Paper short abstract

The author examines how pagan culture functions as a repertoire of references through which a subgroup of activists constructs militant identities, within and against their group, in a larger far-right Catholic organization, drawing on ethnographic observation of key collective moments.

Paper long abstract

During the 2015–2016 period, I conducted a participant observation study within Action française Paris, a historic monarchist movement. This research documents both the tensions between Action française and other groups within the right-wing field (such as GUD and Génération Identitaire) and the internal tensions structuring the organization itself.

While Action française presents itself doctrinally as a Catholic and royalist movement, it appears in practice far less homogeneous. Within the Parisian section, a small subgroup of activists gravitated around a charismatic graphic designer and were drawn to pagan-inspired themes, revolutionary nationalist ideas, and neofolk music.

We will analyze the social dynamics of this group within Action française by exploring two dialectical logics. The first concerns the opposition between a Catholic pole, endowed with strong social and cultural capital and rooted in families historically linked to Action française, and a paganophile pole originating from middle- or popular class backgrounds with no prior socialization into far-right activism.

The second logic contrasts the group’s tendency toward homogenization with processes of individuation observable among certain members. While Action française seeks to impose on its members a social identity as “camelots” in accordance with its doctrine, it also appears as a relatively open space of expression, in which activists stage social identities based on highly specific interests and cultural references.

Finally, the paper examines pagan culture as a repertoire of references through which activists construct their social and militant identities. This analysis is grounded in ethnographic observations of several particularly significant moments of collective life.

Paper short abstract

This paper examines how embodied and sonic practices in recent Iranian protests transform pain and repression into shared hope and meaning.it shows how chanting,silence, and bodily presence create collective solidarity and sustain politico-spiritual resistance beyond formal ideology in crisis.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the intersections of contemporary spiritualities and collective mobilization in recent Iranian protest movements, focusing on how hope, pain, and meaning are enacted through embodied and sonic practices. Drawing on qualitative interviews, digital ethnography, and analysis of personal narratives and audiovisual archives, the study adopts a bottom-up anthropological perspective to explore how experiences of repression, uncertainty, and suffering are transformed into shared emotional and ethical resources for collective action.

Spirituality is approached as a lived and situational mode of sense-making rather than an institutional framework. Practices such as chanting, ritualized silence, mourning, and bodily presence in public and semi-public spaces generate affective intensities and ethical commitments, blurring the boundaries between political protest and spiritual expression. Sound and the body operate as mediators between individual vulnerability and collective solidarity, enabling endurance, hope, and participation in everyday forms of resistance.

By foregrounding sensory and emotional dimensions, this paper contributes to debates on new social movements and contemporary spiritualities, highlighting how embodied and sonic pathways sustain hope and solidarity under authoritarian conditions. It emphasizes that everyday resistance is both materially and spiritually enacted, producing alternative imaginaries of dignity, community, and life beyond state narratives.

Paper short abstract

Drawing on ethnographic research in New Mexico, USA, this paper theorizes Grof breathwork as an affective infrastructure mediating between embodied practice and socio-political struggle. It examines how feminist facilitation both enables and constrains collective mobilization.

Paper long abstract

Situating Grof breathwork practices within histories of sensory discipline and late-liberal forms of somatic self-governance, this paper draws on ethnographic research in New Mexico. Engaging anthropological critiques of holistic health and neoliberal ethopolitics, I analyze how postsecular breathwork practices function simultaneously as techniques of affective regulation and as sites of ethical and political experimentation.

While often framed as individualized healing modalities, these practices are shaped by facilitation styles grounded in feminist and queer ethics of care. These styles cultivate relational and attunement-based forms of attention that challenge individualized models of therapeutic expertise.

Centering on what one interlocutor calls “the Great Allowing,” the paper examines anger as a political emotion shaped by histories of silencing and structural inequality. It asks whether the cultivation of emotional expression within contemporary ‘spiritual’ spaces enables forms of collective resistance or risks re-individualizing structural harm through therapeutic idioms.

