There are two Hindu temples in New York. The Geeta temple Ashram is a traditional orange and white marble North Indian building, which was built in 1972. It reflects the wealth of the first wave immigrants. The Hindu temple society has been criticized of putting only wealthy people on Geeta's board of trustees. The Divya Dham temple was partly built as a response to these class tensions, as the new less

affluent immigrants began to establish their own sacred spaces. Divya Dham is located in former electronics factory and its main deity (god): Vaisno Devi, "appeals to people of all

castes and walks of life" back in India. We were interested in seeing whether we could discover a trace of

similar class tensions within Hindu Mandir.

However, our main focus was on investigating the issues of identity and belonging, which Hindu Mandir may have to offer for its members. There were four members in our research group. Our project concentrated on the use of space in the Hindu Mandir and we looked at

what does the space mean to the people who use it. We observed the form of rituals and symbolism, which are performed in the Hindu Mandir. We were curious about the consequences of having people with

various cultural backgrounds using the same worshipping space. Would people find this problematic? Is the feeling or experience of worshipping different in Glasgow than in India? Is Hindu Mandir able to represent India and create a sense of home among the worshippers? We were curious whether people were satisfied with the appearance of the temple and whether the experience of worship would be different if the building was different? We also looked at power relations in terms of gender differences and differences between older and younger people. During the fieldwork process I sometimes felt like a child who is learning to speak. When children learn a language they first enter the stage of asking endless amount of "what is that?" questions. In this way children obtain vocabulary, which then allows children to proceed to the "why?" stage.

Children connect the underlying patterns of meanings in their environment through responding to any sentence with another "but why?" question, and in this way children learn to

understand their own culture.

Similarly I first obtained the knowledge about the names of objects and rituals in the new environment through "what?" questions, after which I was ready to 'hunt' people with my exhaustive lists of "why?" questions, in order to reveal meaning in the environment. The experience of doing fieldwork was very inspiring; as doing research was not anymore just about reading theoretical

literature, but all the theory became alive once you start looking for patterns in the observed environment