Sites and Politics of Religious Diversity in Southern Europe : The Best of All Gods [1 ed.] 9789004255241, 9789004255234

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Sites and Politics of Religious Diversity in Southern Europe

International Studies in Religion and Society Series edited by

Lori G. Beaman and Peter Beyer, University of Ottawa

VOLUME 19

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/isrs

Sites and Politics of Religious Diversity in Southern Europe The Best of All Gods

Edited by

José Mapril Ruy Llera Blanes

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2013

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sites and politics of religious diversity in southern Europe : the best of all gods / edited by José Mapril, Ruy Llera Blanes.   pages cm. -- (International studies in religion and society, ISSN 1573-4293 ; VOLUME 19)  Includes bibliographical references and index.  ISBN 978-90-04-25523-4 (hardback : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-90-04-25524-1 (e-book) 1. Europe-Religion. 2. Religious pluralism--Europe. I. Mapril, José, editor of compilation.  BL695.S58 2013  200.94--dc23 2013014816

This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, IPA, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 1573-4293 ISBN 978-90-04-25523-4 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-25524-1 (e-book) Copyright 2013 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers and Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper.

CONTENTS List of Tables and Figures�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ix Introduction: Sites and Politics of Religious Diversity in  Southern Europe�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������1  José Mapril and Ruy Llera Blanes PART 1

TRANSNATIONAL RELIGIOUS IMAGINARIES Prophetic Visions of Europe: Rethinking Place and Belonging  among Angolan Christians in Lisbon������������������������������������������������������������� 19  Ruy Llera Blanes Traditions of Disbelief Revisited: The Case of Afro-Dominican  Religious Centres in Madrid����������������������������������������������������������������������������� 37  Cristina Sánchez-Carretero The Metamorphoses of Neopaganism in Traditionally Catholic  Countries in Southern Europe������������������������������������������������������������������������� 51  Anna Fedele The New Age of Greek Orthodoxy: Pluralizing Religiosity in  Everyday Practice������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 73  Eugenia Roussou Religious Belonging and New Ways of Being “Italian” in the  Self-Perception of Second-Generation Immigrants in Italy��������������������� 93  Barbara Bertolani and Fabio Perocco Counterpublics and Transnational Religious Movements in a  Lisbon Mosque���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������115  José Mapril Blood, Sacrifices and Religious Freedom: Afro-Brazilian Associations  in Portugal�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������129  Clara Saraiva

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(RE)CLAIMING SPACE Mosque Controversy, Local Responses and the Religious  Life of Pakistani Immigrants in Athens�������������������������������������������������������157  Inam Leghari Multiplicity of Women’s Religious Expression: Albanian Muslim  Women in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia�����������������������177  Nora Repo Allah’s Places in Madrid: From Spanish Transition to Recent Days���������207  Virtudes Téllez Delgado New Christian Geographies: Pentecostalism and Ethnic Minorities  in Barcelona��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������225  Mar Griera Sikhs in Barcelona: Negotiation and Interstices in the Establishment  of a Community�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������251  Sandra Santos Fraile Should we Talk about Religion? Migrant Associations, Local  Politics and Representations of Religious Diversity: The Case of Sikh Communities in Central Italy���������������������������������������������������������������279  Ester Gallo and Silvia Sai Negotiating Religious Differences in the Cyclades: Discourses of  Inclusion and Exclusion�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������309  Katerina Seraïdari Religious, National, European or Inter-Cultural Awareness:  Religious Education as Cultural Battlefield in Greece�����������������������������331  Trine Stauning Willert Ethnography of Religion, Ethnicity and Reflexivity. Evangelical  Gitanos in Southern Spain������������������������������������������������������������������������������359  Manuela Cantón Delgado

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AN EPILOGUE Map and Imagination: Towards a Phenomenology of Remote  Places���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������383  Ramon Sarró Notes on Contributors�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������389 Index��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������397

LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES

Barbara Bertolani and Fabio Perocco Figure 1. Ethnicization – Ethicization��������������������������������������������������������������103 Mar Griera Table 1. Religious minorities worship centers and other  religious centers�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������228 Table 2. Year of foundation of the religious minorities worship  centers�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������229 Table 3. Doctrinal distribution of Protestant churches������������������������������230 Table 4. Data of foundation of the Protestant churches����������������������������233 Table 5. Ethnic and national distribution of Protestant churches����������234 Katerina Seraïdari Figure 1. The decoration of a Catholic’s woman bedroom in a  village of Tinos����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������318 Figure 2. The most important Catholic feast in Exombourgo  (Tinos)�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������321

INTRODUCTION: SITES AND POLITICS OF RELIGIOUS DIVERSITY IN SOUTHERN EUROPE José Mapril and Ruy Llera Blanes In 2003, a significant debate erupted regarding the religious heritage of Europe. Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and the European Commission were debating the possibility of producing a European Constitution with a specific reference to Christianity as its core value and cultural heritage. At the time, the level of discussion was intense, since many social and political agents contested what could be interpreted as an exclusivist, discriminatory position.1 This event, however, would be just a more notorious episode of a succession of events and processes that have proven the increasing visibility of religious matters in the public sphere. In this context, more recent episodes include the prohibition of Mosque building in Switzerland, religious reactions to homosexual marriage laws in Spain or the ongoing debate regarding Islamic wear in France. After decades of secularist hegemony in the academy and the public opinion, these events constitute relevant examples of how the religious phenomenon has been ‘returning’ to the public sphere and political debates in Europe. Not that it ever disappeared from our lives (see Berger 1967 and 1999). Rather, it re-surfaced from decades of relative obscurity as a relevant topic for debate in sociopolitical arenas, and forced new academic debates regarding secularism and post-secularism (see Taylor 2007; Berger, Davie and Fokas 2008). In truth, the social sciences of religion never ceased to question the place of religion in society within the historical framework of modernity and post-modernity. If Grace Davie had shown us the complexities behind all too encompassing categories such as ‘Western religiosity’ by questioning processes of ‘believing’ and ‘belonging’ (1990, 1994), and José Casanova’s Public Religions in the Modern World (1994) argued quite explicitly towards the recognition of religion’s public character, posing the problem in terms of ‘privatization’ and ‘deprivatization’ of that experience (1994: 40; see Knoblauch 2007 for a critique of this idea), Danièle Hérvieu-Leger, in turn, proposed us a new theory of

1 See http://www.religioustolerance.org/const_eu.htm (Accessed December 2009).

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religious experience based on ‘modern’ processes of individualism, dein­ stitutionalization and mobility (1999). Such proposals ultimately represented an effort to grasp the changing scene of religious practice in Europe. One such culmination was Religious America, Secular Europe?, authored by Peter Berger, Grace Davie and Effie Fokas, that places Europe under scrutiny and within a wider comparative frame (2008). The ‘exceptionality’ (Davie 2006) of the European case in terms of religious expe­ rience, practice and belonging is, therefore, the framework of these reflections. This book represents a contribution to this line of thought, offering different, ‘localized’ perspectives on contemporary religion in Europe. However, regardless of the diverging interpretive approaches, strangely enough the terms under which such a comeback occurred in the public sphere were comparable to historic discourses about ‘essences’, ‘naturalizations’ and primordial arguments about heritage (in this case, religious heritage) of certain places in the globe. By defining which religion represents the core values of a certain regional area, concepts such as autochthony and allochthony (Ceuppens and Geschiere 2005) are therefore implicitly present, including by definition certain creeds and excluding others. Despite the social sciences’ ‘moral’ commitment towards combating such essentialisms, they still seem to be present in everyday life and in multiple socio-political stances.2 Thus, what such public discourses that highlight the ‘return’ of the religious imply, at least regarding the work of anthropologists and sociologists, is the recognition that plenty is yet to be done in terms of the empirical assessment of contemporary religious practices and logics. If historically the Christian ‘essence’ of Europe was a cultural given, and countries were often defined in terms of a ‘single-faith’ approach – i.e., Catholic Portugal, Anglican England, Orthodox Greece, etc. – and in opposition to minoritary or neighboring heathen creeds,3 today both tenets are seriously questioned by the plurality of religious expressions, practices and belongings within what Gerd Baumann termed the ‘multicultural riddle’ (Baumann 1999). This plurality refers, in first place, to a multiplication of religious creeds as an outcome of historic and contemporary migration and missionary dynamics. For instance, Hindu, Islamic, Buddhists, New Age, and several 2 See, for instance, Nicolas Sarkozy’s 2005 statements on the possibility of including Turkey in the EU (Blanes 2008b). 3 For instance, the Arab/Muslim world of North Africa, which played a part as ‘significant other’ in the historical constitution of the modern Spanish nation.

introduction3 others gained over the last decades an unprecedented importance/visibility in the public sphere of several European countries. But this diversity is also visible within one single creed – namely in terms of methods, practices and doctrines. Be it Catholic Christianity, Protestant Christianity or Sunni Islam, this diversity makes it impossible to re-produce homogeneous representations of the different religions and creeds in contemporary Europe. As we will see throughout this book, several examples of ‘Christian diversity’, ‘Muslim pluralism’ or ‘New Age multiplication’ in Southern Europe could be offered to the debate. In many cases, these processes were related to evolving transnational, global migratory dynamics that substantially changed the position of Southern European countries. If the different countries under consideration in this volume were traditionally known as ‘sources’ of out-migration, the fact is that in the last decades most have also became countries of immigration. The structural changes from the past forty years – democratic transitions, European integration and implementation of Schengen agreements – changed the positions of Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece regarding global migration flows (see for instance Castles and Miller 1998; King et al., 2000). These include not only populations with direct historical links through colonial history – such as Moroccans, Capeverdeans, Peruvians, Guineans and Angolans, to mention just a few – but also other and quite ‘unexpected’ population flows. Chinese, Bangladeshis, Pakistanis, Indians and Senegalese are now part and parcel of Lisbon, Rome or Madrid’s socio-cultural scenarios. With these population flows, it is now possible to find a much more complex religious landscape where Brazilian charismatic Catholicism lives side by side with Punjabi Sikh temples (gurudwara) or Nigerian Pentecostal Churches. But when we talk about diversity we must also avoid a pitfall: we cannot assume that this multiplicity is novel and opposed to a homogeneous past (see Dix 2008); rather we see the contemporary processes as reconfigurations of religious pluralism sprung from shifting socio-economic, political and demographic dynamics. In countries such as Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece, for instance, religious pluralism was historically present, but simultaneously obscured by hegemonic and repressive regimes with specific strategies concerning religious adherence and manifestation. Such was the case, for instance, of the Portuguese Estado Novo or ‘New State’ (1932–1974) regime, or Franco’s dictatorship in Spain (1939–1975), which favored strategic alliances with the Catholic Church and repressed other religious expressions historically present in these countries, such as Historical and Evangelical Protestantism (Blanes 2008a). Thus, if religious pluralism is not

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necessarily a ‘new’ phenomenon in the different contexts discussed, the circumstances under which it has become socially and politically relevant must also be acknowledged and debated. Regardless of these acknowledgements, in this volume we feel the urge to take this critical reflection regarding religious pluralism a bit further. What exactly are we talking about when we invoke ‘religious pluralism’? Certainly more than mere statistics or folkloric depictions of colorful diversity. Many of the contributions in this volume give us important clues regarding when, where or who is agent in the configuration of ideas or ‘problems’ of pluralism in contemporary Europe: state or transnational politics (Mapril); ideas of citizenship, mobility, and the nation state (Bertolani and Perocco); territoriality, ethnicization and belonging (Griera, Blanes); memory, history and heritage (Sánchez-Carretero, Fedele, Roussou, Saraiva); jurisprudence and collective association (Gallo and Sai, Seraïdari, Cantón Delgado, Saraiva); the ‘public space’ (Mapril; Leghari, Téllez Delgado, Santos); media and communication strategies (Fedele, Saraiva), etc. Such case studies highlight, from the specific standpoint of ‘Southern Europe’ (see below), the ‘permutational’ character of contemporary religion and other dimensions of social life (Kirsch and Turner 2008). From this perspective, as Thomas Kirsch and Bertram Turner have proposed, there are processes of mutual configuration between, say, religious and legal realms, produced in the interface of contested sovereignties (ibid.). In other words, the mention of religious pluralism or diversity invokes intersections that blur traditional heuristic distinctions between ‘religious’ and ‘social’ phenomena and bring to the fore legal (ibid.; Thaler 2010), political (Banchoff 2007), educational (Kumar 2007), experiential (Stewart and Shaw 1994; Kirsch 2004) and many other issues. Adding these references to the chapters incorporated in this volume, one does observe a conceptual continuity: the notion of the public – or public reasoning (Thaler 2010). In fact, all chapters in this book share the implicit or explicit invocation – through notions of ‘freedom’, ‘controversy’, ‘battlefield’, ‘negotiation’, ‘awareness’, ‘self-perception’, etc. – of religious arguments displayed within the public sphere (regardless of how we define it) through processes of visibility (Kirsch and Turner 2008: 1) and of ‘boundary work’ (Rao 2008) that are eminently political (see Habermas 2002 [1996]). For instance, facing such diversified scenarios, and in the face of the controversies mentioned at the beginning of this introduction, how is it possible to convey autochthony arguments about, say, Christianity in Europe? What Christianity? Practiced by whom? White urbanized middle classes? African Protestants? Brazilian Charismatics? And what about the

introduction5 ‘others’? Despite media phobias and political statements, are Muslims any less European, just because they are Muslims (see Tiesler 2009)? Thus, to tackle religious diversity and sociopolitical claims in Europe, one cannot avoid invoking the dilemmas of citizenship (Levey and Modood 2008; Sarró and Mapril 2009) and multicultural politics within national and supranational frameworks (Basch, Glick-Schiller, Szanton Blanc 1994; Van der Veer and Lehmann 1999). But also, to answer these questions is to look at the historical processes that have made them meaningful today, and also a way to problematize the apparently simple equation that ties Europe to Christianity, a place to a religious creed. As authors such as Gupta and Ferguson (1997) argued, the relation between place and culture is not a given but a problem that needs to be constantly questioned, defied and discussed through ethnographic research. How, then, is this relation produced by agents in several social and political contexts? What are the interests and motivations behind the production of autochthony and allochthony arguments? In what contexts do religious ‘cohabitation’ and (in opposition) ‘competition’ prevail? When an African Christian church in Lisbon, studied by Ruy Blanes, promotes the motto “Our God is the best of all gods” within its followers, what does this tell us in terms of religious agency and political claims in the European scenario? There is an implicit process of boundary work in these positionings: negotiations for the definition of alterity, but also for localizing (defining or disputing) spaces where the abundance of meanings (Orsi 2006), be they sacred or profane, are manifest. From this perspective, as is seen in some of the chapters in this volume, religious movements become conscious or unconsciously ‘ethnicized’ or ‘racialized’ in the process of definition of religious diversity (e.g. Blanes, Griera, Santos). This racialization is frequently part of a double marginalization process – not only through the ‘distinction’ of migrants but also religiously, through the construction of (for instance) ‘Muslim’ or ‘Pentecostal’ others – that establishes the (subaltern) place of many within Europe. For instance, as has been recently argued, the category of ‘Muslim’ is perceived first and foremost as a racialization process intimately linked to Islamophobia in contemporary Western societies (Sayyid and Abdoolkarim 2010). Junaid Rana (2011) takes the argument further by showing that this racialization is part and parcel of an historical process, colonial and post-colonial, of marginalization of Muslim working classes – i.e., as in the case he explores, from Pakistan. This longue durée replicates a global, racialized system that was initially forged in the context of the indentured labor system (Rana 2011). So in a way, the interpretations produced about certain religious movements, in contemporary

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European societies, are not so much about religiosity or religion per se but about larger processes of ‘racialization’ that intersects creed, socioeconomic status, political agency, and collective identifications. In spite of some arguments supporting an idea of exceptionalism, in Southern European countries such processes seem to be present. The correlation between certain religious groups and racialized categories (see e.g. Griera, Blanes, Téllez, this volume), forged during the colonial period and reinterpreted in the post-colonial moment, are quite evident in the Portuguese, Spanish and Italian cases. We are thus forced to ask ourselves: what is the relation between these post-colonial racialized positionalities and the idioms of participation in the public sphere of Southern European countries? The aim of this book is not, of course, to ethnographically explore the racialization of religious groups nor rediscover a new religious diversity within contemporary Europe as discrete categories. Rather, we prefer to see how a particular region in Europe speaks to such interceptions between theoretical categories and empirical phenomena. Religious diversity has been extensively described in several contexts such as the UK, France, Germany, among several others (Hervieu-Léger 1990; Belmont and Lautman 1993; Davie 1994; Blanes and Sarró 2008; inter alia). But in the Southern European case, despite the existence of compelling research and monographs (many of which quoted throughout this volume), a systematic, comparative debate seems to be missing. More so when we find that the strongest images regarding contemporary global migration are shot in places like Gibraltar, Lampedusa, the Canary Islands and so on. What happens ‘after the fact’, in the countries that enact their role as ‘barriers’ in “fortress Europe”, enforcing political strategies to cope with a novel multicultural state? It is precisely this gap that the current book proposal tries to supplement. Localizing Strategies in Southern Europe We must, however, be cautious in this endeavor. By taking ‘Southern Europe’ as a geographical framework, we are (no matter how involuntarily) invoking an historical construct that connects place and culture and produced the idea of a ‘Mediterranean culture complex’ – regardless of where that cultural complex actually begins or ends. In a theoretical move that made the notion of cultural region a significant one for anthropologists, Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece were assumed to share certain cultural and social

introduction7 characteristics and tropes within a ‘Mediterranean complex’: honor and shame; (see e.g. Peristiany 1966; Cole 1991), tradition and local polities (Maddox 1993), gender (Herzfeld 1985), notions of ‘popular religion’ and survivals (Pina-Cabral 1992), etc. (for a critique see Pina-Cabral 1991; PinaCabral and Campbell 1992). Among several other aspects, this association implied the statement that, for instance, Portugal, Spain and Italy shared the same cultural heritage, which allowed comparative exercises regarding specific cultural aspects, and therefore a specific kind of ethnographic writing that placed Christianity and Catholicism as the discreet background in several monographs (as in e.g. Pitt-Rivers 1954). Thus, from the point of view of disciplinary history, we are bound to a problem of ‘translation’ of ethnographic observation into wider scale levels of comparison (Pina-Cabral and Campbell 1992). If this exercise of regional comparison is not necessarily wrong per se (and in fact many other regional categorizations remain peacefully stable and unchallenged), it does require a doubled effort in avoiding theoretical and conceptual reproductions that ‘crystallize’ unquestioned ideas. Today, such uncritical exercises have been for the most part left behind, but have made way for new regionalizations that still bargain a particular currency. Such is the case, to give but one example, of ‘Black Atlantic Religion’ (Matory 2005). In an effort to critically address such ‘localizing strategies’ that produce regional traditions in ethnographic writing (Fardon 1990), the present book also intends to offer an empirical and theoretical update regarding research in this region of Europe, by offering novel ethnographies on subjects and realities on religion that have otherwise received little – if any – attention in recent times. The relevance of this scope is enhanced when we recall that, today, Southern Europe emerges as a key area for these debates. As one of the gateways to Europe, this is a region that is not only a geographic frontier, subject to increasing efforts of (police) control and disciplining, but also a ‘place’ in which cultural, religious, economic and political boundaries are in constant debate and negotiation (see King, Lazaridis and Tsardanidis 2000). To control population movements towards Schengen is to say who belongs and who doesn’t. ‘Southern Europe’, thus, emerges no longer as a cultural region but rather as a reflection of political, economical, juridical, ideological boundary work. In this respect, however, we are not interested in charting the boundaries mile by mile, defining heuristic frontiers, but rather in searching for cases of ‘sites and politics of religious diversity’ in such a way as we have tried to define them in the previous pages. I.e., how they ‘respond’ to pluralism and the multiplicity/cohabitation of religious

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expressions. From this perspective, many other examples and regional/ national contexts could have been included in this volume, and haven’t done so for mere logistic reasons. This explains why Macedonia appears as a case study in this volume, and not, for instance, Slovenia, Romania and Croatia. In this volume, we intend to explore these debates by focusing on ethnographies that critically address those religiouscapes that are frequently categorized as ‘foreign’ in Southern Europe, and debate the sites and politics where religious diversity and ‘cultural identity’ are at stake. By ‘sites’ we are referring to (i) spatial settings such as mosques and other religious edifices; (ii) spaces and itineraries of religious mobilities – from pilgrimage paths to networks and circulations of ideas and objects; (iii) but also arenas – political and apparently secularized – in which several agents debate and discuss the authoctony or allochtony of certain religions (let us recall how until very recently the Portuguese parliament defined who or what was supposed to be considered a religion and who was to be considered a sect, therefore producing different regimes of legitimacy). Our goal, therefore, is not so much to present an extensive geographical mapping of religious diversity in Southern Europe, but rather to sample and focus different significant debates and phenomena that are offering renewed problems to the scientific study of religion. On the other hand, by ‘politics’ we understand not only concrete policy-making and its consequences, but also ideologies and discourses developed in the processes of religious encounter, competition and negotiation between different religious groups. These include, of course, state agents, non-government organizations and political parties and the way these try to define belonging and the place of religion in the public sphere. In response to the debates mentioned above, the chapters included in this volume offer a wide range of empirical contexts and discussions that open many paths for future discussion. Collectively speaking, two different themes emerge from them: 1) the recognition and assessment of transnational religious imaginaries; and 2) the contexts and strategies of making and/or reclaiming space in the European context. Transnational Religious Imaginaries In this section, the main ideas under discussion are those related to the increasing visibility and political importance of transnational religious

introduction9 flows. These include (i) religious ideas, concepts and ideologies, fostered by media channels, press and other global agents (see for instance Al Arabya, UCKG TV networks, among many others); (ii) transnational missionary movements; and (iii) migrant networks through which certain ceremonial practices acquire an eminently transnational dimension. Here, what is at stake is the relationship between transnationality and pluralism – beyond traditional theories of syncretism, hybridization and creolization (Hannerz 1987) – and how they are mediated by certain exercises of ‘imagination’, here understood as the intersection between ‘experience’ and ‘effect’ (Sneath, Holbraad and Pedersen 2009). One example is Blanes’ text, in which the author shows how the process of installation of an African prophetic church – the Tokoist Church – in Europe implied renewed debates about place and belonging. It promoted debates about the ‘universalism’ of the church’s message producing what the author calls a “re-location of the ideological processes”. This is a case where ‘prophetic response’ is intermingled with migration and diasporization, producing an ‘African extraversion’ (Bayart 2000), and the re-territorialization of African heritage. In the contributions of Sanchez-Carretero, Fedele and Roussou, one can find a similar process of transnationalization of religious imagination. In the first case, the author focuses on Afro-Dominican practices in Madrid, more specifically practicing Dominican voodoo worshippers. Here the author shows how female Spanish clients interpret their possession experiences through the lens of a diverse religious logic or paradigm (spiritistcorporal), which is closely linked to a world of transnational flows and mobilities. In Anna Fedele’s chapter, one can see how Italian and Spanish negotiate their religiosity between hegemonic Catholicism and new pagan beliefs. A similar process is described by Eugenia Roussou for the Greek case. Through an ethnography carried out in the cities of Rethymno and Thessaloniki, the author shows how her interlocutors manage new religious imaginaries between Orthodox Christianity and New Age concepts. In Bertolani and Perocco’s chapter, the reader is led to another topic: the transnational reworkings of national religious imaginaries. Through a case study on second generation Sikhs, we observe how young Sikh adults rethink ‘Italian-ness’ through diverse religious belonging and transnational ties. Finally, José Mapril focuses on the role of a Lisbon Mosque in a transnational Islamic public space, where several actors and missionary movements circulate. All these agents are involved in the production and reproduction of discourses and debates about ‘orthodoxy’, piety and

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ethical subjects that span national and regional borders. In this case, it is not only possible to see how ideas travel but also who ‘carries’ them. Finally, the last chapter of this section, by Clara Saraiva, addresses the transnational flows of Afro-Brazilian cults in contemporary Portugal and the way these are refashioning a religious ‘market’ to certain segments of Portuguese believers. (Re)claiming Spaces In this second section, we discuss and address ethnographically contexts in which subjects are involved in processes of (re)production of places for certain religious practices and movements. Our notion of place is twofold: (i) on one hand, the physical construction of religious infrastructures; and (ii) on the other, the claims for a space in the public sphere. In the first case, we are thinking, of course, about the construction of religious sites such as churches, mosques, nandirs, gurudwaras, Islamic cemeteries, Hindu cremation houses, among many others. In this case, the  main objective is to describe the efforts, supports and actions carried out to create such ceremonial and religious infra-structures (see e.g. Metcalf 1996). But our notion of place has a second dimension: the public sphere. In many cases, the apparently simple construction of religious infrastructures is related to the place of religion in the public space. Thus to build a nandir is not simply a problem related to Hindu congregations, and the resources gathered through informal means, but also to the place ‘minority’ religious phenomena and ‘groups’ are attributed. The best example, of course, is the construction of mosques in several contemporary European countries. As Cesary (2005) argued, the obstacles to mosque building (not to mention minarets) are revealing of the place for Muslims. Thus, in such highly politicized contexts, to build a mosque is to produce counterclaims about who belongs and who does not. It is imperative, though, to recognize that these two dimensions of place are only separate in a heuristic sense. In reality, one and the other are part and parcel of the same reality. These two conceptions of place and space are revealed in Inam Leghari’s, Nora Repo’s and Virtudes Téllez’s chapters. The first is about Mosque controversies in Athens involving Pakistani migrants. This is a clear example of the relation between the construction of a religious infrastructure and the production of claims for a place for Islam in the Greek public

introduction11 space. The second addresses the (mis)place of Albanian Muslims in contemporary Macedonia. The third focuses on the controversial place of Islam and Muslims in contemporary Spanish society, especially after March 11th, 2004. A different approach to the relation between place and religion is developed in Mar Griera’s contribution. In this case, the author shows the elective affinity between Pentecostalism and ethnic minorities, which has complexified the landscape of Christianity in contemporary Barcelona. Still in contemporary Barcelona, but focusing on a very different viewpoint, is Sandra Santos’ chapter about the almost invisible presence of Sikhs. One is ethnographically led to the processes and dynamics behind the construction of a Sikh community in Catalonia and the construction of ‘a place of their own’. This case is not so much about public space and political visibility but with the effective construction of an infrastructure for a very recent migration flow. Ester Gallo and Silvia Sai also focus on Sikhs, but this time in Italy, to describe the relations between place making, religious diversity and immigration. According to the authors, these processes are related to the efforts carried out by migrants themselves – in this case, Sikhs – but also with the way the receiving society – Italy – actively ‘produces’ these new arrivals in the public space. Place is clearly a polysemic concept where several actors and institutions actively influence, discuss, negotiate and contest one another. The continuities between Gallo and Sai’s approach and Katerina Seraidaris’ chapter about Greek Catholic priests and intellectuals is quite clear. These are actively engaged in the production of autochthony discourses, in the current context marked by European integration. Catholics produce themselves as important agents in the ‘Europeization’ of Greece, thus giving an unprecedented visibility to Catholicism and its place in nation building and national Greek identity. In Trine Willert’s chapter, one remains in Greece but this time to show how religious educational programs should include the official recognition, by the Greek state, of the increasing religious pluralism. In this case, one clearly sees how the public sphere is a segmented space, where different arenas are engaged in similar debates and discussions about religiosity, pluralism and autochthony. Finally, Manuela Canton debates the (ambiguous) place of Pentecostal Gitanos in contemporary Spanish religious landscape. On one side, Gitanos are constantly seen as potential threatening subjects and, at the same time, from their own viewpoint, tend to produce born again narratives of moral improvements and reinventions.

12

josé mapril and ruy llera blanes Conclusive Remarks

To talk about sites and politics of religious diversity is, in sum, to return to questions of citizenship, secularism and the religious subject. As Jürgen Habermas had suggested, the public sphere was an eminently secularized space of discussion and debate (1991 [1962]). This is so, as the author argues in his latter theories on the post-secular society, because religion or religion based arguments, supported as they are on faith, are impossible to share and thus produce common points of agreement between believers and non-believers. Therefore, the arguments in the public space should be based on a common ground shared by secularists, religious and atheist alike – reason alone (Habermas et al. 2010). Concomitantly, though, the critical reflections on the links between such a perception of the secular public space, the enlightenment project and Christianity have been theorized by authors such as Talal Asad (2003) or Saba Mahmood (2004), claiming for a rethinking of notions of ‘public’, ‘private’ and its historical formations (see also Mendieta and Vanantwerpen 2011). Asad, for instance, calls our attention to the historical constitution of citizenship as a result of a secular/Christian formation in which it erupted. By historicizing such a notion of the public space, Asad is showing us that there is no inevitability in being built according to such a secular discursive formation and above all it reveals how its naturalization, over the course of history, transformed this specific political project into a hegemonic reality. As an hegemony, it is producing precisely what it intend to avoid. Birgit Meyer and Annelies Moors, for instance, have empirically explored such acknowledgements, detecting how contemporary religiosity has involved particular notions of publics, representations and mediations (2006). What this book attempts is to ethnographically explore voices according to whom the religious is in itself a constitutive project of subjectivity and citizenship and thus a valid ground for claims-making from the state. For these, there is no contradiction between being a ‘good’ and ‘liberal’ citizen and a religious subject and the cases discussed all throughout this book reveal such dynamics. Our proposal for a study on ‘sites’ and ‘politics’ in one specific region of the European scenario therefore incorporates recent critique on the notion of public sphere, such as what has been produced by several authors, detecting stances of resistance, contestation, counterhegemony, counterpublics (see e.g. Hirschkind 2006; Thaler 2009). In this regard, rather than concluding assertively, we prefer to end this introduction with a set of questions: in what way does religion, its diversity and plurality ‘matter’ in Southern Europe? For instance, is it possible to

introduction13 speculate over the possibility of a ‘Catholic’ contribution to the European public space (Castles, F. 1993)? In what terms? Hopefully, the chapters that follow will shed, through their empirical inputs, some light on some of the sites and politics at stake. References Asad, T. 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Banchoff, T. (ed.). 2007. Democracy and the New Religious Pluralism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Basch, L., N. Glick-Schiller and C. Szanton-Blanc. 1994. Nations Unbound. Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and De-Territorialized Nation-Sates. London and New York: Routledge. Baumann, G. 1999. The Multicultural Riddle. Rethinking Nation, Ethnic and Religious Identities. London and New York: Routledge. Bayart, J-F. 2000. ‘Africa in the World: A History of Extraversion’, African Affairs 99 (395): 217–267. Belmont, N. and F. Lautman (eds). 1993. Ethnologie des Faits Réligieux en Europe. Paris: CTHS. Berger, P., G. Davie and E. Fokas. 2008. Religious America, Secular Europe? A Theme and Variations. Aldershot: Ashgate. Berger, P. (ed.). 1999. The Desecularization of the World. Resurgent Religion and World Politics. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. ——. 1967. The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. Garden City, NY: Double Day. Blanes, R. and R. Sarró. 2008. ‘European Christianities at the Turn of the Millennium: An Introduction’, Etnográfica 12 (2): 371–376. Blanes, R.L. 2008a, Os Aleluias. Ciganos, Música e Evangelismo na Península Ibérica. Lisbon: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais. ——. 2008b. ‘Um Cemitério chamado Europa: cristianismo, consciência global e identidades migratórias’, in Carmo, R., D. Melo and R. Blanes (orgs.), A Globalização no Divã. Lisbon: Tinta da China. Casanova, J. 1994. Public Religions in the Modern World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Castles, F. 1993. ‘On Religion and Public Policy. Does Catholicism make a Difference?’, Discussion Paper SCASSS, April 1993. Castles, S. and M. Miller. 1993 (1997). The Age of Migration. New York, Guilford Press. Ceuppens, B. and P. Geschiere. 2005. ‘Autochthony: Local or Global? New Modes in the Struggle over Citizenship and Belonging in Africa and Europe’, Annual Review of Anthropology 34: 385–407. Cesari, J. 2005. ‘Mosque Conflicts in European Union: Introduction’, in Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 31 (6): 1015–1024. Cole, S. 1991. Women of the Praia: Work and Lives in a Portuguese Coastal Community. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Davie, G. 2006. ‘Is Europe an Exceptional Case?’, The Hedgehog Review Spring & Summer 06: 23–34. ——. 1994. Religion in Britain since 1945: Believing without Belonging. Oxford: Blackwell. ——. 1990. ‘Believing without Belonging. Is this the Future of Religion in Britain?’, Social Compass 37 (4): 455–469. Dix, S. 2008. ‘Roman Catholicism and Religious Pluralities in Portuguese (Iberian) History’, Journal of Religion in Europe 1 (1): 60–84. Fardon, R. (ed.). 1990. Localizing Strategies. Regional Traditions of Ethnographic Writing. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press.

