Paper short abstract:

This brief presentation focuses on the effects of the Second Vatican Council on religious beliefs and practice in rural Spain. Political and socioeconomic developments in Spain, particularly the fall of the Franco regime, will also be considered.

Paper long abstract:

Based on ethnographic research during the 1960s and 1970s, this presentation examines the decline of everyday Roman Catholic religious beliefs and practice throughout Spain. There is every indication that actions taken by the clergy themselves were largely responsible for the secular attitudes that characterize most Spaniards today. Religious reforms introduced by the Second Vatican Council undermined faith in ancient spiritual verities. Among a host of popular actions, priests themselves annulled religious processions that for centuries had been a source of spiritual strength and social cohesion. The Mass, newly conducted in the vernacular and governed by unfamiliar communion rules, overnight became virtually unrecognizable to the majority of congregants. In addition, longstanding anti-clerical sentiments, which had been suppressed during the Franco regime, received legitimate outlet after the dictator's death in November 1975. Tourism, economic development, the introduction of mass media, and the opening of Spain to immigrant workers also played an important role in the secularization process.

Paper short abstract:

The aim of my presentation is to understand the practice through human-object relationship, materiality, and everyday life. By follow perspectives of material culture studies and vernacular religion, the significance of gems is more about everyday life and personhood than religion.

Paper long abstract:

Wearing crystal gemstones is a widespread practice in contemporary New Spirituality in Estonia and elsewhere. People wear gems in a form of pendant, bracelet, necklace, earring, ring, jewelry or carry gems with them in a bag or a pocket. Often people wear crystals every day constantly.

The practice is part of the material religion of New Spirituality and it can be analyzed from the perspective of material culture studies. Followed by this perspective, I study the mutual relationship between humans and gemstones. Also, it is a practice of everyday religion and vernacular religion. My informants buy and wear gems to deal with personal issues and difficulties in everyday life by supporting their personalities and personal qualities. This is a process of objectification - gems develop and enrich a person and her/his capacities. Gems are biographical objects, that are interweaved with owner`s biography and personality. Also, gemstones have an agency, and gems and persons are entangled and mutually dependent in practice.

The physical and sensory experience of wearing gems mediates closeness and intimacy with gemstones. Gems need to be close to one`s body to have an effect. From the ontological perspective, meanings and concepts are identical to objects, and the aim is to think through things. Following this methodology, I have adopted an emic term 'my stone' that refers to singular gemstones my interviewees wore and had a deeply emotional and personal relationship with. For many of my informants, these gems are like the extension of the self.

Paper short abstract:

Comunione e Liberazione, an Italian-rooted Roman Catholic-based religious movement, produced a new phenomenon within itself, a "flying community" that embraced members of Ukraine, Russia, Belarus and Italy. How they communicate about themselves? Look at their events as mediators for social changes.

Paper long abstract:

Comunione e Liberazione (hereafter - CL) is an Italian-rooted Roman Catholic-based religious movement that has disseminated globally to 76 countries. In the 1950s-60s, CL developed as an active anti-communist group, inspired by one of the prophesies by the Lady of Fatima regarding the consecration of Russia, and expended their activities to the former Soviet Union. Together with The Russia Cristiana foundation established in Seriate, Italy, in 1957, Italian CL members supported Christians and dissident movement in the former Soviet Union creating a mission in Siberia, which later relocated to the European part of Russia having formed a center in Moscow.

CL today produced a new phenomenon within the movement, a "flying community" that embraced members of neighbor countries: Ukraine, Russia and Belarus of different ages and ethnic origins, and Italian long-or-short-term visitors. Its members have different denominational affiliation as Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christians. The mission in Ukraine has been established through CL activities in Russia, and have a strong presence of Italian-born members. Since 2013, the group members regularly organize events in the different places where they live, mostly in Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Minsk; also Lviv, Odessa, Kherson, Gomel and Moscow are for occasional events.

