Paper short abstract:

By focusing on a neighborhood marked by a relevant presence of South Asian migrants, in this paper I examine how devotional and ritual practices performed by Sinhalese people living in Messina (South Italy) trigger place-making processes, “doing and undoing” the city’s social and moral boundaries.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I examine the relation between religion and the city by examining whether and how religious practices activated by migrant groups “do and undo” urban spaces, boundaries and meanings.

Drawing on an ethnographic research aimed at exploring place-making processes triggered by migrants’ rituals, I will focus on Catholic and Buddhist Sinhalese from Sri Lanka – the largest foreign community in the Sicilian city of Messina (Southern Italy). In particular, I will deal with an old neighborhood not far from the city center, nowadays frequented mostly by foreign people (especially Sri Lankans), and that is strongly associated with urban degradation in common public rhetoric.

In recent years, the main square of the neighborhood, the People’s Square, hosts Catholic and Buddhist religious practices organized by the Sinhalese. At Christmas, a nativity scene is set up by Sinhala Catholics and blessed, while on the occasion of the Vesak festivity the Buddhist monk personally takes part in the public collection and distribution of food – offered to Italian people too.

Both religious initiatives aim to reverse the social stigmatization generally associated with the neighborhood and the foreign people attending it, who therefore try to “reveal” themselves and connect to Italian people, with whom interactions are usually seldom.

Turning the ethnographic gaze to this urban neighborhood will be useful to theorize how cities are remapped within the experience of migration, understanding to what extent religious practices activated by migrants play a role in the social production of shared local identities.

Paper short abstract:

Pentecostalism has a global character, but the local dimension is crucial in migration processes. In fact, churches support migrants’ paths of rooting in new urban spaces. I analyse the role of Romanian Pentecostal churches in two neighbourhoods of an Italian city and in Romanian cities of departure

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I analyse the complex relationship between Pentecostal religion and urban spaces. I focus on the study of Romanian migrants in the city of Turin in north-western Italy and in two cities of origin in north-eastern Romania. While much of the anthropological literature on Pentecostalism emphasizes its de-territorialized character and its ability to reinforce global memberships that do not attach importance to specific places, I adopt a different perspective. Instead, I emphasize the crucial role of the territorial dimension, as migrants take root in specific neighbourhoods because of their religious beliefs. They domesticate these areas by building places of worship and performing ritual acts in public spaces. I examine two churches built in very different neighbourhoods: one in a multi-ethnic area in an extremely poor environment and another in a central district inhabited by a more affluent population. The members of these churches have special relationships with other residents and the churches play a special role in the symbolic and socio-economic fabric of their respective neighbourhoods. In the next part of my analysis, I examine two Pentecostal churches in Turin's migrant outmigration sites that have emerged through economic and social remittances and are led by pastors who are themselves returning migrants. These churches reshape both physical and symbolic spaces in those districts where they are and play a fundamental role in redefining the relationships between returnees and non-migrants.

Paper short abstract:

In this communication, we show how religious communities address an essential need for space at a neighborhood level. The spaces created, inhabited and made available by religious communities serve as refuge, hosting services that might otherwise be unavailable in the costly urban setting of Geneva.

Paper long abstract:

In Geneva’s urban landscape the access to spaces is often difficult. However, the availability of spaces is an important condition for the deployment of activities that enable the creation of social ties leading to community building. The shared use of spaces among different religious communities, either through rental or lending arrangements, is an indirect response to the challenges linked to urban saturation. The repurposing of existing locations and new and sometimes multiple uses is one of the strategies employed by actors in search of places to gather. The majority of religious communities, aside from historic churches, often relies on sub-renting places of worship or gathers in spaces not initially conceived for religious purposes, such as commercial or residential buildings that have been converted. Religious communities that dispose of larger spaces however frequently share them with minorities lacking access to a place of worship, but also with local residents or neighborhood associations.

In the realm of the participative research project ReligioCités, led by the Cross-Cantonal Information Center on Beliefs, a Geneva-based applied research center, we observed a wide range of secular activities that are hosted in places of worship. These practices attract divers publics and are the result of a network of relationships created with other social actors within the neighborhood.