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Gupta, A. and J. Ferguson (eds). 1997. Culture, Power, Place. Explorations in Critical Anthropology. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Habermas, J. et al. (2010). An Awareness of What is Missing. Faith and Reason in a Post-Secular Age. Cambridge: Polity Press. Habermas, J. 2002 (1996). A Inclusão do Outro. Estudos de Teoria Política. São Paulo: Loyola. ——. 1991 (1962). The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Hannerz, U. 1987. ‘The World in Creolisation’, Africa 57 (4): 546–599. Hervieu-Léger, D. 1999. Le Pélérin et le Converti. La Religion en Mouvement. Paris: Flammarion. ——. 1990. ‘Religion and Modernity in the French Context: For a New Approach to Secularization’, Sociological Analysis 51: S15-S25. Herzfeld, M. 1985. The Poetics of Manhood: Contest and Identity in a Cretan Mountain Village. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hirschkind, C. 2006. The Ethical Soundscape. Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics. New York: Columbia University Press. King, R., G. Lazaridis and C. Tsardanidis (eds). 2000. Eldorado or Fortress? Migration in Southern Europe. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Kirsch, Th. and B. Turner (eds). 2008. Permutations of Order. Religion and Law as Contested Sovereignties. Aldershot: Ashgate. Kirsch, Th. 2004. ‘Restaging the Will to Believe: Religious Pluralism, Anti-Syncretism, and the Problem of Belief’. American Anthropologist 106 (4): 699–709. Knoblauch, H. 2007. ‘The Sociology of Religion and the “Desecularisation of Society”’, Revista Lusófona de Ciências das Religiões 6 (11): 247–256. Kumar, P. 2007. ‘Religious Pluralism and Religious Education in South Africa’, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 18: 273–293. Levey, G. and T. Modood (eds.). 2008. Secularism, Religion and Multicultural Citizenship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Maddox, R. 1993. El Castillo. The Politics of Tradition in an Andalusian Town. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Mahmood, S. 2004. The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Matory, J.L. 2005. Black Atlantic Religion. Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Metcalf, B. (ed.). 1996. Making Muslim Space in North America and in Europe. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mendieta, E. and J. Vanantwerpen (eds). 2011. The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere. With Judith Butler, Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, Cornel West. New York: Columbia University Press. Meyer, B. and A. Moors (eds). 2006. Religion, Media and the Public Sphere. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Peristiany, J.G. (ed.). 1966. Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pina-Cabral, J. and J. Campbell (eds). 1992. Europe Observed. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Pina-Cabral, J. 1992. ‘The Gods of the Gentiles are Demons: The Problem of Pagan Survivals in European Culture’, in Hastrup, Kirsten (ed.), Other Histories. Loncond: Routledge. ——. 1991. Os Contextos da Antropologia. Porto: Difel. Pitt-Rivers, J. 1954. The People of the Sierra. London: Criterion Books. Rana, J. 2011. Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in the South Asian Diaspora. Durham: Duke University Press. Rao, U. 2008. ‘Contested Spaces: Temple-Building and the Recreation of Religious Boundaries in Contemporary India’, in Pine, F. and J. Pina-Cabral (eds), On the Margins of Religion. Oxford: Berghahn. Sarró, R. and J. Mapril. 2009. ‘Cidadãos e Súbditos: o legado colonial na cidadania da Europa’, Le Monde Diplomatique Portugal, February 2009.

introduction15 Sayyid, S. and A. Vakil. 2010. Thinking Through Islamophobia: Global Perspectives. London: Hurst publishers. Sneath, D., M. Holbraad and M. Pedersen. 2009. ‘Technologies of the Imagination: An Introduction’, Ethnos 74 (1): 5–30. Taylor, C. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Thaler, M. 2010. ‘How (Not What) Shall We Think about Human Rights and Religious Arguments? Public Reasoning and Beyond’, e-Cadernos CES 8: 115–133. ——. 2009. ‘From Public Reason to Reasonable Accommodation: Negotiating the Place of Religion in the Public Sphere’. Diacrítica 23 (2): 249–270. Tiesler, N. 2009. ‘Religião e pertença em discursos europeus: conceitos e agentes muçulmanos’, Análise Social XLIV (1): 17–42. van der Veer, Pl and H. Lehmann. 1999. Nation and Religion. Perspectives on Europe and Asia. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

PART ONE

TRANSNATIONAL RELIGIOUS IMAGINARIES

PROPHETIC VISIONS OF EUROPE: RETHINKING PLACE AND BELONGING AMONG ANGOLAN CHRISTIANS IN LISBON Ruy Llera Blanes On Spiritual Cemeteries “(…) Spiritually speaking, for me, Europe is a cemetery”. These words are from Miguel,1 an Angolan Pentecostal living in Lisbon for almost two decades now (interview, May 10th 2007). As many other Angolans, Miguel had migrated to Europe in the late eighties and early nineties in search of a better life and, as he established in this continent, sought for a place to pursue his faith. As I described elsewhere, this search was intricate, and made Miguel attend Portuguese churches before assuming the decision to create an ‘African Christian church’ in Lisbon, the culto africano, from which many African Pentecostal churches in Lisbon stemmed in subse­ quent years (see Blanes 2008a, 2008b). In the process, Miguel and others found out that faith in Europe, after all, was not what they had imagined: as alleged ‘place of origin’ of Christianity (at least in what concerns many African Christians), Europe was, in fact, the place where faith seemed to be loosing pace. As Paulo, an Angolan Pente­ costal pastor from the same church as Miguel, told me, with progress and the increase of individual well being, “people in Europe just don’t seem to care any more. People don’t need God anymore” (interview, January 12th, 2007, my translation). The promise of salvation and civilization heard so many times in Africa by the mouth of white missionaries was, after all, a hoax.2 (…) I expected this to be, well, almost paradise! And I was very, very surprised when I arrived. I used to say: “these men brought us the Gospel, but these men do not live the Gospel!” Because I saw churches with fifty, thirty people. For us, that’s no church, it’s just some small group. I was very surprised (interview, January 12th 2007, my translation). 1 All names of interviewees cited in this text are fictitious, except in the case of public figures. 2 I am referring here to well discussed narratives of mission, conversion and Western, civilised modernity in African and other colonial settings (see Comaroff and Comaroff 1991; Van der Veer 1996; Valverde 1997).

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This contrasted with the experience that people like Miguel and Paulo col­ lect from their memories of the homeland: “Faith is in the streets, it is everywhere. In Africa, when one is sick, he does not have a pharmacy just around the corner, he will have to walk for miles to the nearest one – if he is so lucky. So people go to church” (interview Paulo, February 7th 2007, my translation); or “(…) In Africa, when one preaches in the street, people will say ‘Oh, this man is talking about God!’, whereas here people will think you are begging” (inter­ view Paulo, January 12th 2007, my translation). The contrast produced by the experience of diverse, or even contradic­ tory, forms of Christian experience motivated these forms of reaction and recognition that build on more or less abstract categorizations of ‘Europe’ and ‘Africa’ (see MacGaffey 1972). But in fact, the surprise factor involved in these statements represented but the initial moment of the African Christian migrant experience. What we have seen, in the Pentecostal case, is that it is part of a process of establishment of a ‘third way’, a different form of religious experience mediated by the process of mobility and that stresses its self-definition as ‘transculturally (or universally) Christian’ while simultaneously downplaying ‘culture’ (Blanes 2008a, 2008b). As Gerrie ter Haar argues, the recent trends of African migration to Europe, and the processes of religious implantation developed by migrants in the European territory have produced novel forms of action, world­ view  and, ultimately, identity and belonging (1998, 2003). This author has described how the process of migration – or, better yet, of ‘becoming migrant’ – has forcefully imposed a debate among African Christians, who have had, in the Netherlands as in many other European countries, to start seeing themselves as migrants, minorities, integration seekers and, ultimately, just ‘Africans’ (2003), regardless of their origin, life trajectories, territorial identifications and senses of belonging. As I mentioned above, this process of classification, imposed by juridical conditions and by media discourses, clashed in many cases with the universalist claims of many doc­ trines brought by African migrants. But it has also provoked novel ways of religious ‘being in the world’ and engaging in civil society – from ecumen­ ism to local outreach, the recognition of an ‘immigrant faith’, ‘reverse mis­ sion’, re-enchantment ideologies, etc. (see e.g. Adogame 1998, 2004; Fancello 2008; Henry and Noret 2008; Maskens 2008). But in truth, processes of spiritual confrontation, dialectics and refram­ ing are not unheard of, nor are they recent or exclusively motivated by the postcolonial process of migration. Historically, many African religious movements (Christian and other) had been contesting, in multifaceted forms, the ‘spiritual colonization’ framed by European missions sponsored



prophetic visions of europe21

by the colonial endeavor. The rise of African Independent churches was, in fact, a form of contestation of Western missionary endeavors (Ranger 1968, 1986), and many intellectuals from colonial and postcolonial times denounced the epistemological and spiritual closet the Africans were his­ torically bound to in the colonial era – from Marcus Garvey’s panafricanism and Frantz Fanon’s psychopathology of colonization (1967 [1952]) to Mudimbe’s discussions on ‘African gnosis’ (1988, 1994) and Lamin Sanneh’s claim for the ‘changing face of Christianity’ (Sanneh and Carpenter 2005). Thus, not all Christian churches involved in these processes of transna­ tionalization have staged the same kind of reaction towards the heritage and contemporary status of ‘European Christianity’. If Pentecostals per­ form a ‘universalizing iconoclasm’ in order to “make a complete break with the past” (Meyer 1998),3 other Christian movements of African origin – pro­ phetic, historical protestant, Catholic, etc. – perform different strategies of reaction and reframing the ‘European cemetery’. In this paper, invoking recent debates on processes of locating ‘Africaness’ in transnational contexts (Bayart 2000; Amselle 2001; D’Alisera 2004; Palmié 2007; Sarró & Blanes 2009), I will discuss the particularity of a ‘pro­ phetic response’ to the processes of migration and transnationalization, suggesting that it has not only produced a reconfiguration of religious and ethnic memory and identity but also developed novel understandings of proselytization and outreach connected to processes of ‘ideological loca­ tion’ that envelope particular meanings pertaining ‘European spirituality’. In other words, churches that are involved in a process of transnationaliza­ tion which has not only brought them to Europe but also forced them to re-semanticize ideas of place and belonging in doctrinal and experiential terms.4

3 This framing of Pentecostalism as an ‘anti-cultural’ doctrine has been very popular in recent anthropology of religion (see Meyer 1998), although it has also been contested and debated (see Robbins 2004; Marshall 2009; Robbins and Engelke 2010). 4 My research, from which this particular argument originated, started in 2007 and focused on African Christian movements in Lisbon and their role in the development of a plural religious setting in Portugal. This research, entitled Religious Pluralism: African Christianity in Lisbon, has included fieldwork in Lisbon, Angola and other European sites, and was funded by the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) in Portugal, and devel­ oped under the framework of two other research projects: Recognizing Christianity: How African Immigrants Redefine the European Religious Heritage (funded by the NORFACE con­ sortium) and The Christian Atlantic: Ethnographic Encounters among Portuguese, Brazilian and African churches in Lisbon (funded by the FCT). All projects have been coordinated by Ramon Sarró, with whom I have also shared many fieldwork moments in Lisbon and Angola. Most arguments expressed in this text are an outcome of our joint fieldwork trips and our

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I will do so bringing to the forefront my recent research on the ‘Tokoist Church’, a Christian prophetic movement of Angolan origin. The Tokoist church – officially, Church of Our Lord Jesus Christ on Earth – is a pro­ phetic based movement, created after the following of an Angolan mukongo5 called Simão Gonçalves Toko, the original prophet. The move­ ment began in the early 1940s in Leopoldville (Belgian Congo), where Toko, a former Baptist, migrated and later proselytized. Toko and his followers were persecuted by the Belgian authorities and, in 1950, expelled to Angola where, despite the efforts of the Portuguese regime (and, after indepen­ dence in 1975, by the Angolan authorities), it grew to become one of the major actors in this country’s religious scene and in the Angolan diaspora to this day (see Blanes 2009). In the first years of existence, this movement had a clear-cut anticolonial message, similar to that of other prophetic movements of the region (Kimbanguism, Mpadism, Matsuanism, etc.), claiming for an African spiritual salvation and simultaneously rejecting European missionary dis­ course.6 Because rejecting colonialism in Africa, in those days, necessarily implied anti-Europeanism, despite its pacifist approach Tokoism was an inspiration for the development of an Angolan ‘national conscience’ in the wake of the struggle for Angolan liberation and independence (Fernando 1995; Gonçalves 2003). In the subsequent decades, despite difficult relation­ ships with the postcolonial Angolan government (Grenfell 1998; Blanes 2009a), the Tokoist church eventually became an example of a ‘national (Angolan) church’ (Viegas 1999). Today, under the leadership of Bishop Afonso Nunes, it is self-described as a ‘universal church’ (Blanes 2009). As I have explained elsewhere, the historical process of institutional development of the church, from a regional, ethnicized (Bakongo) move­ ment in the early 1940’s into a national, multiethnic Angolan church in the 1960’s and 1970’s and, finally, into a transnational church in the 1990’s, despite the apparent linearity of its stages of growth, was a complex and painful one (Blanes 2009). In this process, the status of ‘being Tokoist’ was negotiated through multiple (and often opposed) ascriptions and alle­ giances that inevitably produced driving tensions in terms of identitary discourse and belonging. In the following pages I want to focus on the

ongoing dialogue with his research in the Kimbanguist church (see Blanes and Sarró 2008; Sarró, Blanes and Viegas 2008; Sarró and Blanes 2008, 2009; Blanes 2009a, 2009b). 5 Individual of Bakongo ethnicity. 6 It also implied a rejection of particular stances of ‘African tradition’, such as witchcraft, etc.



prophetic visions of europe23

process of implantation of the Tokoist church in Portuguese and European territory, and its consequences in terms of political claims and universalist claims in the church’s discourses. Spiritual Reconfigurations in Lisbon Back in the early 1990’s, when a small group of Angolan Tokoist migrants recently migrated to Lisbon first acknowledged the need to create their own place of worship, Portugal was already a city experiencing an impor­ tant transformation in religious terms. Enveloped in a tradition of Catholic worship,7 the last decades of the twentieth century witnessed a process of both ‘pluralization’ and ‘pluralist reconfiguration’ in what concerns reli­ gious practice, visibility and public role. If by ‘pluralization’ I mean a diver­ sification of religious creeds and institutions through the incorporation of previously inexistent religious movements, by ‘pluralist reconfiguration’ I am referring to processes of diversification within a given religious institution – such as Christianity (Catholicism and Protestantism). These dynamics were inspired by profound societal changes in modern Portugal. On the one hand, the political turn provoked by the Carnation Revolution in April 25th, 1974 – that overturned the conservative dictatorial regime of the Estado Novo in favor of a democratic regime – implied, in the subsequent years, a societal rejection towards all things religious and therefore Catholic, whilst opening ground for a juridical framework that incorporated religious diversity and freedom (Vilaça 2006: 151 and ff.). On the other hand, the societal and demographic changes observed in Portugal after the political change, especially in what concerns emigration and immigration trends – with a significant increase of, among other groups, African and Brazilian immigration into Portugal (Esteves 1991; Bastos and Bastos 1999; Baganha and Gois 1999) –, inevitably opened room for the diversification of religious creeds (Vilaça 2006; Bastos and Bastos 2006; Dix 2008). In this context, places like Lisbon’s Martim Moniz central square, where migrants of African and Asian origin dwell and work, have become emblematic in the recognition of a religious pluralism in this coun­ try (see e.g. Bastos 2004; Mapril 2007, 2009). In the Christian sphere, these changes were paramount. With the new wave of migrants from Brazil, Africa and (from the late 1990’s on) Eastern 7 On the contours and heritage of this tradition in Portugal, see for instance Cabral (1992), Valente (1999), Vilaça (1999), Santos (2001), Barreto (2003) and Dix (2008).

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Europe, among other things, the expression of diverse (Charismatic, Pentecostal, Orthodox, etc.) forms of Christianity became more present in the public sphere. The late 1960’s witnessed growing trends of migra­ tion from former Portuguese colonies (Brazil, Angola, Cape Verde, GuineaBissau and Mozambique) into Portugal. Many of these migrants contributed, for instance, for the revamping of the decades-old Aliança Evangélica Portuguesa (AEP, Portuguese Evangelical Alliance) into an active umbrella organization (Santos 2001). Another visible moment was the establishment of the Neopentecostal church of Brazilian origin, the UCKG in the mid 1990’s, highly publicized and polemic, given the public rejection towards their entry (Mafra 2002). Finally, another interesting case was the develop­ ment of a Gypsy Pentecostal movement in Portugal since the late 1970’s, with an important impact among this community (Blanes 2008c). This in turn reminds us that these reconfigurations are not just mediated by pro­ cesses of migration, but rather of mobility and transnationalization. Many other examples could follow. The African participation in this context is also heterogeneous and dynamic. Given the sociological and religious background of their country of origin, African Christians in Portugal are mostly Angolan and Cape-Verdean migrants or “second generations” (Blanes 2008a) – although smaller communities of Congolese (Sarró 2009) and West Africans are also known (see e.g. Formenti 2011).8 The African Pentecostal development described above is but one of the heterogeneous forms of participation in the Portuguese Christian scenario. In an introductory survey performed in the beginning of 2007, we identified several stances of this participa­ tion:  from the establishment of ‘African nuclei’ or congregations within previously established Portuguese churches (like the Igreja Lusitana) to the creation of ‘Portuguese churches’ by African leaders and followers (like the Associação Cristã Templo de Deus or the Igreja Luso-Africana), the more or less informal congregation of African groups in spaces offered by Portuguese churches (such as in the Assembly of God’s Tabernáculo da Fé in Amadora, northern Lisbon, or the Centro Cristão Vida Abundante), the association with local networks (such as the aforemen­ tioned AEP or the historical Protestant based Conselho Português de Igrejas 8 I am keeping the Lisbon area as major reference here for two main reasons: firstly, because African migration is mostly concentrated in and around the Lisbon Metropolitan area and because the vast majority of African religious communities are located in this same region; second, because it has been the site of my research. Obviously, this does not mean that what happens outside the capital is not of interest (see Beard 2008).



prophetic visions of europe25

Cristãs, COPIC) and, finally, the inauguration of European delegations of African churches (such as the Tokoist church, the Kimbanguist church, etc. We must keep in mind that these diversified expressions of religious and Christian pluralism in Portugal are not very significant from a statistic point of view (Vilaça 2006). Nevertheless, they are indeed telling in terms of religious interaction and agency in the Portuguese scenery, inasmuch as they participate in what sociologist Helena Vilaça interprets as the expression of religious modernity (Hervieu-Léger 2005 [1999]) and, follow­ ing José Casanova (1994) a re-centering of religion in the public sphere (Vilaça 2006: 22–23). Confirming this suggestion, they actively seek public spaces of manifestation and visibility, in order to ‘present’ and ‘justify’ their role in European religion, often provoking stances of incomprehension and debate, as well as of mission and conversion – as has been recently described for instance regarding the Kimbanguist Church (Mélice 2006; Sarró 2009; Garbin and Pambu 2009; Sarró and Mélice 2010; Sarró and Santos 2011). Thus, it is not necessarily through the prism of quantifying data that the agency of migrants in local religious contexts defies ideas of ‘Eurosecularism’ (Berger, Davie and Fokas 2008) and contributes to renewed debates on mul­ ticulturalism, citizenship and nationality (van der Veer and Lehmann 1999; Levey and Modood 2008). Nevertheless, as Steffen Dix points out, religious plurality in Europe is not necessarily a ‘product of modernity’. Rather, what we are witnessing now is a reconfiguration into new dynamics of convivência, religious coex­ istence (2008: 60–61) that produces new forms of visibility, recognition and reaction. And this reaction goes both ways: for ‘migrants’ – who reflect upon their own religious heritage and its role in terms of ‘baggage’ or ‘sex­ tant’ (Baumann 1999) – and for ‘locals’, who discover a previously unknown diversity in their own backyard. But we do not want to enter the pitfall of bipolarizing the problem by opposing locals and newcomers. Our point here is that, regardless of how ‘modern’, ‘pre-modern’ or ‘post-modern’ these reconfigurations may be, Portugal became, in the postcolonial setting, a newfound scenario for dif­ ferent transnational religious strategies in the Atlantic space (Sarró and Blanes 2008, 2009). We could state that whilst, formerly, Christianity embarked in Portuguese ports and crossed the Oceans so as to arrive to Africa and America and evangelize the peoples it encountered along the way, today the paths and avenues of religious movement are far more com­ plex: there is a crossing of Christianities coming from Africa to Europe and America, from Europe to Africa, and from America to Africa and Europe

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(Sarró and Blanes 2009: 53–54). What is happening today in Lisbon is but one example. Lisbon as Place of Prophecy The processes described above begin to explain the scenario of diversified religious activity found by the Tokoists in their arrival to Lisbon. Just like Miguel and Paulo, the group that inaugurated the first church in Lisbon had migrated to this city in the turn of the decade. Thus, it was a matter of time and opportunity before they made a move in order to open a cult space of their own. Starting off as a group of five to ten people meeting in a hostel in downtown Lisbon, they consecutively used borrowed cult spaces, from the Presbyterian church and a secondary school in central Lisbon, to sharing a space with other African Pentecostal groups (among which Paulo and Miguel’s) in Martim Moniz, in the old quarters of the city. Finally, around the year 2000, they established in their current location, in Vale do Forno, Odivelas (north of Lisbon). Today, they are a steady group of around one hundred believers who not only attend the weekly service every Sunday but also participate in the mul­ tiple activities developed by the church leaders – from meetings to prayer and fasting séances, choir practice and catechism. Most believers live far away from the church headquarters; nevertheless, most of their free time (weekends, after work) is spent either in the church or going there – a fact that indicates the centrality of religious practice for them. Furthermore, the first steps were recently taken towards the opening of a second Tokoist church in Portugal, in the Algarve region, eventually which culminated in the conversion of a small group of Portuguese believers. The Tokoists are also a very mobile group; every weekend, it is frequent to learn of visits by fellow believers either from Angola or from other Europeans countries. Likewise, many of the Angolans that belong to the Lisbon church often circulate around Europe, through the Angolan migrant networks, to look for work. In this particular context, the fact that the first diasporic Tokoist church was born in Lisbon may have been, at a first glance, a coincidence motivated by factors other than spiritual determinism – as Angolan migration towards Schengen Europe had Portugal as main destiny, and Lisbon often works as a ‘revolving door’ for Angolan entry to the EU (Ferreira, Lopes and Mortagua 2008; Grassi 2008; Oien 2008). Nevertheless, it is also true that Portugal played a determinant role in Tokoist history: not only was it the imposer of a colonial system that



prophetic visions of europe27

persecuted and imprisoned Toko and his followers during the first decades of existence of the movement, but it was also to Portugal – namely, the island of São Miguel in the Azores, mid Atlantic – where Toko was sent to exile during a decade (1963–1974). It was also from this location that Toko, who had been given a job as assistant lighthouse keeper, developed what I have termed a ‘postal leadership’ (Blanes 2009), exchanging thousands of letters with his followers in Luanda, where he designed what was to become officially The Church of Our Lord Jesus Christ on Earth (recognized in 1974, months before the Portuguese left Angola). Thus, Portugal and the places in Lisbon and the Azores where Toko sojourned during this period became significant, historical sites for the church. Initially understood as a ‘determination of absence’ by the follow­ ers in Angola – who saw how their figurehead was forcefully removed from their territory –, Toko’s sojourn was later, in the years that followed his return to Angola, understood as a place from which the prophet – as the lighthouse where he worked at – guided them in the journey of church building. When the first Tokoists arrived in Lisbon, one of their first mis­ sions was to retrace the prophet’s steps in this country, photograph the major landmarks of his stay and record interviews with people who met and interacted with him (interview with church leader, October 2007; see also Kisela 2004). It is also in Lisbon where one of the main historical sources on the Tokoist movement is located: the archives of the political police of the Estado Novo (PIDE), who, since Toko’s expulsion from the Congo in 1950 and until the Portuguese retreat from Angola in 1975, had produced several reports, interrogations and confiscated letters concerning the Tokoist movement. Therefore it was no surprise to learn that the first trip of the current leader of the main Tokoist branch outside Angola was, precisely, to Portugal, in 2005. Nevertheless, the process of installation of a Tokoist church in Lisbon reveals an interesting dynamics: that the Tokoist church in Lisbon relied on migrant networks in order to develop their activities. In fact, it was not part of any strategy from the church’s homeland, but rather the outcome of the association of individual interests in Portuguese territory. The situation in Angola was not, in this context, favorable for such an enterprise: after the prophet Simão Toko’s death in 1984, the church experienced a series of important internal conflicts, where different sectors disputed leadership and authority in his succession (Blanes 2009). These conflicts divided the church into different, opposed groups that claimed to be the ‘real Tokoists’, and members from each group were forbidden of visiting each other. Thus, the idea of a church expansion was not a priority. It was not until Afonso

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Nunes, the current leader of the main Tokoist branch – the Universal Directorship – took office in the year 2000 that this became a priority. Afonso Nunes, a Tokoist believer coming from the same region as the prophet’s place of birth, appeared in the church’s headquarters in Luanda, where the Central Directorship branch was settled. He claimed that he had been visited by Toko’s spirit, conversed with him, and finally accepted becoming ‘possessed’ by the spirit, thus becoming the ‘personification’ of Simão Toko. This personification also implied the incorporation of specific instructions: the unification and restructuring of the church, the develop­ ment of a Universal Directorship and, finally, the construction of a Universal Temple. Nunes/Toko then engaged in an intense backstage activity, attempting to reunite the different parties with his message. The level of success of this entrepreneurship is measured in the (up to date) partial reunification he has succeeded; yet on the meantime he has led this Cúpula (Central Directorship) to an unprecedented level of following, congregating tens of thousands of believers on a weekly basis in the main church in Luanda,9 while increasing the public visibility and civil action of the Tokoist move­ ment. Simultaneously, he has transformed the church into a ‘Universal Directorship’, declaring a renewed geographical framework for the church’s ethos. Since then, Tokoist churches have sprung in Europe, Southern Africa, Brazil and even Japan (Blanes 2009). But in truth, it was in fact from Lisbon (and not Luanda) that the first initiatives to develop a ‘diasporic Tokoist community’ were promoted. Lisbon church leader Pastor Gomes traveled countless times across Europe to congregate believers spread throughout the Angolan diaspora and to convince them to open cult spaces. Today, we can assert that the initiative was a success, since Tokoist churches are known, apart from Portugal, to be in Spain, France, Belgium, Netherlands, United Kingdom, Switzerland and Italy. Thus, we can understand that Nunes’ universalist proposal was more a reaction to ongoing events than a predetermined proselytist strategy (on this see Blanes 2011). On the other hand, what these divergent paths that developed through­ out the 1990’s – conflict and dismemberment in Angola, unity and expan­ sion in Europe – tell us is that perhaps the church was not prepared for a diasporic version of itself in that period. An illustrating example is how the

9 The church has recently inaugurated (August 2013) its Universal Temple, with a capac­ ity for fifty thousand believers.



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leadership in Luanda reacted to a policy promoted by the church in its first years of existence in Lisbon: that, contrary to what was happening in Luanda, there would be no distinction between believers from the different allegiances and therefore any Tokoist, despite his allegiance, could attend. This motivated a harsh response from the Luanda leadership to which the Lisbon group belonged to, who threatened them with expulsion. Nevertheless, after the political changes in the homeland after the year 2000, they were finally acknowledged, and their ecumenical effort had been, in fact, pioneering (interview with Lisbon church leader, January 2008). This example conforms the kind of ambiguities that populate the rela­ tionship between homeland and diasporic churches. In the case of pro­ phetic churches, this ambiguity becomes evident. On the one hand, there is an umbilicality that binds diaspora and homeland – illustrated in the way the Tokoist liturgy and rituals are reproduced almost in photocopy in Lisbon and in Luanda, and the explicit hierarchy that organizes the church’s politics. On the other, frictions such as the one described above demon­ strate the tensions between different ‘Tokoist experiences’, mediated by a process of mobility. Recognition and the Particularities of Universalism What, then, are the translations of these ambiguities and dilemmas when it comes to Tokoists ‘recognizing Christianity’ in Europe? When the Tokoist church was officially recognized in Angola 1974 – a few months before the departure of the Portuguese authorities and the end of the colonial period in Angola –, it was under the designation of “Church of Our Lord Jesus Christ in the World”. From this name we can depart that, from day one the church incorporated a concern for a universalist approach in its ethos. From a doctrinal point of view, this was stated through the concepts of ‘remembrance’ and ‘reformation’ (see Blanes 2009a), related with the idea of a universal spiritual restoration of a true, authentic Christianity. As I described above, for the Tokoists this ideology implied a simultaneous rejection of ‘European Christianity’ as it was presented by Western missionaries in the 19th and 20th centuries. But we have seen in the preceding section that the self-proclaimed Christian universalism does not necessarily obscure or eliminate particularities and ambiguities (see also Martin 2007). Thus, it appears more as an expression of will than an instituted commitment. So, what I propose here is that the way Tokoists

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understand their ‘universalism’ and their ‘prophetic visions of Europe’ are intrinsically related. Contrary to what happens with many churches of migrant origin in Portugal (or Europe, in fact), the Tokoists did not develop explicit strategies regarding association and networking with other religious groups. When I asked Sandro, an evangelist of the Lisbon church, why this was so, his reply was somewhat prophetic: “What for? In the future, there will be only one church in this world – the Tokoist church”. Thus, the Tokoists felt no need to engage in local religious politics. In fact, during our fieldwork among the Tokoists and Kimbanguists in Lisbon, both my colleague Ramon Sarró and I witnessed attempts to create an association of migrant churches with the inclusion of ‘African churches’ such as the Kimbanguists and Tokoists – attempts invariably met with the lack of interest or understanding regard­ ing the final objectives of such an enterprise, on behalf of the leaders of these churches. Sandro’s reply above expressed a heartfelt conviction regarding ‘Tokoist righteousness’. In fact, one of the church’s main slogans, frequently shouted in unison in their dominical services, is “Our God is the best of all gods!” This slogan reveals two interesting concepts: in first place, a self-cultivated idea of moral rectitude; in second, the implicit ecumenical recognition of ‘mul­ tiple gods’ (instead of ‘one God’). In other words, a religious multicultural­ ism of sorts. “(…) After all, there are so many churches in the world, so many ways of speaking to God, so many ways of communicating”, stated Pastor Gomes, the leader of the Lisbon church, in one of his sermons (January 3rd, 2009). Therefore, we should not interpret this sense of self-righteousness as a translation of ideas of moral superiority or just plain lack of interest in other forms of Christianity. Tokoists insist on the importance of cultivating and respecting relations with other churches. It is quite common to hear them talk about the Kimbanguist church, for instance, as a ‘sister church’. The Kimbanguist church, together with other Christian groups of Angolan origin (the Pentecostal Assembly of God of Makulusu, Angolan congrega­ tions of the Methodist and Lusitan churches, etc.), are frequently invited by the Tokoists to celebrate important dates in their liturgical calendar – the same happening inversely. This tells us that, despite renouncing political and strategic networking, the Tokoists do cultivate relationships with other churches in the Lisbon scenario. But interestingly enough, those connections reverberate more with African migrant networks than with local, Portuguese institutions. Contrary to other African Christian groups in Lisbon, the Tokoists seem



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contempt with safeguarding their Africa-ness and reproducing it in dia­ sporic territory. Nevertheless, this does not mean that proselytism is not an issue for Tokoists (Blanes 2011). In fact, it has become a central problem in the church’s strategy in recent times. After a visit from Bishop Nunes to Lisbon in December 2008 – described by the church as a trip to “feed the faith in Europe” –, a debate settled among the church members. Nunes announced that several changes had to take place in the Tokoist diaspora. Among them, the most significant one was that the churches could no longer be considered ‘African’, ‘migrant’ or ‘Angolan’ churches, but rather Portuguese, Spanish, French and so on. This meant that the leaders of each church would become ‘nationals’ in the near future, that the services would have to be performed in the local languages (and not Portuguese, as is currently widespread), and so on. In other words, the churches of the Tokoist dias­ pora must continue to grow, but no longer within the Angolan communi­ ties: they must learn to transcend the migrant (African) condition and engage in an ‘outreach’ with the local (Portuguese) society. This is under­ stood as a final stage in the process of becoming a ‘truly universal’ church. What has happened in the following months in the Lisbon church reflects the members’ attempts to respond to this appeal. In the Tokoist ethos, proselytism is not actively performed as a door-to-door activity, but rather through testimony and example. Thus, they are struggling to find other ways to have an impact in the local scene – trying to obtain more vis­ ibility in the local media, developing food donation campaigns, etc. Members of the Lisbon church recognize the difficulty in taking this next step, and are concerned as to whether they will succeed or not. And the challenge remains. “(…) The holy seed we sung about in the beginning of this sermon, it must be spread. The church must expand right here in Portugal, because it was in this land that Mayamona10 suffered” (sermon, Tokoist church of Lisbon, September 28th, 2008). Prophetic Modernity and Extraversion In the preceding pages, we have seen how the process of installation of an African prophetic church in Europe was surrounded by multiple processes (from migration to epistemological redefinition) that culminated in renewed debates regarding place and belonging. Taking into consideration 10 ‘Mayamona’ was Simão Toko’s given name in Kikongo, meaning “he who has seen”.

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the impact of the process of migration and consequent religious diaspori­ sation, the Tokoist church – as other prophetic movements such as the Kimbanguist church (see Sarró 2009), and in contrast with other African churches dwelling in Lisbon – has promoted novel terms of ‘universalism’ that do not necessarily reject ideas of Africa-ness, but rather incorporate them in the process of ideological re-location. If Tokoists began in the 1940’s by rejecting ‘European Christianity’, today they have proposed a ‘Tokoist solution’ to the same interlocutor. This Portuguese case of ‘prophetic response’ to migration and diasporiza­ tion can also be understood in terms of ‘African extraversion’, i.e. a ‘modern’ recognition that the place and role of Africans in the world need no longer be in terms of passiveness and asymmetry (Bayart 2000; Sarró 2009), but rather a part of the progressive acknowledgement that the African ‘place’ in the world is now de-territorialized (or rather re-territorialized) and trans­ national (D’Alisera 2004). Translated into the religious sphere, as many authors have argued recently, if it is not possible to think of African religion without equating mobility and diaspora (Johnson 2007; Palmié 2007), nei­ ther is it possible to think of religion in Europe (and Portugal in particular) without that same equation (Baumann 1999; Vertovec 2002). But this process of re-location, as we have described elsewhere, poses a dilemma to Christians such as the Tokoists – a dilemma created by tendencies toward both ‘centrifugality’ and ‘centripetality’ (Sarró and Blanes 2009; Sarró 2009), i.e., doctrinal discursive configurations that are either ‘africanizing’ or ‘universalizing’ and do not necessarily conform a coherent bricolage (Mary 2000) – and where the notion of ‘Africa’ (and therefore that of ‘Europe’) becomes a ‘floating signifier’ (Amselle 2000). One such example was the different misunderstandings that marked the relationship between diasporic and homeland Tokoists in terms of policy and belonging. References Adogame, A. 2004. ‘Engaging the Rhetoric of Spiritual Warfare: The Public Face of Aladura’, Journal of Religion in Africa 34 (4): 493–522. ——. 1998. ‘Building Bridges and Barricades’, Marburg Journal of Religion 3 (1): 1–13. Amselle, J.-L. 2000. Branchements. Anthropologie de l’Universalité des Cultures. Paris: Flammarion. Baganha, M.I. and P. Góis. 1999. ‘Migrações Internacionais De e Para Portugal: O que Sabemos e Para Onde Vamos’, Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais 52/53: 229–280. Barreto, J. 2003. Religião e Sociedade. Dois Ensaios. Lisbon: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais. Bastos, C. 2004. ‘Lisboa, século XXI: uma pós-metropole nos trânsitos mundiais’, in Pais, J. M. and L. Blass (eds), Tribos Urbanas: Produção Artística e Identidades. Lisbon: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 195–224.