At the same time, breathwork practices are embedded in therapeutic markets, commodified trainings, and holistic imaginaries that can constrain mobilization. It may inadvertently redirect attention from structural violence, while neoliberal somatic ethics situate bodies as sites of moral and emotional accountability. In this tension, breathwork emerges as an ambivalent affective infrastructure: it enables relationality, care, and attunement, while remaining entangled with regimes of self-optimization and governance. It shows how feminist facilitation within breathwork both enables new forms of collective attention and relational engagement, while simultaneously constraining mobilization through its entanglement with therapeutic and marketized frameworks.

Paper short abstract

Drawing on ethnography of a messianic fundamentalist congregation in Northern Ireland, this paper develops a comparative perspective with earlier research on spiritual seekers, exploring intersections between forms of religiosity, political attitudes, and social trajectories.

Paper long abstract

This paper draws on my most recent ethnographic research on a messianic and fundamentalist congregation in Northern Ireland (“Ahava”), as well as on the religious and political networks in which it is embedded. This case study forms part of a broader fundamentalist counterculture, both at regional and transnational levels, and thus provides an interesting entry point for analysing logics of commitment and forms of political mobilisation. This ethnography has also enabled the development of a comparative perspective. Indeed, in my earlier research on “spiritual seekers”, I focused on social actors who believed in progress understood as self-transformation—that is, an individualised mode of engagement that seemed largely disconnected from politics and collective action. By contrast, the Ahava case confronted me with individuals holding premillennial prophetic views of the Second Coming, convinced of the imminence and inevitability of an apocalyptic end of the world, for whom progress appears futile, if not counterproductive. And yet, at a time when commitments and collective affiliations are widely perceived as eroding in Euro-American societies, these fundamentalists seem to embody some of the last remaining activists, mobilising both around religious goals and through fervent engagement in a re-enchanted political sphere. The comparison thus brings into focus intersections between forms of religiosity, political attitudes, and social trajectories, which this paper seeks to analyse.

Paper short abstract

In Brazil’s religious movement Vale do Amanhecer (Valley of the Dawn), mediumship enables shifts toward Romani identity and reshapes activism, representation, and political legitimacy through spiritual practice and state interaction.

Paper long abstract

Some leaders and followers of the Brazilian religious movement Vale do Amanhecer (Valley of the Dawn) have raised awareness of Cigano (Brazilian Romani/“Gypsy”) social challenges, fostered activism, and influenced political decisions. In this syncretic Christian and Spiritist karmic movement, founded in 1959 by Tia Neiva in Planaltina, Brazil, mediums incorporate Cigano entities, including those of the working line of Ciganas Taganas. Mediums who incorporate Cigano spirits—also known as 'ciganos de alma' (Gypsies of the soul)—often shift their ethnic identification toward Romani/Cigano, drawing on ancestral narratives such as family stories and inherited rituals. How do these “Gypsies of the soul” come to be accepted or tolerated as representatives of Romani culture by state institutions and activist networks? How does their visibility affect the politics of representation and recognition of Romani communities? This theoretical discussion is situated at the intersection of the anthropology of Brazilian religions related to Vale do Amanhecer and the “Gypsies of the soul” (Pierini 2023; Maia 2014, 2015, 2018; Madureira 2010; Bomfim 2002), debates on passing and the construction of identity in Romani Studies (Wakeley-Smith 2023; Styrkacz 2024), and methodological analysis of categorization and taxonomies (Yanow 2016; Roth 2005). This case study contributes to understanding how mediumship functions as a catalyst of ethnic conversion and how identity claims reshape political legitimacy. The presentation is based on multisited ethnographic fieldwork (Brasília, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro), digital ethnography, and media analysis of the YouTube channel of the first Cigana Tagana.

Paper short abstract

Based on qualitative research in northern Peru, this paper shows how popular religiosity becomes a source that nourishes social critique, affirms marginalised histories, and challenges polarising neoliberal and postcolonial orders.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores popular religiosity as a site of critique and mobilization in contexts marked by social marginalisation and historical inequality. Drawing on qualitative research among campesinxs in the northern Peruvian region of Bajo Piura, it examines how locally embedded forms of Christianity—deeply entangled with colonial histories—are reworked into practices that contest neoliberal and postcolonial orders.