Finally, we argue that these places serve as “refuge”, hosting and providing services that would otherwise be unavailable in the expensive urban setting of Geneva. We conceptualize this dynamic with the notion of “urban hospitality” (Joseph 1998, Stavo-Debauge 2020).

Paper short abstract:

With an ethnographic focus on Naga churches in New Delhi, this paper explores the challenges and opportunities associated with Christian living in the mega-city at a time of deepening political and economic uncertainties and anxieties that Naga migrants experience there.

Paper long abstract:

For the past 20 years or so, New Delhi has been attracting increasing numbers of Naga migrants from Northeast India who have tended to cluster in certain neighbourhoods in the mega-city. They have been doing that both for greater convenience and social support but also for greater safety, given their precarious position as what I call ‘hyper-visible’ migrants who experience multi-dimensional forms of everyday violence, discrimination and exclusion in New Delhi. With majority Naga being Christian, it is not surprising that while creating spaces and places for themselves and their communities in the patchwork of urban living, Naga migrants have also established a multitude of ethnic churches in New Delhi. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in several such churches across New Delhi, this paper explores the opportunities and challenges that Naga pastors experience in establishing and running churches in the mega-city – and how religious-place making in a foreign, and often hostile, urban environment has propelled them to think of different ways in which they could innovatively cater to the spiritual and social needs of their congregants. The paper argues that in order to understand the complex ways in which the mega-city has had a transformative impact on Naga church and community life in New Delhi, we need to gain better ethnographic insights into the everyday lived experiences of Naga Christians amidst the ever-increasing uncertainty and precariousness of the urban mode of life for religious and ethnic minorities in India’s capital city.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the friction between state-mandated processes of place-making and citizens’ religiously inflected forms of identification and organization, shedding light on the contested and negotiated place of Islam in Dutch governmental landscapes.

Paper long abstract:

Social professionals in Dutch urban contexts aim at designing and doing urban social policies with residents. The neighborhood is envisioned as the scale at which this cooperation with local residents should flourish. Residents may, however, bring different religious values and orientations. What does this mean for making and doing social policies with residents?

In this paper, I focus on an ethnoracially diverse and working-class neighborhood to show how patterns of desiring and problematizing communities run through these processes. Perceptions of religion, more specifically, Islam, play an integral part because it constructs notions of ‘difficult-to-reach-groups’ and ‘closed-off communities’. For social professionals, the assumed closed nature and in-group character of these groups goes against their mission to bolster social cohesion.

I examine this simultaneous process of desiring and problematization community involvement via the role of an active resident in local place-making processes. This resident, who perceives the neighborhood as his home and the Islam as his guidance, takes up an advocacy role through organizing social initiatives that focus on the neighborhood and bring together Islamic residents. His role and stark presence in local place-making processes lead to friction and contestation regarding representation and the relation between religion and state. Other residents accuse him of acting as if the neighborhood merely consists of a ‘Muslim community’, while public officials and social workers question the desirability of Islamic activities. These contestations provide insight into the friction between state-mandated processes of place-making and those of citizens who prioritize religiously inflected forms of identification and organization.

Paper short abstract:

I illustrate Śaktipur’s 'cosmological architecture', or the manifestation of Śakti and Śiva’s eternal play (the negotiation between, on one side, the manifest and expanded and, on the other, the abstract and contracted) through spaces and activities that reflect Śakti'a and Śiva's respective nature.

Paper long abstract:

Nested in a rural valley surrounded by nine hills, the South Indian temple-complex Śaktipur is more than just a place of worship. Presenting two main temples (Śrī Meru, dedicated to Śakti, and Dakśavati, for Śiva), two shrines (Kāmākhyā, manifesting Devī’s yoni, womb or vulva, and Śivalāyam, embodying Śiva’s liṅga, phallus), two homam salas, one ashram housing Guruamma and Gurujī’s friends and family members, one dormitory where ritual specialists and pilgrims live, one canteen, some fields and gardens, and a cow-shed, in Śaktipur the worldly and the transcendent merge in ways that invite us to rethink conventional rural–urban and human–divine dichotomies.