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Garbin, D. and D. Pambu. 2009. Roots and Routes. Congolese Diaspora in Multicultural Britain. London: CRONEM. Gonçalves, A.C. 2003. Tradição e Modernidade na (Re)Construção de Angola. Porto: Afrontamento. Grenfell, J. 1998. ‘Simão Toco: An Angolan Prophet’, Journal of Religion in Africa 28 (2): 210–226. Grassi, M. 2008. ‘Práticas, formas e solidariedades da integração de jovens de origem ango­ lana no mercado de trabalho em Portugal’, Economia Global e Gestão 12 (3): 71–91. Henry, C. and J. Noret. 2008. ‘Le Christianisme Céleste en France et en Belgique’, Archives des Sciences Sociales des Religions 143: 91–110. Hervieu-Léger, D. 2005 (1999). O Peregrino e o Convertido. A Religião em Movimento. Lisbon: Gradiva. Johnson, P.C. 2007. Diaspora Conversions. Black Carib Religion and the Recovery of Africa. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Kisela, J.A. 2004. Simão Toco. A Trajectoria de um Homem de Paz. Luanda: Nzila. Levey, G. and T. Modood (eds.). 2008. Secularism, Religion and Multicultural Citizenship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. MacGaffey, W. 1972. ‘The West in Congolese Experience’, in Curtin, P. D. (ed.), Africa and the West. Intellectual Responses to European Culture. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Mafra, C. 2002, Na Posse da Palavra. Religião, Conversão e Liberdade Pessoal em Dois Contextos Nacionais. Lisbon: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais. Mapril, J. 2009. ‘O lugar do sacrifício: qurbani e circuitos transnacionais entre bangladeshis em Lisboa’, Análise Social XLIV: 71–103. ——. 2007. ‘“Maulana says the Prophet is Human, not God”. Milads and Hierarchies among Bengali Muslims in Lisbon’, Lusotopie 14 (1): 255–270. Marshall, R. 2009. Political Spiritualities. The Pentecostal Revolution in Nigeria. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Martin, D. 2007. ‘Master Narratives and the Future of Christianity’, Journal of Religious and Intellectual History 59 (1): 1–13. Mary, A. 2000. ‘Le Bricolage Africain des Héros Chrétiens’, Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religions 114: 1–27. Maskens, M. 2008. ‘Migration et Pentecôtisme à Bruxelles: Expériences Croisées’, Archives des Sciences Sociales des Religions 143: 49–68. Mélice, A. 2006. ‘Un Terrain Fragmenté. Le Kimbanguisme et ses Ramifications’, Civilisations 54 (1–2): 67–76. Meyer, B. 1998. ‘“Make a Complete Break with the Past”. Memory and Post-Colonial Modernity in Ghanaian Pentecostalist Discourse’, Journal of Religion in Africa 28 (3): 316–349. Mudimbe, V.Y. 1994. The Idea of Africa. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. ——. 1988. The Invention of Africa. Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Oien, C. 2008. ‘The Angolan Diaspora in Lisbon: An Introduction’, Economia Global e Gestão 12 (3): 23–33. Palmié, S. 2007. ‘Introduction. Out of Africa?’, Journal of Religion in Africa 37(2): 159–173. Ranger, T. 1986. ‘Religious Movements and Politics in Sub-Saharan Africa’, African Studies Review 29 (2): 1–69. ——. 1968. ‘Connections between “Primary Resistance” Movements and Modern Mass Nationalism in East and Central Africa. Part I’, Journal of African History 9 (3): 437–453. Robbins, J. and M. Engelke. 2010. ‘Introduction’, South Atlantic Quarterly 109 (4): 623–631. (Special Issue on “Global Christianity, Global Critique”). Robbins, J. 2004. Becoming Sinners. Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.



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Sanneh, L. and J. Carpenter (eds). 2005. The Changing Face of Christianity. Africa, The West and the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Santos, L.A. 2001. ‘Protestantismo’, in Azevedo, C. M. (ed.), Dicionário de História Religiosa em Portugal. Lisbon: Círculo de Leitores. Sarró, R., R. Blanes and F. Viegas. 2008. ‘La Guerre en temps de Paix. Ethnicité et Angolanité dans l’Église Kimbanguiste de Luanda’, Politique Africaine 110: 84–101. Sarró, R. and R. Blanes. 2009. ‘Prophetic Diasporas: Moving Religion across the Lusophone Atlantic’, African Diaspora 2: 1–21. ——. 2008, ‘O Atlântico Cristão: apontamentos encontros religiosos em Lisboa’, in Cabral, M. V., K. Wall, S. Aboim and F. Carreira da Silva (orgs.), Itinerários. A Investigação nos 25 Anos do ICS. Lisbon: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais. Sarró, R. and A. Mélice. 2010. ‘Kongo and Lisbon: The Dialectics of Centre and Periphery in the Kimbanguist Church’, in Fancello, S. and A. Mary (eds), Chrétiens Africains en Europe. Prophétismes, Pentecôtismes et Politique des Nations. Paris: Karthala. Sarró, R. and J. Santos. 2009. ‘Gender and Return in the Kimbanguist Church of Portugal’, Journal of Religion in Europe 4 (3): 369–387. Sarró, R. 2009. ‘Kongo en Lisboa: un Ensayo sobre la Reubicación y la Extraversión Religiosa’, in Y. Aixelà, L. Mallart and J. Martí (eds), Introducción a los Estudios Africanos. Barcelona: CEIBA. ter Haar, Gerrie, 2003, ‘Who defines African Identity? A Concluding Analysis’, in Cox, James & Gerrie ter Haar (eds.), Uniquely African? African Christian Identity from Cultural and Historical Perspectives. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. ter Haar, G. 1998. Halfway to Paradise: African Christians in Europe. Cardiff: Cardiff University Press. Valente, D. 1999. ‘As relações Igrejas-Estado em Portugal antes e depois do 25 de Abril de 1974’, Lusotopie 1999: 271–275. Valverde, P. 1997. ‘O Corpo e a Busca de Lugares da Perfeição: Escritas Missionárias da África Colonial Portuguesa, 1930–1960’, Etnográfica 1 (1): 73–96. van der Veer, P. and H. Lehmann. 1999. Nation and Religion. Perspectives on Europe and Asia. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. van der Veer, P. (ed.). 1996. Conversion to Modernities. The Globalization of Christianity. London: Routledge. Vertovec, S. 2002. ‘Religion in Migration, Diasporas and Transnationalism’, Working Paper Research on Immigration and Integration in the Metropolis, Vancouver Centre for Excellence. Viegas, F. 1999. Angola e as Religiões. Luanda: Edição de Autor. Vilaça, H. 2006. Da Torre de Babel às Terras Prometidas. Pluralismo Religioso em Portugal. Porto: Afrontamento. ——. 1999. ‘Alguns Traços acerca da Realidade Numérica das Minorias Religiosas em Portugal’, Lusotopie 1999: 277–289.

TRADITIONS OF DISBELIEF REVISITED: THE CASE OF AFRO-DOMINICAN RELIGIOUS CENTRES IN MADRID1 Cristina Sánchez-Carretero Over the last decade, in both the humanities and in the social sciences, there have been numerous investigations into migration, transnationalism, diasporas, frontiers, the construction of localities and globalisation. The crossroads between migration and religion has also been explored in detail by anthropologists and sociologists who have studied the consolidation of religious practices after the migratory process as a strategy for obtaining resources, maintaining links with the community of origin, and for the internal organisation of groups of immigrants themselves (Goris 1995; Steven-Arroyo and Cadena 1995; Levitt 1998, 2003; Hagan and Ebaugh 2003; Mahler and Hansing 2005). This article aims to contribute to this research through an ethnographic study of the resurgence of Afro-Dominican practices in Madrid amongst the so-called “servants or bearers of mysteries” or, as some anthropologists have named them, practising Dominican voodoo worshippers. Specifically, this article aims to explore the market of spiritual goods these centres offer to female Spanish clients as a way of understanding, within another paradigm, their own experiences in relation to possession. Increas­ing numbers of Spanish women have found an answer for a type of behaviour seen as ‘inappropriate’ and pathological in their local contexts in Madrid, and in which they were labelled as suffering from dissociative identity disorders. The pathologization of the experiences of possession is part of a religious-materialist-rational logic or paradigm and opposes what might be called a religious-spiritist-corporal logic – that of the bearers of mysteries, or saints. In the latter, the experiences of possession are legitimised as corporal, spiritual and non-pathological. Explanations within this logic provide alternative answers to people who experience the sensations of possession but who are situated in a cultural context which explains

1 This article is a version of a paper in Spanish presented at the XI Anthropology Conference of the FAAE in September 2008.

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these sensations as pathologies. Re-thinking the cartographies of religious logics, including what David Hufford called “the tradition of disbelief” (Hufford 1982b), is essential. Hufford states that in studying the supernatural we must critically recognise the existence of traditions of disbelief, not just the traditions of belief,2 and suggests that we should ask questions such as: why does a person refuse to believe in ghosts or the afterlife in general? Why does a person choose to uphold these non-beliefs? Which processes of inference have led them to have these systems of beliefs in non-belief? (Hufford 1982b: 54). Through this repositioning in the face of religious-materialist-rational logics, ethnographic research into religious practices in which the body is a direct channel of communication with the spirit world can help us to understand the religious-spiritist-corporal logic that comes into play amongst the “bearers of mysteries”. The promise of “healing body and soul” (Bourdieu 1988: 104) has helped to promote the success of Afro-Dominican centres in Madrid. It has also provided women who previously experienced their corporal relationship with the spirit world as something pathological with an alternative explanatory model for their states of possession, as we will see below with the story of Marta and Altagracia’s centre. A cartography of these centres in Madrid and the celebrations, vows and festivals that surround them makes it possible to analyse the religion as a backdrop for considering certain cultural aspects, without attempting to isolate it or consider it separately (Cantón 2001: 231). In the Dominican Republic, the centres of the bearers of mysteries have a “primordial function as a medical cult” (Davis 1987: 74). After the migratory process, this cult is simplified even further. In the case of the Afro-Dominicans in Madrid, the therapeutic function is the most primordial, together with their function as the centre of an informal network for obtaining resources, in which the mysteries or saints are a further instrument in the universe of logics of the daily lives of their followers.

2 “Upon stepping outside our own academic streams of tradition in this way we immediately find two parallel sets of traditions about the supernatural where we had thought there was only one: traditions of belief and the one hand and traditions of ‘disbelief’ on the other (…) From this perspective atheists are believers as much as the faithful are. The religionist is as much a sceptic of the materialist framework as is the materialist a sceptic of the supernatural. The traditions of disbelief are especially interesting because there are indications that they are surprisingly homogeneous across the entire range from genuinely unlettered folk-disbelievers all the way to the most eminently lettered materialist” (Hufford 1982: 48).



traditions of disbelief revisited39 The Silences of Dominican Voodoo

While the majority of Afro-Caribbean religious practices have received attention from the academic world for decades, those of the Dominican Republic have not been explored in similar detail from an anthropological perspective. A much smaller number of monographic works have been dedicated to Dominican voodoo in comparison to santería, palo monte, Haitian voodoo, candomblé or umbanda.3 In fact, and unlike other AfroCaribbean religious practices, in the case of the Dominican Republic there is not even any consensus on what practices should be called. Some anthropologists, such as Martha Ellen Davis (1987; 1996), Carlos Esteban Deive (1981; 1996), June Rosenberg (1979) and José Francisco Alegría-Pons (1993) describe them as ‘Dominican voodoo’. Others, such as Dagoberto Tejeda Ortiz (1998), refer to ‘traditional religion’, “belief in the saints” or “belief in the mysteries”, applying the same terminology used by those who believe in the “twenty-one divisions”. With the exception of the judú from the province of Samaná, and the Liborismo of San Juan de la Maguana, there is no generic term for these types of religious practices. This is partly due to the social stigma and invisibility suffered by religions with an African origin, their connections with slavery, and the political uses of everything connected with Africa in the construction of the Dominican national identity (Sørensen 1993; Sagás 2000; Howard 2001; Sánchez-Carretero 2005). In addition to this history of silence, the particular relationship between Haiti and the Dominican Republic also needs to be noted.4 To name something is to give it existence, to understand it and recognise it: situating it in a time and in a place. The servants or bearers of mysteries and their followers practice an un-organised religion without a name. Their practices are named according to the individual believers, or the actions they perform, but the practices as a whole do not receive a generic name because, according to Davis, “one of the main characteristics of a popular 3 Patín Veloz is considered a pioneering researcher in the field of studies on Dominican voodoo, with a series of articles written in the late 1940s (1975), although Carlos Esteban Deive wrote the most influential initial monograph on the subject (1979). Other studies include those by Davis (1987), Rosenberg (1979), Tejeda Ortiz (1998), Andújar Persinal (1997; 1999) and José Francisco Alegría-Pons (1993). The study of Lundius and Lundahl on the Olivarist movement and the Palma Sola massacre (2000) is also of note. 4 See Sánchez-Carretero (2005) for an analysis of the rejection of African elements in the Dominican Republic. At the end of the 1970s, intellectuals began to incorporate the African legacy as a part of their academic discourses (Deive 1974; Rosenberg 1979) and in recent years several monographs have been published inside and outside of the country dedicated to the anti-Haitian attitude (Sagás 2000; Howard 2001).

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religion is precisely its variation, because it is born out of the local circumstances of its worshippers. For this reason there is no dogma or liturgy, there is no orthodox voodoo” (Davis 1987: 58). It is a religious system that is complex, persecuted and stigmatized. It is diffuse and disguised to avoid the social rejection it provokes. It is also impregnated with a degree of self-rejection by the worshippers themselves.5 However, those who “believe in the mysteries” do identify themselves as believers with a common religious practice, and although there is no standard system of beliefs and rituals in the Dominican Republic, in the same way as there is no such system in Haiti, “it is possible to identify a certain degree of uniformity in their magical-religious features and systems, which is valid in order to allow us to study them as a whole” (Deive 1975: 17). While the Dominican Republic shares a history of colonization and interbreeding with the rest of the Caribbean, it has its own unique features in terms of its independence and its relations with Haiti. These led to the development of different religious practices based on the Kardecist spiritism of the nineteenth century, African religions and Catholicism, although it shares with the others the essential backdrop of possession and connecting curative functions with spiritual functions. The Dominican anthropologist Carlos Andújar has indicated the following differentiating elements of Dominican voodoo: (1) a greater flexibility in the liturgy; (2) the de-institutionalisation of priestly practices, without the exhaustiveness of the initiation rites of Haitian voodoo; (3) spontaneity in relation to ceremonies and rituals, with celebrations held outside of the sacred calendar; and (4) the absence of a fixed place of worship, as the room dedicated to the altar does not have to be the one chosen for ceremonies (Andújar 1999: 191). All of the Afro-Caribbean religious systems share, firstly, the possession of the bodies of the bearers or servants of mysteries – the “horses” – whereby the saints “ride” the “horses”, who usually describe this state as if they were “possessed by the mysteries, beings, spirits or saints”. The “horses” are able to carry the saints – such as St. James, St. Michael or St. Ana6 – in their bodies. Secondly, these religions share the ability to heal and transform the material reality of those who ask for help from the bearers of mysteries. 5 Patín Veloz (1974), Miniño (1983) and Davis (1987) use the term “servants of mysteries”: “Neither do the Dominican worshippers refer to themselves as voduistas. In general, the worshippers refer to themselves as ‘horses of mystery’ (as well as using a Haitian term – ‘cheval’), or, more sophisticatedly, ‘servants of mystery’” (Davis 1987: 65). 6 Or, using their African equivalents, Ogún Baleyó, Belié Belcán or Anaísa.



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The elements of the religious practices are simple: the bearer of mysteries (also known as a “servant” or “medium”), and the altar with engravings of the saints and certain ritual objects such as a bell to call on the mysteries, candles, a glass containing water, perfumes, drinks, etcetera. Normally, there is also a helper known as the “spiritual secretary”, although they are not essential. As a result these practices can be seen more as constituting a “medical cult” (Davis 1987: 222). The main activity of the centres is to provide consultations, and sometimes to hold festivals (holy hours or prayers) to thank the mysteries or to keep promise with a vow. The bearers of mysteries have special powers, such as the ability to “incorporate mysteries” (i.e. to be possessed by spirits), together with second sight, the extrasensory perception that includes the ability to capture the spirits of the living and the dead, as well as telepathy and premonition (Davis 1987: 267). The worshippers themselves deny that what they do is voodoo, and consider this word a synonym for “black magic”. Altagracia, a bearer of mysteries in Madrid, expressed on several occasions what she prefers to be called: “most people use the term ‘bearer of mysteries’… I also like ‘medium’ and ‘parapsychologist’”. These last two terms legitimate the contact Altagracia has with the spirit world, through the European tradition of Kardecist spiritism. However, they do not add anything of the peculiarities of the belief in the saints or mysteries that Altagracia professes – what anthropologists have called ‘Dominican voodoo’, in reference to the eastern variety of the same voodoo practiced in Haiti. But Altagracia is very clear that the word ‘voodoo’ does not describe what she does: Altagracia: Well, I don’t like the word ‘voodoo’, because for me ‘voodoo’ means someone who does evil, that’s the way I understand that word: a person who casts spells, who does terrible things, and I think that word is really ugly… It has nothing to do with it, because what I consider as voodoo describes making sacrifices from life to life; giving life for life. Like sacrificing an animal for the life of a person, and as far as I’m concerned, that word doesn’t convince me. Q: Working with evil instead of good? A: That’s what voodoo means to me, or the way I understand the word ‘voodoo’. That’s why I don’t like talking about it. I don’t like the term ‘sorcerer’ either. Maybe I can joke about being a ‘little witch’, but not about being a sorcerer. No, I respect everyone for their ideology and the terms they use for things, but not that word… Q: Do you know any sorcerers who actually call themselves that? A:  Very few, because nobody gives themself their own name, do you understand? I can call someone something and that’s it, when I know that I have said those things, and like here, like the way they normally call people, clairvoyants, mediums…what’s the word… parapsychology, they call

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cristina sánchez-carretero them sorcerers or sorceresses, but I can’t say that, I never consider using that word. The only thing I say is “well, I came into this world to serve”, and here I am, for as long as God wants me… but on the contrary….and what is more, I don’t even like the idea that people know I can do these things, I haven’t even got a card. I’m not allowed. Anaísa says that this is publicity, and that she doesn’t publicise herself. People should just go and see her, and then bring along the next person.7

The logic maintained by Altagracia in rejecting the term ‘voodoo’ is, in part, the logic I previously referred to as ‘religious-materialist-rational’, which separates religion from magic. The aim of trying to separate religion from magic is a proposal that has endured in anthropology since its origins as a discipline in the nineteenth century. As Cantón Delgado says: “It is likely that the concepts people from the west spontaneously have about magic, possession by spirits or witchcraft, in contrast, for example, to African concepts, are connected to the supernatural, the extraordinary, the mysterious and the fantastic. But phenomena which, for us, fall outside of rational comprehension are, in other traditional cultures, the pillars of the most basic comprehension of the world” (Cantón Delgado 2001: 21). The case of voodoo is particularly tainted by exotic stereotypes of the “magic of the others”. Voodoo has been represented as a cult based on fear and black magic, as the anthropologist Nadia Lovell explains in the case of Haitian voodoo, in which the “images of zombies, the walking living dead or bloody sacrifices, including, it is sometimes said, human victims have taken pride of place. A plethora of films, articles and documentaries has served to reiterate the wildness of voodoo in the Western imagination” (Lovell 2002: 1). These books, documentaries and magazines normally use dramatic images and particularly obscure language. Afro-Dominican Centres in Madrid In Madrid, the activities associated with the centres of bearers of mysteries are simplified, and limited to a large extent to their therapeutic functions. As noted above, celebrations may also be held, such as “holy hours” or prayers to keep promise with a vow, although these are simpler in comparison to those held in the Dominican Republic. For example, the palos or atabales, a type of drum used in festivals dedicated to the mysteries, are rarely used in ceremonies held in the centres in Madrid, and when the 7 Audio recording: Dominican Republic-070506-1.



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palos are played, it is done in discotheques or bars.8 In fact, the high profile of these latter activities contradicts the idea of keeping what occurs in the centres out of the public eye: the desire for anonymity, for fear of being misinterpreted. The altars and temples in Madrid are a miniature version of those found in the Dominican Republic, where “on average, the temple is nothing more than the home of the person performing the ritual, with a room with an altar consecrated to one or more gods. The altar is usually found in a corner of the room, and is nearly always shaped like a stepped pyramid in two sections” (Deive 1975: 207). In Madrid, I was able to document active centres of bearers of mysteries in the districts of Cuatro Caminos, Argüelles and Salamanca, and in other areas on the outskirts, such as Torrejón. The observations included in this study are from one of the centres in the district of Salamanca, where I have carried out fieldwork since 2001. From January to April 2007, I stayed in an attic next to the centre in order to conclude a project that is still underway on the daily life of the centre, and the story of the bearer who is responsible for it, Altagracia. In May 2007 I travelled to the Dominican Republic with Altagracia and her “spiritual secretary”, accompanying them on a series of visits to other bearers of mysteries on the island. The empirical research on which these ideas are based also comes from fieldwork carried out between 1999 and 2001 in Vicente Noble (a town in the south-east of the Dominican Republic) and in Madrid, to study the narrative construction of the migratory experience (Sánchez-Carretero 2002). The south-east of the Dominican Republic is characterised by having suffered large-scale emigration to Spain, rather than to the USA – the other main destination for migrants leaving the island. Towards the end of the 1990s, the majority of migrants from the island leaving for Spain were women, mainly from the province of Barahona. From the end of the 1980s and throughout the whole of the 1990s, there was an increase in the number of Dominicans migrating to Spain. In the early 1990s, most entered Spain as tourists, as until 1993 Dominicans were not required to hold a tourist visa to enter the country. Subsequently migration spread to the whole country, and in recent years there has been a greater balance between women and men, as the main method of entering Spain has been through the process of family reunification.9 8 For further reading on the palo festivals in Madrid, see Sánchez-Carretero (2004). 9 The figures and references are related to the moment of writing this article in 2009. Therefore, migration changes due to the current financial crisis are not included. Dominican

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The centre run by Altagracia has gone from being one of the meeting points in Madrid for Dominican women who “believe in the saints”, to being increasingly visited by Spanish women. In fact, Altagracia’s assistant from the end of 2003 until the end of 2005 was Marta, a girl from Madrid in her early 20s, who found an explanation in the saints for something she had felt since she was a child. The growing presence of Spanish women in the AfroDominican centres in Madrid is an example of the “wide-ranging” metamorphoses referred to by Cantón Delgado: Far from interpreting the increasingly visible dynamic of contemporary religious creativity as a revitalisation of the irrational, as a symptom of an intense moral crisis, as a Machiavellian fraud motivated by corrupt leaders, or as a fleeting fashion that may disappear on the turn of the millennium, we try to understand the fragmentation of the religious landscape as the expression of a wide-ranging metamorphosis (Cantón Delgado 2001: 234).

These are subordinate religious practices, which are not part of the hegemonic scenarios of the most institutionalised religions. The Dominican centres of bearers of mysteries in Madrid offer the advantage of providing spiritual and corporal services without dogmas, involving consultations with people mainly seeking solutions for problems connected with health, money or love (three key words in any migratory project, or any life project). It remains necessary to explore in detail the role of the Dominican centres of bearers of mysteries in Madrid as places of socialisation, their metamorphosis and their increasingly large numbers of Spanish participants and initiates. Half-way between Mystic and Rational Geographies It’s really hard to say: Jesus, what the hell is inside my daughter! I mean, she is a part of me, I gave birth to her (Carmen, 28 May 2004).

In contrast with the pathologization of spiritist experiences within a rational-positivist logic, the explanations provided within a mystical paradigm or logic, as is the case with the bearers of mysteries, provide alternatives for people who experience these sensations physically, but who do not feel that their cultural context legitimises such sensations as corporeities located within religious-spiritual practices. In Altagracia’s centre in Madrid, migration in Spain has been studied by Carmen Gregorio Gil (1998), Gina Gallardo Rivas (1995), Yolanda Herranz (1996) and Cristina Sánchez-Carretero (2002); the study by Ninna Nyberg Sørensen (1997) is of particular interest as it compares the situation between Spain and the USA.



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from 2003 to 2008, there have been at least four cases of Spanish women who have found an answer for behaviour classified as ‘inappropriate’ and pathological in their local contexts in Madrid, and which had classified them as having dissociative identity disorders. I will focus on the case of Marta, who found an explanation through the mysteries for what she considered to be a mental imbalance. Before meeting Altagracia, Marta and her sister Carmen applied a rational-positivist logic which did not include possession as an acceptable possibility, and led them in the direction of psychiatric pathology.10 In 2008, Marta was 25. She had experienced “it” for the first time four years previously. I use the word “it”, meaning “possession”, because Marta did not enter into the semantic field of possession or being mounted. Marta: the first time it happened was in a discotheque, but it was a Spanish discotheque, not a Dominican one or anything like that. The first time it happened to me was when I really flipped out in the discotheque, but I had dreams and saw things from when I was a little girl.11

She met Altagracia through her best friend, who told her she read cards. Her friend knew that Marta had the gift: Marta: I walked in to where Altagracia’s altar is, but she wasn’t there, Anaísa was, and I just cried and cried, but I felt happy. The first thing she said to me was “who touched your head when you were little?” and it was my Grandma (…) I knew that there was something weird in my head, that something in my head wasn’t right… that I wasn’t a normal person, because of the dreams, because of seeing things that other people couldn’t see, a young person, a girl, how come she went to the cemetery to calm down? A normal girl doesn’t do those kinds of things, they’re not normal, a normal person doesn’t do them, you can crap yourself out of fright… My mother’s had a terrible time because of me.12

Marta works in a hospital as an assistant nurse, and after she met Altagracia, began to explain through the mysteries everything she had felt since she was a child; she found another interpretative paradigm – in the Kuhnian sense – to understand what was happening to her. Until then, as mentioned 10 Since 1992, the World Health Organisation has included the “disorder of trance and possession” as a type of dissociative disorder, and defines these as “disorders in which there is a temporary loss of the sense of personal identity and full awareness of the surroundings… attention and awareness of the surroundings may be limited to one or two immediate aspects, and a small but repeated series of movements, postures and expressive manifestations is frequently presented” (International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems 10th Revision, F44.3, http://apps.who.int/classifications/icd10/ browse/2010/en#/F44.3 accessed April 18 2013). 11 Audio recording: M-1 28-05-04a. 12 Audio recording: MARTA 1 28/05/04A.

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above, she had used the pathological-rationalist model to analyse what was occurring. The corporal sensations of experiencing altered states of consciousness, hearing voices, having visions, dreams and premonitions were interpreted via a pathology of “personality disorders”. Her nieces Paula and Carola, her sister Carmen’s daughters, aged 16 and 10, also have the same altered states of consciousness. After visiting Altagracia’s centre, a new vocabulary and a different model of understanding have made these experiences legitimate, and the new paradigm has situated the experiences of Marta, Paula and Carola outside the marginalisation of the pathological. Mexican anthropologist Federico Besserer uses the anthropology of the senses to analyse the sensory order that is necessary in order to exercise governability and maintain social inequalities: “when women mobilise inappropriate senses within an existing sensory regime, a conflict of senses is produced” (Besserer 2000: 373). Drawing on Besserer’s ideas, it could be said that Marta, through Altagracia’s centre, has access to a new code of senses that mediates between the person, the family and the social structure. Two years after meeting Altagracia, Marta had learned to control the mysteries that “mounted” her, had completed her initiation, and could cerrar la vía (“turn off the connection”) when she did not wish to be “mounted” – or on the contrary, call on them so that they did so whenever she wished. Altagracia has disciplined Marta’s body and the creation of successive meanings through the intersubjective experiences of her encounter with the spirits (Csordas 1993: 140–141). Despite the fact that Altagracia’s centre has experienced a marked increase in its number of Spanish clients, together with a growing internationalisation as a result of larger numbers of Columbians and Ecuadorians, it is nevertheless difficult for the Dominicans who use the centre to accept that Spanish women can also be bearers of mysteries. As Marta says, “in Dominican houses you have to put up with hearing things like ‘the Spanish cannot be mounted…they are faking it, they cannot be mounted’, and they don’t believe it.” Marta’s is not the only case. Altagracia has met at least four Spanish women who “bear mysteries” and several women of other nationalities: young women aged below thirty, all but one of whom are educated to at least secondary school level. But the majority of the Spanish women who visit the centre on its consultation days – Tuesdays, Fridays or Saturdays – do not do so for this reason. They come instead to meet with Anaísa, and the age and socio-economic profile of these women is much wider.



traditions of disbelief revisited47 Conclusions: On the Debate of the Secularisation or Marketing Symbolic Spiritual Goods

The search for solutions to problems – including illnesses, emotional issues, money-related problems, and others – in religious practices connected with what has been classified as magic is related to the debate regarding the crisis of modernity and the appearance of new types of religion as a response to globalisation. Far from disappearing, the quest to understand connections with the spiritual world through the body has intensified. Pentecostal evangelism, Afro-Caribbean religions and certain types of newage movements, for example, are practices in expansion in which the link between the body and spirits (whether these are understood as saints, the souls of the dead, the Holy Spirit or the spirit in general) is established directly through spiritual possession. Instead of upholding the theory of the end of religions, it is possible to reach the conclusion, with Raquel Romberg (2003), that alternative religious practices are adapting to the consumer society within a market of transcendental symbolic goods, or spiritual symbolic goods. Bourderian concepts are thus adapted in referring to religious “capital” and new offers of “the cure for body and soul”. The starting point for many academic studies on the supernatural, according to David Hufford, is the idea that supernatural beliefs must either be based on an error of perception or that they otherwise conceal different interests. These investigations assume that popular beliefs in the supernatural are not based on the rational, or “are not empirical”. Hufford’s experiential framework contradicts this by proposing that these beliefs are not based solely on faith (Hufford 1995: 11), but are also based on experience, developing what he refers to as the “experience-centred approach”.13 The basic error of explanations that focus on non-belief is that they exclude a priori a category of possible explanations for supernatural phenomena – the explanations of those who have experienced them – instead taking the view that “as it cannot be, therefore, it does not exist.” However, very few believers in the supernatural exclude materialist explanations, because their vision of the world is inclusive and allows acceptance of both types of possibilities (Hufford 1982: 52). The tension between spiritist-corporal logics and rational-positivist logics has also been present in the history of studies on trance and possession.

13 These ideas are discussed in his book The Terror that Comes in the Night (1982a).

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In the descriptions of possession made from the perspective of medical anthropology and medicine, a pathology is assumed to be associated with these processes. For Wallace Zane, there are three main groups of anthropological theories that explain possession: as hysteria associated with processes of repression (applying Freudian theories); as a model of disassociation-multiple consciousness (the Janetians); and possession as an expression sanctioned by culture (Zane 1995: 20).14 Although the term ‘superstition’ is no longer used in anthropological studies on these religious practices, evaluative paradigms are still used in which “traditions of non-belief” intervene by setting reason and the religious world in opposition. Other vocabularies that allow us to penetrate the spiritual world are necessary. Edith Turner states that it is now time to go on the offensive, and to include studies on possession within the anthropology of religion in a position of equality: It is important at last to find out what this psi, this chi, this wakan, this shamanic gift is. We do indeed need to get close to it to know it, and closeness is now of the essence. So far, one of the best ways has been shown to be what we have done, to accumulate full-scale ethnographies on spirituality and psi as those faculties appear in the lives of different people all over the world. When these become commonplace, science itself will be compelled to join up with us and accept the human being as spirit-involved. Once this is achieved, we can together lay out the characteristics of psi, spirit, and their provenance, and become familiar with them (Turner 2006: 55).

Here we should remember the well-known quote from Janice Boddy on studies on possession, which have progressed from asking “how is it possible for a person’s being to be controlled by external forces?” to asking “how is it possible that theoretical models on religion in the west have refused to accept this permeability?” (Boddy 1994: 427). Do we continue to place them, without question, in the traditions of “disbelief”? Why is it so difficult to propose direct research into these “external forces”? Why are the “mysteries”, the “beings”, the “people” who surround the life of Altagracia not researched from the perspective of permeability in the bodies of their “horses”? This study has attempted to position religion and migration as two transversal scenarios. Porters of mysteries can provide an explanatory model of legitimisation for possession. In the cases of the Madridians, Marta, Paula and Carola, their contact with Afro-Dominican practices transformed their

14 For a review of articles on possession, see Sánchez-Carretero (2007).



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previously pathological experiences. “My people, my saints”, as Altagracia calls them, guide, accompany, advise, and often direct and control, but also negotiate the progress of worshippers in all facets of their daily lives: their personal relationships, the education of their children, as well as economic and health-related matters. In addition, they provide alternative paradigms to explain bodily reactions which do not marginalise or assign to these reactions a psychiatric pathology. References Alegría-Pons, J.F. 1993. Gagá y vudú en la República Dominicana: Ensayos antropológicos. San Juan, Puerto Rico: Ediciones El Chango Prieto. Besserer, F. 2000. ‘Sentimientos (in)apropiados de las mujeres migrantes. Hacia una nueva ciudadanía’, in Barrera Bassols, D. and C. Oehmichen Bazán (eds), Migración y relaciones de Género en México. México D.F.: UNAM-IIA/GIMTRAP. Boddy, J. 1994. ‘Spirit Possession Revisited: Beyond Instrumentality’, Annual Review of Anthropology 23: 407–434. Bourdieu, P. 1988. Cosas dichas. Barcelona: Gedisa. Cantón Delgado, M. 2001. La razón hechizada. Teorías antropológicas de la religión. Barcelona: Ariel. Csordas, T.J. 1993. ‘Somatic Modes of Attention’, Cultural Anthropology 8: 135–156. Davis, M.E. 1987. La otra ciencia: El vodú dominicano como religión y medicina populares. Santo Domingo: Editora Universitaria-UASD. Deive, C.E. 1996 (1975). Vodú y magia en Santo Domingo. Santo Domingo: Fundación Cultural Dominicana. ——. 1981. ‘La herencia africana en la cultura dominicana de hoy’, in Vega, B. (ed.), Ensayos sobre cultura dominicana. Santo Domingo: Museo del Hombre Dominicano, 105–141. ——. 1974. ‘Cromolitografías y correspondencias entre los loa y los santos católicos en el vodú dominicano’, Boletín del Museo del Hombre Dominicano 4: 20–62. Gallardo Rivas, G. 1995. Buscando la vida: Dominicanas en el servicio doméstico en Madrid. Santo Domingo: IEPALA-CIPAF. Goris, A. 1995. ‘Rites for a Rising Nationalism: Religious Meaning and Dominican Cultural identity in New York City’, in Stevens-Arroyo, A.M. and G.R. Cadena (eds), Old Masks, New Faces: Religion and Latino Identities. New York: Bildner Center for Western Hemisphere Studies, 117–141. Gregorio Gil, C. 1998. Migración femenina: su impacto en las relaciones de género. Madrid: Narcea. Hagan, J. and H.R. Ebaugh. 2003. ‘Calling Upon the Sacred: Migrants’ Use of Religion in the Migration Process’, The International Migration Review 37 (4): 1145–1162. Herranz Gómez, Y. 1996. ‘Formas de incorporación de la inmigración latinoamericana en Madrid. Importancia del contexto de recepción’, Ph.D. Dissertation, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Howard, D. 2001. Coloring the Nation. Race and Ethnicity in the Dominican Republic. Boulder, CO: Rienner/Signal Books. Hufford, D. 1995. ‘Being without Bodies: An Experience-Centered Theory of the Belief in Spirits’, in Walker, B. (ed.), Out of the Ordinary: Folklore and the Supernatural. Logan: Utah University Press. ——. 1982a. The Terror that Comes in the Night: An Experience-Centered Study of Supernatural Assault Traditions. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ——. 1982b. ‘Traditions of Disbelief’, New York Folklore 8: 47–56.

