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P192


Rituals against gentrification: drama, performance and religious practices in spaces of urban conflict 
Convenors:
Víctor Albert Blanco (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), ISOR)
Stefano Portelli (Università degli Studi Roma Tre)
Manuel Delgado-Ruiz (Universitat de Barcelona)
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Chair:
Marta Contijoch-Torres (Universitat de Barcelona)
Formats:
Panel
Mode:
Face-to-face
:
Facultat de Geografia i Història 206
Sessions:
Friday 26 July, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Madrid

Short Abstract:

This panel aims at updating our understanding of the link between rituals and urban transformations imposed by neoliberal capitalist planning policies.

Long Abstract:

This panel aims at updating our understanding of the link between rituals and urban transformations imposed by neoliberal capitalist planning policies. While resistance against gentrification and displacement becomes planetary, and the awareness of the spatial implications of urban religion grows, the question of the ritual dimension of conflicts over space has remained unaddressed. Rituals are culturally defined, repetitive, and obligatory practices, that condense symbols and organize the function of collective expression and behavior. In urban contexts, public rituals may include mass celebrations in honor of a local saint, minor cults that convey social discontent in ritual forms, but also any kind of civil mobilization, up to the systematic transformation of streets and squares in landscapes of barricades and fire. All these are totally or partially variants of what symbolic anthropology calls “social dramas”: codified performances that allow the emergence of recalcitrance, opposition, and disaffection towards a social order embedded in space and in its mutations. Proposals for this panel could focus on the strategies deployed by religious groups to resist or adapt to the urban changes, on the reactions of allegedly non-religious collectives to the presence of religious expressions in the same areas, or on the forms of urban governance applied to confessional practices, especially in cities with high rates of diversity; but also on the role of religious groups and rituals in the economic and symbolic valorization of specific neighborhoods. We are also interested in how political protests and even insurrections adopt their liturgies, and languages proceeding from the religious sphere. Only a convention separates religious from secular rituals; all of them – from those manifesting forms of religiosity unaccepted by mainstream society, to those in which anger emerges as a form of cultural expression – systematically reveal the force of what Lefebvre called “the urban”, that is, the urban society, or the urban as society, in its permanent conflict with whatever attempts to limit or foreclose its space.

Accepted papers:

Session 1 Friday 26 July, 2024, -
Session 2 Friday 26 July, 2024, -