I look at CL activities as translocal places for cultural overlapping (Low and Lawrence-Zún͂iga 2003), and exhibits as spatial tactics and heterotopia as a strategy and/or technique of power and social control with different functions for insiders and outsiders (Foucault 1986, Yeager 1996) where festive are mediators for social change (Picard 2016).

Paper short abstract:

I will analyse the way in which the Komi hunters in the Russian North discuss their world perception and animistic basics of their ideas and behavioral routines. I will also consider possible impact of new animistic movements and ideas on the Komi hunters' discourse.

Paper long abstract:

The aim of my study is to analyse animistic ideas and behavior among the Komi hunters. The Komi inhabit the north-eastern corner of the European Russia. They were baptized in the 14th century and scholars usually consider that traces of animism are almost extinct among the Komi. On the other hand, long essayist tradition perceives a Komi forest as a mystical source of Komi identity. I have done ethnographic fieldwork among the Komi hunters since the mid-1990s and recorded numerous narratives with animist substrate. Besides, everyday conversations with the hunters serve as a source for my understanding of Komi hunting practice, motivated by animistic ideas. I also consider impressions from hunting trips for assessing the way in which animist conduct is actually present in a Komi hunting practice. My ethnographic explorations enable to confirm that the Komi hunters' world perception and practical behavior have a certain animistic background. However, it is complicated to establish the state-of-art of the Komi vernacular animism. Even after two decades of investigations, the occurrence of it remains rather vague and ambivalent to me. It may be that this vagueness of my impressions has something to do with the mode of Komi animism as such. There are only scarce explicit evidence of actual animistic ideas and ways of behavior but, at the same time, the animistic code of conduct prescribes evasive presentation of one's potential convictions. Anyhow, this tangible animism differs clearly from a mystical approach of urban animistic ideas that also circulate among the Komi.

Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes various concepts of the sacred attached tothe Royal Hill in Kraków. 'Traditional' and 'alternative' religious practices performed at the Hill not only challenge but also influence ordinary worship routines related to the Hill's complex religious-heritage landscape and materiality

Paper long abstract:

The Royal Hill in the city of Kraków (Poland) generates and absorbs many concepts of the sacred. The multivocal religious landscape of the Hill attracts seemingly different groups of worshipers who perform specific patterns of worship routines. The Hill is renown as a significant Christian pilgrimage site. The Roman Catholic cathedral is connected to the cults of medieval and contemporary Polish saints. The Cathedral is also an important historic monument celebrated by many Poles as a temple of 'national heritage' and 'Polish Pantheon' where royal tombs and sarcophagi of national heroes can be seen. While the Christian history of Poland is celebrated in the Cathedral and in the Castle's museum, the Royal Hill also attracts neo-Pagans searching for places and material objects connected to pre-Christian Slavic rites. Another sacred spot is related to the 'earth chakra' - the energy spot or a ley line believed to be located at the Hill. Groups of energy seekers, 'alternative' spirituality practitioners, followers of 'Oriental religions', non-conventional healers perform their practices at the site, even though the cathedral and museum managers oppose them and restrict access to a very small 'energetic area'.

I am proposing to use an example of the Royal Hill in Kraków to discuss complexity and diversity of contemporary worship routines. At the Hill, varying concepts of the sacred are being celebrated by different groups of people who use the same space. Conflict and cohabitation, competition and mutual borrowing, separation and mingling shape 'alternative' as well as more 'traditional' worship routines.

Paper short abstract:

After two-years fieldwork within Mandirs, Masjids and Gurdwaras across Europe, the paper builds on visual ethnographic data to investigate how worship routines and lay matters find expression in such temples: thresholds of private/public, community/society, change/continuity, inclusion/exclusion.

Paper long abstract:

A manifest effect of transnational migrations on European urban landscape involves the establishment of non-indigenous worship places.

Considering south Asian immigrant minorities, since the post-colonial heyday a range of temples have sprouted over Europe; notably, Hindu Mandirs, Islamic Mosques and Sikh Gurdwaras have given visibility to other peoples' appropriation of public space. Yet, not all these houses of worship have been equally accommodated in their new settings, nor the groups that inhabit them have developed similar cohesion, performing devotions while also attending to mundane matters.