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Levitt, P. 2003. ‘“You know, Abraham was Really the First Immigrant”: Religion and Transnational Migration’, The International Migration Review 37 (3): 847–873. ——. 1998. ‘Local-Level Global Religion: The Case of US-Dominican Migration’, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 37 (1):74–89. Lovell, N. 2002. Cord of Blood: Possession and the Making of Voodoo. Anthropology, Culture, and Society. London: Pluto Press. Mahler, S. and K. Hansing. 2005. ‘Toward a Transnationalism of the Middle: How Transnational Religious Practices Help Bridge the Divides between Cuba and Miami’, Latin American Perspectives 32: 121–146. Miniño, M.M. 1999 (1983). ¿Es el vudú religión?: el vudú dominicano. Santo Domingo, Casa Weber. Patín Veloz, E. 1975. ‘El vudú y sus misterios (referencias y definiciones)’, Revista Dominicana de Folklore 1. Pessar, P. 1995. Visa for a Dream: Dominicans in the United States. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Romberg, R. 2003. Witchcraft and Welfare: Spiritual Capital and the Business of Magic in Modern Puerto Rico. Austin: University of Texas Press. Rosenberg, J.C. 1979. El Gagá. Religión y sociedad de un culto dominicano: Un estudio comparativo. Santo Domingo: Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo. Sagás, E. 2000. Race and Politics in the Dominican Republic. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Sánchez-Carretero, C. 2007. ‘Nuestra religión, vuestra magia: los misterios dominicanos cruzan el Atlántico’, in Callau Gonzalvo, S. (ed.), Culturas mágicas: magia y simbolismo en la literatura y la cultura hispánicas. Zaragoza: PRAMES, 246–259. ——. 2005. ‘Santos y Misterios as Channels of Communication in the Diaspora: AfroDominican Religious Practices Abroad’, Journal of American Folklore 118: 308–326. ——. 2004. ‘Nuevas y viejas tradiciones entre dominicanos en la diáspora: de los rezos familiares a las discotecas’, in Ortiz, C. (ed.), La ciudad es para ti. Barcelona: Anthropos, 75–97. ——. 2002. Narrating Diasporas: Strategies in the Creation of Locality and Agency among Dominican Women Abroad. Ann Arbor: UMI. Sørensen, N.N. 1997. ‘Nueva York is just another Dominican Capital - Madrid es otro mundo’, Género y Sociedad 4 (1): 160–219. ——. 1993. ‘Creole Culture, Dominican Identity’, Folk 35: 17–35. Stevens-Arroyo, A.M. and G.R. Cadena (eds). 1995. Old Masks, New Faces: Religion and Latino identities. New York: Bildner Center for Western Hemisphere Studies. Tejeda Ortiz, D. 1998. Cultura popular e identidad nacional, 2 vols. Santo Domingo: Consejo Presidencial de Cultura-Instituto Dominicano de Folklore. Turner, E. 2006. ‘Advances in the Study of Spirit Experience: Drawing Together Many Threads”, Anthropology of Consciousness 17: 33–61. Zane, W. 1995. ‘Ritual States of Consciousness: A Way of Accounting for Anomalies in the Observation and Explanation of Spirit Possession’, Anthropology of Consciousness 6: 18–29.

THE METAMORPHOSES OF NEOPAGANISM IN TRADITIONALLY CATHOLIC COUNTRIES IN SOUTHERN EUROPE Anna Fedele One day in March 2006 I was having tea with Dana, an Argentinean woman in her early fifties who had founded in 2002 Goddess Wood,1 a “women’s spirituality group” that was the largest and fastest growing in Catalonia and probably in whole Spain. As we discussed our future projects she told me that she wanted to write a book about “her work with women”.2 She found that many English and Spanish authors had written about female spirituality and about the importance of the “return of the Goddess”, but she wanted to write about the “Christian Goddess”. Dana believed that women in Europe and especially in traditionally Catholic countries such as Spain could not and should not simply do away with their “Christian cultural heritage” but rather draw on it to find their own way towards the “Goddess”. Little attention has been paid by social scientists to the spread of Neopagan theories and practices in continental Europe and especially in traditionally Catholic countries in Southern Europe such as Italy or Spain. This text offers insight on this religious phenomenon from an anthropological perspective and is based on fieldwork among Italians, Catalans and Spaniards between 2002 and 2006 for my dissertation on alternative pilgrimages to French Catholic shrines dedicated to Mary Magdalene or holding dark madonna statues.3 During my research I focused especially on the reinterpretation of Christian figures, rituals and churches using theories derived from the Neopagan movement. Differently from other religious movements that do not accept the conceptualization of Europe as having Christian roots,4 the

1 I used a pseudonym for the group, its leader and most of its members. Only a few women of this group asked me explicitly to use their real names, but I do not refer to them in this text. Except for Celso all the other names used in this text are pseudonyms. 2 All citations come from personal interviews or informal conversations. The translations from Italian, Catalan and Spanish are mine. 3 See Fedele 2009, 2013a. 4 See the introduction to this volume.

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Italians and Iberians5 influenced by Neopaganism I came to know found that the “Christian heritage of Europe” could not be denied and wanted to reconceptualize it. Appropriating Neopagan theories coming mainly from the United States and the United Kingdom, the men and women I encountered during my research remodeled them to fit their own cultural and religious backgrounds. It is difficult to determine an approximate number of Neopagans in mainland Europe. This is due to different factors such as the uninstitutional nature of the Neopagan movement, the secrecy of many individuals out of fear of social criticism or even discrimination and, finally, because of the disagreement about the religious movements that fall into the category of “Neopagan”. Among social scientists there is yet no agreement about the term or terms to be used to describe groups sharing Neopagan beliefs. Apart from “Neo-paganism” (e.g. Rountree 2006a) and “Neopaganism” (e.g. Pike 2001), terms such as “Goddess movement” (e.g. Griffin 1995), “Goddess spirituality” (e.g. Luhrmann 2001) or “feminist spirituality” (Eller 1993) are being used. Neopagan groups and movements deserve to be studied bearing in mind the range of differences existing among them (Salomonsen 2002: 10) and should not be lumped together under the general term “New Age”. As other religious scholars studying contemporary “lived” religion and spirituality have observed, it is difficult to work with statistical data because many individuals nowadays refuse to identify with a specific religious tradition or continue to consider themselves as Catholics even if their spiritual practices are far from being orthodox (e.g. McGuire 2008: 3–17; Bender 2010: 3–5; Fedele and Knibbe 2013: 1–27). In fact, even if statistically speaking the number of Pagans in countries such as Spain or Italy are virtually invisible, a growing number of people, especially women, are attracted by Neopagan ideas and concepts. When asked about their “religious affiliation” in a survey most of my informants would not describe themselves as “Pagans”; they consider the word “Pagan” as too negatively charged within the Catholic societies they have grown up in.6 5 Throughout the text I use the term ‘Iberian’ to refer to women in Dana’s group coming from different parts of the Spanish state. I do this because many women in this group were Catalans and some of them would not feel at ease being labelled as ‘Spanish’. 6 Helen Berger, a sociologist who has been studying Neopaganism in the US during the last 20 years and recently tried to obtain statistical data also about the rest of the world, confirmed my impressions and commented that she had received little response to her survey from Southern Europe. She observed however that this might also be related to the fact that the survey was in English.



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I will argue that in Southern European countries where the presence of Catholicism is still very evident, Neopagan theories that often contain clearly anti-Christian statements are only slowly finding their way to people’s minds and hearts. When this happens, it is very often due to spiritual leaders who blend the key issues of Neopaganism with Christian symbols and ideas. Coming to terms with the ideals and structures of a Catholic belief system that they consider be “patriarchal” and “denying women’s power”, spiritual practitioners who shared with me their worldview claimed their right to use Christian figures and places for their own rituals. This process of adaptation is particularly interesting because of the paradox it represents. Whereas American and British Neopagans seek to restore a “pre-Christian” pagan belief system that supposedly existed before Europe’s and America’s Christianization, my Southern European informants wanted to bring back to Neopaganism certain Christian elements and figures whose power and influence they felt could not be ignored because they belonged to their “cultural heritage”.7 Neopagan Movements Neopagan theories began to circulate in the 1960s in Great Britain and in North America, and most Neopagans consider themselves as part of a revitalization process of pre-Christian nature religions.8 They criticize institutionalized religions and particularly Christianity as patriarchal and misogynist. Neopagans think that the Christian vision of the body as a place of sin leads Christians to despise the material world and to perceive their sexuality as sinful. This general rejection and denigration of body and matter is, according to Neopagans, one of the principal causes of both the actual current ecological disaster and of the widespread sexual perversions such as child abuse, molestation or the rape of women. In order to halt this process, Neopagans advocate a sacralization of body and sexuality and a 7 In Italian the words used were bagaglio culturale, in Spanish bagaje cultural or herencia cultural. As far as I could see in this context religion was considered as being part of the ‘cultural heritage’ and people from Dana’s and Celso’s group did not refer explicitly to a ‘religious heritage’. 8 See Hutton (1999) for an extensive study of the origin and development of Neopagan beliefs. See Adler (1979) for a description of this development from within the movement. For an early study about witchcraft among Londoners see Luhrmann (1989, 2001). For ethnographic or sociological studies about Neopagans in the United States see Orion (1995), Berger (1999), Berger et al. (2003), Pike (2001), Salomonsen (2002) and Magliocco (2001, 2004). In Great Britain, see Greenwood (2000); in Australia, Hume (1997); in New Zealand, Rountree (2003). See Albanese (1991) for a discussion of ‘nature religions’ in America.

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vision of nature and of the planet Earth as inhabited by divine forces. Neopagans want to create non-hierarchical communities, based on a deep respect for nature and for each other’s beliefs and choices. The movements reunited under the term “Neopaganism” range from neo-shamanic groups revitalizing Native American or other shamanic traditions, over to groups that have been described as part of a “feminist spirituality” (Eller 1993), or to witchcraft groups, as well as contemporary druids and Isis fellowships. In this sense Neopaganism appears as an “umbrella term” (Magliocco 2001: 1) and not all social actors described by social scientists with this term would necessarily call themselves “Neopagans” or “Pagans”. This is particularly so for European Neopagans who do not seem to share with their Northern American equivalents the need to form associations (see Berger et al. 2008: 14); they usually do not belong to any religious organization and refuse to identify with a precise religious movement. The Italians and Iberians I came to know during my fieldwork had been brought up as Catholics and refused the idea of forming part of an established religion again. Following a common trend in contemporary religiosity in North America and Europe described by religious historians and social scientists, they stated that they were not “religious” but “spiritual” (among others: Heelas et al. 2005; Zwissler 2007; Berger et al. 2008: 14). Disappointed by the negative experiences within the Catholic framework they preferred the word “spirituality” to that of “religion” (Fedele 2009; Knibbe 2010; Fedele and Knibbe 2013: 1–27). Using Grace Davie’s (1994) terminology one might say that after “belonging” to the Catholic Church “without believing” in most of the dogmas, they now shared Neopagan theories and practices refusing to “belong” to a specific Neopagan group. As we will see many Iberians and Italians influenced by Neopaganism prefer to be secretive about their spiritual theories and practices, feeling that these would be misunderstood not only by their (often practicing) Catholic families but also by their wider social environment. The group whose activities I followed in Italy was centered upon the workshops and trips led by Celso Bambi and loosely organized in a “cultural association”. In 2003 Celso regularly held workshops about an “indigenous tradition” identified as “Andean tradition”. For these “Andean” workshops Celso drew upon the knowledge he had acquired during his apprenticeship with the Peruvian anthropologist and “Andean priest” Juan Nuñez del Prado.9 He also organized initiatory journeys to Peru and trips to sacred 9 See Molinier and Galinié (2006: 144, 175, 252–258) and Nuñez del Prado’s book edited by Celso Bambi and Nityama Masetti (1998).



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sites in Europe related to the Etruscans. In 2003 he also led two pilgrimages to places related to Mary Magdalene, the “Black Madonnas”, the Cathars and the Templars.10 In Spain and Italy workshops related to Neopaganism tend to be organized in an informal way (i.e. having no legal visibility). Once the workshops start attracting an important number of people and gaining social visibility, the most common solution is to create a non-profit organization. In 2003 Celso had already made this shift but the Barcelona based female group Goddess Wood was still in a liminal phase. When I started my fieldwork in 2004, Goddess Wood consisted of up to 300 women from different areas of the Spanish state who participated now and then in rituals or workshops organized by Dana. There was a set group of 30–40 committed members who regularly attended the group’s activities.11 The most important activities of the group were the annual initiation ceremony at the beginning of February and the “pilgrimage of the blood”12 organized every second summer between July and August. The Goddess Wood group was more cohesive than the Italian one. The group held monthly gatherings to celebrate the new moon and many of the committed members were friends and also met outside the group’s activities. Dana fostered a sense of cohesion calling the group members “sisters” and emphasizing the elements women had in common. Both Celso and Dana had had important spiritual experiences related with Christian figures but criticized the Catholic religion for its androcentrism, its “demonization” of body and sexuality and its exaltation of life in the other world. According to them, this attitude was exemplified by Catholicism but inherent to Christianity and more generally to monotheistic religions. Both leaders had perceived that they did not need any intermediaries to relate to the divine and had therefore set out on their personal spiritual quests. On these quests both had found out that it was unnecessary to do without the Christian figures they knew from their childhood

10 Celso had been organizing workshop about the ‘Andean tradition’, trips to Peru and workshops in sacred Etruscan sites led by himself and/or Juan Nuñez del Prado since the late nineties. For more details about “Black Madonnas” see below; about the spiritual theories related to Cathars and Templars see Fedele 2013a: 15–18. 11 In 2009 the group and its activities had grown both in terms of participation and of social visibility; Dana had therefore created a cultural association as a legal background for the group. 12 The pilgrimage took its name from menstrual blood and the sacralization of the menstrual cycle was one of the key issues in Dana’s group; see Fedele (2013a: 145–190, forthcoming).

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and perceived as inherent to their cultural background. For this reason they had elaborated strategies to access Christianity in a different way and shared some of their strategies in their workshops and trips. Even if Celso and Dana had different paths, their teachings had many points in common and the basic tenets derived from Neopaganism.13 In the shift from Catholic to Neopagan theories the conceptualization of the world in terms of “energy” plays an important role (Fedele 2009). Most persons participating in Dana’s and Celso’s activities had already learnt to interpret the world surrounding them as the visible manifestation of an invisible “energy”, a life force permeating the cosmos (among others: Hanegraaff 1996: 113–181; Heelas 1996: 15–40). They knew that it was important to receive nurturing positive energy from the outside world into their personal energy field (surrounding their physical bodies) and to release the heavy (or negative) energy to “Mother Earth” (Fedele 2013a: 85–88). Both Celso and Dana criticized the world-denial and body-mortifying Christian attitude and considered it as the starting point of many present evils such as the exploitation of the planet. They emphasized the need to “re-consecrate matter”, to overemphasize women’s power and the “Feminine” and to venerate the metaempirical being identified as the “Goddess”. They acted similarly to the channellers studied by Michael F. Brown and wanted “to bring together elements of life ripped apart by Western civilization: science and religion, body and soul, culture and nature, male and female, reason and intuition, thought and matter. Where one half of a dichotomy has overpowered the other,” they tried “to strengthen the weaker partner” (Brown 1997: 48). Dana’s and Celso’s groups shared a corpus of theories about preChristian civilizations in Europe according to which these allegedly matriarchal cultures (Eller 2000) venerated a main female divinity, the “Great Goddess”, attributed an important role to women and did not despise terrene life or bodily pleasure (among others: Magliocco 2004: 29; Pike 2001: 190–195). Reclaiming unity with ancient paganism, these spiritual practitioners advocated the sacralization of body and sexuality and perceived that they had “lost connection” with their “feminine essence” or more in general with 13 The average age in Celso’s and Dana’s workshops and trips was between 30 and 60. Participants came from the lower middle and middle class. Differently from Celso’s group, Goddess Wood also attracted women from the lower classes and young women in their early twenties; this may partially be attribued to the lower prices of the activities organized by Dana. Even if Celso’s activities addressed both women and men the majority were women.



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“the Feminine” and with “Mother Earth”.14 They attributed this loss to the principles of “patriarchal society” that undermined women’s power and autonomy, but also to the consequences of the sexual revolution in the sixties that led women who wanted to be successful to adopt a masculine way of life. Living according to rhythms regulated by a society dominated by men, both men and women had supposedly lost contact with nature’s rhythm, with the nurturing “energy” of “Mother Earth” and with their intuitive and sensitive “female side” or “essence”. The necessity to get attuned again with “the Feminine” and “Mother Earth’s” cycles and to reclaim the connection with an ancient “matriarchal” cult emerges from the description of Goddess Wood written by Dana: Goddess Wood was created in February 2002 with the aim to offer to all women a place and structure where the rites of passage of female life and the sacred feasts of Mother Earth can be celebrated. Our objective is to bring up to the present our ancient feminine lineage in order to re-cognize ourselves as Daughters and Priestesses of the Goddess. (…) With the arrival of patriarchy, the sacred woods were burnt, the priestesses were murdered and women were reduced to slaves. The name of the Goddess was erased from the books and the shadow of her oblivion fell over humanity. After many centuries, today a new rising shines through. The Great Goddess, whose genesis still goes on, is reborn in our hearts and radiates her energy through the daughters who return to Her (…).15

The “return of the Goddess” could be fostered through a recuperation of theories and rituals allegedly belonging to pre-Christian, “matriarchal” times but, as we have seen, both Dana and Celso considered that Christianity was too deeply rooted into European consciousness and could not be totally left aside. Christian Heritage and Matriarchal Roots On their personal quest, both Celso and Dana had at some point been in touch with the so-called “indigenous traditions” of Latin America. Celso had discovered the “Andean tradition” coming from Peru and Dana had been introduced to the Mexican “Conchero tradition” through Clara. A charismatic woman in her fifties, Clara lived in Ibiza selling her own 14 “Mother Earth” and “Goddess” were sometimes used as synonyms considering that “Mother Earth” was the visible manifestation of the Goddess. 15 For the creation of this text Dana was influenced by Diane Stein (1987) and Zsusanna Budapest (1986, 1991).

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handicrafts and had been the disciple of Nanita, a Mexican leader of the “neo-Conchero” movement in Mexico (De la Peña 2006: 75).16 It would take too long here to describe these two so-called “indigenous” traditions”17 in detail and to discuss the implications of this kind of transcultural borrowing.18 It suffices here to say that both traditions blended Christian theories and practices with figures, concepts and ritual gestures allegedly deriving from pre-columbine civilizations (the Incas for the “Andean tradition” and the Maya and Aztecs for the “Conchero tradition”). Both Clara and Juan Nuñez del Prado had adapted the teachings received from their “indigenous” teachers to the “Western” audience using terms and concepts (e.g. energy, grounding, etc.) derived from the “New Age”, the Neopagan movement and also from Jungian psychology. What interests us in the context of this article is that these “indigenous traditions” served as important references for the reinterpretation of Christianity. These traditions were seen as a useful example of how preChristian civilizations had faced the encounter with Christianity, accepting its main figures and terms but secretly maintaining its “pagan” roots and its “matriarchal” values. According to this corpus of theories the Incas, Mayas and Aztecs had found a way to include Christian theories and practices in their original belief system and continued to venerate their pre-Christian gods and goddesses without loosing their connection with “Mother Earth”. Eager to reclaim and to “reconnect” with the “pre-Christian roots of Europe”, the Italians and Iberians who shared with me their spiritual theories and practices considered the so-called “indigenous groups”19 from Latin-America as a model to follow. So-called contemporary “indigenous traditions”, allegedly combining pre-columbine and Christian elements, appeared therefore as useful tools in the reclamation process of their preChristian European heritage. Using “energy techniques” and rituals driven 16 The Concheros derive their name from the concha, a musical instrument that is similar to a guitar. They perform ritual dances associated with a popular religious cult in Mexico. Their existence is attested to only since the 18th century, but their traditions may date from the period of the colonial conquest of Mexico. For more details about the Conchero movement, see Rostas (1996, 1998). For more details about the relationship between the Conchero and the neo-Conchero movement in Mexico and in Europe see De la Peña (2002, 2006). 17 For more details about the “Andean tradition” and the “Conchero tradition” see Fedele 2013a: 76–82; for a comparative study of neo-Indian movements in Mexico and Peru see Galinier and Molinié (2006); for a detailed analysis of mystical tourism in Peru, see Hill (2008). 18 For more details about the debate on transcultural borrowing in- and outside the Neopagan movement see Pike (2001: 123–154). 19 In Italian the words used were poplazioni indigene and sometimes the adjective amerindiane was added. In Spanish women more generally referred to los indígenas.



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from contemporary “indigenous traditions”, men and women from Celso’s and Dana’s groups wanted to recuperate the connection with the preChristian roots of Europe and come to terms with their Christian and particularly Catholic past. With their teachings, Clara and Juan pointed towards the existence of important points in common among different pre-columbine civilizations and identified certain contemporary indigenous (or allegedly indigenous) groups as the guardians of these ancient shared features. In this context, pre-columbine civilizations as the Incas, the Mayas or the Aztecs appeared as having many things in common with European pre-Christian civilizations:20 they allegedly lived in societies with more gender equality, a closer contact to nature and with pacifist and democratic ideals (Pike 2001: 146; Hill 2008). Using “energy techniques” and/or rituals driven from “indigenous traditions”, Celso and Dana allowed their disciples to “connect” with the power places that had once been used by their pre-Christian ancestors. These power places could be archeological sites but also sites “appropriated by the Church”. In fact, most Christian churches (and particularly those dating from the Gothic period) were held to have been constructed in “power places” where the Celts or other pre-Christian civilizations such as the Etruscans, the Phoenicians or the Romans had built their temples; such churches, therefore, helped to establish a “connection” with the “matriarchal roots of Europe”. Italians and Iberians in Celso’s and Dana’s groups wanted to reclaim power places allegedly considered as sacred by pre-Christian civilizations that the “Church” had appropriated. In this sense, pilgrimages to Christian churches allowed them to venerate and contact the “Goddess” where she had once been worshipped with different, non-Christian names.21 Certain figures from the Christian pantheon like Mary Magdalene or the “Black Madonnas” played a particularly important role in fostering the return of a “Christian Goddess”. Talking about Mary Magdalene, Dana commented: [I believe that] the first thing you have to do is to forget about the historical existence of Mary or of the Magdalene. This is a way without an end (…) For this reason I think that the most adequate way and the way that I always

20 Reference texts about the ‘Andean tradition’ for Celso’s group were Jenkins (1998); Nuñez del Prado (1998) and Huarache Mamani (2000). 21 For more details about pilgrimages related to the ‘New Age’ and the Neopagan movement see Bowman (1993, 1993), Ivakhiv (2001), Weibel (2005), Rountree (2006a, 2006b), Badone (2008) and Fedele (2009, 2013a).

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For Dana, the different Catholic representations of the Virgin Mary relating her to different apparition sites (e.g. Montserrat, Lourdes, Fatima) or to different moments of her life (e.g. Immaculate Conception, Mater Dolorosa, etc.) further demonstrated that the Virgin was in reality only the expression of the many roles and names of the “Christian Goddess”. Celso and Dana considered Christian figures such as Jesus, the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene as the Christian equivalent of Pagan gods and goddesses, the multiple representations of the “Great Goddess” and her male equivalent, “God”. Dana and Celso described Mary Magdalene as a sort of female equivalent or counterpart of Jesus, who had been transformed by the “Church” into a repentant sinner.22 Influenced by texts such as The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln 1982) or The Cult of the Black Virgin (Begg 1985), the pilgrims considered “Black Madonnas” as the representation of a “dark side of the Feminine” that had been repressed by the “patriarchal Church Fathers”. This dark side was the expression of the wild, destructive and sexual aspects of women that the immaculate Virgin Mary had been deprived of.23 Dana and Celso presented Mary Magdalene as a “priestess of the Goddess” who belonged to a matriarchal religion and culture and had shared her wisdom with Jesus. Magdalene’s importance on Jesus’ side had later been downplayed by the “Church” and she had been transformed by the “Church’s Fathers” into a repentant prostitute. As for the “Black Madonna”, Celso and Dana followed Ean Begg’s theory that the statues were in reality representation of pre-Christian goddesses brought back from the crusades (Begg 1985). Both Magdalene and the “Black Madonnas” worked as traits d’union between Christianity and the “matriarchal” religions of the past because they were perceived as belonging to both these dimensions.

22 For more details about the different roles attributed to saint Mary Magdalene see Haskins 1993 and Fedele 2008. 23 For more details about the importance attribued to ‘Black Madonnas’ in the ‘New Age’ and Neopagan movement see Weibel (2001) and Fedele (2013b: 96–114). For a discussion of the meanings of dark madonna statues in different historical periods see Scheer 2002 and Christian 1995.



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Celso and Dana tried to create continuity with pre-Christian civilizations in Europe and their “matriarchal beliefs” both on a temporal and on a spatial level. On a spatial level they attained this continuity by visiting places related to the “pre-Christian civilizations of Europe”. Celso, for example, held workshops in the zone of Pitigliano, where there are many easily accessible Etruscan archeological sites. Establishing physical contact with the rests of buildings erected by the Etruscans, workshop participants could receive the “energy” stored in these sites and establish a personal connection with their Etruscan roots. Christian heretic groups of the past, like the Knights Templar and the Cathars, helped to create continuity on a temporal level; they supposedly knew about the importance of the “Sacred Feminine”. These groups had allegedly tried to combine Christian and pre-Christian beliefs and practices and had therefore been persecuted by the “Church”. They therefore appeared as predecessors in the quest to reclaim unity with the pagan roots of Europe and both these movements were believed to form part of an “underground church” venerating the “Sacred Feminine”.24 During the “pilgrimage of the blood” dedicated to Mary Magdalene in summer 2004, Dana explained that noble families belonging to the Cathar movement had lived in Catalonia and there was an “underground church” that guarded the secrets about the importance of Mary Magdalene for Christianity. For this reason, there were several chapels dedicated to the saint in this area. Dana’s pilgrimage group visited places in Provence related to Mary Magdalene’s legendary arrival to Gaul after Jesus’ crucifixion. With their journey, Dana said, Iberian women would create a web that united the places related to Mary Magdalene in France and those in Catalonia. Through the reference to a common territory (Catalonia) Dana’s pilgrims sought to find connections between past and present; they created a historical continuity that started from pre-patriarchal cults, over to the “underground religion”, and culminated in the current revival of the “Goddess cult”. Iberian pilgrims wanted to “revitalize” through their physical journey a web that allegedly existed in the past. We will now consider two ethnographic examples, Celso’s group’s visit to the cathedral of Chartres and Dana and Celso’s interpretation of a Catholic

24 Reference texts for this kind of beliefs were those of early anthropologists such as J.J. Bachofen (1948 [1861]) and M. Murray (1933); but also of mythologists such as R. Graves (1961) and M. Stone (1976) and of the archeologist M. Gimbutas (1974, 1989). Influential authors referring to the aforementioned sources were R. Eisler (1987) and V. Noble (1991).

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mass; both cases illustrate well the leaders’ blending of Christian and Neopagan elements. Celts, Templars and “Black Madonnas” in the Cathedral of Chartres In summer 2003, Celso organized a pilgrimage to places related to “Mary Magdalene, Black Madonnas and the Cathars and Templars”.25 Asked to describe the places that had most impressed them, many Italian pilgrims described their experiences in Chartres. The Gothic cathedral of Chartres was completed in the XIII century and was an important pilgrimage site during the Middle Ages. Like some other Gothic churches in France (e.g. Notre-Dame d’Amiens) the cathedral has a labyrinth that is made of stonework laid into the floor.26 Drawing on a tradition based on the theories about the French Gothic cathedrals developed by Fulcanelli (1964), Celso said the cathedral was built on a site where powerful telluric currents crossed and had been recognized as sacred by the Celts long before the arrival of Christianity.27 He described the cathedral as one of the highest expressions of the “sacred architecture” built under the influence the Templar order; the labyrinth it contained represented a path of union of masculine and feminine energies. In Celso’s terms, the labyrinth offered the pilgrims from the past and present an access both to the center of the world and the unifying center inside themselves. Here, as in other important Catholic pilgrimage sites they visited, Celso’s pilgrims shared Charpentier’s ideas in The Mysteries of Chartres Cathedral (1966): What these [Catholic] pilgrims probably did not know was that they had done nothing but recover the path that many generations before them had walked; because the pilgrimage to Chartres existed well before the arrival of the Christians and probably even before the Celts. Before them, many generations had come to gather and pray inside the cave where the Virgin Mother reigned, who was beyond any doubt a Black Virgin and was probably called Isis, Demeter or Bélisama (1966: 20–21).28

25 For a detailed itinerary of Celso’s tour, see Fedele (2013a: 311). 26 In 2003 and 2004 when I visited the cathedral, the labyrinth could be completely seen, and could actually be walked upon on Fridays. On other days it was covered with chairs for visitors, in order, some pilgrims thought, to hide it. 27 Pilgrims were assiduous readers; for a detailed analysis of the spiritual-esoteric literature they used as a base for their beliefs see Fedele (2008: 83–118, 167–195). 28 My translation of the original French text.



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In Celso’s terms, the entire cathedral, and especially the labyrinth, served as a catalyst for spiritual elevation. For the Italian group, the cathedral represented a place of union not only between masculine and feminine forces but also between different traditions. The fact that a “Black Madonna” was revered in the crypt further demonstrated the place’s link with previous civilizations venerating the “Goddess”. The cathedral has a long history of being the subject of esoteric research and is one of France’s best-known centers for contemporary Templars, labyrinth walkers and visitors eager to contact the telluric currents allegedly crossing the place.29 The original statue of Our Lady of Underground (Notre-Dame de Sous-Terre) venerated in Chartres was destroyed in a fire and the image in the crypt is a copy. Not far from the statue there is a well, which some say belonged to a previous Celtic temple. After “connecting” with the “energy of the well”, Celso invited the pilgrims to receive the energy of the “Black Madonna” standing in front of her statue. Then they should take each other’s hands and create a circle in front of the statue. Immacolata, a rather small woman in her forties with short curly brown hair and brown eyes, told me that her most powerful experience during the pilgrimage had happened in Chartres in front of the “Black Madonna”.30 Since her childhood, she had desired to have a “normal” name, not one that evoked “her family’s origins in Southern Italy and Catholic religiosity”. Named after her paternal grandmother, Immacolata felt that this name “conditioned her whole life”, even if most of the people knew her by a nickname. She worked as a clerk and lived in Rome on her own. Immacolata’s parents had migrated to Rome from a village near Avellino. Like many Italian women of her generation, Immacolata went to a Catholic school for girls but she stopped going to church after leaving school. Immacolata had always felt attracted to esoteric themes but had not followed up this “attraction” until recently. In 2000 she made friends with Gemma, who introduced her to crystal therapy and they began to share books and attend workshops together. Even if she was no longer a practicing Catholic, Immacolata still believed in the power of Catholic religion and remembered moments of peace and serenity when, as a child, she visited the aunt of her grandfather who was a nun. She clearly felt that her spiritual interests might be perceived as being in contrast with her Catholic upbringing and underlined 29 See for instance: http://www.sacredconnections.co.uk/holyland/MysteriesofChartres .htm. Consulted in November 2011. 30 Immacolata’s life story and her experiences in Chartres are also described in Fedele (2013a: 49–50, 2013b: 96–114).

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that neither her parents nor her colleagues and friends knew about her “parallel life”. Immacolata commented about her experience in the cathedral: In the crypt of Chartres I stayed near the tabernacle and I still shiver when I think about it. I felt like a hollow reed, crossed by that energy coming from below. It was an amazing experience. I would like to go back there (…) it was near the Black Madonna. (…) Celso made us form a circle and take each other’s hands. I remember taking off my shoes and nudging Gemma with my elbow telling her: Take off your shoes! Because without shoes there was no obstacle to this flow (April 8, 2005).

