Paper short abstract:

By looking into the transformative power of pilgrimage in the Russian Urals, this paper combines anthropological approaches to space, post-colonialism, practice and material culture. Muslim minority pilgrims engage with the past and the dead to produce alternative non-Russian spaces.

Paper long abstract:

In a multi-cultural environment and especially in conditions of empire, pilgrimage can be a tool for individuals and groups to newly experience and define space. Pilgrimage then has an inward and outward effect, remaking the people moving through the landscape but also recreating the ground they set foot upon. Nowadays, Muslims tend to be portrayed as foreign Others in the Russian media, even though it was the Russian Empire that expanded south to swallow the multi-ethnic populations of the Volga and Urals regions. In a mostly Christian Orthodox environment that designates a minority status to Muslims, pilgrimage around the almost exclusively Tatar / Bashkir village of Barda in the south of Perm Krai contributes to a resignification of the entire space. Barda is located in a valley surrounded by seven mountains that once served as lookouts for guardians, who in time came to be venerated as holy men. When the pilgrims pay their respects at gravesites, springs and mountain slopes, the old paths of pilgrimage are being activated, baraka (a spiritual force) begins to flow, the landscape of the dead comes to life and a peripheral Russian area transforms into a mythic land of Tatar sages and warriors of central significance. The reawakening of the land goes hand in hand with spatial claims being made and related to religious, local and ethnic / national identities. Apart from the sites themselves, recorded sermons, photographs, fragrance and blessed sweets play their role in conferring a spiritual quality to the experience.

Paper short abstract:

The monastic communities in Czech Republic restore and reinvent their life after the period of illegality during the communist regime. In this contribution we argue that materiality is not just object, but tends to shape renewal of monasticism as well as its position in the postcommunist society.

Paper long abstract:

Nowadays, we are witnessing the conversions of monastic places as reaction to the change of the political regime (from the communist to the capitalist one) in the Czech Republic.

The communist regime put all the men consecrated life to the illegality and caused the discontinuity in the lives of the monastic communities and in the use of monastic buildings. Currently, the communities try to find their reinterpretation of the monastic tradition and of the tradition of the place in order to give the meaning to their presence in the locality. During last four years we work on the social anthropological research of moral economy (Fassin 2009) of monasteries of Benedictine tradition in the Czech Republic. We have seen that these buildings, the materiality of monastic tradition, represent the huge archive (Assmann 2010) of the different, sometimes contradictory memories of the place (including the antireligious memory inscribed during the communist era) and the communities have to choose some elements of the archive in order to converse the place according to the current canon they decided to live. We will analyse the dialogue of materiality with the immaterial tradition during the creation of the new canons and so the conversion of the places as well as the legibility of the canons. We argue that converting of monastic spaces represents process that is inherent in these spaces and that materiality of monastic buildings is an active agent shaping the restoration of monastic life and giving face to it for the society.

Paper short abstract:

This paper seeks to understand how the notions of 'miracle' and 'saint' have been maintained throughout the Soviet period in Azerbaijan's modern urban context and how residential houses have been turned and 'branded' as prayer houses.

Paper long abstract:

This paper seeks to understand how the notions of 'miracle' and 'saint' have been maintained throughout the Soviet period in a modern urban context. The practice of pilgrimage to saints' tombs and graves has typically been associated with Azerbaijan's traditional rural lifestyles and theorized as a 'little' tradition of practicing Islam. However, it is obvious that beliefs in saint's miracles form a significant part of modern urban lifestyles in Azerbaijan. The aim of this paper is to understand how far the cult of Shia saints and pilgrimage to sacred sites is embedded in Baku's urban life, infrastructures (transport) and how the secular authorities interact with it. There are different worshipping places in the city, which are 'branded' with the name of Shia saints. In my case study I focus on a residential house in central Baku, which has been turned into a semi-formal prayer house in the 1990s. By 'branded' I mean that the site was incorporated in the hagiographical literature, tourist guidebooks and became an important canon in miracle stories and visuals for pilgrims and tourists. I argue that Shia popular saint veneration practices construct flexible 'shared' spaces, which are not only 'portals' to other worlds, but also the sites where the city's social life, materiality and politics are inscribed.

Paper short abstract:

The paper describes the way in which Maya mountains, caves or pre-Columbian ruins are appropriated and recreated by their traditionalist and New Age visitors. It suggests that converting spaces implies converting authenticity, imbedded in the interaction with the nonhuman entities.

Paper long abstract:

Maya traditionalists today believe that mountains, caves or pre-Columbian ruins are vitally important beings, endowed with life and agency. These nonhuman entities are regularly visited and sustained by prayers and sacrifices. In the contemporary religiously pluralistic, transnationalized and glocalized world, however, some of these places become meaningful for other sorts of visitors - not only Maya Protestants and cultural revivalists, but also Euro-American tourists and spiritual seekers. These places are in a process of ongoing transformation, which is expressed both in the narratives of materiality/spirituality and in the ritual practices, ranging from rigorous, continual and community based ceremonies to very flexible, flash and individual performances.

