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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:
- Wednesday 22 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 Wednesday 22 July, 2020, -Paper short abstract:
Using ethnographic case studies from research on social media musicking among Spanish migrants in London, this paper analyses how music rituals are enacted on secular and religious social media spaces focusing on three case studies: music memes, music games, and celebrity mourning practices.
Paper long abstract:
Media circulation rituals are foundational stones of online communication, allowing users to articulate morality and values and contribute to sociality. Social media activities can also be considered moral in themselves (Miller et al. 2016), but the crucial role of music practices in this mediascape is still unascertained. Using ethnographic case studies from my research on social media musicking among Spanish migrants in London, I analyse how music rituals are enacted on social media focusing on three case studies: music memes, music games, and celebrity mourning practices. Social media constitutes a space where moral actions are subject to adjudication (Miller 2012), and a medium to develop parasocial interactions with others and the supernatural realm through the circulation and exchange of sacralised music items. These interactions are made possible by the users' tacit understanding of imagined modes of listening. Similarly, musicking rituals on social media help users to establish norms and values of taste, affect, and behaviour, often using symbolic and imagined elements of visual music media. Consequently, in online communication music media becomes a ritualised form of vernacular grammar that is used to participate in group sociality, connecting the mundane and the everyday with the eternal and the moral. In conclusion, musicking practices of circulation and exchange of music on social media constitute online forms of ritualised exchange of music commodities and knowledge, in which users expand and enrich their social lives by sending music into a partially unknown social circle from which they may not receive anything in return.
Paper short abstract:
In secularized Eastern Germany, elements recognized locally as related to, originating from or belonging to religious sphere appear nevertheless in unexpectedly strong ways. Especially religious materiality serves as a resource used by all kinds of actors in nonreligious and postreligious ways.
Paper long abstract:
Analysing cases of use of church buildings in North-Eastern Germany, I draw attention to the fact that in the region considered as strongly secularized, elements recognized as related to, originating from or belonging to religious sphere appear in public discussions in unexpectedly strong ways. Especially religious materiality, in form of religious buildings, serves as a resource used by all kinds of actors engaged in identity politics, and discussions concerning heritage as/and future.
Based on Quack (2014) and Lee (2012), I propose a scalar concept of nonreligiousness to refer to relationships between those who in a given place and time define themselves as not belonging to a religious field, and those phenomena, objects or people, who are perceived by the former as religious. Nonreligiousness is understood as a relationship between what is historically defined and recognized as religious, and what self-defines as beyond the religious field. Postreligious is a term inspired by the works of Höhn (2006) and points out that in recent decades in Europe religion is no longer seen as providing a metaphysical social bond or a reservoir of answers to questions concerning meaning of life, but instead, it is mostly seen as aesthetics and as a creator of moods.
I look at bottom-up initiatives aimed at creating a common cross-border Polish-German space, which mobilise aspects of religious practices, identities, and, most importantly, materialities. This in turn allows for looking at the role of religion in contemporary Europe, as providing a platform for negotiation and contestation of identities.
Paper short abstract:
The Holocaust figures as an exceptional space-time in European claims of living in secular tolerance. This paper complicates these assumptions by taking the case of a plea for Muslim prayer at Auschwitz Memorial to interrogate how European imaginaries of humanity regiment religious difference.
Paper long abstract:
Scholars have attended to how the secular, as the worldly episteme, has consolidated and shaped the modern notion of religion. But what if the secular is predicated upon paradoxical and localized nodal points in modern history, including and not limited to the genocide of European Jewry and others during the Holocaust? The Holocaust figures as an exceptional space-time in European claims of living after religious violence and in secular tolerance. And although perennially commemorated and sacralized as an exception to European liberal-democracy, Holocaust memorial sites are national heritage sites employed by EU states for secular purposes. Based on long-term ethnographic research with a secondary-school in Berlin, this paper discusses how a school trip to Auschwitz Memorial as a form of claiming universal humanity is challenged by the presence of Muslim religious practices at the Memorial site. By attending to a case of Muslim prayer at the memorial site and the anxieties it triggered, this paper contrasts Muslim religious difference with the notion of secular humanity. In taking this contrast as a starting point, the paper addresses how Muslim practices in public and particularly so at Holocaust Memorial sites contest and disturb the exceptional character of genocidal violence as it has been folded into a narrative about European secularism. By bringing out Auschwitz as the paradigmatic space of exception (Agamben 2005; Das & Poole 2009) this paper will explore how European secularism feeds on the Holocaust as a space-time that legitimizes the governance of religious minorities in the present.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores religious, secular and in-between spaces based on ethnographic research with a revived synagogue and its community and on consideration of other case studies. Such study may set the stage to develop perspectives of space as emerging beyond the division between secular-religious.
Paper long abstract:
This paper is based on ethnographic research with a synagogue whose building was restored against all the odds in the 1990's in Greece. This ancient site whose worshippers were annihilated in WWII, has gradually emerged to become a diverse heritage site with a new community formed by self-identified as religious, secular, spiritual etc. members. While an active synagogue, it is also a memory and commemoration place, a touristic site, a cultural and research centre. It represents, thus, an archaeological monument which continues to live as active urban space of multiple temporalities and resignifications. As Smith (2003) underscores, the tension between action (activities) and material representation (places) is an important element of heritage which can also be a process of dissent and contestation. Taking as starting point an alternative approach to space as always becoming, constituted through interactions, based upon the existence of plurality, 'a product of relations-between' (Massey 2005), this paper explores how the synagogue's revival has challenged current ideas of boundaries and boundaries permeability between the religious and the secular. As Asad (2003) has shown the secular "is not a simple break" from the religious, or "an essence that excludes the sacred". Practices emerged at this synagogue extend beyond its physical space into the everyday communal and personal lives. According to Ammerman's (2014) study of "lived religion" as expressed in the everyday life embodied and enacted forms of spirituality, hybrid types of spiritual narratives occur. This paper argues for the existence of such in-between both secular and religious spaces.