In front of the “Black Madonna” Immacolata felt that she could finally connect with “Mother Earth” something she had tried to achieve for a long time. Like other pilgrims, she felt that the “energy” coming up from the ground nurtured and healed her, making her feel “grounded” and empowered. For her, the “Black Madonna” was the personification of “Mother Earth”, fully representing the earthy and mysterious “Feminine” that Cathars and Templars hinted at. Participants in this pilgrimage but also in other workshops told me that after the “exercises of connection” led by Celso they felt more “grounded” and more “connected with Mother Earth”. For several women in Dana’s and Celso’s groups to recuperate the connection with “Mother Earth” implied also a healing process similar to that of Immacolata. They gradually acknowledged and transformed the negative information they had received from their parents and more in general from society and could heal their “wounded femininity”.31 Creating energy connections with power places related to pre-Christian times allowed people in Celso’s and Dana’s groups to develop a sense of being “grounded” or “rooted”. These roots had a double meaning: they were not only a link with “Mother Earth” and more in general with the “Feminine”, they were also “cultural” roots allowing to establish a link with their pre-Christian past. Reinterpreting the Mass Participants in Celso and Dana’s workshops and trips learnt not only to reinterpret and reclaim Christian sites and figures, but also to develop a different approach to the most important rituals of Christianity. As we will see

31 For more details about the wounds related to femininity see Fedele (2013a: 191–242).



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in the following example, they reinterpreted the Catholic mass referring to a pre-Christian, matriarchal past. Another “Black Madonna” shrine that Celso included in this tour in summer 2003 was Rocamadour. Here Celso had arranged a mass held by a French priest he knew from previous visits there. The Italian mass for the group took place in front of the statue of Notre-Dame de Rocamadour. Before the mass Celso briefly explained to the group that the pilgrims should try to experience the mass “as if the inquisition had never happened”. He thereby meant that the pilgrims should try to forget what the “Church” had done against the “medieval witches” or heretic groups of the past they perceived as their forerunners. For Celso the mass was a powerful ritual that derived from a synthesis of different pre-Christian cults and could therefore allow its participants to commune with the divine forces.32 The pilgrims should experience this ritual as if they were doing a group ritual and were all playing an active part in it. Most pilgrims decided to join the mass and once it was finished they shared their spiritual experiences and energy perceptions during the ritual; some of them commented that this event had helped them to partially make peace with the mass they knew from their childhood. Only two of the mass participants criticized the priest as a “hypocrite” and expressed their feeling of disgust during the ceremony. As we have seen Celso and Dana believed that many Christian churches had been built where there had previously been pre-Christian temples. Using a similar interpretative strategy they also described the mass as based on pre-Christian rituals. Celso in particular invited people in his workshops and trips to discover the pre-Christian roots of this ritual and to profit from its power transcending the limits of religious affiliation. As the following example shows, Dana’s women did not accept this reinterpretation as easily as Celso’s pilgrims in Rocamadour. In summer 2004, while Dana’s pilgrims were visiting the cave of La Sainte-Baume in Provence, where Mary Magdalene was believed to have lived for 30 years, a group of French Catholic pilgrims were attending a mass, celebrated by the priest who accompanied them. Some of the Iberian pilgrims, including Dana and Clara, stayed to participate. During the French mass inside the cave, most of Dana’s pilgrims were sitting outside, talking, eating, knitting and interpreting tarot cards. When Dana and the others

32 Before the mass Celso could be seen reading in an Italian book containing a collection of articles by C.G. Jung entitled “The symbolism of the mass” (1978 [1942]).

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came out of the mass, everyone began to discuss whether it was right that Dana, Clara and other pilgrims had attended this Catholic ceremony. Everybody wanted to share their feelings about the officiating priest and the way he behaved. Clara was enthusiastic about “the way he moved the energy” which reminded her of some “ceremonies of the Concheros”. Estrella, one of the committed members of the Goddess Wood in her mid-thirties, criticized Clara’s attitude and expressed her anger openly; soon a debate about the mass started among the women.33 Clara explained that women should have attended the mass and transcended dogma thereby taking advantage of an unique opportunity: this priest was celebrating the mass according to the pre-Vatican II model. By using movements and gestures that had disappeared from the current ritual of the mass the priest allowed pilgrims to access a deeper spiritual dimension. Listening to Clara’s explanation it seemed that in this instance there was a barrier to be overcome in order to benefit from something (a place, a ritual) that pertained to the Catholic belief system, but whose power could be appreciated by pilgrims in terms of “energy”. Latin-Americans like Dana and people like Clara and Celso who had received a spiritual formation in Mexico and Peru seemed to cross this boundary easily. Dana explained her relationship with the Catholic Church and the way “the Christian Goddess” managed to reunite Christian and Neopagan ideals by saying that in Latin America Christianity, and Catholicism in particular, were not perceived in the same way as in Europe. For centuries, people had been used to the mixture of indigenous beliefs and dominant Catholicism. For this reason, Dana did not feel that there was a contradiction between the original message that was at the base of Christianity and the worship of the “Goddess”. In fact, several people who had traveled with Celso to Peru told me that they had begun to see Catholicism and its related images in a different way. Discovering and observing (through Celso’s explanations) the syncretic use made of figures like the Virgin or the Christ around Cuzco had allowed them to experience statues, churches and masses more freely. Conclusion Throughout this text I have shown that, although almost invisible on a statistical level, Neopagan theories and practices are slowly finding their 33 This episode is described and analysed in more detail in Fedele (2013a: 114–118).



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way into traditionally Catholic countries such as Italy or Spain. Events such as the “Goddess conference” held in Madrid34 for the first time in 2010 and again in 2011 confirm that more and more people in Southern Europe find that Pagan goddesses and gods address issues that divinities from the Christian pantheon do not speak to. During fieldwork among Portuguese women influenced by the Neopagan movement I found that they share with their Italian and Spanish equivalents many of the characteristics analyzed in this text;35 like them they tend not to describe themselves as Pagans. We have seen that the spiritual leaders teaching Neopagan theories and practices in Italy and Spain feel the need to blend them with Christian elements in order to make them accessible for their audience with a Catholic background. Spiritual leaders such as Celso and Dana think that Christian places, rituals and figures can be reinterpreted giving them back their “original”, “pre-Christian” meaning. Dana and Celso and their respective groups shared the widespread assumption (referred to in the introduction to this volume) that religion represents the core values of a certain area. They recognized that during the last twenty centuries the dominant religion in Europe had been Christianity and that in Spain and Italy Catholicism still was the main religion. As a consequence, they thought that if they managed to reinterpret and transform the Catholic beliefs and practices of their society they could significantly change its core values. These Italians, Catalans and Spaniards wanted to transform the “patriarchal” values they perceived as inherent to European and more generally to Western society; nevertheless they believed that they could not totally dismiss the Catholic theories and practices they perceived as forming part of their “cultural heritage”. As we have seen, Italians and Iberians influenced by Neopaganism reclaimed their “pre-Christian roots” referring to the Etruscan and Celtic civilizations in Europe; they believed that these ancient civilizations shared a “matriarchal” set of beliefs and social values. Postulating the existence of a pre-Christian and pre-patriarchal past in Europe and also in the Americas they considered certain contemporary “indigenous groups” in LatinAmerica as the “guardians” of pre-columbine and therefore pre-Christian 34 For more details see the webpage of the Spanish Goddess conference: http://www .conferenciadeladiosa.es. Consulted on April 10, 2012. 35 In her analysis of practices againts the evil eye in Greece Eugenia Roussou (2011) found that the spiritual practitioners she interviewed perceived continuity rather than rupture between their New Age influenced rituals and the Orthodox religion they had grown up with. See also Roussou this volume.

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beliefs and rituals. Eager to reconnect with their “matriarchal roots”, they used techniques and rituals deriving from “indigenous traditions” in order to tap into the energy stored in power places identified as having Etruscan or Celtic origins. Religious movements such as the Templars or the Cathars guaranteed them a temporal continuity with their pre-Christian past; Christian figures such as Mary Magdalene helped them to bring together their Christian and pre-Christian heritage. The “indigenous wisdom”, derived from groups described as the “guardians of ancient pre-Christian traditions”, emerged as a powerful resource for overcoming the difficulties created by what these spiritual practitioners considered their principal enemy, “patriarchy”, and what they saw as patriarchy’s most powerful ally, the “Church”. Appropriating elements from different indigenous traditions, they extracted myths and rituals from their original cultural and social contexts and tended to consider them as part of a unique corpus of “indigenous wisdom”, thereby ignoring the quite different concepts of sexuality, corporeality and gender of the indigenous group these rituals derive from. With their theories derived from Neopaganism, Celso and Dana offered in their trips and workshops a different access to Christian figures such as the Virgin Mary or Mary Magdalene. Women like Immacolata felt empowered by their encounter with divinities such as the “Black Madonna” that reminded them of the Virgin Mary they knew from their Catholic background. Yet the “Black Madonna” also incorporated new “Pagan” features allowing these women to feel more “connected to Mother Earth”. It will be interesting to observe if in the future spiritual practitioners who blend Pagan theories and practices with Christian figures and concepts will decide to become more visible or not. They might begin to describe themselves as “Christo-Pagans” as some American Pagans have recently been doing36 or remain in a liminal space between Paganism and Christianity as they have done until now. Acknowledgements Several parts of this text form part of my dissertation that has been published under the title Looking for Mary Magdalene: Alternative Pilgrimage and Ritual Creativity at Catholic Shrines in France (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). I would like to thank William A. Christian, 36 See for instance Higginbotham and Higginbotham 2009.



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Élisabeth Claverie and José Luis Molina who acted as supervisors as well as Michael Houseman, Enric Porqueres and Joan Prat who were on my dissertation committee and Ramon Sarró and Donatella Schmidt who acted as external readers. I am grateful to Sabina Magliocco who discussed with me the characteristics of the different groups related to Neopaganism, to Helen Berger for her suggestions regarding statistical data about Paganism and to Sarah Pike who shared with me her experience about the increasing interest for Christian figures among American Pagans. I also thank Ruy Llera Blanes and José Mapril for their attentive reading and feedback, Eugenia Roussou for her comments and corrections and Cédric Masse for his ongoing support. References Adler, M. 1986 (1979). Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and other Pagans in America Today. London: Penguin Books. Albanese, C. 1991 (1990). Nature Religion in America: from the Algonkian Indians to the New Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bachofen, J. 1948 (1861). Das Mutterecht. Basel: B. Schwabe. Badone, E. 2008. ‘Pilgrimage, Tourism and The Da Vinci Code at Les-Saintes-Maries-de-laMer, France’, Culture and Religion 9 (1): 23–44. Baigent, M., R. Leigh and H. Lincoln. 1996 (1982). The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. London: Arrow Books. Beckford, J. and M. Levasseur (eds). 1991. New Religious Movements and Rapid Social Change. London: Sage. Begg, E. 1985. The Cult of the Black Virgin. London: Penguin Books Arkana. Bender, C. 2010. The New Metaphysicals. Spirituality and the American Religious Imagination. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press. Berger, H. 1999. A Community of Witches. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Berger, H. et al. 2003. Voices from the Pagan Census: Neo-Paganism in the United States. Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press. Berger, P. (ed.). 1999. The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Co. Berger, P., G. Davie and E. Fokas. 2008. Religious America, Secular Europe? A Theme and Variations. Aldershot: Ashgate. Berliner, D. and R. Sarró (eds) 2007. Learning Religion. Anthropological Approaches. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Bowman, M. 1996. Cardiac Celts: Images of Celts in Paganism. In Harvey, Graham and C. Hardman (eds), Paganism Today. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 242–51. ——. 1993. ‘Drawn to Glastonbury’, in Reader, I. and T. Walter (eds.), Pilgrimage in Popular Culture. London: Macmillan, 29–62. Brown, D. 2003. The Da Vinci Code. New York: Pocket Star Books. Brown, M.F. 1997. The Channeling Zone: American Spirituality in an Anxious Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Budapest, Z. 1991. Grandmother Moon: Lunar Magic in our Lives. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco. ——. 1986. Holy Book of Women’s Mysteries. Berkeley, CA: Wingbow Press. Charpentier, L. 1966. Les Mystères de la Cathédrale de Chartres. Paris: Robert Laffont.

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Christian, W. 1995. ‘La Devoció a les Imatges Brunes a Catalunya. La Mare de Déu de Montserrat’, Revista d’Etnologia de Catalunya 6: 24–31. Davie, G. 1994. Religion in Britain Since 1945: Believing Without Belonging. Oxford: Blackwell. De la Peña, F. 2006 (1999). ‘Le mouvement de la mexicanité ou l’invention de l’autre: Néotradition, millénarisme et imaginaire indigène’. Ph.D. Dissertation, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. ——. 2002. Los hijos del sexto sol. Un estudio etnopsicoanalítico del movimiento de la Mexicanidad. México: Instituto Nacional de Antropología. De Sède, G. 1967. Le trésor maudit de Rennes-le-Château. Paris: J’ai Lu. Eisler, R. 1987. The Chalice and the Blade: Our History; our Future. San Francisco: Harper and Row. Eller, C. 2000. The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory. Boston: Beacon Press. ——. 1993. Living in the Lap of the Goddess: The Feminist Spirituality Movement in America. Boston: Beacon Press. Fedele, A. (forthcoming) “Reversing Eve’s Curse. Mary Magdalene, Mother Earth and the Creative Ritualization of Menstruation” Journal of Ritual Studies. ——. 2013a. Looking for Mary Magdalene: Alternative Pilgrimage and Ritual Creativity at Catholic Shrines in France. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. ——. 2013b “Black Madonna Versus White Madonna: Gendered Power Strategies in Alternative Pilgrimages to Marian Shrines”. In Gender and Power in Contemporary Spirituality: Ethnographic Approaches, eds. Anna Fedele and Kim Knibbe, 96–114. London and New York: Routledge. ——. 2009. “From Christian Religion to Feminist Spirituality; Mary Magdalene Pilgrimages to La Sainte-Baume, France”. Culture and Religion, 10:3, pp. 243–261. ——. 2008 El camino de María Magdalena. Barcelona: RBA ediciones. Fedele, A. and K. Knibbe (eds). 2013. Gender and Power in Contemporary Spirituality: Ethnographic Approaches London and New York: Routledge. Fulcanelli. 1964 (1929). Le Mystère des Cathédrales et l’interprétation ésotérique des symboles hermétiques du grand œuvre. Paris: Jean Jacques Pauvert. Galinier, J. and A. Molinié. 2006. Les Néo-Indiens. Une religion du IIIeme millénaire. Paris: Odile Jacob. Gardner, G.B. 1959. The Meaning of Witchcraft. London: Rider and Company. ——. 1954. Witchcraft Today. London: Rider and Company. Gimbutas, M. 1989. The Language of the Goddess. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco. ——. 1974. The Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe: 6500–3500 bc. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Graves, R. 1961 (1948). The White Goddess: a Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth. London, Boston: Faber and Faber. Greenwood, S. 2000. Magic, Witchcraft and the Otherworld: An Anthropology. Oxford: Berg. Griffin, W. 1995. ‘The Embodied Goddess. Feminist Witchcraft and Female Divinity’, Sociology of Religion 56 (1): 35–49. Hanegraaff, W. 1999. New Age Spiritualities as Secular Religion: A Historian’s Perspective. Social Compass 46 (2):145–160. ——. 1996. New Age Religion and Western Culture. Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought. Leiden: Brill. Haskins, S. 1993. Mary Magdalen - Myth and Metaphor, New York: HarperCollins. Heelas, P. 2002. The Spiritual Revolution: From ‘Religion’ to ‘Spirituality’. In Religions in the Modern World: Traditions and Transformations, eds. Linda Woodhead, P. Fletcher, H. Kawanami, and D. Smith, 357–377. London and New York: Routledge. ——. 1996. The New Age Movement. Oxford: Blackwell. Heelas, P. et al. 2005. The Spiritual Revolution; Why Religion is giving Way to Spirituality. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Hervieu-Léger, D. 2005. ‘Bricolage vaut-il dissémination? Quelques réflexions sur l’opérationnalité sociologique d’une métaphore problématique’, Social Compass 52 (3): 295–308.



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Higginbotham, J. and R. Higginbotham. 2009. Christo-Paganism: An Inclusive Path. Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn Publications. Hill, M. 2008. ‘Inca of the Blood, Inca of the Soul: Embodiment, Emotion, and Racialization in the Peruvian Mystical Tourist Industry’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 76 (2): 251–279. Huarache Mamani, H. 2000. Kantu. El poder de la mujer. Arequipa: Tiki Ediciones. Hume, L. 1997. Witchcraft and Paganism in Australia. Carlton South, Vic.: Melbourne University Press. Hutton, R. 1999. The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ivakhiv, A. 2001. Claiming Sacred Ground. Pilgrims and Politics at Glastonbury and Sedona. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Jenkins, E. 1998 (1997). Initiation: A Woman’s Spiritual Adventure in the Heart of the Andes. London: Piatkus. Jung, C.G. 1978 (1942). Il simbolismo della messa. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri. Khalsa, P.S. (ed.). 1981. A Pilgrim’s Guide to Planet Earth: A Traveler’s Handbook and New Age Directory. London: Wildwood House. Knibbe, K. Forthcoming. ‘Relating to Christianity: Searching for a Religion without Power’, in Heelas, Paul and D. Houtman (eds), Inner Life Spirituality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ——. 2007. ‘Faith in the Familiar. Change and Continuity in Religious Practices and Moral Orientations in the South of Limburg, the Netherlands’. Ph.D. Dissertation, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. Lovelock, J.E. 1979. Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. Luhrmann, T.M. 2001. ‘The Ugly Goddess: Reflections on the use of Violent Images in Religious Experience’, History of Religions 41 (2): 114–141. ——. 1989. Persuasions of the Witches’ Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Magliocco, S. 2004. Witching Culture. Folklore and Neo-Paganism in America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ——. 2001. Neo-Pagan Sacred Art and Altars. Making Things Whole. Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press. McGuire, M. 2008. Lived Religion. Faith and Practice in Everyday Life. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Murray, M. 1933. The God of the Witches. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ——. 1921. The Witch Cult in Western Europe. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Noble, V. 1991. Shakti woman. Feeling our Fire, Healing our World. San Francisco: HarperCollins. Nuñez del Prado, J. 1998. Caminando nel cosmo vivente. Guida alle tecniche energetiche e spirituali delle Ande. Cesena: Macro Edizioni. Orion, L. 1995. Never again the Burning Times: Paganism Revived. Prospect, IL: Waveland Press. Picknett, L. 2003. Mary Magdalene. Christianity’s Hidden Goddess. London: Robinson. Pike, S.M. 2001. Earthly Bodies, Magical Selves: Contemporary Pagans and the Search for Community. Berkeley: University of California Press. Redfield, J. 1993. The Celestine Prophecy. New York: Warner Books. Rostas, S. 1998. ‘From Ritualization to Performativity: The Concheros of Mexico’, in HughesFreeland, Felicia (ed.), Ritual, Performance, Media. London: Routledge, 85–103. ——. 1996. ‘The Production of Gendered Imagery: The Concheros of Mexico’, in Marit Melhuus and K. A Stølen (eds), Machos, Mistresses, Madonnas: Contesting the Power of Latin American Gender Imagery. London: Routledge, 207–229. Rountree, K. 2006a. ‘Performing the Divine: Neo-Pagan Pilgrimages and Embodiment at Sacred Sites’, Body and Society 12 (4): 95–115. ——. 2006b. ‘Journeys to the Goddess: Pilgrimage and Tourism in the New Age’, in Swatos, William (ed.), On the Road to Being There: Pilgrimage and Religious Tourism in Late Modernity. Boston: Brill, 33–60.

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——. 2003. Embracing the Witch and the Goddess: Feminist Ritual-Makers in New Zealand. London: Routledge. Roussou, E. 2011. ‘When Soma Encounters the Spiritual: Bodily Praxes of Performed Religiosity in Contemporary Greece’, in: Encounters of Body and Soul in Contemporary Religious Practices; Anthropological Approaches. A. Fedele and R. Llera Blanes eds. pp. 133–150. Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books. Salomonsen, J. 2002. Enchanted Feminism: The Reclaiming Witches of San Francisco. London: Routledge. Saxer, V. 1959. Le culte de Marie Madeleine en occident des origines à la fin du Moyen Age. Paris: Cahiers d’Archéologie et Histoire. Scheer, M. 2002. ‘From Majesty to Mystery: Changes in the Meanings of Black Madonnas from the Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries’, The American Historical Review 107 (5): 1412–1440. Sebastiani, L. 1992. Tra/Sfigurazione. Il personaggio evangelico di Maria di Magdala e il mito della peccatrice redenta nella tradizione occidentale. Brescia: Queriniana. Starbird, M. 1998. The Goddess in the Gospels. Reclaiming the Sacred Feminine. Santa Fe, NM: Bear & Co. ——. 1993. The Woman with the Alabaster Jar: Mary Magdalene and the Holy Grail. Santa Fe, NM: Bear & Co. Starhawk, M.S. 1989 (1979). The Spiral Dance. San Francisco: HarperCollins. Stein, D. 1987. The Women’s Spirituality Book. St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn Publications. Stone, M. 1976. When God was a Woman. New York: Harcourt Brace. Watkins, A. 1984 (1925). The Old Straight Track. London: Sphere Books. Weibel, D. 2005. Of Consciousness Changes and Fortified Faith: Creativist and Catholic PilGrimage at French Catholic Shrines. In Pilgrimage and Healing, eds Jill Dubisch and Michael Winkelman, 111–134. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press. ——. 2001. ‘Kidnapping the Virgin: The Reinterpretation of a Roman Catholic Shrine by Religious Creatives’. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California, San Diego. York, M. 1995. The Emerging Network: A Sociology of the New Age and Neo-Pagan Movements. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield. Zwissler, L. 2008. ‘Demonstrations of Faith: Religious and Political Identity Among Feminist Political Activists in North America’. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Toronto. ——. 2007. ‘Spiritual, but Religious: Spirituality Among Religiously Motivated Feminist Activists’, Culture and Religion 8 (1): 51–69.

THE NEW AGE OF GREEK ORTHODOXY: PLURALIZING RELIGIOSITY IN EVERYDAY PRACTICE Eugenia Roussou Owing to the long-established intimacy between Orthodox Christianity and the Greek socio-cultural identity, the Greek spiritual landscape has stereotypically been perceived as almost exclusively Orthodox. According to recent statistics, around ninety seven percent of the Greek population is – at least nominally – Orthodox (Alivizatos 1999: 25). In its everyday practice, however, Greek religiosity is pluralized. Nowadays, practices of ‘New Age’ and eastern spiritual orientation challenge the exclusivity of Orthodoxy as the autochthonous religion in contemporary Greece. Orthodoxy’s defences have dropped, and its concrete walls have turned into a porous religiosity. Greeks are not afraid to be spiritually creative. The challenge to their identity, through pursuing spirituality, has developed into a cultural actuality.1 I ethnographically explored the pluralized religiosity in Greece when I spent fifteen months, divided between Rethymno, a town on the island of Crete, and Thessaloniki, the second largest city of Greece, doing research on the practice of the evil eye.2 The evil eye (mati) arises from the widely 1 For the needs of my argument, ‘religiosity’ is used as a general term that captures the broad spiritual landscape of contemporary Greece, and which incorporates both ‘religion’ and ‘spirituality’ in its signifieds. ‘Religion’ is employed as synonymous to the prevailing organized religious institution in Greece, namely Orthodox Christianity. And ‘spirituality’ is used in order to signify non-institutional and more subjectivized practices of ‘New Age’ and eastern spiritual orientation. I do not analytically perceive religion and spirituality as contradictory. People in my Greek fieldsites have shown that religion and spirituality should be considered as complementary – the boundaries between them are blurred. At the same time, when I talk in the thesis about the ‘spiritual landscape of contemporary Greece’, or the fact that my informants are ‘spiritually creative’, the terms ‘spiritual’ and ‘spiritually’ stand for both (‘New Age’ and eastern) spirituality and (Orthodox Christian) religion, and their mutual interaction. 2 My evil eye research was conducted between August 2005 and November 2006. I have since returned to Rethymno and Thessaloniki, making sure that my ethnographic observations and analytic conclusions are still up to date. It has to be noted, however, that my informants’ quotes, comments and the data used in this article come from my fifteen months of fieldwork in Crete and northern Greece. I talked to a relatively equal number of shop owners, civil servants, artists, teachers, pensioners, students, housewives and young

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held conviction in Greece that everyday sensory communication and energy exchange between people can inflict symptoms of illness upon them (matiasma). Afflicted individuals are healed through a ritual known as ksematiasma. Performed predominantly by lay specialists, this ceremony contains numerous elements of Orthodox Christian symbolism.3 And, in addition to the spiritual beliefs and practices involved, people draw on a panoply of evil eye material objects (matakia), which are mainly used as prophylactic charms against any form of evil. My informants explain matiasma (evil eye affliction) by introducing ‘New Age’ ideas about energy and Christian ideas about possession by the Devil. They combine Orthodox prayers and reiki in the ritual healing of ksematiasma. They practise feng shui and yoga in order to prevent evil spirits and the evil eye from attacking them. They buy prophylactic charms that combine evil eye symbols and Christian religious figures and hang them on their walls and/or bodies. Through their engagement with the evil eye, Cretans and northern Greeks are contributing to the emergence of a novel perceptual, ritual, performative and material affinity between Orthodox Christianity and ‘New Age’ and eastern spirituality.4 The evil eye

professionals. In terms of age, the youngest of my informants were in their early/mid-twenties and the oldest in their late sixties/early seventies. They were mainly educated, and a large number of them were in the process of obtaining or have already obtained a university degree. They also seemed to lead a relatively comfortable life. Variations do occur. There were some Rethymniots and Thessalonikans who, although financially comfortable, only just managed to finish primary school. There were others who had obtained a university degree but their financial situation resembles that of a working-class person. With these factors in mind, it can be maintained that my informants generally belong to a middle class, which, however, is not homogenous but consists of multiple internal levels of social, economic and educational deviation. 3 The Greek Orthodox Church accepts the existence of the evil eye. According to the official ecclesiastic discourse, the evil eye is an act of the Devil, and priests are the only ones who possess the spiritual power to heal people from it. Although lay healers insist on the fact that they only use Orthodox Christian prayers during ksematiasma, the Church regards those healing rituals as satanic, since they are not performed by an official representative of the Church. 4 In this article, I follow Brown’s (1997: vii) definition and consider ‘New Age’ as ‘a diffuse social movement of people committed to pushing the boundaries of the self and bringing spirituality into everyday life.’ Burning sage, ritual aura-cleansing, using rocks and beads that are believed to possess mystical qualities, mediumship, the use of mystical forces for healing purposes, the channelling of energy, magic, the perception of the supernatural, and anything non-Christian constitute, according to my informants and in my ethnographic consideration, the fundamental ground of the ‘New Age’ phenomenon. ‘New Age’ and eastern spirituality commonly share some of the above-mentioned practices. ‘Eastern spirituality’, however, refers, throughout my analysis, specifically to the practices of yoga, reiki, and feng shui.



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practice becomes a vehicle for a contemporary Greek religiosity that is moving in new directions. The ‘New Age of Greek Orthodoxy’, as employed in the title of the present article, does not just refer to the fact that ‘New Age’ spirituality is claiming a position in the field of Greek religiosity nowadays. It also and most importantly points to the fact that the prevailing religion of Greece, Orthodox Christianity, is challenged by ‘New Age’ and eastern spirituality, which has recently entered the field of Greek religiosity. Consequently, the contemporary spiritual landscape in Greece is reaching a new age of pluralism, where official and unofficial beliefs and practices cross each others’ paths and multiply interact. What follows is a closer examination of the challenges the prevailing religion of Greece, Orthodox Christianity, faces in the contemporary world, and how Orthodoxy responds to the age of globalization. After taking a look at the long-established relationship between Orthodoxy and Greek identity, I will proceed to reconsider the idea that Orthodoxy is the ethnic, autochthonous religion of Greece by exploring how it intersects with ‘New Age’ and eastern spirituality through the evil eye practice. I will finish by tackling the link between ‘New Age’ and eastern spirituality and secularization, in an attempt to provide an answer to the question whether the appearance of spirituality and the seeming eclipse of Orthodoxy’s preeminence signify a Greek turn to a secular state. Orthodox Christianity and Greek Identity Orthodox Christianity and Hellenism share an intimate bond. As Molokotos-Liederman (2004: 404) observes: “Helleno-Orthodoxy is a body of thought which holds together the national unity of Greece both institutionally and culturally.” Orthodoxy’s penetration into Greek culture commences from central – as far as one’s socio-cultural education is at stake – social units, such as family and school. Children who belong to Ortho­dox Christian, and not necessarily observant, families, learn from a very young age to go to church every Sunday and get entangled with the Orthodox sacraments. Furthermore, all students are taught throughout the Greek primary and secondary school how the Orthodox Church considerably contributed to the positive outcome of the Greek War of Independence. It appears that, in general terms, children in Greece are from a very young age influenced and led through a process of catechesis to believe that Orthodoxy is a vital part of their Greek identity.

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Archbishop Christodoulos5 never ceased to work towards increasing the privileged position of Orthodoxy, by emphasizing how handing political power over to the Church would strengthen ‘Greekness’. Ever since 1998, when he was elected to the Archbishopric of Athens, Christodoulos persistently tried to bring the Church into the forefront of Greek social and political life. The Orthodox Church of Greece, with Christodoulos in the lead, managed to be politically influential (see Stavrakakis 2003). Although the conditions for a politically active Church had existed before him (Alivizatos 1999: 24), the separation between the state and the Church narrowed during his days of governing Orthodox affairs. He insisted on the idea that Hellenism and Orthodoxy were inextricably linked (Stavrakakis 2003: 156–157), and that the Church should therefore possess the authority to publicly participate in Greek socio-political affairs. Christodoulos was a very popular religious leader, very influential to a wider crowd of believers, even to non-believers, and certainly his powerful position was widespread throughout Greece. Although he was never silent about the Church’s political aspirations, Christodoulos attempted to reinforce the status of Ortho­doxy in Greek society by dropping some of Orthodoxy’s rigidness. He wanted and managed to attract young people to the Church, and to make Orthodoxy a more popular part of Greek everyday life, even for those who were far from religious adherents.6 Yet, by opening the boundaries of religion, he contributed to the creation of a porous Greek religiosity. 5 Christodoulos was the Archbishop of the Church of Greece at the time of my fieldwork. Although he has now passed away, his image as a powerful religious leader with sociopolitical authority still remains intact in the consciousness of Greeks. Christodoulos has not been the only public figure who invoked the inseparable bond between Orthodoxy and Greek identity, and used it as a discursive tool against Western modernity. Such invocations had already commenced in the 1980s, when certain intellectuals, artists, and priests, the founders of what is nowadays called ‘neo-Orthodoxy’, began to publicly denounce Western culture and its ideals and values. They argued that Western modernity can only lead to socio-cultural erosion and identity loss, and that only Orthodoxy could protect Greeks from the dangers of the West. ‘Using the media in a particularly skillful fashion, they have advanced a populist interpretation that blends Greek nationalism, anti-Western attitudes, anti-modernism, and Orthodoxy’ (Roudometof 2005: 91). Neo-Orthodox thinkers themselves have not accepted the term ‘neo-Orthodoxy’, for, according to Christos Yannaras (one of the acknowledged leaders of this movement), their aim is not to invent new Orthodoxy, but to go back to the authentic roots of Orthodox tradition (Makrides 1998: 142). For a detailed analysis of ‘neo-Orthodoxy’, see Makrides (1998). 6 One characteristic example of how Orthodoxy became more popular in the years of Christodoulos is that of the so called ‘Free Monks’. This is a group of Orthodox Christian monks, who interpreted Archbishop Christodoulos’ call to the younger generation in a very particular way: they adopted a musical approach as a social tool to get closer to young people. They released their first CD album in 2000, and two other CDs followed in 2001 and 2002 respectively. They combined rock-style tunes with religiously orientated lyrics



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Greek Orthodoxy in a Global Age Greek spiritual identity has begun to escape its rigid attachment to Orthodox Christianity. Although Orthodoxy remains influential in presentday Greece, new spiritual practices, which belong to the so-called eastern spiritual tradition and to the ‘New Age’ phenomenon, have manifested themselves in the everyday life of Greeks. These new spiritual practices, however, have not necessarily started a war with Orthodoxy. It seems that they have influenced Orthodox practitioners to become less religiously exclusive. On the other hand, they have offered a spiritual alternative to those Greeks who have abandoned any effort to keep a good relationship with the Orthodox Church. Russian Orthodoxy faced a similar situation. The socio-cultural and political freedom of the post-communist era created ‘an unrestricted diversity and competition’ in the Russian field of religiosity. (Agadjanian and Rousselet 2005: 29). The Russian Orthodox Church lost its might. “In line with a global trend that has partly affected the Russian cultural landscape, ‘religion’, in a significant shift, now became a highly individualized expression of non-rigid, flexible quests that do not claim ‘universal and eternal’ validity” (ibid.: 30). Indeed, during the 1990s, Russian religiosity experienced an inflow of Western religious groups, new religious movements and non-denominational small-scale religions, which were all very popular in large Russian cities such as Moscow and St. Petersburg. As Agadjanian and Rousselet (ibid.: 31) note, “the Russian territory was rapidly becoming part of global religious networks. Religion, in all its forms, was thus a facet of a titanic process of inclusion of the nation into the new global taxonomy as part of the ‘democratic West’”. The Russian Orthodox Church fought against this invasion of new forms of spirituality in the country, a situation that resulted in the adoption of a new law, which imposed legal restrictions on religious pluralism (ibid.: 40). In the twenty-first century Russian spiritual landscape, the situation remains unaltered: mainstream Russian Orthodoxy might formally co-exist with contemporary global culture; however it has not embraced it. The religious pluralism that the country experienced during the 1990s appears to be fading. Berger (2007: 19) asserts that ‘new religious pluralism’, as he calls it, is the result of globalization. According to his analysis, religious pluralism has characterized by a somewhat proselytizing undertone. Shortly after their debut, their songs became a hit (although at present, a few years after the Free Monks first appeared on the Orthodox frontiers, their musical popularity has decreased). For an analysis of the Free Monks phenomenon, see Molokotos-Liederman (2004).