Based on constructivist Grounded Theory and 43 qualitative interviews conducted between 2020 and 2023, the analysis shows how popular religious narratives articulate an incongruence with dominant socio-economic realities and legitimize the struggle of the campesinxs in a dispute over land use. Religious practices generate critical interpretations of injustice, affirm devalued autochthonous histories, and enable forms of collective reflection and everyday resistance.

By engaging with decolonial theory, Latin American Thought, and liberation theology, the paper argues that popular religiosity should be understood not exclusively as a residual or conservative force, but as a dynamic field through which polarisation is both experienced and challenged. In doing so, the paper highlights how religious practices and narratives can open critical and emancipatory possibilities beyond binary oppositions of domination and resistance and challenge a often implicit secular norm in social sciences.

Paper short abstract

This paper examines how Issan Dorsey articulated queer Buddhist care as a form of grassroots spiritual mobilization during the early AIDS crisis. It explores how street-level Buddhist practices transformed compassion into collective care, solidarity, and ethical response within queer communities.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how Issan Dorsey (1933–1990), a former drag performer, sex worker, and recovering addict who later became a Soto Zen priest, articulated a form of queer Buddhist care that functioned as a grassroots spiritual mobilization during the early AIDS crisis. Situated at the intersection of queer subcultures, spirituality, and activist care practices, Issan’s work offers a bottom-up response to moral stigma, governmental neglect, and the affective violence surrounding AIDS.

Drawing on textual and cultural analysis, the paper explores Issan’s teachings, public presence, and community-based practices as forms of spiritual engagement rather than individualized religious devotion. In a context shaped by public panic and moralizing discourses on sexuality, Issan reframed suffering not as punishment but as a relational condition that demanded proximity, shared vulnerability, and everyday practices of care. Through what I conceptualize as “On the Streets of Zen,” together with the AIDS Bodhisattva Path and his queer inflection of Dōgen’s notion of Uji (Being-Time), Issan accompanied addicts, sex workers, and unhoused LGBT+ people across San Francisco’s queer communities.

The founding of Maitri Hospice exemplifies how Buddhist spirituality became embedded in grassroots caregiving, transforming compassion into a collective and embodied practice of solidarity. By integrating queer temporality with Buddhist ethics, the paper argues that Issan’s “Queer Uji” articulated an alternative cultural politics of time that challenged dominant narratives of purity, urgency, and moral failure. In doing so, queer Buddhist care emerged as a modality of politico-spiritual mobilization that reimagined crisis as a site of ethical relation and collective transformation.

Paper short abstract

Drawing on ethnographic data collected in French-speaking Europe, this paper explores how individuals practising Pagan, holistic and esoteric spiritualities embrace ‘Soft Ecology’ as a non-militant yet engaged mode of environmental involvement.

Paper long abstract

In this pivotal moment for our planet's future, many members of ‘alternative’ spiritual communities have turned to the vast field of eco-spirituality to find tools for developing modes of ecological engagement and cultivating relational ethics. Described as a ‘quiet revolution’ (Sponsel, 2012), eco-spirituality has long been criticised for its depoliticised and individualistic character (Bookchin, 1990). However, recent surveys conducted in French-speaking Europe have challenged these assumptions, exploring why practitioners value eco-spiritual practices as vital to initiating an effective and collective ecological transition (Becci, 2023; Chamel, 2024; Itel, 2023). Although these individuals explicitly distance themselves from militant environmentalism —often perceived as confrontational and morally prescriptive— their attitudes and actions cannot be qualified as ‘indifferent’.

This paper explores how spiritual seekers relate to ecospirituality as a form of ‘Soft Ecology’: an environmental engagement that does not conform to conventional models of political activism or militant ecological movements, yet cannot be reduced to apolitical individualism. Drawing on empirical data collected in France, Switzerland, and Belgium, this paper examines how these actors articulate ecological concern through spiritual and therapeutic practices rather than collective protest, lobbying, or ideological and political mobilisation. Advancing the ‘ethics of care’, this paper also argues that ecospirituality enacts a micro-social form of ecological engagement centred on vulnerability, interdependence, and attentiveness to everyday life. This conceptualisation of ‘Soft Ecology’ reframes environmental responsibility not as a duty enforced through norms or activism, but as a disposition emerging from lived experience, as well as affective and embodied bonds with the more-than-human world.