That is, culture is comprehended as something one has, or as a process one shapes. The interesting point Bauman makes is that the social scientist should not make a simple choice between the 'wrong' essentialist and 'right' processual notion of culture, but should study the reasons and processes by which people change from an essentialist discourse into the processual discourse and vice versa. People are endowed with a 'dual discursive competence'. They know when to reify their own religious identity and when to query their own reification. The religious perceptions, practices and identifications of female believers are relatively neglected.
Women often symbolize and demarcate boundaries between social, religious and ethnic groups.
Women as religious actors' is less well-documented phenomenon. Upon migration, Islam undergoes a dual process of universalization and localization. Among young generations, there is a tendency to reject the parents' conformity to pre-migration cultural traditions. They strive for an authentic universal Islam. Thus, the change in religious discourse among the generations should be systematically compared.