In this talk, I illustrate what I call Śaktipur’s ‘cosmological architecture’, or the manifestation of Śakti and Śiva’s eternal play (namely the negotiation between, on one side, the manifest and expanded and, on the other, the abstract and contracted) through spaces and activities that reflect Śakti’s and Śiva’s respective nature.

As emerges from their distinct architectonic features and the different types of ritual and worldly activities they host, (1) Śrī Meru is a ‘cosmic household’ that embodies Śakti’s life-affirming expansion, (2) Kāmākhyā and Śivālayam manifest Śakti and Śiva’s playful quarrel and, finally, (3) Dakśavati embodies Śiva’s contraction beyond beingness.

In manifesting Śakti and Śiva’s cosmic play through spaces and practices that span the ritual and worldly domains, Śaktipur blurs the human and the divine. The ensuing conceptual ambiguity calls for new analytical frameworks which, I suggest, can emerge from a methodology that is rooted in dwelling.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in two neighbourhoods of the global city of Bangalore - one at the heart of the city and one on the periphery – this paper explores how the city is constructed as a palimpsest of 'villages' encompassing local histories, myths, and stories.

Paper long abstract:

Bangalore, the third most populous city of India, has predominantly been a case study for understanding globalization, unchecked rapid development, and the consequent exacerbation of urban problems. Erstwhile known as a pensioner’s paradise, it exploded into an urban agglomeration after the Information Technology boom at the turn of the millennium. This has surfaced deep infrastructure related problems and social tensions caused by increasing migration to the city. However, these rapid changes have not obliterated the ‘villages’ of the city. Indeed, they have blurred the boundaries between the city, the sub-urban and the rural. Drawing on two case studies of neighbourhoods – one at the heart of the city and one on the periphery – this paper explores how the city is constructed as a palimpsest of villages encompassing local histories, myths, and stories from origin villages of immigrant communities. This paper draws on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork, since January 2023, in the two neighbourhoods. The local myths and memories of inhabitants highlight the nature of the city as ‘always-in-flux’, amidst the terrains of expansion, movement, change and erasure. The two neighbourhoods have come to typify different aspects of the city, and stake claim to a slice of the city, despite political assertions of belonging based on biographical history, or linguistic identities. At the crux of this exploration, the study of neighbourhoods enables conversations with anthropological scholarship on intimate relations between the human and the non-human, presented in the forms of local gods, stone spirits, and nature.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how Hojai Muslim migrants, originally from Assam, navigate Mumbai's Mohammad Ali Road to establish new transnational networks. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, it focuses on how religious practices construct and adapt spiritual imaginaries of migration.

Paper long abstract:

For more than a decade, Mohammad Ali Road has been attracting Muslim migrant workers to work in the hospitality and tourism industry. This neighbourhood has a strong overlap with Muslim networks due to the Hajj Committee of India. This paper examines Islamic practices in the neighbourhood through the use of religious techniques, such as tariqas, to transform Hojai migrants' social ties (silsilas) into transnational movements. The complexities of making and unmaking the neighbourhood into connectedness have amplified into a new trans-local environment. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Mumbai, this paper argues how Hojai migrants can assimilate into spiritual imaginaries through the processes of labour. This led to the development of transnational practices and negotiations with different state and non-state actors (rent collectors, brokers, travel agents, visa traders, recruiting agencies, and NGOs), which have facilitated their move from Mumbai to the Arabian Peninsula. While the paper explores how the neighbourhood shaped religious attitudes, beliefs, and motivations, I draw my analysis through the intersection of migration and religion within the context of transcendence.

Based on the narratives of the interlocutors, this paper addresses two questions: firstly, how has knowledge of religious mobilization supported these Hojai migrants in Mumbai? Second, how does their religious experience shape Assam's Hojai? The paper engages these questions to understand religious practice as a heuristic analysis of tools, including their epistemic and material aspects. To this end, the paper reflects how the influence of religion impacted the social lives of migrants in a trans-local setting.