hybridization of Thai and Korean sensational forms or material media (Meyer 2013, 2020)—for instance, when Korean temple items such as Tarot cards or bracelets, alongside pre-existing Thai sacred objects, are incorporated into Thai religious imaginaries that are already inclusive and hybrid. This dynamic not only appears to sustain a sense of spiritual continuity, but may also foster conditions that facilitate more confident and agentive engagement with Korean society. Rather than resulting in cultural isolation, such practices potentially enable Thai migrants to participate in and contribute to Korea’s pluralistic social and religious landscape. These sacred transnational social spaces—made possible through the embodied and portable practices that mediate Thai religious imaginaries in Korea—ultimately offer migrants spiritual familiarity, emotional resilience, and a platform for cultural learning and belonging in the host society.

5. Conclusions: Rethinking Religion and Migration Through Mediation

This article has proposed the concept of mediation as a generative analytic lens for exploring how migrants engage with their religions in host societies. In resonance with the lived religion approach, it has demonstrated that mediation operates at the core of migrant religiosity—structuring its experiential, affective, and material dimensions. Focusing on Thai migrant students in South Korea, the analysis has shown how sacred objects and embodied rituals—such as the veneration of Buddhist amulets, Hindu deity pendants, Catholic rosaries, and everyday ritual acts—operate as material media and practices of mediation. They simultaneously mediate and materialize religious imaginaries, structure migrants’ sensory and emotional engagements with their lived realities, sustain spiritual and cultural belonging across borders, and further facilitate encounters and hybridization between Thai and Korean sensational forms (Meyer 2013, 2020). Religion, in this framework, does not appear as a fixed institutional or doctrinal system, but as a dynamic assemblage of mediation practices that materialize and animate sacred imaginaries, thereby generating sacred social spaces across borders. Through interactions with religious objects and rituals, migrants produce transcendent and transnational experiences. Such practices shape affective, spiritual, and spatial continuities amid displacement, and foster more confident and agentive forms of engagement with the Korean religious and cultural landscape. The following section elaborates the broader theoretical implications of the religion-as-mediation framework, suggesting that mediation constitutes a critical and generative condition for theorizing migrant religiosity as a lived, embodied, and world-making practice.

The framework illuminates a new perspective on how religion operates in transnational migrant contexts. Rather than conceptualizing religion as merely symbolic or representative, this approach foregrounds its material, sensory, and embodied dimensions, demonstrating how religious imaginaries become tangible, portable, and experientially real through specific practices of mediation involving material objects and embodied rituals. Migrants’ sacred objects and ritual practices do not merely signify fixed identities or inherited traditions; rather, they materialize and animate shared religious imaginaries, shaping how migrants sensorily experience, inhabit, and engage with their host societies. This perspective supplements prevailing paradigms in migration studies, which often adopt an instrumentalist approach to religion—framing it primarily as cultural heritage, a psychological coping mechanism, or an institutional support structure. Instead, it advances a more holistic understanding of religion as a dynamic constellation of mediation practices through which the transcendent is embodied, animated, and experienced as real. These everyday practices of mediation reshape how migrants inhabit places, relate to others, and navigate spiritual and emotional life in host societies. For instance, Thai migrant students’ ongoing veneration of Buddhist amulets in Korea is not merely an expression of tradition or nostalgia; rather, it constitutes an ongoing practice of mediation that inscribes Thai Buddhist–Animist imaginaries onto their everyday lives. In this regard, mediation is the foundational and constitutive condition through which religion becomes materially embodied, sensorially mediated, and animated as real across geographical and national boundaries —an insight that enables a more nuanced understanding of migrant religiosity as inherently entangled with materiality, embodiment, and the bodily senses.