The paper surmises such sacred grounds as public thresholds, spatial hubs that stand as the backdrop of internal and external social relations of each religious community vis-à-vis other creeds and within specific national contexts. Ethnographic work I recently conducted between Italy, the NL and the UK (in the cities of Brescia, Rotterdam and Birmingham) shows that unknown dynamics of differentiation occur within such shrines, foyers of the current economic downturn. Despite providing retreats of solidarity and bulwarks for ethno-religious identity, the south Asian diasporas of Gods lodge and reproduce pre-existing and novel exclusions. Keeping my arguments in tension with 'home studies', I ponder: Who runs these holy households acting as a gatekeeper, and whom instead remains at bay, marginalized or ostracized, barred from participation?

Seeing the lived intersection of gender and faith in highly diverse local contexts might illuminate the historical complexity of interreligious coexistence, but also expose the contemporary entanglement of spiritual and political strategies for doing boundary-work, between community resistance and intercultural dialogue.

Paper short abstract:

Quotidian actions of horticulture production and vegetables gift giving constitute the basis of the moral economy in the village of Corgas. Cultural practices of reciprocation are equally present in the local mundane religious routines. This paper focuses on how these scheme of persisting actions are used to address new contextual realities.

Paper long abstract:

Following André-Georges Haudricourt analysis on man/nature modes of technical efficacy, I will argue that ordinary religious routines in the village of Corgas (Proença-a-Nova, Portugal) can be understood as systems of actions aimed at the cultivation of the local social milieu and to ritualize the local life.

The seasonal actions of seeding, pruning, grafting or harvesting the horticultural plantations belong to a genealogy of local techniques to care for the land. Similarly, the quotidian and the seasonal local practices of worshiping the ancestors – daily praying, commending the souls every day during the 40 days of Lent, the weekly auction of smokehouse outside Sundays’ mass to collect money for worshiping the souls, or the quotidian devotion of the alminhas (small niches dedicated to the Souls) – also belong to a historically constituted system of actions rooted on the consensual values of reciprocation and belief in deferred exchanges.

Domestic and religious moral economy is thus part of an integrated system of actions comprehending exchanges between human and non-human. In that sense, religious and/or horticultural routines constitute analogous delicate activities which co-participate in a seasonal regeneration of people’s and nature’s lives.

Based on my ethnographic research this paper will look at 1) the mutually constitutive nature of these forms of seasonal and quotidian cultivation/worshipping; and, on 2) the present relevance of this social system of moral economy to address new crisis, as in the catastrophic forest fires that destroyed the village’s fields in 2003, and neighbouring villages in 2017.

Paper short abstract:

In diaries, memoirs, connected with the First World War, the question arises how and to what extent internalized ordinary worship routines were one of the important segments of ensuring normality as a survival strategy employed by both soldiers and civilians on the Isonzo front and the hinterland.

Paper long abstract:

When one looks at the event that happened (or is believed to have happened) in the first year of the First World War, depicted in the Christmas Eve movie Joyeux Noël (2005), when the soldiers on both sides were said to have taken off a night and day against the will of their superiors, interrupting the shooting and killing of the opposite side, one can wonder how deeply the soldiers internalized position in which the mere singing of Christmas songs had a synesthetic effect because it transformed the extreme situation into an annual normality and the expectation of the man at home, who sets up a crib and tree. It is a question of how the established worship routine, internalized in childhood, creates a special feeling that makes possible a different experience of Christmas even in the war and how it transcends hostilities. The need for the ordinary practice of worship routines is also testified to by three churches built by the soldiers themselves on the Isonzo front in 1916: the church in Javorca, the mosque in Log pod Mangartom, and the Russian chapel below the Vršič Pass. At the same time, it is a study of how these ordinary worship practices were used to deal with the deaths of comrades at the front or relatives at home.

Following these ordinary worship routines, usually only briefly recorded, this study discusses the diaries of Slovenian, German, and Italian soldiers and civilians in the Isonzo front and its hinterland.