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implications in two levels. The first level is institutional: the clergy loses its socially given authority, and lay people become active agents in a religious market that is constantly seeking new religious clientele (ibid.: 21). The second level is cognitive: individuals can choose their religion, which is not a taken-for-granted part of their consciousness any longer, but is freely chosen and subjectivized (ibid.: 23). The pluralism I ethnographically discovered in Greece can be interpreted as a phenomenon that belongs to a process of globalization, having derived from the articulation of global socio-cultural influences. The Greek Church, just like the Russian Church, has resisted globalization, which can allegedly lead to secularization, and has made clear that it considers itself as the sole representative of contemporary Greek religiosity. Yet, unlike the situation in Russia, its attempt to restrict the power of a potential new religious pluralism has not been successful. On the other hand, the inflow of ‘New Age’ and eastern spirituality in the Greek spiritual landscape has been considerably more subtle than in the Russian case. At the same time, Greeks in my fieldsites do not take Orthodoxy’s supremacy for granted; they still appear to be free and capable of making free choices as far as their religiosity is concerned, without being extremely influenced by the Church’s official discourse and resistance towards globalization and secularization. Spiritual Synthesis: Everyday Orthodox Encounters with ‘New Age’ and Eastern Spirituality Rethymno is a tourist town. Thousands of foreign visitors overflow this popular Cretan town, especially during the summer and autumn months. Those tourists bring over popular socio-cultural tendencies from all over the world. ‘New Age’ and eastern spirituality constitutes one of those global-acclaimed trends. According to their owners, most of the Rethymniot shops that sell healing crystals, oil, incense, feng shui and evil eye objects were established mainly for the benefit of the foreign tourists. Gradually, the shops began to attract Greek tourists and locals, many of whom are now well acquainted with and initiated into ‘New Age’ and eastern spirituality. When it comes to Thessaloniki, feng shui shops and yoga teaching centres have gained increasing popularity in approximately the last five years. It does not seem so coincidental that it is about five years ago when Chinese products (mainly clothing) started winning over the Greek marketplace and, as a result, Chinese shops are now everywhere



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to be found in northern Greece. Apparently, the Chinese influence on Greek culture is not confined within the field of materiality. The Greek landscape of religiosity has been won over by eastern spiritualities as well. Ever since 2005, when my fieldwork started, and I gained the opportunity to closely observe how Greeks practise their religiosity, and how they express their selves through it, the quest for new spiritual confrontations has seemed present. Hollywood films, world music, the Greek media, the various Chinese shops, tourists, and the cultural exchanges in the global market have all contributed to the spread of ‘New Age’ and eastern spiritual practices in the Greek popular culture. The widespread use of the concept of energy in present-day Greece is symptomatic of this popularity ‘New Age’ and eastern spiritual ideologies have gained in the country. Energy blurs the boundaries between Orthodoxy and ‘New Age’ and eastern spirituality. Yoga, feng shui, reiki, ‘New Age’ mysticism and the evil eye: they are all practised simultaneously, in combination, or as stand-alone spiritual performances. And they all share and revolve around a common trait: energy. Rethymniots and Thessalonikans manipulate energy, in order to develop their spiritual path and test their religious aspirations, in relation to or independently of Orthodoxy, and in terms of discourse, practice and belief. Greek religiosity is not just about the meeting between and coexistence of Orthodoxy, ‘New Age’ and eastern spirituality. Contemporary Greek religiosity has entered a pluralistic age, where Orthodoxy and ‘New Age’ and eastern spirituality do not only encounter each other but, as will be demonstrated below, enter a process of amalgamation in everyday practice. Yoga came up in the course of many discussions I had with people in both my fieldsites. There appears to be a kinship between yoga and the evil eye, especially as far as my Thessalonikan informants’ opinion is concerned. The closeness between yoga and mati mainly has to do with the way energy is communicatively circulated in both. As Strauss (2005) remarks, yoga can accept multiple definitions. It mainly has to do with the development of one’s well-being, health and spirituality. It can be an attitude, a philosophy, a set of practices, or a way of being in the world (Strauss 2005: 2). Yoga originated in India. However, nowadays it has become an integral part of contemporary ideologies and practices all over the world. In the words of the anthropologist: “Yoga can be understood as a practical method for acquiring spiritual capital” (ibid: 9). “The yoga centre was in the basement. Every time I went down the stairs, I could see this huge icon of Christ hanging from the wall in the entrance. You know, basically to prevent people from thinking that yoga is

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something ‘New Age’.” This is how Melina,7 a woman in her mid-twenties, spatially described the place where she was practising yoga in Thessaloniki. The owner of the yoga centre was her friend. Placing an icon that is obviously linked to and represents Orthodoxy in such an obvious place has been strategically and meaningfully used, in order to bring two cosmologies together into a peaceful coexistence and possible spiritual synthesis. Yoga is not simply an eastern spiritual practice that has nothing common with Orthodoxy. Quite the opposite: they are both concerned with a quest for the spiritual. Melina’s friend adapted yoga in such a way that it would fit into the Greek context. The Greek Orthodox Church has not expressed any official opinion about the act of practising yoga. Informally, those informants who are acquainted with yoga have assumed that the clergy must be opposed to it. Actually, some individuals in Rethymno and Thessaloniki, who are Christian devotees, have placed yoga under the umbrella of ‘New Age’ and have characterized it as non-Christian and as non-religious. Others, who attend church liturgies quite often and define themselves as good Christians, but who are also ideologically open to accept the existence of other spiritual practices, are more flexible. Although they do not usually practise yoga themselves, and if they do it is only for exercise purposes, they respect people who take up yoga as a physical as well as a spiritual practice. I have met yoga practitioners who are relatively or quite religious; however, what the Church thinks does not really appear to matter much to them. They do not see anything wrong in practising yoga on Sunday afternoons, after having attended a liturgy. They do not see anything wrong in synthesizing spiritualities. Westerners, through the means of ritualized practices, use eastern spirituality in order to change the meaning of suffering (Garrett 2001: 329). Catherine Garrett is an academic sociologist who suffers from chronic pain, and has taken up transcendental meditation (TM), yoga and reiki in order to heal herself. Writing about the experience of the people with whom she has practised these eastern spiritual performances, she proclaims that “the popularity of TM, Reiki and yoga in advanced capitalist societies can be understood as a search for the sacred” (Garrett 2001: 336). I tend to agree with her assertion. In practising yoga and reiki, either as stand-alone practices or in combination with evil eye rituals, people in Rethymno and Thessaloniki feel they communicate with the sacred. The evil eye is part of

7 The real names of my informants have been replaced by pseudonyms.



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a contemporary quest for spiritual and/or sacred forces to which they can bodily relate. A female informant of mine, who comes from a small town near Thessaloniki, has developed her own ritualism when it comes to ksematiasma.8 I asked her to perform the ritual on me. She accepted. She made the sign of the cross on my forehead, she kept murmuring a prayer, she started yawning and so did I. So far, nothing out of the evil eye ordinary caught my attention. She reached the end of the healing ritual and then, all of sudden, and transcending my ritual expectations – I had witnessed so many ksematiasmata over more than twenty years, after all, therefore I almost always (thought I) knew the ritual process and what to expect – she clapped her hands once. I was stunned. I had no idea why she had done that; my personal and ethnographic curiosity was noticeably raised. She stated that I had lots of evil eye on me, we yawned a little bit more to make sure we would totally get rid of it, and then, not being able to keep my inquisitiveness down any longer, I asked her what was with the clap of the hands. She explained that it had to do with reiki.9 Clapping the hands together after performing the ksematiasma would help the negative energy of the evil eye, which she had bodily absorbed, as the energy had migrated from my body to hers, disperse into the universe. “I have developed my own ksematiasma technique”, she joked, adding that she was a very successful and respected ksematiastra. I knew she was a reiki healing practitioner. I would not have imagined, however, that she would put Christian prayers and reiki together into a ritual action. Reiki bears a particular resemblance to ksematiasma. As people in Thessaloniki and Rethymno have observed, both are types of healing based on the channelling of energy. Afroditi, my informant mentioned above, is an Orthodox believer. She always wears a golden chain with a cross and a mataki (evil eye charm) on her neck. She thinks that the evil eye healing is based on Orthodoxy, and it is this communication with the sacred during ksematiasma that helps her heal people. At the same time, Afroditi is in favour of eastern philosophy. She is keen on yoga, and she 8 In the most typical ritual performance of ksematiasma the healer uses water and oil and recites an Orthodox Christian prayer, such as the Creed, or a prayer with strong Christian symbolism, where Jesus, the Virgin Mary and other saints are invoked. Yawning during the healing performance is a sign that a person is indeed evil-eyed and that the healing is successful. The healer usually incorporates the symptoms of illness as felt by the evil-eyed person, which symptoms gradually leave the healer’s body without any other action. 9 The word ‘reiki’ means ‘universal life-force energy’. It was first discovered by the Japanese priest Mikao Usui in the late 19th century, who developed a special type of healing by channelling healing energy (Quest 1999: 6).

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believes that energy circulation constitutes one major function of the world; and, of course, she is a reiki healer. Eastern spirituality is part of her everyday way of living. So is Orthodoxy. The embrace of yoga, reiki, Orthodox prayers and ksematiasma “collapses time and space within embodied practice, conjoining disparate pasts from different places within a particular present” (Klassen 2005: 378). Through their embodied practices, Afroditi, and the rest of my informants who have adopted both Orthodoxy and eastern spirituality in their lives, create a spiritually pluralistic present that collapses the boundaries between Orthodox Christianity and eastern spirituality; and, most importantly, they amalgamate those seemingly very different cosmologies into one. “Oriental medicine and philosophy is based on the premise that along with all the physical aspects of our world that we can see, hear, touch, smell and taste, there is a movement of a subtle flow of electromagnetic energy” (Brown 1996: 1). Feng shui is established on the existence of this energy outside the realm of the sensory. So is the evil eye. Feng shui is claiming a highly fashionable position in the contemporary Greek everyday world. Perhaps it is the need to follow the global trends of behaviour and life organization, and/or to be ‘socially distinct’ (Bourdieu 1984) that has resulted in a close affiliation between the evil eye and feng shui. This connection continuously appeared in fieldwork discussions I had with young, educated individuals, mostly women, in both Crete and northern Greece, who follow fashion and its trends. They buy feng shui objects, and place them in their houses together with evil eye amulets. They strongly believe that both evil eye and feng shui material objects help positive energy circulate freely in their living space. As they explain, adopting the feng shui ideology and practice as part of their everyday life is not only indicative of their worldly knowledge of global trends; it also differentiates them from others, enhancing their social status with spiritual and socio-cultural distinctiveness. In one of the most central and busiest streets of Thessaloniki, another feng shui shop claimed ethnographic attention. The sign, ‘Feng Shui World’, left no doubt about its interior contents. I had already passed it a couple of times, and it was either crowded, which meant, according to my logic, that I would not really have the chance to gain a lot of information from the owner, or closed. One day I found it empty, at last, and I stepped inside. Instead of the Chinese couple I had glimpsed before, a Greek young woman was there to assist with my shopping. I was fairly disappointed; I would have preferred the Chinese owners to be present, so that I could extract more useful information – or so I thought. The shop assistant, when I explained what I was doing and asked whether she would be kind enough



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to answer some of my questions, replied that, although the Chinese owner of the shop was not around, she would be happy to discuss the evil eye with me. She proved to be Cretan, a detail which surprised and pleased me at the same time; it was a link between my field sites, which could not pass unnoticed. Perceiving this coincidence as a sign that I was on the right research path, we talked about feng shui, about the evil eye, about energy. Maria told me that the idea of the evil eye had always existed in her family, but she never fully believed in it. Since she started working in the feng shui shop, and was constantly dealing with the idea of energy and the ways in which it is manifested, her relationship with the evil eye had become stronger, and more insistent. Meanwhile, my attention was caught by the wall behind the desk where Maria was sitting: it was fully covered by a carpet with Chinese ideograms, and a mataki was hung on it; an image, which formed an excellent portrayal of Maria’s own shift in her relationship with feng shui and the evil eye. And then, the question I had wanted to put all along came out: how come there are evil eye objects in a feng shui shop? What is the relationship between feng shui and evil eye things? Is there a relevant belief in China? Maria stated that it is practically the same thing. Chinese people believe in the existence of energy. And mati is exactly that: an exchange of energy among people. Was this the reason why the Chinese owner decided to draw his Greek clients’ gazes onto a Chinese carpet married to a Greek evil eye? Was he trying to indicate the degree of cultural sameness between his culture and Thessalonikan culture? Was this a performance of cultural hybridity? Or was it an act on his behalf, to incorporate his own cultural feng shui energy into an energy of ‘Greekness’? Knowledge of feng shui does not only indicate that one is fashionable. It also demonstrates one’s ability to escape social and personal narrowmindedness, by embracing, or simply claiming awareness with regard to a cultural practice which originates abroad – it symbolically transforms a person into a citizen of the world. As shown above, I have met certain individuals in Rethymno who accept feng shui, but deny the existence of the evil eye. As they have explained, feng shui is a globally acclaimed practice, whereas the evil eye, despite its eminence in the Greek context, is not internationally well-known; hence, uncertainty with regard to its efficacy wins through. What the Chinese owner did, therefore, was take a commonly held Greek belief, and unite it with an internationally known spiritual ideology. His appropriation of the evil eye, pushed it onto a wider spiritual market, and seemed successful. Simultaneously, it created a new breed of spiritual pluralism.

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I discovered Athina’s feng shui shop as I was walking around my Thessalonikan neighbourhood. The window was full of small Chinese objects, labelled according to their potential usage. They promised positive developments in the love domain, good luck, and good health. One glass ball caught my eye. The label next to it declared: “Protection against the evil eye”. Intrigued, I entered the shop. Athina was very willing to assist. She took the ball out of the window so that I could have a closer look, and stated that this was the feng shui object for protection against the evil eye. Then, she pointed towards some matakia that were hanging from a wall. When asked if these Greek-style matakia were also considered part of the feng shui practice, she replied by showing me an object which was comprised of two small silver figures next to a mataki, a feng shui item that, as Athina explained, is usually bought because it offers prosperity in romantic relationships. Apart from its aid with marriages and relationships, this object skilfully depicted marriage between two cultures: feng shui and the evil eye had found each other. Before I left, I noticed a couple of objects displaying an intimacy already encountered in the field: combined religious icons and evil eye things were standing opposite me once again. When I enquired about these, Athina replied that “the Church believes in the evil eye”. Then, she proceeded to explain that, when she first opened the feng shui shop, she was uncertain whether it would be accepted by Orthodox Christianity. Being religious herself, she asked her confessor:10 “Father, what shall I do? People ask for feng shui objects”. The priest came to visit the shop, so as to look at the objects and offer his opinion on their spiritual suitability. Since, as she clarified, he did not see anything that would insult Orthodoxy, and since people wanted these objects, he gave his permission. Athina was relieved and carried on with the final arrangements for opening her feng shui establishment. Perhaps it was only this specific priest who did not see any conflict arising between Orthodoxy and feng shui practice. Still, this ethnographic incident is indicative of the fact that feng shui is not necessarily perceived by the Church and its official representatives as spiritually threatening. Athina is a religious woman; therefore, her explanation that she wanted to open the shop to help people find what they want seems to have touched the priest’s humanitarian feelings. If lay people want feng shui objects, they should have them. Maybe the priest did not realize the spiritual signifieds 10 Confessor is an Orthodox priest who has the power to hear confession, and who usually possesses the role of one’s spiritual mentor.



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that feng shui objects [can] carry. Perhaps, that is, he did not determine that feng shui objects depict a path to spirituality which could be in conflict with doctrinal Orthodoxy. The significance, however, does not lie in the reasons why the priest let Athina open her shop. The importance of what happened rests on the fact that a priest walked into Athina’s establishment, saw the feng shui things, saw matakia, saw the material combination of the two, and did not feel any spiritual danger. Whether he was the exception to the Orthodox rule, or not, this was one more incident I encountered during my fieldwork which demonstrates that Orthodoxy and the Church have lowered their strictly doctrinal walls. It is a sign that Orthodox Christianity and eastern spirituality are not, or no longer, at cultural war. On the contrary, they can ideologically and performatively coexist, interact, and mix. The spiritual landscape of contemporary Greece, at least the one I managed to observe during my fieldwork and my subsequent visits to Greece, has been through a process of ‘easternization’. Greeks have recognized “the importance of Eastern religious themes in what is usually called ‘New Age spirituality’ and their general spread into the wider culture” (Bruce 2002: 118). This is a Western socio-cultural phenomenon that Bruce characterizes as ‘the Easternization of the West’. This process of ‘easternization’, which has claimed a part in Rethymniots’ and Thessalonikans’ everyday life, does not denote a shift to the secular. Orthodoxy is still present in Rethymniot and Thessalonikan everyday practices. ‘Easternization’ signifies that global trends have invaded the Greek spiritual landscape. As a consequence, the way people interpret and manifest their spiritual actions has become more pluralistic. Contemporary Greek religiosity is nowadays influenced by both Orthodox Christianity and eastern and ‘New Age’ spirituality. Vicky, a female Rethymniot who owns a ‘New Age’ shop in the Old Town of Rethymno, was quite explicit in her attempt to establish a connection between energy, ‘New Age’ and eastern spirituality in the Greek context. Her place was full of, as Vicky put it, “evil eye charms, spiritual rocks, crystals, Chinese and Indian artefacts, incense, oil, and a variety of other socalled ‘New Age’ objects”. She clarified that she holds a diploma in feng shui. She then went on to explain to me that every human being has an aura, which can be either positive or negative, and which aura s/he transmits to others. The energy of someone’s aura affects people and as a result they feel the symptoms of the evil eye on their body. At the end, she showed me how one can be protected by the evil eye or ward off evil spiritual forces, by pointing out the rocks that can be used for reiki healing, for feng shui, and against evil forms of energy attack.

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While I was in Thessaloniki, I discovered a shop that was exclusively selling different types of rocks and crystals, which were meant to be used for healing purposes and positive energy, and a large variety of matakia. The owner, a polite middle-aged man, was very willing to discuss both my evil eye research and his energetic rocks and crystals. He pointed to an object with an eye glass bead, a small silver Christ and a silver garlic bud. I asked Kostas what he thought about this material synthesis of an evil eye, a religious figure, and a good luck symbol. He replied that he did not mind the mix, as long as there were religious symbols evidently placed on the objects. He immediately declared: “if these protective things carried symbols from China, for instance, I would never accept them. But since they carry Greek symbols, these objects can definitely function as charms”. His rhetoric against foreign spiritual influences, however, does not go along with his actions. His shop is predominantly occupied by the presence of healing rocks and crystals that carry ‘New Age’ and eastern spiritual ideological power, and which up until recently have not been part of any kind of Greek spiritual practice. They actually belong to a recently developed ‘New Age’ cultural wave that has not been inherently Greek; but which, nevertheless, has become an integral part of the spiritually changing Greek landscape. In his comparative study about ‘New Age’ shops in Israel and in New Zealand, Zaidman (2007) observes that ‘New Age’ is enjoying a gradual development in both countries. More and more ‘New Age’ shops are opening, in both large and small towns. A wide range of ‘New Age’ goods are available in the marketplace, and people are attracted to buy them. The most popular objects, which are found in both Israel and New Zealand, are incense, crystals and oils. In each one of the two countries, however, one can additionally find goods that are associated with its national religion (Zaidman 2007: 259–260). ‘New Age’ shops, therefore, have adapted their best-selling stock in such a way that they are comfortably accommodated in the already familiar religious field, while being adopted and synthetically treated by people. ‘New Age’ Greek shops work equivalently. Yet, in the Rethymniot and Thessalonikan cases, it is a synthesis of four kinds of material objects. Christian, ‘New Age’, eastern spiritual and evil eye objects are not only brought spatially and socially together, but they very often become one item. This material union effectively depicts how religion and spirituality have entered a process of ritual and spiritual proximity and amalgamation in contemporary Greece. Klassen (2005) explains how liberal Protestants have developed their amalgamated spirituality through the use of ‘ritual proximity’. The North American liberal Protestants Klassen has studied blend Christian and Asian



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rituals together. Through this process, which Klassen calls ritual proximity, they develop a strategy where a pluralistic ritualism is applied and practised, and new lineages of religious inheritance within webs of Christian ritual are constructed (ibid: 377). The anthropologist also points out the irony of such a ritual adaptation (ibid: 378). North American Protestants had socio-culturally and religiously colonized their Asian counterparts. Now, however, they have in turn been ritually and spiritually colonized themselves. As a result of this historic underlining, some of their fellow Christians accuse them of heresy, while others perceive their spiritual pluralism as exoticism. Greece has not been involved in any serious and organized crusade to impose Orthodox Christianity on eastern cultures. The irony of reversed colonization, therefore, bears no subsistence. Yet, as in the liberal Protestants’ case, accusations are cast toward those Rethymniots and Thessalonikans who adopt, and are adapted to, a pluralized ritualism. Since, however, the majority of my informants seem to be engaged in such a synthesis, voices against a creative use of ritual proximity and mixture are heard but are not fundamentally influential. The evil eye practice is considered to belong to Orthodox Christianity and at the same time it escapes this ownership. It is a Christian act as much as it is a non-ecclesiastic practice. And when ‘New Age’ and eastern spiritual ideologies enter the evil eye practice, a ritual, performative and rhetorical proximity is generated. Klassen has observed sun salutations in a church sanctuary, the use of biblical verses for meditation needs, and the channelling of healing energy through an anointing service (Klassen 2005: 378). My informants do not practise yoga inside a church, meditate with religious books or do reiki during a baptism. In that sense, then, their ritualism is perhaps not so proximate. Nevertheless, the same people who go to church for the Sunday liturgy get attacked by the evil eye, perform ksematiasma for others, do yoga and reiki. They refer to mati as yet another everyday practice that contributes to the maintenance of their positive energy level, to the extermination of negative aura which might surround them, to their good spiritual and physical health. Or they just rhetorically engage a fashionably contemporary ‘New Age’ language, while articulating the vocabulary of easternoriented spiritual practices, and place the evil eye in a pluralistic field of energetic ritualism. North American Protestants construct ritual adaptations of a standardized religious practice. They distance themselves from their religious colonial ‘heritage’; and they go on to “pursue a mingling of rituals, religions, spirits and ‘energies’ in their twenty-first-century versions of a healing

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mission” (Klassen 2005: 380). Greek Orthodox Christians follow a similar cultural renovation; less explicitly, perhaps, yet equally vigorously. Rethymniots and Thessalonikans act creatively. They choose whether or not to follow Orthodoxy. Simultaneously, they look around for new resources that can keep them spiritually alert. The evil eye is an excellent path for that cause, since it offers a ‘religiously correct’11 opening beyond the official Church ideology. At the same time, the evil eye, as handled in contemporary Greece, stands on a ground that articulates a ritual proximity with worldly religious practices, spiritual quests, and energies. Reassessing Religiosity in Contemporary Greece One may well contend that this novel spiritual development in Greece can be considered as a ‘New Religious Movement’: an “organized attempt to mobilize human and material resources for the purpose of spreading new ideas and sensibilities of religious nature” (Beckford and Levasseur 1991: 29). New Religious Movements are intentional, collective, and historically specific (ibid.). They hold a conflictive relationship with their competitors or opponents (Beckford 1991: x). At the same time, however, they “offer to their participants various encouragements to translate their spirituality into practical, everyday action” (Beckford 1991: xiv). The recent appearance of ‘New Age’ and eastern spirituality in the so far largely Orthodox Greek spiritual landscape encourages people to practise their spirituality in everyday life. Yet, this movement of everyday Greek religiosity in the direction of non-Orthodox pathways does not appear to be intentional, forced or organized. It does not aim to replace or overthrow Orthodoxy; instead, it mixes and interacts with it. “New paths of religiosity are responses to the insecurity which has resulted from letting go of the churches; individuals have started to seek new forms of spirituality or new itineraries into the sacred” (Margry 2008: 34). The majority of my informants have questioned the position which Orthodox Christianity holds in contemporary Greece. The Rethym­ niots and Thessalonikans I managed to speak to belong to two categories. There are those who define themselves as Orthodox Christians, but who 11 I am using the term ‘religiously correct’ in the sense that the evil eye practice utilizes Orthodox performances and is considered as belonging to an Orthodox rhetoric. Even if the Church rejects ksematiasma as practised by lay healers, the evil eye practice in general is still widely connected with the ‘legitimized’ aspect of Orthodoxy.



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also remain friendly and ideologically open to other paths of establishing a communication with the spiritual and sometimes combine Christian and new spiritual practices. And there are those who have gradually disengaged themselves from Orthodoxy without totally cutting the link with it, and who usually seek to express and live their religiosity through ‘New Age’ and eastern-oriented paths of spirituality. But even those who keep their defences against following new paths of religiosity well raised have recognized that something is spiritually changing in Greece nowadays. A piece of research, which was conducted in 1998 among the Dutch and focused on a comparison between the young and the elderly, showed that the Netherlands have experienced a dramatic religious change since the sixties (Houtman and Mascini 2000: 455). In parallel to the decline of the Christian churches and the erosion of Christian religion, the popularity of ‘New Age’ practices has increased (ibid). This change is caused by increased levels of moral individualism, and has led some to argue that Dutch culture and society have become secular, whereas others explicitly recognize the Dutch ‘New Age’ phenomenon as a new type of religion (ibid). But it is not only the Dutch that appear to experience a spiritual change in the European continent. There is a general assumption that religion in Europe is facing erosion, since Christianity is losing its position as the dominant cultural tradition (Knoblauch 2003: 270); an assumption, which brings the issue of secularization into the picture, raising the question whether religion is disappearing from Europe, or is European religiosity simply changing (Stark, Hamberg and Miller 2005: 3). Despite the advocates of secularization, who have resuscitated the perception that ‘God is dead’, a phrase that Nietzsche had famously theoretically employed in order to describe the decline of people’s belief in God (see Bruce 2002: 60–74), the idea of secularization has been strongly criticized. Casanova (1994) suggests that religion in the modern world is not secularized but ‘deprivatized’, since ‘religious traditions throughout the world are refusing to accept the marginal and privatized role which theories of modernity as well as theories of secularization had reserved for them’ (ibid.: 6). In a similar manner, Berger, one of the most well-known social scientists who strongly support the theory of desecularization,12 maintains that “the assumption that we live in a secularized world is false. The world today, with some exceptions, is as furiously religious as it ever 12 Berger was one of the first scholars to support the ‘secularization’ theory (Berger 1967). Later, however, he came to overturn his initial theoretical views, and proceeded to develop his ‘desecularization’ theory instead (Berger 1999).

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was, and in some places more so than ever” (Berger 1999: 2; cf. Bhargava 1998: 1). And perhaps religious institutions might have lost their power in many societies, Berger (ibid.) continues; however, people in their everyday lives carry on being influenced by old and new religious and spiritual beliefs and practices. Luckmann (1990: 127) has also agreed that religion is well established in the modern world, and has interpreted human experience as a continuous flow of ‘little’, ‘intermediate’ and ‘great’ transcendences. In his words: “Modern social constructions of religious significance shifted away from the ‘great’ other-worldly transcendences to the ‘intermediate’ and also to the minimal transcendences of modem solipsism, whose main themes tend to bestow a sacred status upon the individual” (ibid.). Greece is experiencing a spiritual transcendence. But this is not a process of transcending Orthodoxy and moving towards a secularized state. Despite its gradual disengagement from religion, the Greek state is still intertwined with Orthodox Christianity and the politics involved in the relationship between them. The idea of Helleno-Christianity is what is left behind. The Greek sociocultural and ethnic identity is no longer synonymous with Orthodoxy, but is also influenced by other paths of spirituality. Orthodoxy, ‘New Age’, yoga, feng shui, reiki, the evil eye: they all offer different routes which Greeks can follow in order to express their spiritual curiosity. They are practised together and/or in different combinations. The Weberian notion of charisma, which “is outside the realm of everyday routine and profane sphere” (Weber 1964: 358) has changed meaning. By attending church liturgies and doing sun salutations at home, by combining reiki and ksematiasma healing treatments, by buying material charms where feng shui and Christian symbols co-reside, by explaining evil eye affliction in ‘New Age’ terms, my informants have shown that spiritual charisma is not only incorporated by a religious elite. It is not restrictedly obtained by priests or other religious specialists. A spiritual charisma is up for grabs for individuals during their everyday journey towards spiritual growth. This subjective-life spirituality, or the mind-body-spirit spirituality, as Heelas (2006: 224) explains, is a spirituality that rests on experience; it is experienced as sustaining life. One does not have to follow a dogma or a Church strictly. People are free to pursue whichever spiritual path inspires and helps them more in the context of their everyday lives. The question whether the contemporary world is going through a ‘spiritual revolution’ has been given an attempt at an answer by Heelas and Woodhead (2005) in their homonymous book. According to the ‘spiritual revolution’ claim, “traditional forms of religion, particularly Christianity,



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are giving way to holistic spirituality, sometimes still called ‘New Age’” (Heelas and Woodhead 2005: x). Heelas and Woodhead, with a team of other researchers, decided to test the claim by conducting empirical research in the market town and regional centre of Kendal, in the north west of England (ibid: 8). They concluded that there is no point in asking whether the Kendal residents are experiencing a spiritual revolution. The spiritual revolution has already taken place. The European spiritual landscape has changed (Martikainen 2007; Pollack 2008). ‘New Age’ and eastern spiritualities have made their way in and have been received with a renewed interest. Greece seems to be taking part in this spiritual revolution. At the same time, however, the fact that Greeks do not seem to be as actively connected with their prevailing religion as they used to does not mean they have abandoned Orthodoxy and have become secularized (Davie 2002: 8). Orthodox Christianity has not been replaced by subjective-life spiritualities. Greeks have the choice to follow Orthodoxy, or to reject it altogether. They can be Christian adherents and simultaneously experiment with other spiritual practices. Rethymniots and Thessalonikans have gained the freedom to creatively practise their religiosity in multiple spiritual ways. To paraphrase Davie (1994), they believe without necessarily belonging. Rethymniots and Thessalonikans have found a way to bring Orthodox spirituality and ‘New Age’ and eastern spirituality together into a new age of spiritual creativity. References Agadjanian, A. and K. Rousselet. 2005. ‘Globalization and Identity Discourse in Russian Orthodoxy’, in Roudometof, V., A. Agadjanian and J. Pankhurst (eds), Eastern Orthodoxy in a Global Age: Tradition Faces the Twenty-first Century. Walnut Creek: Altamira Press, 29–57. Alivizatos, N. 1999. ‘A New Role for the Greek Church?’, Journal of Modern Greek Studies 17: 23–40. Beckford, J. 1991. ‘Introduction’, in Beckford, James (ed.), New Religious Movements and Rapid Social Change. London: Sage, ix–xv. Beckford, J. and M. Levasseur. 1991. ‘New Religious Movements in Western Europe’, in Beckford, James (ed.), New Religious Movements and Rapid Social Change. London: Sage, 29–54. Berger, P. 1967. The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. Garden City, New York: Doubleday. Berger, P. 1999. ‘The Desecularization of the World: a Global Overview’, in Berger, P. (ed.), The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics. Washington D.C.: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1–18. Berger, P. 2007. ‘Pluralism, Protestantization, and the Voluntary Principle’, in Banchoff, T. (ed.), Democracy and the New Religious Pluralism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 19–29. Bhargava, Rajeev. 1998. ‘Introduction, in Bhargava, R. (ed.), Secularism and Its Critics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1–28.

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Bourdieu, P. 1984. Distinction: a Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Brown, S. 1996. Principles of Feng Shui. London: Thorsons. Brown, F.M. 1997. The Channeling Zone: American Spirituality in an Anxious Age. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press. Bruce, S. 2002. God is Dead: Secularization in the West. Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers. Casanova, J. 1994. Public Religions in the Modern World. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Davie, G. 1994. Religion in Britain Since 1945: Believing Without Belonging. Oxford: Blackwell. ——. 2002. Europe-The Exceptional Case: Parameters of Faith in the Modern World. Sarum Theological Lecture. London: Darton, Longman and Todd. Garrett, C. 2001. ‘Transcendental Meditation, Reiki and Yoga: Suffering, Ritual and SelfTransformation’, Journal of Contemporary Religion 16 (3): 329–342. Heelas, P. 2006. ‘The Infirmity Debate: On the Viability of New Age Spiritualities of Life’, Journal of Contemporary Religion 21 (2): 223–240. Heelas, P. and L. Woodhead. 2005. The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion is Giving Way to Spirituality. Oxford: Blackwell. Houtman, D. and P. Mascini. 2000. ‘Why Do Churches Become Empty, While New Age Grows? Secularization and Religious Change in the Netherlands’, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 41 (3): 455–473. Klassen, P. 2005. ‘Ritual Appropriation and Appropriate Ritual: Christian Healing and Adaptations of Asian Religions’, History and Anthropology 16 (3): 377–391. Knoblauch, H. 2003. ‘Europe and Invisible Religion’, Social Compass 50 (3): 267–274. Luckmann, T. 1990. ‘Shrinking Transcendence, Expanding Religion?’, Sociological Analysis 51 (2): 127–138. Makrides, V. 1998. ‘Byzantium in Contemporary Greece: the Neo-Orthodox Current of Ideas’, in D. Ricks and P. Magdalino (eds.), Byzantium and the Modern Greek Identity. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 141–153. Margry, P.J. 2008. ‘Secular Pilgrimage: A Contradiction in Terms?, in Margry, P. J. (ed.), Shrines and Pilgrimage in the Modern World: New Itineraries Into the Sacred. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 13–46. Martikainen, T. 2007. ‘Changes in the Religious Landscape: European Trends at the Dawn of the Twenty-first Century’, Swedish Missiological Themes 95 (4): 365–385. Molokotos-Liederman, L. 2004. ‘Sacred Words, Profane Music? The Free Monks as a Musical Phenomenon in Contemporary Greek Orthodoxy’, Sociology of Religion 65 (4): 403–416. Pollack, D. 2008. ‘Religious Change in Europe: Theoretical Considerations and Empirical Findings’, Social Compass 55 (2): 168–186. Quest, P. 1999. An Introduction to Reiki: A Step-by-Step Guide to Reiki Practice. London: Piatkus. Roudometof, V. 2005. ‘Orthodoxy as Public Religion in Post-1989 Greece’, in Roudometof, V., A. Agadjanian and J. Pankhurst (eds), Eastern Orthodoxy in a Global Age: Tradition Faces the Twenty-first Century. Walnut Creek: Altamira Press, 84–108. Stark, R., E. Hamberg and A.S. Miller. 2005. ‘Exploring Spirituality and Unchurched Religions in America, Sweden, and Japan’, Journal of Contemporary Religion 20 (1): 2–23. Stavrakakis, Y. 2003. ‘Politics and Religion: On the “Politicization” of Greek Church Discourse’, Journal of Modern Greek Studies 21: 153–181. Strauss, S. 2005. Positioning Yoga: Balancing Acts Across Cultures. Oxford: Berg. Weber, M. 1964. The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. London: Collier Macmillan Publishers. Zaidman, N. 2007. ‘New Age Products in Local and Global Contexts: a Comparison between Israel and New Zealand’, Culture and Religion 8 (3): 255–270.