This framework also calls for a rethinking of the analytic priority often given to institutional religious participation in migration studies. While religious institutions remain important, the religion-as-mediation approach shifts attention to how individual migrants reshape their religiosity through quotidian, taken-for-granted engagements with personal sacred objects and habitual rituals—for instance, touching a Buddhist amulet when overwhelmed by everyday challenges in the host society, performing a wai (ไหว้) before sacred objects, or greeting unseen spirits when entering unfamiliar spaces. The empirical findings of this study, grounded in the religion-as-mediation approach, show that implicit religious imaginaries—rather than explicit affiliation or doctrine—structure migrants’ everyday practices. As Taylor (1995, p. 28) notes, the social imaginary functions much like Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus or what Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty refer to as the “background”: an unspoken social understanding or horizon against which explicit beliefs make sense. While religious affiliation and doctrine require conscious assent, social imaginaries guide shared practices prereflexively. A common practice among Thai migrant students in Korea—placing sacred objects on high shelves—makes this dynamic clear. In Thailand, household altars, Buddha images, and spirit houses are positioned above eye level. Raised within a Thai Buddhist–Animist cosmology in which the sacred must look down on the profane, Thai migrants internalize this vertical hierarchy. When they replicate this arrangement in cramped Korean living spaces, they rarely invoke doctrinal reasoning. They simply know that the sacred object belongs on the highest shelf. This embodied, prereflexive understanding—nourished by underlying social imaginaries—transposes Thai Buddhist–Animist logics into the new context, even among those who now identify as Protestant, Catholic, or non-religious.

Thus, this approach offers a more nuanced lens on transnational religious networks. While migration studies frequently emphasize the role of religious institutions—such as temples, churches, and diaspora organizations—in sustaining migrant religiosity, the lens of mediation draws attention to how material objects and embodied practices serve as alternative, and often primary, sites where migrant religiosity is reshaped and enacted. Thai migrant students maintain transnational religious ties not necessarily through formal participation in religious communities, but through daily engagements with sacred objects, ritual practices, and family-initiated customs performed remotely. This aligns with the lived religion approach, which reconceptualizes religion as an embodied, affective, and quotidian phenomenon—less rooted in institutional participation and more embedded in the textures of everyday life that extend across borders in the contemporary world.

The framework also deepens our understanding of portable practices (Csordas 2009) by illuminating how they are sustained through engagements with material forms such as bodies, objects, and spaces—each operating as sensational forms or material media (Meyer 2013, 2020). Rather than conceptualizing such practices as merely adaptive responses to mobility, this approach frames them as portable practices of mediation that structure migrants’ lived, transnational experiences of the sacred and the transcendent. Through this lens, it is found that portable practices and their associated material media bridge both the ontological divide between the human and the transcendent and the geographical divide between Thailand and South Korea, mediating and materializing migrants’ religious imaginaries as tangible and experientially real within transnational migrant contexts. In the case of Thai migrant students, portable practices—such as carrying sacred objects, performing a wai (ไหว้) before them, or placing amulets on elevated surfaces—mediate and materialize Thai Buddhist–Animist cosmologies within Korean domestic spaces. These practices do not merely preserve cultural or religious continuity; rather, they enable migrants to inhabit new places in a host society as transnational and transcendent extensions of home. In this sense, portable practices of mediation create sacred transnational social space across borders (Csordas 2009; Meyer 2013). This process can empower migrants to participate more confidently and agentively in the host society, as illustrated by interviewees who engage with both Thai and Korean sacred objects.

In this regard, this study expands the religion-as-mediation framework by exploring how mediation practices function in transnational migrant contexts. Its empirical findings suggest that portable mediation practices, as performed in host societies, do not simply reproduce existing religious imaginaries; rather, they render those imaginaries more expansive, inclusive, hybrid, and transnational than they were in Thailand. Instead of employing material media as one-way conduits that render the transcendent visible, this study reveals a circular dynamic whereby migrants continually reshape their imaginaries through daily, embodied practices of mediation in response to new environments and challenges in the host society. Through this ongoing process, migrants create sacred transnational social spaces where the here-and-now of lived experience intersects with an imagined elsewhere-and-beyond across geographical and ontological boundaries. These spaces support spiritual continuity, emotional comfort, and everyday agency. Religious mediation practices in transnational migrant contexts, therefore, are not merely the transmission of fixed imaginaries across borders, but ongoing acts of religious world-making (Meyer 2013)—where the sacred objects, human bodies, and religious imaginaries of both the home and host society co-produce new and hybrid forms of religiosity.