In this paper, drawing on my ethnographic fieldwork, I will describe how these natural/cultural shrines are converted and recreated by the given groups, particularly by their traditionalist and New Age visitors. Contrary to the well-established stress on social construction of sacred space and competing discourses, I will emphasise the phenomenological and experiential dimension of the human-nonhuman encounter. Here, I will argue, the theme of a sense of authenticity comes to the fore. Although authenticity is socially contextual, it is also a very personal matter, embedded in a particular existential situation and embodied in a particular phenomenal experience of the divine. Converting spaces thus implies converting authenticity, which is anchored not only to the meaning imposed on the nonhuman entities, but also to the very interaction with them. In such a context, the converted spaces may indeed result in the conversion of individuals involved.

Paper short abstract:

I am based on the indigenous idea of territory’s ability to absorb the memory of significant events committed within its limits. In my presentation I indicate the types of conversion of territory, caused by necessity to move to another place, rivalry for the territory or religious conversion.

Paper long abstract:

Relying on my extensive ethnographic fieldwork, I will describe the conversion of the sacred natural sites of the indigenous peoples of Siberia, caused by their religious praxis. I am based on the indigenous idea of territory’s ability to absorb the memory of the most significant events committed within its limits. As over time, the certain territories can accumulate within them a number of such events, eventually they obtain spiritual fullness and become able to remind people of the past events imprinted on them.

In my presentation I indicate to three types of conversion of territory, practiced in Siberian spirituality. First, conversion occurs because of such socio-cultural change, which makes it impossible the continue ritual praxis within the certain locations. In that case, all the spiritual memory of those locations is as if shifted and removed to another physical location. The second type of space conversion is due to the rivalry of the groups (or individuals) over a certain territory, which results in displacing its previous owners, followed by the acquisition of all the spirits ‘inhabited’ that place and appropriation of the spiritual content that place ("place of power") is associated with. The third type of conversion of space deals with mastery of the place, followed by the removal of all its spirits and filling it with a completely different, often opposite content. Such renovation of space occurs in case of religious conversion, for example, when establishing a Christian Church on a site of shamanic sacrifices.

Paper short abstract:

Understood as an assemblage of interacting human and nonhumans, the Israeli-Palestinian Wall has actively converted the space around it from contested areas into spaces of Christian Prayer. In particular, it has transformed the highly militarized area of Checkpoint 300 into a novel Christian Shrine.

Paper long abstract:

In the year 2002 the erection of the wall between Israel and Palestine drastically modified the landscape where it was constructed. It prohibits the Palestinian inhabitants of the West Bank from interacting with what used to be their landscape and it imposes a specific political and military jurisdiction over the areas where it is built. The physical presence of the Wall in the Bethlehem municipality, has progressively converted the spaces where it stands in a multiplicity of ways. For instance, its construction has transformed the space surrounding it into Area C, which, since the Oslo Accords, falls fully under Israeli civil and military control. Due to the defensive purpose of the Wall allegedly against Palestinian illegal infiltrations in the State of Israel, the land where it stands has become highly militarized. The militarization of this "Wall Zone" has caused an emptying of the streets and buildings standing in its vicinities. In particular, the area surrounding Checkpoint 300 has been converted into a new Christian shrine where the icon known as Our Lady of the Wall. was painted on the wall's slabs to accompany a weekly recitation of the rosary. This prayer has been both converting a violent and militarized space into a space of prayer as well as becoming a space for Christian political contestation. Thus, understood as an assemblage of interacting human and nonhumans, the wall has actively converted the space around it from deserted areas to spaces of religious-based protests.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on my ethnography of Berlin’s new ‘Jewish’ scene this paper considers the dynamics of migration and conversion and shows how (a) converting space engenders ambivalence and a process of ‘becoming’. I show how the concept enriches our understanding of the fluidity of subject positions and the complex social and political realities of urban life.

Paper long abstract:

To convert is to move, but it is simultaneously to identify or to position, for conversion is a movement from one identity to another. (Barber, 2014: 142)

Over the past decades, Berlin has witnessed a tremendous internationalisation, to the extent that some consider it a cosmopolitan enclave: no doubt, migration has become an experience of daily life. Consequently, Berlin’s Jewish population has equally witnessed demographic and structural change: After the large waves of Russian Jews in the 1990s, the young Jewish scene of Berlin is now also populated by Jews from Israel, Europe and the Americas, who temporarily or permanently sojourn in the cosmopolitan space. This ‘diasporic space’ (Brah, 1996), engenders unexpected practices and encounters: suddenly self-declared ‘secular’ Israelis find themselves frequenting a synagogue service, singing Jewish liturgical songs or learning scripture which had been foreign to them before. In my research on the new ‘Jewish’ scene in Berlin, I observed a musical project where Jewish-Israelis and (among others) non-Jewish Germans embark on a project to sing Hebrew choral music in a protestant church. Drawing on my ethnographic work, this paper shows how space can be inhabited and can have a converting effect and can equally be converted, transformed into something novel, unexpected and unforeseen. With illustrations from migrants and converts, I will contrast differing experiences of entering and inhabiting a space which not only engenders the movement from one position to another (as Barber suggests above) but one which holds a plethora of positions. This illustrates that a converting space and the conversion of space is one of liminality, uncertainty and ambivalence. Taking up a liminal position in that space is an act of becoming. Thus, I argue that considering and analysing the interaction between space and its inhabitants provides us with profound anthropological insights, not only towards the fluidity, flux and constant change of subject positions but also towards social realities in the context of migration and the constitution of cosmopolitan urban life.