RELIGIOUS BELONGING AND NEW WAYS OF BEING “ITALIAN” IN THE SELF-PERCEPTION OF SECOND-GENERATION IMMIGRANTS IN ITALY Barbara Bertolani* and Fabio Perocco** The Eclipse of Multiculturalism and the Return to Assimilationism “Italian Style” Italy – traditionally a nation of emigration – over the past twenty years has become a nation of immigration. There were 3,432,651 documented nonnationals residing in Italy on 1-1-2008 coming from more than 180 countries (Caritas-Migrantes, 2008),1 corresponding to 5.8% of the total population of 60 million. Half come from elsewhere in Europe and nearly a quarter from Africa; Romanians, Albanians, Moroccans, Chinese and Ukrainians are the largest groups; the Indians numbered 77,432, about 40% of whom were women. The young people (under 18) numbered about 760,000, including some 570,000 schoolchildren (about 200,000 of them born in Italy). This phenomenon has led to a significant increase in cultural and religious plurality,2 produced in particular by the great heterogeneity of national origins. As far as religion is concerned, it is estimated that, in 2008, 775,626 of the immigrants were Catholics, 1,129,630 Orthodox, 138,825 Protestants, 52,181 other Christians, 1,253,704 Muslims, 7,165 Jews, 90,931 Hindus, 55,861 Buddhists, 44,674 animists, with 435,013 belonging to other religions, including Sikhism (about 25,000).3 The peremptory process of stabilization, the sudden transition from individual to family immigration, and the acceleration of the phases of the migration cycle have produced a rapid diversification of the social and cultural demands and a greater visibility of the social practices connected with diet, dress, and religious rites. As a result, Italy – a country   * Sections 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. ** Section 1.    1 Source: Istituto Italiano di Statistica. According to the équipe of the Caritas Dossier Statistico the number of documented immigrants are, rather, between 3.8 and 4 million.   2 I speak of “increase in cultural and religious plurality” since the idea of a monocultural and monoreligious Italy is theoretically and historically untenable.   3 The criterion for the estimate is based on the religious distribution in the countries of origin, extrapolated from government data.

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accustomed to the myth of racial uniformity and religious homogeneity – has been caught up in an epochal transformation. How has Italy reacted to this situation, which in many respects is ‘new’? In the course of the 1990s a significant part of the country regarded the religious traditions of the immigrant populations with a sort of ‘hostile indifference’, while a minority regarded them with a curiosity (sometimes tinged with exoticism), sympathy, or genuine interest that gave rise to many – small, but significant – experiences of exchange, often involving organized or informal groups connected with secular or Catholic associations. In the late 1990s, as the immigrants became more deeply rooted in society, the question of their religious identity came to the fore in public discourse and was presented as a problematic aspect. The fact that the most pressing problem was judged to be Islam is emblematic of the position Italy took in reference to the multi-religiousness produced by immigration, especially with respect to the question of defining the characteristics of the public space. A number of subjects have sought to present this broad and deep Islamic presence as unnatural and threatening. The mass media, specialized in the production of negative discourses on immigrants through the distorted use of the concept of ‘otherness’, singled out the Muslim immigrants as the maximum exponents of such ‘otherness’ and represented them as carriers of a radical difference to be kept at a distance. The Northern League has shown its hostility and annoyance in an increasingly aggressive manner:4 indeed, it has made the “Islamic invasion” one of the cornerstones of its ideological system, focusing its (national and local) political action on mobilization against the public presence of Islam in the name of the defence of northern Italian, Catholic, and national identity. It has presented itself as the standard bearer of the local communities whose local traditions and social body are ‘threatened’, but also as the defender of a modernity endangered by “Islamic obscurantism”. Then, a number of intellectuals have made the relationship between Italian society and Muslim immigrants into a question of cultural integration, insisting that the Islamic religion constitutes an insuperable obstacle to social inclusion (Sartori 2000; Fallaci 2001). Weaving a web of theses and concepts, they present the Muslims as subjects characterized by a natural drive to constitute societies 4 From 2000 to the present there have been numerous anti-mosque and anti-Ramadan demonstrations and torchlight processions, in which sites to be used for Islamic places of worship have been defiled with pig droppings or by having pigs walk through them.



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in the form of hostile enclaves, ethically and juridically based on the community rather than the individual, and therefore denounce the organic incompatibility between such subjects and the democratic principles of Italy. Finally, a part of the Catholic Church, confronted for the first time on its own turf with a universal historical religion represented by a considerable number of workers of foreign origin, has presented this presence as a problem, especially as far as inter-religious relations and Catholic identity are concerned. With these premises, over the past decade a migration policy has been developed – following guidelines dictated by the Northern League – composed of various dimensions, the first and foremost of which is a policy of exclusion and of segregation of the immigrants, designed to keep them from taking social roots or rising above subordinate status. A further dimension consists in a policy of ethnicization without rec­ ognition of the religious identity and cultural rights of the “minorities”. Policies, practices and public discourses define the immigrants as “carriers” of difference – especially ethnic difference – but in a negative and inferiorizing sense. The institutions and a majority of the population see many of the immigrants (especially the Arabs and the Indians) as subjects totally immersed in the religious dimension, obscuring their internal pluralism and assigning roles and behaviours the immigrants have to bear in mind if they are to be considered “good immigrants”. This gaze drives the immigrants to close themselves into their own communities, their own ‘ethnic’ confines, and at times is interiorized; nevertheless, this falling back upon tradition and community of origin must come about invisibly and on the sly, since in the public sphere no religious identity other than the Catholic is recognized and tolerated. The manifestation of ‘different’ religious traits is judged to be a sign of ‘failed’ integration, and above all an offence to the Catholic character of the nation and a lack of respect for the secularity of the state. Today, cultural and religious difference is more and more often the object of – also physical – persecution by political parties, groups and individual citizens, or of institutional discrimination (in schools, in health services, in the sphere of private life: dress, diet, religious belief). Many young people of foreign origin, born or in any case raised in Italy, criticize the fact that they have to crouch behind their ethnic origins and eternally be considered foreigners and different; they refuse to accept the fact that belonging to a religion different from Catholicism be a source of discrimination and stigmatization. Then, a third dimension: an assimilationist policy without assimi­ lation,  prevalently political and propagandistic, that makes provision for

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assimilation to the dominant values and adaptation to the conditions of exploitation that are imposed, in exchange for just a touch of social inclusion – but without a trace of social, political and juridical equalization. This neo-assimilationist policy, which assimilates that small part of immigrants held to be ‘reliable’, is intrinsic to the strong institutional racism that has surged in the past few years. It ‘speaks’ directly to the mass of the immigrant populations and contains a very clear diktat: don’t make requests of any kind, know your place, carry on with your self-spoliation – with the enticement of integration. The attempts in recent years to reduce or eliminate culturally plural spaces and multi-religious situations5 are part of a policy of social and cultural apartheid, and represent for Italy the fading of a project for a pluralistic society, the eclipse of multiculturalism; they mark the end of the debate on a multicultural society and of the experiments with intercultural policies. In recent years, even though nothing systematically intercultural was effectively realized, still, the public debate, the national policies regarding schools, health and social services, and the local social policies had, at least, entertained such a possibility, and a few positive things had been done. But today this possibility is no more. In concluding the European elections of 2009, Silvio Berlusconi declared: “We are not for a multiethnic Italy”. This process of banishing whatever is considered extraneous to Italian culture and identity has come about through the combined action of iden­ tity policies and security policies. The former, an integral part of the latter, brought public discourse back to the restoration of the primacy of Italianity. The immigrant populations are called upon to converge and to assimilate to ‘Italian’ (national, linguistic, cultural) identity, on pain of criminalization and isolation, since their own cultural and religious traditions are considered “inferior” to and “incompatible” with Italic civilization. Indeed, these ideas found their – bipartisan – application in the national legislation: in 2007 the Prodi government issued the “Charter of Values and of Citizenship”, while in 2009 the Berlusconi government passed the law on security (which for newly-arriving immigrants makes provision for the compulsory signing of an “integration agreement” in order to obtain a residence permit).6 5 The Tuscan city of Lucca went so far as to outlaw ‘ethnic’ restaurants, in order to safeguard Italian (local) cuisine; the Lombardy region passed an anti-kebab law in April, 2009. 6 The Security Decree provides for the introduction of a point-system residence permit, and of an integration agreement between the state and the foreigner “articulated by credits, with the [immigrant’s] commitment to subscribe to specific integration objectives, to be attained in the period of validity of the residence permit”, on pain of revocation of the



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The Charter of Values is a reflection of the fading of the temperate multiculturalism that had characterized the policies of some European countries in recent years, and of the segmented and nonparticipatory assimilationism recently exhibited in Europe. It fits within the tangle of identity policies adopted by the governments of various European countries, intrinsically designed to devalue immigrants symbolically and inferiorize them materially. And it constitutes the synthesis of the current Italian position with regard to the cultures and the religions of its immigrants – and of the Muslims in particular. It is a symbol, a warning, for all the immigrants, telling them: “Know your place! You are in someone else’s home, our home, and, here, we are in charge”. The severe clampdown on the conditions of immigrants in recent years has been sustained by an intensification of institutional racism and by a policy of assimilation “Italian style”, risen to national policy tout court. This has meant not only abandoning the debates on recognition and shrinking the spaces of multi-religiousness, but also the denial of the very presence of immigrants. The incessant anti-immigrant (not anti-immigration) campaign has produced, at times, the immigrants’ self-compression of their social and cultural demands, or the reduction of the occasions for exchange and the weakening of the relations between immigrant associations and local institutions. With respect to this picture, in which the denigration of religious difference is central, we can observe two situations that do show some disconti­ nuities. One situation regards the Senegalese; and the other, the Sikhs. The Senegalese immigrants – numbering about 62,000, Muslims most of whom belong to the Muridiyya confraternity – enjoy a good public image, as good workers. The Sikhs in Italy (Denti et alii, 2005) most of whom are employed on the farms of lower Lombardy and Emilia as milkers and farm hands, have a public image that is generally positive. Better known by the local media of the provinces in which they live (Cremona, Brescia, Reggio Emilia, Parma, Mantua, Vicenza) than by the national media, they are represented as good workers and peaceful persons, even if this image is greatly stereotyped by its folkloric aspects (the inoffensive spirituality of the Indians, their natural vocation for farming and husbandry, their dress) and focused on the pervasiveness of the religious element. In general the orientation of the local populations and of the institutions is positive, even if it permit and expulsion. The text provides for a reduction of points in case of violation of the laws, a lack of knowledge of the Italian language, and “for not having attained a good level of integration”.

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is characterized by a paternalistic spirit – a spirit of superiority – toward a population judged to be at an inferior stage of social evolution. The religion of these immigrants is generally not stigmatized, and there have been acts of helpfulness and public recognition on the part of the central and local authorities: the opening of gurdwaras (Sikh temples) usually do not give rise to the polemics and demonstrations that are customary on the occasion of the opening of Islamic prayer rooms; the gurdwara in Novellara (in the province of Reggio Emilia) was inaugurated on October 1st, 2000, in the presence of Romano Prodi, president of the European Commission; in 2009 the law court of Vicenza (an area that hosts a large Indian population employed in the tanning of hides) passed a sentence stating that the dagger of the Sikhs is not to be considered a “cutting and thrusting weapon”; at present there are ongoing negotiations with the Italian state to enter into an agreement for the juridical recognition of Sikhism;7 religious festivals such as the “Nagar Kirtan” and the “Vaisakhi” are celebrated with the benevolent consent of the authorities, the political parties, and the local populations. Can we consider the Sikhs an ‘exception’? And if so, why? If the research studies have now explained the situation regarding the Senegalese (whose basic strategy has consisted in rendering Islam invisible while highlighting their Senegality, their Africanity, or their belonging to a black, ‘magical’ Islam of the confraternities), for the Sikhs it is too soon to answer these questions, since an accumulation of specific studies is still lacking; at the moment we are in the realm of hypotheses. At a more general level it seems there has been a ‘selective stigmatization’ on the part of the mass media and the political class, which have railed against the more numerous populations, with greater social weight (Romanians,8 Chinese, Moroccans, Albanians) and better established in the country’s major economic sectors, to arrest their progressive social advancement. The Sikhs – just 0.7% of the immigrant population in Italy – do not represent a first-class target. At an intermediate level it appears that local public opinion views the Sikhs’ employment status as positive, since the work they do is clearly 7 In the absence of a legal Agreement, and since in Italy there is no law on religious freedom, Italian regulations state that, regarding the State’s relations with the Sikhs, one is to apply the law on “Admitted Cults” of 24-6-1929, no. 1159, and the relative regulation of implementation of 28-2-1930, no. 289, to which the Constitutional Court has made some minor changes with individual sentences over the years. 8 A recent study estimates that on 1-1-2008 there were about one million Romanians in Italy (Caritas, 2008).



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subordinate and segregated. ‘Confined’ in the performance of precise and low-cost production functions in the dairy sector (in particular, the production of Parmesan cheese) or in some restricted sections of manufacturing (tanning, chair-making), their work is in niche markets, not in the strategic economic sectors (industry, construction, hotels and tourism, services for firms) – work that is viewed positively precisely because it is subordinate? Even the Northern League takes a positive view of these immigrants – whom it sees as peasants. At a micro level we note that, in a game of mirrors with the local context, the Sikhs tend to enhance the more formal aspects of their religious identity and present themselves in public in a manner that fulfils the expectations of exotic spirituality and strange customs expressed by local society. Contrary to the Senegalese, they have played the card of rendering their religious identity visible. But the question of exactly what identity is to be shown in public is still open. Despite the unitary representation given by majority society and by a part of the Sikhs themselves, their identity is subject to manipulations, to tensions, even by the younger generation. To begin to answer these questions it will be necessary to analyze the sense of belonging to Sikhism and the social significance that such belonging assumes in the local contexts – which are by no means the same throughout the Italy of a thousand towns, with its diversity of political cultures. In particular, it is a question of understanding whether the Sikhs create exclusive communities, how they do so, whether this gives rise to conflicts with the local society, and how much this is due to the interiorization of the gaze of a majority society that generally stigmatizes the creation of foreign communities, seeing them as examples of non-integration. Unless, perhaps, the community is a subordinate one, constituted by a religious minority? In relation to the aspects and problems presented in this first section (in particular the positions taken by Italian society with regard to immigration and multi-religiosity), the question of the second generations – also in their religious dimension – appears to be crucial. As we shall see in the following sections, analysis of the religion of second-generation immigrants is not only an important indicator of the forms of social inclusion of this ‘new’ presence, but also a test of pluralism in Italy. The Religiousness of Second-generation Immigrants: Is it a Crucial Matter? The question of second-generation immigrants and of their cultural and religious identity is often presented in the public debate as crucial.

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To immigrants, the birth and the socialization of a new generation force them to come to terms with their status as “minorities who have settled abroad”. Moreover, it leads them to question themselves on the transmission of their cultural and religious heritage (Bastenier and Dassetto 1990). To the Italian society, instead, it seems that the redefinition of social integration depends above all on this matter. Therefore, the loyalty of young people of foreign origin and their socio-economic integration become a test-bed of great symbolic resonance (Ambrosini and Molina 2004). The international scientific debate on these subjects tends to be divided between two opposite interpretative approaches: that of religious assimilation and that of reactive religiousness. Briefly (and in spite of some internal variations), supporters of the first approach affirm a gradual loss of importance of religiousness with the increasing time of stay in the immigration country and with progressive socio-economic integration (Alba and Nee 1997). On the contrary, supporters of the second approach assume that the immigrants’ children are systematically and structurally disadvantaged. For them, the exposure to values and success patterns of the West does not lead to real chances of success. Therefore, the radicalization of religious choices and behavior by second-generation immigrants becomes the answer to discriminating or xenophobic attitudes of Western societies (Vertovec and Rogers 1998). This theory is based on the concept of “reactive ethnicity”, as a way of dealing with the adversity of the host societies, entailing the development of defensive and solidarity identities to face this adversity (Portes and Rumbaut 2001: 284). These approaches certainly do not exhaust the debate on the subject.9 However, they are sufficient to highlight a common trait in a large part of the literature: the tendency to superpose – till they coincide – two identity dimensions, the ethnic and the religious ones. Instead we think these should be analytically distinguished. The link between religion and ethnicity is certainly very narrow, due to the way in which the ethnic identity of a human group is historically and socially built. Religion often performs the task of rendering the ethnic principle holy, of giving a transcendent foundation to the cultural identity of people (Pace 2007, 2008). However, in as far as religions claim to be universal patterns of salvation, they tend to exceed the ethnic specificity of the different human groups. This does not mean that the link between ethos and ethnos does not remain ambivalent 9 For instance, Portes and Rumbaut (2001) propose an analytical ‘intermediate’ theory, which is based on the idea of processes of segmented assimilation, as a result of selective acculturation.



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and that the fact of referring to a transcendent truth cannot be exploited by politics, thereby strengthening ethnic conflicts. In the case at issue, analytical superposition and fusion of ethnicity and religion leads to a reduction of the latter to particularism and to a neglect of its ‘universal aim’. If the matter of religious belonging of secondgeneration immigrants is faced in this way, one ends up supposing an incompatibility of adherence: it is not possible to be a young Sikh (or Muslim) and a young Italian, simultaneously. That is, we risk to ‘ethnicize’ what we want to see as being different from us, with the purpose of redefining our irreducible ‘otherness’. In the Italian public debate, this is what normally happens. In the scientific debate, instead, we think that it is important to distinguish the two dimensions, as far as possible. Therefore, putting aside the assimilation vs reaction pattern of analysis, in the following text we propose a different interpretation. But how important is religion really to second-generation immigrants? How does their religious membership (if any) reveal itself? What meaning does it have in the complex dynamics of identity adjustment? We will try to give a few first answers to these questions, starting from the case study of second-generation Punjabi-Sikhs. Second-generation Punjabi-Sikhs: Research Presentation From September 2008 to July 2009, we led a qualitative, empirical research on Punjabi Sikh boys and girls.10 An unequivocal definition of what is meant by ‘second-generation immigrants’ is not to be found in the literature. Definitions vary from the restrictive one – according to which ‘second-generation’ refers only to those children born in the host country – to more inclusive others (Rumbaut 2004). I chose to include all children born in Italy or who arrived there before the age of eighteen. I interviewed 14 to 24 year-old boys and girls, who had come to Italy at least one year earlier and who defined themselves as ‘Sikhs’. Despite this common definition, the group revealed itself to be very heterogeneous regarding the involvement and the interest shown toward Sikhism and with regard to the sense attributed to religious membership. 10 The work was based on 40 in-depth interviews. The young people resided in the districts of Reggio Emilia and Mantova, in North Italy. A ‘snow-ball’ sampling was used, the interviews being performed in the Sikh temple (gurdwara) of the city of Novellara (14), at pupils’ homes (19) and in their habitual meeting places: the football ground (5), the public library (1), the pub (1). In the text, pseudonyms are used to protect the interviewees’ privacy. The first results of this research were published in Bertolani (2009).

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The interviews investigated above all the questions of membership, tra­ dition and Punjabi culture, considered important issues to study Sikh identity (Helweg 1999). About membership, the attempt was made to understand which were the criteria of belonging to the Sikh group. Young people were asked what were, according to them, the most important prescriptions and prohibitions that they had to respect in order to define themselves as ‘Sikh’, whether they respected them and if they felt themselves to be ‘true Sikh’ or not. Also, asked were the personal motivations of engagement in the ‘Khalsa’ (or ‘community of the pure ones’) through the initiation ritual of amrit (that is, drinking holy water from a common recipient).11 Concerning tradition, the analysis concentrated on the outward symbols of Sikhs (the so-called ‘5Ks’)12 and whether young people understood these above all as ‘ethnic markers’ or as religious symbols. Their importance in the process of defining their personal identity was investigated. Finally, the theme of Punjabi culture was explored, considering it as a general system of values and behavioral patterns, sometimes in open contradiction to the religious dictates. In particular, the young people were asked to express themselves on two linked matters: the caste system and the habit by which marriages are arranged by the families, following the traditional rules of caste endogamy and lineage exogamy. These subjects were selected because they are in contradiction to the principles of Sikhism13 (but still widespread in the social practice of first generation immigrants) and because they potentially strengthen the intergenerational conflict (Ballard 1982). Analyzing the interviews, two main ways of understanding and experiencing religious belonging were identified. These ways point in opposite directions and, from an analytical point of view, they represent the two poles of a continuum. At the first pole, the ethnicization of the religious message is to be found, that is the tendency by the subject to assemble different issues like social rules, collective practice of the cult, membership in a culturally definite group and religious teachings. The second pole is instead 11 To simplify, we could compare this rite to a sort of ‘baptism’ since it marks the subject’s entry into the group of the observant Sikhs. For an introduction to Sikhism, see McLeod (1997). 12 The so-called ‘5Ks’ are distinctive symbols of Sikhs: Kes (hair, beard and bodyhair which are never cut: symbolizes the respect for the body as it was created by God), Kirpan (a bent dagger which represents the vocation of Sikhs to fight against every type of injustice); Kara (an iron bracelet which reminds Sikhs to act with justice); Kanga (a wooden comb which symbolizes order, care and cleanliness at the physical and the spiritual level) and Kachera (long underpants up to the knees, which symbolizes chastity and matrimonial fidelity). See McLeod (1997). 13 Sikhism preaches equality in front of God and imposes the overcoming of the hierarchical social division into castes, typical of the Hindu society. See McLeod (1996).



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that of ethicization. It symbolizes the process of individualization of religious behavior. This means that the tight link between practices, rules and religious message is relinquished and that the emphasis is placed on the universal message of Sikhism and on the idea of religious belonging as a ‘private matter’ (Marchisio 2005). However these opposite tendencies have to be placed in context. If we want to understand the complexity of the process of identity definition by members of the second generation, it is necessary to remember that young people always reinterpret their religiousness referring to something or someone else. In this case, it is their community of origin and the Italian society (the stigmatizing dynamics of which have been described above). Therefore, the emphasis on ethnos or on ethos has to be combined with two other analytical dimensions: that is the symbolic spaces of the out and of the in. As a convention, the relationship that develops between Sikh youths and their community of origin is placed in the internal space, while the one that occurs together with the Italian society is placed in the outside space. Figure 1 is an interpretive scheme that shows the analytical dimensions identified. It summarizes the main ways in which religious membership is defined. A set of possible ways is represented, according to the social context of reference. A young Sikh can, for instance, conceive his membership above all as “being a member of a cultural and ethnic community”, that of the Punjabi-Sikhs. This interpretation guides his actions towards his group of origin as well as towards Italians: in this case, the sense attributed to religious membership is visually represented in the figure by ‘AD’. The opposite way, that of the complete ethicization, is instead represented

‘IN’ A

C

ETHNICIZATION

ETHICIZATION

D

‘OUT’

B

Figure 1. Ethnicization – Ethicization.

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by ‘BC’. It is, however, possible to adopt ‘mixed’ strategies; for instance proclaiming one’s ethnic origin when relating to Italians (by wearing certain symbols interpreted as ‘ethnic markers’) while insisting on one’s personal way of belonging to religion when relating to other Sikhs, independently from those same symbols (CD). Alternatively, a young Sikh can ethnicize his religious behavior while acting within the community (by giving a ‘cultural’ interpretation to rituals and cult practices or by approving rules of social behavior which are bound to tradition), while insisting on the universality of Sikhism when relating to the Italian society (AB). Let us consider some examples. Ethnicisation of Religious Identity About two thirds of the people in the sample considered religious membership to be a very important aspect of their identity. In general, a prevailing tendency towards ethnicisation could be identified, both in relation to the group of origin and to Italian society. A first example concerns the external symbols, referring to tradition and membership: the ‘5Ks’ and the turban. Most youths consider the ‘5Ks’ as indicators of Sikh identity and as compulsory for ‘baptized’ Khalsa-fellows. However, many have an approximate knowledge of the religious meaning of these symbols: wearing them is above all a sign of membership to the group. In particular, kara and kes perform the function of ‘ethnic markers’, distinguishing between ‘we’ and ‘they’, the inside and the outside of the Punjabi-Sikh group. According to me [the ‘5Ks’] are five symbols of Sikhism. Maybe… if you have these five things … even if you put on only Kara, the other person can recognize you as Sikh… What they really mean, I don’t know (14 year old girl, amrit­ dhari, in Italy for 13 years).

Also, the investigation of behavior, which, according to the youths, identifies and distinguishes a ‘good Sikh’ from someone who is not, reserves some surprises. In fact the young people generally have an idea of Sikhism which is mainly bound to social practice and religious culture. For instance, a large fraction of amritdhari Sikhs in my sample adopt a conception of religious membership that is above all based on the respect of many rules and prescriptions, at times very rigid. Adjustments mostly concern the time of morning prayers; whereas the ban on certain foods and drinks and abstention from smoking are regarded with the greatest rigor. Not to eat meat, eggs and fish is given great importance, even if there is no point in the holy text of Sikhs (Guru Granth Sahib) where this prohibition is made clearly explicit.



religious belonging and new ways of being “italian”105 [A Sikh] can’t touch meat and can’t drink wine, nor alcoholic drinks or cigarettes; even he cannot eat eggs. He must not at all go near a drunken person. If he goes near a person who smokes or is drunk, he must first of all go home and wash himself. [A Sikh must] take a shower every day in the morning, then must pray mandatorily. Women must cover their heads, also the men with the turban. [Sikhs] must not tell lies, always tell the truth, because that also brings luck. [When preachers come in gurdwara], they tell you other new rules I’ve never heard, then you hear and learn more from them. For instance, I didn’t know that when a person smokes, it is forbidden to stand nearby him. And when you come home, if you don’t want to take a shower, at least you must wash your face and feet before eating. This I learned in church [gurd­ wara] (17 year old girl, amritdhari, in Italy for 10 years). It’s very difficult to be a Sikh; perhaps I’m not. First of all I must be nit nem. It means ‘someone who prays five times a day’, three in the morning and two in the evening. Then, I must not look at a man other than my husband. I must not eat eggs, meat. I must not cut my hair, neither on my body. [I must wear the ‘5Ks’]. I must give a tenth of my salary to the poor. I must not tittle-tattle. I was eating [meat] before, yes. I was eating cheese. A person [told me]: “look, there is cheese-rennet in [the cheese]”. He knew because he was working in a dairy. He explained this to me. I had a lot of cheese in the fridge; we threw it away (24 year old girl, amritdhari, in Italy for 14 years).

Sometimes, some social rules are referred back to religion (those regarding, for instance, female modesty, relations among the sexes, etc.), even if nobody knows where they are written in the Guru Granth Sahib, or who was the religious master (guru) that dictated them. Yes, because among us, if a person is a ‘baptized’ Sikh, it’s forbidden to put on trousers. However some say, “well, the important thing is to have the body covered”. I say “No, with trousers you can see the legs anyway”… Instead, with [Punjabi] clothes, nothing can be seen. [This] was told me by my brother… Then, as for make-up, my dad told me: “among us it’s forbidden to remove our hair. Also make-up isn’t right”. Some baptized [women] put on make-up anyway because they say, “Goodness knows, we must live our lives, who cares?” Then I say, “why are you baptized?” (17 year old girl, amritdhari, in Italy for 10 years).

In general, the importance attached to the adoption of rules of living differentiates the Punjabi-Sikh group into those who generally respect such rules and those who do not, and even within the first group, into Sikhs who do it in a very ‘complete’ manner (adhering to the ‘Khalsa’), and others who do not (for instance kesdhari Sikhs who wear a few symbols without being ‘baptized’). Initiation to the ‘Khalsa’ may have some very precise social consequences, since it may cause deep divisions and lead to a hierarchical structure within the Sikh community. Indeed, the fact of adhering to the

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‘Khalsa’ seems to separate those who believe in putting the word of God into practice to the end from all the others, as if there were different “degrees of Sikhness”, in relation to which one can define oneself from the rest (Nesbitt 1991). The result is a sort of tension concerning the definition of who is a ‘true’ Sikh and who is not. ‘Baptism’ and the ‘5Ks’ construct symbolic borders between the two groups. A true Sikh is a person who is ‘baptized’, who prays God. … I am Sikh but am not baptized, so I don’t consider myself as a ‘complete’ Sikh, that is now I am ‘half’ Sikh… I don’t know yet [whether I’ll want to go ahead or not] (14 year old boy, kesdhari, in Italy for 9 years). I’m a Sikh if I’m ‘baptized’. If [a person] isn’t baptized she isn’t of any religion. However, if she believes, she can say “I believe in Sikhism” but not that “I am a Sikh”. People say “Ha! I am a Sikh!” and in the end they’re drunk. [Kesdhari] are [also believers], because they wear the ‘5Ks’. They know that someday they’ll be baptized (17 year old girl, amritdhari, in Italy for 10 years). [‘Non-baptized’ people] can also believe in the Guru Granth Sahib, the matter isn’t that they don’t believe… However they don’t respect what our guru said… Guru Gobind Singh says not to cut their beard nor hair, right?… They believe in God but, however, don’t hear completely his words… (23 year old boy, amritdhari, in Italy for 9 years).

This is not simple speculation but a redefinition process of religious identity in an ethnic sense, which has consequences inside, as well as outside the group. Inside the community, what has been defined as “locally based sikhism” (Leonard 1999) fosters the strengthening of a certain self-representation: A Sikh is chiefly a “saint soldier”, that is a follower who fights for the preservation and the diffusion of his religious identity, standing out from those who adopt more distant or moderate behavior. Therefore, religious membership tends to combine itself with militancy (however, only inside the group) and the religious arena can become a place where acquisition of status is possible, a site where one can look for prestige and visibility (Pace 2007) or obtain someone else’s respect. For instance, the dog: if it has a collar around the neck, one understands that there is a master. Without collar, nobody looks after it. Perhaps nobody will feed it either. With a collar, it’s also respected by the people around it. Then, I must be ‘baptized’, then at least I have my ‘father’, when I die I’ve my dad who will protect me (24 year old girl, amritdhari, in Italy for 14 years).

Towards the Italian society, instead, the idea of the saint soldier combines itself with the tradition for martyrdom. In this case, the Sikh is one who,



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just to defend his religion, accepts discriminations and humiliations inferred by Italians, considering them a very little thing in comparison to all the sacrifices of his Masters. He defines a positive (ethnic) identity by reacting to someone else’s contempt (Portes and Rumbaut 2001). Anyway this result, as will be explained later, must not be taken for granted. [Italians] were calling us “Talibans, talibans!” I was getting angry, but now I don’t get angry anymore (23 year old boy, amritdhari, in Italy for 7 years). When I was in India, I didn’t know much about Sikhism, about what our gurus had done for us. When I came here… well, they explain to you… I have thought… that if they’ve done all this for us, we can do something as well… Guru Gobind Singh had four children. They died, for what? For the religion … for our religion, for Sikhs! [Muslims said] “become Muslim!”… but they [kept the religion] for whom? For us! Because we are of a different religion! … they always fought… for their religion! And then, if they did all these things for us, we also must do something (23 year old boy, amritdhari, in Italy for 9 years).

For some Sikh boys and girls, ethnicization of religious belonging matches the feeling of ‘being Indian’. In spite of having acquired linguistic competence or good economic integration in Italy, some young people dream of going back to India, do not feel at ease with Italians and prevalently associate with their national mates. Being Sikhs means being ‘Punjabi-Indian’; the Sikh identity and the Italian one seem to be incompatible. [I attended Italian schools, I’ve Italian friends, I know the language, I work and I’ve been here for a long time, but] I feel [more] Indian. Even if I live here since many years, I prefer always to remain Indian. [My Indian identity] is bound to my religion. Mostly to religion, and then to the house in India (22 year old girl, amritdhari, in Italy for 14 years).

This way of considering religious identity can lead to cultural and relational encapsulation. However, it is not always the case. Sometimes it can generate the opposite result, encouraging young people to camouflage themselves in the Italian society. That is probably what happens to those youths who do not consider religion as an important matter for their personal identity. This question should be considered more deeply on another occasion. Anyway, even those boys and girls who do not attach great importance to religion (about one third of the sample), explain their behavior in different manners and give different meanings to it. Some of them consider religion as being the main cause of discriminations by Italians and therefore do not want to keep it. Some others plan a sort of ‘short-term’ indifference, with the idea of getting back to Sikhism in the future, during another phase of life.

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barbara bertolani and fabio perocco I thought I should wait [before becoming ‘baptized’] till I will be let’s say 40 years old. [Because] there are so many things I should than respect. As I am young, I wouldn’t respect them now. It’s difficult. Like, for example, keeping my hair uncut (laughs). Also keeping my head covered, not retouching my eyebrows. Then, using different clothes. For instance, I don’t know whether shorts can be worn or not (20 year old girl, in Italy for 7 years).

Finally, the ethnicization process acted out by some Punjabi-Sikhs often combines with a set of dynamics already in action in Italian society. For instance, stereotyped ideas (that all Sikhs wear a beard and a turban and are completely plunged into a religious dimension of life) and the perception of Sikh identity as homogeneous are strengthened. The consequence could be, for instance, that the local authorities try to involve in the process of governance those community leaders whom they consider to be representative, because they fit Italian stereotypes. Ethicisation of Belief and Behaviours Some boys and girls emphasize the universal contents of Sikhism. The ethi­ cization of religious belonging leads to revalue the sense rather than sign of identity symbols. Sikhism is above all understood as a moral guide and as a ‘values-tank’ and much less as a set of rules of living and of social practice or cult; the stress is therefore placed on the mystical and private dimensions of faith. I think that God is unique, there aren’t any differences. Therefore, for me it’s the same [to go to the gurdwara or to church]. I go [anyway] in God’s house. I don’t care how God is called. I don’t care the way [one prays]. God is always the same, I think (19 year old girl, born in Italy). No, my sister and I have never put the ‘5Ks’ on [even if we are ‘baptized’]. We wore them like pendants… I always have the kara… My aunt sent Kacheera to us, but… we weren’t used to them and never took them (14 year old girl, amrit­ dhari, in Italy for 13 years). No, [I am not amritdhari]. I got accustomed to this way from the beginning. My dad, [in India] he wasn’t either. Let’s say that I have his same religious ideas. The important thing is to be devoted ‘inside’, it doesn’t matter if you wear long hair ‘outside’, or if you don’t eat meat. I think that what really matters is to believe deeply in God, the 10 Gurus, and to believe in their teachings (16 year old boy, in Italy for 12 years).