Lastly, this discussion positions mediation as a key conceptual lens for theorizing the religion–migration nexus. In Migration and New Media, Madianou and Miller (2012) introduce the concept of polymedia, emphasizing that “relationships, increasingly do not depend on one particular technology, but on a plurality of media which supplement each other and can help overcome the shortcomings of a particular medium (p. 8).” They show how migrants engage diverse media technologies to sustain transnational family ties, carefully weighing each medium’s affordances and constraints. The material and affective properties of a given medium profoundly shape how migrants navigate and sustain relationships across distances, influencing not only interactions with their migrant families, but also their own identities and emotional experiences.

This notion of polymedia closely resonates with the religion-as-mediation framework. Just as digital media facilitate and shape transnational intimacy by bridging geographical distances, sacred objects and embodied rituals operate as material media that mediate transcendent connections across spiritual and cosmological divides. In both frameworks of migration and religion, mediation is not a secondary phenomenon but a constitutive condition through which lived relationships—whether familial or spiritual—are formed, sustained, and sensorily experienced across borders. As Madianou and Miller (2012) emphasize, every “relationship is intrinsically mediated and always has been” (p. 142). Bringing these perspectives together allows us to conceptualize religion and migration as inherently mediated experiences, structured through material, embodied, and/or digital practices of mediation. These practices not only sustain transnational and transcendent ties, but also configure how individuals—whether as religious subjects, migrants, or both—experience, inhabit, and negotiate their familial and spiritual relationships across distances. For example, Thai migrant students often turn to sacred objects—such as amulets, rosaries, or Ganesha pendants—not merely as sources of comfort, but as material media through which they experience spiritual intimacy with transcendent beings and absent family members. These objects become embedded within everyday embodied practices—such as morning prayers or the ritual placement of sacred items on elevated surfaces—that sustain and materialize transnational familial bonds and spiritual belonging across borders.

Furthermore, as shown in the above discussion, the concept of mediation foregrounds both religious and migrant agency, offering a critical alternative to the technological determinism often implicit in mediatization theory (Couldry 2012). Madianou and Miller (2012) emphasize that migrants actively select and combine media forms based on context-specific needs and constraints. This perspective aligns with the way Thai migrant students make their religious imaginaries more expansive, transnational, and hybrid as they engage with sacred objects and ritual practices in the host society. Practices such as placing sacred items on elevated shelves, performing a wai (ไหว้) before putting them on, and participating in merit-making rituals are not passive reproductions of tradition. Rather, they are generative and agentive practices of mediation, through which migrants embed familiar religious cosmologies into unfamiliar environments and further create sacred transcendent social spaces in them.

Bringing these resonant theoretical frameworks together offers a more integrated theorization of religion in migration as a process fundamentally structured through technological, material, and embodied practices of mediation. This approach foregrounds how migrants do not merely adapt to displacement, but actively construct transnational and transcendent social worlds through the deployment of sacred objects, embodied rituals, and the ongoing reconfiguration of the religious imaginaries that underlie them. Rather than treating religion and migration as distinct domains, this perspective helps us conceptualize them as overlapping forms of mediation—each generating lived realities through the mobilization of images, objects, bodies, rituals, and other material forms that operate as sensational forms or material media (Meyer 2013, 2020). Ultimately, the religion-as-mediation framework enables us to theorize how migrants reimagine and re-enchant their everyday lives in host societies, constructing a sacred transnational social space that is materially grounded, sensorily mediated, and experientially real across borders.