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- Convenors:
-
Ioanna Galanaki
(University of Southampton)
Heidi Armbruster (University of Southampton)
Anastasia Badder (University of Cambridge)
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- Formats:
- Panels
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 21 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
In light of the success of the far right and new culture wars in Europe, controversies about the relationship between the secular and the religious have gained new ground. We will explore sites and practices of religion and secularism as a way of shedding light on these insecure times.
Long Abstract:
Secularism has long been central to Western self-understandings of progress and modernity. Even as scholars (c.f. Asad 2003; Hirschkind 2011) have shown that secularism has its own history and is not an inevitable telos for the modern world, the concept has taken on a new contemporary relevance. The apparent clash between the secular and the religious continues to churn in political realms and these categories shift in the face of social and political crises. To this point, Mahmood (2009) and others have argued for greater attention to the ways that the secular and religious articulate with and transform each other, especially in the context of particular events, legal and political processes, spaces, and objects. To this end, this panel seeks to explore how concepts of the secular and religious emerge and shape space in European sites. Approaching space as constituted through practice and based upon the existence of plurality (Massey 2005), we examine contested spaces that are variously defined as religious and/or secular in order to better understand how these categories are enacted, conceptualized, and altered across contexts. How do certain spaces (physical or conceptual) become loci of religious and secular claims? How are these spaces figured as religious and secular, by whom and in what contexts? How do contested definitions impact the ways that actors organize spatial practices and relationships? We invite papers that explore these and related questions based on ethnographic studies of spaces that have become sites of contestation between the secular and religious.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 21 July, 2020, -Paper short abstract:
The ethnographies of the religious schools in Czech Republic and Slovakia will show the mutual redefinition of secular and religious framing of these schools. The school actors use a specific "rational" mixture of secular and religious arguments as "charter" for their school.
Paper long abstract:
Religious schools can be seen as ambivalent spaces where the secular and the religious engage in an ongoing mutual redefinition. This paper focuses on a set of cases from the Czech and Slovak republics, where equal state funding for religious, private and public schools has been ensured since 1990. These schools are invested with diverse expectations and motivations. The founding actors (be it a diocese, a religious order or a Protestant church, but more than 90 % are Catholic) typically expect that some level of religiosity is lived and offered to the students and parents. At the same time, only a minority of students of religious schools come from core religious families (even in the more traditional Slovakia); they choose religious schools based on their reputation of familiarity, safety and individual approach. The teachers and managing personnel often (but not always) see the school as an opportunity to seek and perform their own (sometimes particular) religiosity or spirituality. The state (represented by the school inspectorate) expects higher teaching quality or innovative approach. In my paper, I analyse how the different actors navigate themselves in the schools where secular and religious meet in mutual redefinition. It creates the possibility for different actors to bricoler the specific "rational" mixture of secular and religious arguments, which come to form a specific "charter" for their school. The differences of these "charters" reflect and illuminate the dynamic processes of renegotiation of the position of churches and church religiosity in (post) secular societies.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the construction of ambivalent boundaries between the secular and the religious in the context of festive practices in kindergartens in Austria. It shows how these processes generate inclusionary experiences of belonging for some children and marginalization for others.
Paper long abstract:
Almost every winter, the beginning of Christmas season in Austria is heralded by heated public debates about the proper place of religious celebrations in public childcare institutions for children before school-age. Propelled by increasing anti-Muslim racism, these discussions usually revolve around half-true stories, for example about how Saint Nicholas has allegedly been banned from public kindergartens out of what right-wing politicians frame as "false respect" for Muslim children. Based on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork in two state-regulated and -financed kindergartens in Vienna, this paper explores how kindergarten staff handles these tensions and strives to reconcile their task of transmitting "Austrian traditions" with an understanding of kindergarten as a secular space. For that purpose, I trace how kindergarten pedagogues and their assistants put considerable energy and effort into the production of secularized versions of Christian festivities, while celebratory practices related to other religions are predominantly constructed as a familial responsibility. The paper particularly pays attention to material and spatial dimensions of festive practices like decorating, eating, playing and parading and illustrates how these amount to a selective demarcation as well as blurring of boundaries between public and private spheres. Considering, furthermore, how children participate in, appropriate and distance themselves from these celebrations, it also traces how festive practices nurture experiences of intense belonging for some children, while they feed into and deepen the marginalisation of others.
Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses religious spatialities in Poland in the context of social change and political activism. The examined religious spaces represent the mainstream Catholicism conflated with right-wing political ideologies, but they also constitute spaces of social and religious innovations.
Paper long abstract:
In the times of contemporary Polish religious and populist turmoil, some Catholic spatialities have become arenas for alternative and subversive socio-religious practices and imaginaries. Those emblematic Catholic spatialities trigger, or are instrumentalized for legitimizing the expressions of social discontent and activist movements aimed against hegemonic Catholic and populist discourses.
The proposed topic is especially important in the context of the role that the Catholic church plays in contemporary Poland. According to multiple approaches, it is a religious hegemon shaping social and political lives. Polish Catholicism intersects with right-wing political actions and populist discourses; and therefore, it is often perceived as an oppressive social matrix.
Conversely, we argue that Catholicism should be also examined as one of the principal spaces where subversive and alternative social and religious imaginaries and practices emerge. We will concentrate on several case studies of religious spatialities in Krakow, such as "Pope's window" in terms of lived, conceived and perceived space. We will also ruminate on Catholic religious spatilities as zones where Polish traditional religious practices and discourses encounter new imaginaries introduced by migrants, for instance missionaries coming from the Southern hemisphere.
Following the case studies, we will discuss the religious spatialities in Krakow as important intersections and dialogical hubs for the new understanding of the secular-religious dynamics. This paper is based in ongoing research on agency, deconstruction, and new framings of religion in Polish public sphere.
Paper short abstract:
Monuments to saints are a relatively recent innovation for post-Soviet urban landscape and therefore problematic. They are often seen as contestants of urban spaces, limiting the variety of practices in them. We shall discuss performative and discursive practices which drive or oppose this process.
Paper long abstract:
Starting from 2000s, numerous monuments, commemorating popular Orthodox saints were erected in Russia including 80 statues of saint patrons of matrimony Petr and Fevronia of Murom, 27 statues of St Nicholas, etc., changing both the commemorative landscape of the post-Soviet cities and traditional Orthodox reservedness towards sculptural icons (especially located outside places of worship). The change, however, is problematic for all urban stakeholders, from city administration and businesses who regard it from a political stance, to clergy discussing the sacral status of these unfamiliar objects, to urban activists feeling danger of religious expansion. These objects are simultaneously framed as places of memory and worship, spaces for tourist photography and vernacular religion rituals, centres of urban festivities and rallies, replacing Soviet commemorative objects or entering into complex semiotic and spatial relations with them. But also they highlight controversies of ownership of urban spaces. Any monument, and a monument to a saint specifically, limits the repertoire of socially approved practices in a public space where it stands - therefore monuments to saints can produce or reinforce sacred locations, revitalize abandoned spots, alienate existing points of attraction or even secure empty spaces from unwanted real estate development. In the paper we'll discuss urban practices (both performative and discursive) driving these processes and the place of monuments to saints in the weave of sacral and commemorative geography of contemporary Russian cities.
Paper short abstract:
Starting from Massey's assumption that "space is always in a process of being made", I propose some of the results of my fieldwork in slot halls. In particular, I investigated the interactions between political power and religious power in defining the positioning of gambling halls in cities.
Paper long abstract:
My paper will focus on the active controversy between some forces attributable to the catholic world and public institutions that issue gambling laws. The ethnographic research on slot halls, in two provinces of northern Piedmont in Italy, has allowed me to enter into a debate that highlights the capacity of action of religious power in terms of defining public space. In particular, my analysis focuses on the legal measure called 'distanziometro' which provides for prohibiting the positioning of slot rooms within certain limits from places identified as "sensitive", such as schools, sports facilities, religious institutions, hospitals, credit institutions, railway stations etc. A 2016 law, which became binding after three years, is now being discussed again by the new regional government. This proposed modification is causing the organized protest of the Catholic world which reiterates the need to remove these places from the life of the city community. I investigate my fieldwork results as an example of "the rearticulation of religion in a manner that is commensurate with modern sensibilities and modes of governance" (Mahmood 2009). Furthermore I will put a specific attention on another meaning linked with the gambling space, the one associated to the space of chance, because it calls into question some elements of magic and ritual that make it a terrain of ancient controversy for religious institutions.