Paper short abstract:

Urban rituals participate in the construction of educational imaginaries, which, understood as a base representation of an emblematic population of the city, are manifested in material orders that depend on the circumstances in which the neoliberal city is constituted.

Paper long abstract:

In general, rituals characterize religious practices as a whole. However, the influence of neoliberal capitalism on religion, suggests that the issue could be also thought through the city, its edges, invisible borders, among other aspects that have particularized the scenario of its political normalities and abnormalities. Bogotá is a great Latin American capital, young when it comes to big cities with big problems and economic power. A city that in the mid-1950s began a process of modernization without return that produced margins and peripheries everywhere, and educational practices that became rituals lend themselves to understanding some dynamics in which the urban can be suspended in favor of “city” situations. The neoliberal city that began to take shape at the end of the 70s started forgetting its industrializing dream and gave way to the urban planning of services, banks, universities and other infrastructures typical of postmodern economies. Antonio Nariño University opened its doors in 1977, and by the end of the 90s it had offices in Bogotá and several other cities in the country, one of which, located in the middle of the eastern hills of the Colombian capital, illustrates how educational rituals have built the city in a particularly subtle way, where the violence of gentrifications can go unnoticed in the face of the urgency of more important issues, the long process of consolidation of these new urban realities, and the very profile of an institution that is related with its surroundings from the indelicacy of the subtle.