Therefore, a Sikh is not somebody who wears symbols externally, but someone who cherishes them inside. If one wears them, this can be done in a provocative manner; or they become a part of someone’s look.



religious belonging and new ways of being “italian”109 The dastar and the turban… are our identity. If I should go around without the turban, for me it would be like going into the square naked. It is a part of my identity, I’m what I am thanks to… [this]… so I created my personality and my identity thanks to the turban, thanks to the beard, I’m different from the other ones because… I have this (21 year old boy, kesdhari, in Italy for 15 years).

According to this interpretation, the ‘true’ Sikh isn’t necessarily the amritd­ hari, but someone who puts into practice the teachings of the gurus: one can be amritdhari and still be a hypocrite, not ‘baptized’ and sincerely believing. The internal hierarchy in the Punjabi-Sikh group, based on adhesion to the formal rules, is therefore considered not appropriate or is contested. [They] criticize me and say “the Kara has to be put on to the right hand” and I say, “And what changes if you put it in the left or in the right hand? It is not written anywhere!” These little things explain how we’re different. I don’t feel like getting ‘baptized’ to become like them! [If you want to get amrit] you must have a solid preparation and above all be convinced… Because what happens? Very often young people ‘baptize’ themselves because “Come on, let yourself be baptized, so that we go together here and there”… It’s bad to say but it is like a fashion. Those that preach the religion are pointing to the quantity, while I think that they should point to the quality… [They say] “baptize yourself baptize yourself!” But if young people can’t read the prayers [because they cannot read Punjabi], what are they ‘baptized’ for? If they don’t know what the principles of the Sikh religion are, it’s useless that they’re ‘baptized’! It doesn’t make sense! [We have different ideas] and that’s why I am not getting ‘baptized’ myself (21 year old boy, kesdhari, in Italy for 15 years).

In these cases, any discrimination by Italians, does not lead to “reactive religiousness”: conflicts are solved through dialogue, or by taking advantage of one’s human capital. [My schoolmates] were telling me … “He has an onion on the top of his head, he is a gift parcel which has a bow on the top”… Things like these, [because I wear the dastar]. I wasn’t answering… I tried to explain; however some people simply don’t want to understand these things, so with them it’s difficult. However, when I went to Secondary School, I became able to change things… when they understood that I was a good student and that they needed me, then things changed (21 year old boy, kesdhari, in Italy for 15 years).

Someone who lives religious membership in this way usually reinterprets a plural and multiple identity in a positive way. These young people feel in harmony with the values of the other great universal religions, since they think that these values are the same as those of Sikhism. So, such values become a common universal basis and not a factor of differentiation;

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they are a kind of passepartout, thanks to which it is possible to redefine one’s identity, both inside the Punjabi-Sikh community and outside it. One can be ‘Indian’ and ‘Italian’ at the same time, without feeling uneasy. It is possible to reassemble the two symbolic universes of reference without this process involving any ‘loss’. I would explain to Italians that in our religion God is seen as supreme, didn’t arise and didn’t die, without limits, without fears. God controls the whole world. In each religion, you can find the same founding principles. They are the same. Interpretations are various (20 year old boy, kesdhari, in Italy for 8 years). There are some universal teachings. All religions rely on these teachings: to help your neighbor, not to tell lies… (16 year old boy, in Italy for 12 years).

Therefore, the ethicization of the religious message acts as a positive resource. That is above all true when boys and girls try to enlarge their space for taking free decisions, or when they want to meet unconventional choices. Examples concern the matters of arranged marriage and of caste identity. The majority of Sikh youths disagrees with the traditional rules on the choice of bride or bridegroom and claims the right to freely choose the partner. Nevertheless they know that this can be a reason of conflict with their parents. Sikhism is then appealed to in its universal aspiration, where it states everybody’s equality in front of God and advocates the overcoming of castes. The question of the choice of their partner will be a test bench for their parents: if they are ‘true’ Sikhs, they will not give relevance to caste and will leave their children a free choice. On the other hand, the facts of being observant and devoted (together with other personal accomplishments, such as school or professional success) become reasons also for these children to expect the confidence and respect of their family. [I would like] a woman who can understand me. I don’t care which is her religion and colour and nationality… because I believe that one doesn’t get married with the religion of the other person but with the person herself. [My parents don’t agree]. On this subject they are very rigid… [I expect some conflicts, even a lot]. I expect a beautiful chaos in the family, with my father who shouts at me… yes, yes… However, in the meantime I’ll already know how to face the situation (21 year old boy, kesdhari, in Italy for 15 years).

Conclusions In the first part of this essay we have highlighted a set of dynamics which are currently taking place in the Italian scenario; specifically, we have



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observed a policy of exclusion and segregation of migrants in the political discourse and practices, combined with a trend towards ethnicization that, still, does not take into account issues of religious identity and minorities’ cultural rights, along with the emergence of an inclination to assimilate that small part of immigrants that are deemed to be ‘reliable’. Furthermore, we have highlighted that such dynamics complement the common perception of immigrants, from the Italian society’s point of view, as subjects totally immersed in the religious dimension, obscuring in this way all internal pluralism. Our hypothesis is that, in relation to the generalized stigmatization of religious identity of migrant populations, Sikhs constitute a kind of exception: the opening of new gurdwaras and other religious public events take usually place without resentment in the local contexts, while in the public discourse they are not represented as a treacherous presence. However, it is necessary to better understand why and what consequences this has on the processes of identity definition of younger generations. In this respect, we can put forward some interpretative hypotheses that need to be deepened through further research aimed at taking into account the local community as well. We think that one of the reasons that explain the different attitude of the Italian society towards the Sikhs are the widespread stereotypes about India (related, in the collective imagery, to the life and works of public figures such as Mahatma Gandhi and Mother Teresa of Calcutta), that reinforce the expectations of non-violence and of constant immersion of Indians in a spiritual dimension.14 This means that the Sikhs are in general considered benignly both from the Italian population and the local institutions, that depict them as reliable and quiet workers adapting themselves to the local socio-economic system, family fathers/mothers, “honest people who do not disturb”. In our opinion such reading is sometimes exploited by the Sikh groups: they take into account these stereotypes when getting in touch with the local society, assimilating and returning them within a sort of mirror game. As a matter of fact, the cultural behaviours paraded are emphasized in their very folk aspects in order to satisfy the autochthones’ lust for the exotic (spices, colourful clothes, turbans, music, etc.); otherwise, the leaders that usually interact with the local institutions (both for religious and other governance purposes) are those who exactly incarnate the stereotype of their 14 Sikhs are perceived as ‘Indians’, who are generally considered Hindus: usually the religious differences between the two are neither known, nor seized upon.

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counterparts. Among the Sikh groups of Reggio Emilia province, for instance, there doesn’t seem to be any competition of leadership and identity (at least as far as the dialogue with the local body of citizens is concerned), and this reinforces the Italians’ idea of a cohesive and homogeneous community, apparently not crossed by conflicts. As a result, therefore, in some respects the Sikhs have somehow actively interiorized the gaze of the other, adhering as much as possible to the context’s expectations that are sometimes mantled of paternalism towards these “good savages” coming from India. We could perhaps consider this as a ‘small steps pragmatism’ that has allowed them to obtain results in the local receiving territory, that for others are beyond reach. Our hypothesis is also that, compared to such an image played towards the Italian society, competitive or conflicting dynamics have on the other hand found space within the Sikh community. Indeed, despite what it appears from the outside, results of fieldwork enquiries (Bertolani 2003, 2004, 2005) demonstrate that Sikhs are not compact as they seem to be; they are heterogeneous and divided within: among castes, among different family networks, among Khalsa and non Khalsa adherents; also, competition plays an important role especially in the field of economic achievement and consumption practices – both in Italy and in India. What are the consequences for the second-generation immigrants? The study of religious belonging has allowed to highlight, at least partially, some aspects concerning sociality, life expectations, partner’s choices, cultural habits, belonging to one or more Sikh youth’s territories and groups of reference. The results of this study show a great internal heterogeneity among second Punjabi-Sikh generations in terms of religious membership. We have suggested to overcome the ‘reaction vs assimiliation’ pattern of analysis and we have focused our attention on the ways in which religion is lived and interpreted by young people both in the way they relate themselves to their community of origin and to Italians. We have therefore highlighted three profiles that we have defined in relation to dynamics of ethnicization rather than ethicization of religious behaviours. Ethnicization is accompanied by expectations of discrimination on the part of the Italian society. In some cases this has led to a certain degree of closure, to a reactive faithfulness and to the choice of an exclusive group of reference made of fellow people, identified in the Khalsa adherents. Alternatively, in different circumstances, the idea that ‘being a Sikh’ could be source of mockery has led to an estrangement from religion (or from those cult behaviours that are considered essential in defining a Sikh) and to a closure towards the group of those peers, both Italians and Punjabis, that have adopted a



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similar choice. The ethicization of religious behaviours, instead, has usually been accompanied by strategies of identity negotiation, both towards the group or family of origin and the Italian society. The topic needs further enquiries. Nevertheless, for the majority of youth in our sample, religion has revealed to be a resource in the process of social integration and redefinition of identity. Regardless of the ways in which this has happened, it was thanks to religion (and not in spite of it) that this was made possible for them. Perhaps, this has happened, though differently, also in the case of their parents. References Alba, R. and V. Nee. 1997. ‘Rethinking Assimilation Theory for a New Era of Immigration’, International Migration Review 31: 826–74. Ambrosini, M. and S. Molina (eds). 2004. Seconde Generazioni. Turin: Edizioni Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli. Ballard, R. 1982. ‘South Asian families’, in Rapoport, Robert et al. (eds), Families in Britain. London: Routledge, 179–204. Bastenier, A. and F. Dassetto. 1990. ‘Nodi conflittuali conseguenti all’insediamento definitivo delle popolazioni immigrate nei paesi europei’, in Italia, Europa, e nuove immigrazioni. Torino: Edizioni Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli, 3–64. Bertolani, B. 2009. ‘Processi di trasmissione e ridefinizione dell’identità religiosa fra le seconde generazioni sikh nel reggiano: alcune riflessioni a partire da una ricerca sul campo’, Religioni e Sette nel Mondo 1: 110–28. ——. 2005. ‘Gli indiani in Emilia: tra reti di relazioni e specializzazione del mercato del lavoro’, in Denti, Domenica et al. (eds), I Sikh. Storia e immigrazione. Milan: Franco Angeli. ——. 2004. ‘I sikh in provincia di Reggio Emilia: processi di ridefinizione dell’appartenenza religiosa’, Religioni e Società 50: 31–38. ——. 2003. ‘Capitale sociale e intermediazione etnica: il caso degli indiani punjabi inseriti in agricoltura in provincia di Reggio Emilia’, Sociologia del Lavoro 91: 92–102. Caritas. 2008. Romania. Immigrazione e lavoro in Italia. Rome: Idos. Caritas-Migrantes. 2008. Immigrazione. Dossier Statistico 2008. Rome: Idos. Denti, D. et al. 2005. I Sikh. Storia e immigrazione. Milan: Franco Angeli. Fallaci, O. 2001. La rabbia e l’orgoglio. Milan: Rizzoli. Helweg, A. 1999. ‘Transmitting and Regenerating Culture: The Sikh Case’, in Pashaura, S. and G. Barrier (eds), Sikh Identity. Continuity and Change. New Delhi: Manohar, 299–314. Leonard, K. 1999. ‘Second Generation Sikhs in the US: Consensus and Differences’, in Pashaura, S. and G. Barrier (eds), Sikh Identity. Continuity and Change. New Delhi: Manohar, 275–297. Marchisio, R. 2005. ‘Ripensare la laicità: tra pluralismo e individualismo religioso’, Rassegna Italiana di Sociologia XLVI (4): 605–39. McLeod, H. 1997. Sikhism. London: Penguin Books. ——. 1996. The Evolution of the Sikh Community. Five Essays. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Nesbitt, E. 1991. ‘“My Dad’s Hindu, My Mum’s Side are Sikhs”: Issues in Religious Identity, Arts, Culture, Education’. Research and Curriculum Paper, Chalbury: National Foundation for Arts Education. Pace, E. 2008. Raccontare Dio. La religione come comunicazione. Bologna: Il Mulino. ——. 2007. Introduzione alla sociologia delle religioni. Rome: Carocci. Portes, A. and R. Rumbaut. 2001. Legacies. The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Rumbaut, R. 2004. ‘Ages, Life-stages and Generational Cohorts: Decomposing the Immigrant First and Second Generations in the United States’, International Migration Review 38 (3): 1160–1205. Sartori, G. 2000. Pluralismo, multiculturalismo, estranei. Milan: Rizzoli. Vertovec, S. and A. Rogers (eds). 1998. Muslim European Youth. Reproducing Ethnicity, Religion, Culture. Brookfield: Ashgate.

COUNTERPUBLICS AND TRANSNATIONAL RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS IN A LISBON MOSQUE José Mapril The main objective of this article is to show how Muslims in Southern Europe, more specifically in Lisbon, Portugal, actively participate in what several authors have defined as a transnational Islamic public space. By transnational Islamic public space I am thinking about the proposals of authors such as Mandaville (2001), Bowen (2004), Roy (2003), Eickelman and Salvatore (2006), Allievi (2003) and Nielsen (2003). This is what John Bowen (2004) has called a “global public space of normative references and debate”, in which “orthodoxy”, religious practices and authority are in constant discussion and debate. This transnational sphere has to be interpreted in the context of a Public Islam (Eickelman and Salvatore 2006), that is: ‘Public Islam’ refers to the highly diverse invocations of Islam as ideas and practices that religious scholars, self-ascribed religious authorities, secular intellectuals, Sufi orders, mothers, students, workers, engineers, and many others make to civic debate and public life. In this public capacity, ‘Islam’ makes a difference in configuring the politics and social life of large parts of the globe, and not just for self-ascribed religious authorities. It makes this difference not only as a template for ideas and practices but also as a way of envisioning alternative political realities and, increasingly, in acting on both global and local stages, thus reconfiguring established boundaries of civil and political life (Eickelman and Salvatore 2006: 98).

All these voices and movements manipulate religious texts and ideas and try to spread their messages in local and transnational contexts through media technologies (satellite television, internet, CD, and DVDs) and translocal circuits (Mandaville 2001; Johnson 2002; Eickelman and Anderson 2003 Eickelman and Salvatore 2006). As the literature has shown, several of these religious movements have been engaged in debating and defining the “correct” Muslim behaviour not only in Islamic contexts but also among Muslims in non-Islamic countries (see Cardeira da Silva 2006). These transnational circuits are crucial for the translocal production of “orthodoxy”, which, of course, links Islamic countries to Muslims spread all over the world, including Europe and the USA. Many of these circuits are related to debates and (competing) definitions

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about what is the “correct” Islamic behavior. In this sense, “orthodoxy” is not an Islamic doctrine that would apparently exist unchanged and independent of all historical time and place (as orientalists would argue) but instead a continuous search for what the “correct” behaviour really is (Soares 2005). If one faces Islam as a discursive formation (Asad 1986), then “orthodoxy” is produced in the context of specific social relations and is, of course, subject to changes in place and time. When Talal Asad (1986) mentioned the interaction with sacred texts he is thinking about the exegetical commentaries produced by academics and men of learning but also to the ways Muslims in general call upon the central authoritative elements in order to solve practical problems and to define what is the religious truth. According to Saba Mahmood (2005), by emphasizing the practical contexts in which the foundational texts acquire specific meanings, Asad does not see the Qur’an and the Hadith as religious truths, instead he develops a perspective in which the divine texts are an element in a discursive field of power through which the religious truth is itself debated, established and defined. It is precisely to define the centrality of a specific ceremony, for example, that the sources of authority are manipulated leading to the emergence of lively debates and discussions. As Soares (2005: 8–9) argues: (…) one can focus on discourses, which include what is taken for granted and what is debated and discussed in both oral and written forms of communication. In other words, one can consider questions of argument and conflict over practices (what is or not correct) and the ways in which orthodoxy might change overtime. Studying discourses in this way allows one to understand different ways of being Muslim that often emphasize different ideas about Islam, religious practice and authority.

This transnational public space, though, is not simply a space of debates but seems to be also close to what Charles Hirschkind (2006: 106) describes as a counterpublic. This idea of a “counterpublic” rests upon a conceptual edifice in which deliberation and discipline, or language and power, are regarded as thoroughly interdependent. (…) Public speech results not in policy but in pious dispositions, the embodied sensibilities and modes of expression understood to facilitate the development and practice of Islamic virtues, and therefore of Islamic ethical comportment.

Thus this notion implies a duality of meaning: it is a deliberative space, where debates, discussions and exchange of ideas happen about religious truth, but it is also a space for the making of ethical subjects. For Hirschkind (2006), it is through cassette sermon audition – and the disciplining of the



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senses –, in contemporary Cairo, that this counterpublic is produced. In this chapter though, it will be argued that transnational Islamic movements in contemporary Southern Europe are also engaged in the making of similar counterpublics. These are not simply discussing religious truths but are engaged in the making of ethical religious subjects, and the act of transmitting religious knowledge in itself reveals these two dimensions (see also Mahmood 2004). Let me illustrate what I have been arguing with an example of a mosque in Lisbon. The Baitul Mukarram Mosque in Lisbon The Baitul Mukarram Mosque began as a small apartment that organized the five daily prayers for a congregation of seventy persons. It was created in 2000 by a group of Bangladeshi migrants that arrived in Portugal in the previous decades.1 Initially, religiosity was performed in the existing Portuguese Islamic institutions, namely the Lisbon Central Mosque, but soon a group of Bangladeshis, the most successful and prestigious figures, decided to create an autonomous religious space, mainly due to pragmatic reasons. This was located right in a neighborhood in down-town Lisbon – Mouraria – where Bengali Muslims had established several businesses and thus a short distance from the working place. After a small size apartment, where it began as a room for the five daily prayers, salat or namaz, for no more than seventy persons, it was upgraded for a four-storey seventy year-old building that could receive up to three hundred persons on a busy day. With this location transfer, the Baitul

1 The first Bangladeshi arrived in 1986 but it was during the nineties and beginning of 2000s that their numbers began to rise significantly. Most of my interlocutors came to Portugal in search for legalization and employment opportunities lacking elsewhere. Most were already staying in other European countries, sometimes ‘undocumented’ and working in the lower and informal ends of the economy, and came to Portugal (as well as Spain and Italy) for the regularization programs developed by the authorities during the 1990s and beginnings of 2000s (1993, 1996, 2001). Some left again, but several decided to stay and today it is possible to find up to four thousand five hundred Bangladeshis in Portugal, including women and children, spread between urban centers such as Lisbon, Oporto, Setubal and Faro, etc. Their position in the labor market goes from working in the lower ends of the Portuguese economy to entrepreneurial activities related to ready-to-wear shops, restaurants, supermarkets and groceries. Just in downtown Lisbon, there are approximately one hundred and sixty Bangladeshi shops that employ more than three hundred people, all Bangladeshis (Mapril 2011).

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Mukarram mosque assumed a different ceremonial role since it began performing the jumu’a, the Friday weekly prayer. Today it is a warehouse where four to five hundred people can perform their daily and weekly prayers and where three hundred can break the fasting during the month of Ramadan. Due to its very diverse congregation, mainly composed of Guineans, Indians, Pakistanis but mostly Bangladeshi, it has three permanent leaders of prayers, one Bangladeshi, one Portuguese and one Guinean that lead the prayers in different moments of the day. The Portuguese imam is also in charge of leading the Friday sermon and prayer, the most important ritual occasion of the week. In total, the commission of this mosque, which is exclusively controlled by pioneer Bangladeshi migrants, spends up to four thousand € monthly and during Ramadan an extra twenty five thousand € in meals. Its main sources of income are pioneer Bangladeshis themselves and other personal contribution and no funding comes from either Portuguese or Bangladeshi Islamic institutions. Because of this financial autonomy and its overwhelming Bengali congregation, it is informally called the “Bangla Mosque” and it was precisely because of this association that its committee named it after the central Mosque in Dhaka – Baitul Mukarram. In spite of this, the main Portuguese Islamic representatives – the Islamic Community of Lisbon (ICL), controlled by Portuguese of Mozambican and Indian origin, who first arrived in Portugal in the fifties as students, and later after the decolonization process (Tiesler 2000, Vakil 2004), in the mid-seventies and beginning of eighties – contributed bureaucratically towards the creation of the Islamic Community of Bangladesh, the recognized religious association that controls the Baitul Mukarram mosque. Today, this mosque is part and parcel of a larger infra-structure that cater for Sunni Muslims in the capital and in Portugal,2 which is composed by seven mosques, ten prayer rooms (located both in central Lisbon as well as  in its outskirts), an Islamic college (with religious and civil curricula) and  Islamic sections in several cemeteries (Tiesler 2000, Vakil 2004, Loja  2002, inter alia). The mosques and prayer rooms present an enormous  diversity of congregations according to national (Bangladeshi, Pakistanis, Portuguese and Guinean), linguistic (Bengali, Urdu, Portuguese), and doctrinal positions (Deobandis and Barelwis). Such diversity is not 2 According to ICL figures there are between 45 to 50 thousand Sunni Muslims in the country. These include Portuguese (converts and “born in the cult”), Guinean, Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Indian, Senegalese citizens, among many others (Tiesler 2000, Vakil 2004, inter alia).



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only visible in the existing institutions but sometimes inside each one of them, where several discourses and perspectives about Islam and religiosity interact with each other. The Bangladeshi Mosque is a very good example. Transmitting Ideas and Dispositions This space reproduces two discourses about the “correct” practice of Muslims, the first connected to the Tablighi Jama’at while the second is part and parcel of the Barelvi teachings. These are frequently described in the literature as antagonistic but in fact what my interlocutors have taught me is that they are part of a continuum along which several different positions and attitudes may be found. The tablighis meet at the central mosque in Lisbon, where an Ijtema, an annual meeting, usually takes place. Delegates from several countries get together and for several days the proceedings take place, with religious discourses and meetings. During the event, information is collected about mosques and prayer rooms all throughout the country in order to perform da’wa, literally “calling”. This usually lasts three days and then the team moves to another mosque or prayer room. In 2006 alone, the Baitul Mukarram was visited by these missionaries on three different occasions. In all, they spent three days, usually Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, sleeping and eating in the mosque, in restaurants and in private houses. The choice of these days of the week is far from random. Friday is the day of the jum’a, the weekly prayer, which usually is the busiest prayer of the week, and Sundays are rest days for most Bangladeshis and therefore an excellent opportunity to invite (Da’wa) people to join the Jama’at (community) in Tabligh (inform, to know). On one such occasion, the five Tablighi left in gasht (calling) divided in two groups and they went in different directions. A group stayed in Benformoso street, where the mosque was located, while the other group headed for the main square (Martim Moniz) and adjacent shopping malls in the surroundings, to invite and call Muslims to join the mosque later that day. A Mozambican and a South African Tablighi headed to a Bangladeshi supermarket and explained, in Urdu, that they would remain in the mosque during the following three days and invited them to join in Tabligh. On other occasions, the gasht was carried out with the help of some Bangladeshi that guide them through the streets of this former Moorish quarter. Another calling was performed after each namaz.

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In all occasions, the congregation that got together did not exceed ten people, mostly Bangladeshis and Pakistanis, although some Portuguese were also present. These meetings always occur in a circle and the bayan, the speech, is performed by one of the missionaries. The Tablighi spread among believers in order to help them translate the message in several languages. This concern is the recognition that despite the diversity of nationalities and languages the most important thing is to be a Muslim and therefore to know the “appropriate” and “correct” behavior. But the presence of the missionaries in the middle of the congregation, even during the salat, the five daily prayers, is a demonstration that they see themselves as constantly learning. When the bayan ends, members of the audience can join the missionaries and become themselves teachers. The person responsible for the bayan asks who wants to join the da’wa and collects the contacts for future occasions. According to this movement, the production of spiritually renewed individuals is the movement’s central goal and thus every Muslim should spend some time in his life transmitting the “correct” Islamic behavior and calling Muslims to the “proper” behavior (Metcalf 1996). Whenever they are in the mosque, it is up to them to lead the salat at the end of which they make a homily (bayan). The most important bayan takes place after the sunset prayer, the closing times of the shops in the area and these are performances where the main ideas of this revivalist movement are transmitted and embodied by the missionaries themselves. All of these homilies were about the virtues of the “correct” behavior and its relation to intention. The following excerpt is revealing: Allah said to recite Allah il Allah ul Allah and those who did received a reward and those who have not didn’t received anything. The prophet sought among all followers and those who accompanied him were rewarded with sowab and not others. All birds on earth and all the fish in the sea prayed for the followers of the prophet.

As a South African Tablighi argued, if a person does not do what Allah and the prophet said, not even money will save them: During the Hajj, we can find poor people while the rich cannot make it. Why do you think that is? It is not because of wealth but because of the will of Allah.

This statement leads us to another very common topic in the bayans: the absence of class distinctions among Muslims. According to their message, all Muslims are equal and therefore there should be no class divisions since ultimately all Muslims are responsible for each other. In another bayan a



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Tablighi stated: “(…) whatever we have in life is something we cannot take with us after death so it is better to distribute it to the poor.” This same idea was again reproduced in a conversation inside the mosque: (…) If every Muslim helped the needy instead of keeping the wealth in their pockets, perhaps differences would decrease. I have to prepare for death and for what follows. What does it matter if I have a lot of money after death if it ends up in someone else’s pocket?

Such considerations about the co-responsibility are linked to a perception that all Muslims wherever they are, are linked together in what Appadurai (1996) describe as a ‘transnational imaginary’. Several bayans reflect this same idea: “Muslims are not Spanish, nor bangladeshi, above all are Muslims.” Ishmael, a British convert, made this claim in an exemplary manner: “(…) I wrote to my ex-wife to tell her about multiculturalism in Portugal. In mosques one can find people of all nations and races.” But this transmission of knowledge and meanings is not only verbal. The way the message is transmitted is also revealing. The bayans transmit explicit knowledge but they are also performances where messages are inscribed in the bodies of the missionaries themselves. This movement represents the proper Islamic behavior based on the examples of the Prophet and the Sahabah, the companions of the prophet. These are perceived as models for the correct religious practice. Through the bayans, their posture and activities, they revive the ways of the prophet thus setting the example for those wanting to become pious Muslims. They transmit what to do through the example of the Prophet and Allah, using the Qur’an and the Hadith. Their ultimate goal is to produce “new Medinas” (Metcalf 1996). In addition to this movement and its revivalist perspectives, this same mosque welcomes other narratives about Islam this time of Barelvi inspiration, supported in the visits of other religious specialists. One of these occurred in June 2005, with the visit of Bangladeshi imam of a New York mosque (Mohammad-Arif 2000). The Maulana, like many of my interlocutors called him in recognition of his learning, had been in Spain. Before returning to the U.S., though, the commission of the Baitul Mukarram mosque invited him to come to Lisbon to do a bayan. Travel expenses would be supported by the commission. The event took place as usual after 8 o’ clock (p.m.) to allow the largest possible turnout. The Maulana was sitting at a table, placed next to the minbar, from where he did the bayan. The congregation was sitting and leaning against the walls. Ahead, in the first

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row, one could find the pioneers, the imam and some committee members. The bayan was about several issues but one of them was how the Jama’at Tablighi had created a sixth pillar of Islam: “intention” (niyya). According to this movement, the Maulana continued, to pray with the only intention of being rewarded by God was hypocrisy. Instead, the prayers should only be practiced in the name of God. In their reformist efforts, the Maulana argued, Tablighi produced innovations (bid’a) to the “orthodoxy” and therefore had no right to accuse others of doing so. At this precise moment, he picked up his book written and argued that in it he proved that milads were already present in the Qur’an and the Hadith and that therefore they were not innovations (as tablighis would critically argue). After the homily, the Maulana led a milad (or mawlids) – a congregational prayer usually performed on the birthday of the prophet or of holy men – and rose, along with the congregation, to make qyiam, the recitation of a durud, standing. He argued that this was a way to honor the great man the prophet Muhammad had been. Rising to do qyiam during the course of this ceremony is a demonstration of respect for the prophet, since it is believed that on such occasions he joins the congregation. Another variation is to leave an empty chair where the prophet can sit among the believers during the ceremony. This Maulana reflected a clearly Barelvi vision of Islam, especially in what concerned his perspective regarding milads. Besides his insistence on performing the qyiam, he had published a kitab, a religious book, in which he argued that these ceremonies were addressed in the Qur’an and the Hadith, an argument repeated several times by some of my interlocutors. Besides this, it has a universal nature because it is not something only practiced in South Asia (a common criticism presented by revivalists) but it is something practiced in other parts of the Islamic world. After the mahfil, the Maulana was selling the book at the mosque and Mukitur bought several copies. He wanted to offer one to a friend who was very critical of milads and thus had skipped the event altogether. Maybe this book would make him change his opinion. Usually these two discourses live side by side in this same space, as if there existed a continuum between the two, but occasionally, as it happens in several other contexts, the tensions lead to segmentation and separation. In 2007, a group of Bangladeshis, closely connected to barelwi teachings, separated from the Baitul Mukarram mosque and created their own prayer room. After some negotiations they returned to the Bangladeshi mosque.



counterpublics and transnational religious movements123 Ethical Subjects, Corrupt Places

As we have seen so far, each of these discursive formations is based on specific religious movements (see Eickelman and Piscatori 1990): the first, the Tablighi Jama’at of Deobandi inspiration was founded by Muhammad Ilyias in the 1920s. The Deobandi movement was founded by Rashid and Nanautvi Gangohi in Deoband, northeast of Delhi. It emphasized the importance of religious education and had a limited interest in the affairs of state. They argued that Muslims should follow the main sources of Islamic authority – the Qur’an and the Hadith – and recognize a central importance to the sciences of revelation. For this movement, all notions of intercession, especially those coming from Sufi inspired movements, are criticized as non-Islamic, especially because they see Islam as a religion of scriptures. The words of God and the deeds of the prophet are essential to know how Muslims should behave (Metcalf 1982; Robinson 1988). This view was brought to the twentieth century by Maulana Muhammad Illyas (1885–1944) through the creation of the Tablighi Jama’at in Deoband, in the 1920s. Ilyas had studied in Deoband and this influence was evident in this movement. The Tablighis are a missionary movement that encourages Muslims, regardless of their educational and socio-economic background, to dedicate some of their time traveling in order to renew the ceremonial practices of believers. This renewal should lead them to the “correct” practices, defined by the major source of knowledge – the Qur’an and the Hadith. This is a version of Islam whose mode of religiosity, to use Harvey Whitehouse’s words (2004), is clearly scripturalist that is based on the transmission of the written sources, the word of God, literacy and lack of mediation. The second example, on the other hand, produces discourses on Islam greatly inspired by Barelvi teachings related to the apologetic cult of holy men (pir) and mazaars (the tombs in which some of these holy men are buried that frequently become places of pilgrimage). This perspective is directly related to the Sufi inspired movements widely spread and present throughout all South Asia (Robinson 1988; Werbner 2003; inter alia). Their arguments have clear parallels with those of Maulana Ahmad Riza Khan (1856–1921) whose publications were very central to the Barelvi movement. Riza Khan’s teachings were based on the idea that Islam should be practiced as it had been handed down and transmitted from generation to generation, that is, marked by customary practices. For Barelvis, Prophet Muhammad was a central figure in intercession. If Muslims wanted the forgiveness of God they should seek the intercession

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of the Prophet, as well as some other charismatic figures, and thus they attribute a central importance to milads – the celebration of the prophet’s (or other walis) birthday (Robinson 1988). The prophet is seen as a carrier of various attributes, including a vision of the future, knowledge of the unknown, and the ability to be present – spiritually or even physically, if he so wishes, in multiple locations simultaneously. Riza Kahn endured such arguments using the Qur’an and Hadith, which has allowed him to criticize those, like Deobandi, who denied the importance of intercession, based on the idea that all Muslims are equal before God. Such arguments were seen by Riza Khan as a clear sign of arrogance. The barelvi message was spread across South Asia during the twentieth century, although, unlike the Tablighi, the Barelvi are not a movement in the strict sense of the word but a conception of Islam that is reproduced by scholars and several men of learning. In this case, Islam is based on an imagistic mode of religiosity (White house 2004), of devotional meetings and the recognition that there are men who can be called upon to intercede with God. This is a perspective based on charisma and mediation. Historically, these two movements are a reaction to the British colonial rule in India and are not only very active in the region but also abroad (Metcalf 1982, 1984, Ewing 1988; Robinson 1988, 2004; Veer 1994; Werbner 2003; inter alia). Both have been active in several Islamic countries and among communities of Muslims all over the world. The missionary activities of the Tablighi Jama’at, for instance, has given them a great importance from Asia to America. This revival movement has centers in the United Kingdom, Belgium, France, South Africa, among many other ­countries (Dassetto 1988; Robinson 1988; Kepel 1994; Metcalf 1996b, 2002; Veer 2001; inter alia). Even in Portugal its influence has been felt, as we have seen. Today, one can also find Barelvi religious specialists among South Asians in western countries (Lewis 1994; Mohammad-Arif 2000; Werbner 2003; Garbin 2004, 2005). The transnational movement and circuits of men of learning and other scholars imply the circulation Barelvi figures between Europe and South Asia. Thus, for both these movements migrant Muslims in Southern Europe are part and parcel of a transnational counterpublic, to whom they speak about religious truths but also about the making of ethical religious subjects (see also Mahmood 2004). It is not my intention to describe here the interpretations of my ­interlocutors – that is something I will have to leave for another occa­sion –



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but it is enough to say that for those to whom religion is an important issue, the  message of these movements, especially in a European context frequently perceived as morally corrupt and threatening (although a land of economic opportunities), is seen as sources of virtue, knowledge and guidance. Some Final Notes Throughout this paper, I have argued that Bangladeshi Muslims in Lisbon, together with some other Sunni Muslims in the country, are actively engaged in a “transnational public space of normative references and debate” (Bowen 2004). This has been shown through a case study about a mosque located in downtown Lisbon – the Baitul Mukarram mosque – in which it is possible to find two discourses about Islam, “orthodoxy” and piety. The first is closely connected to the Deobandi inspired Tablighi Jama’at., while the second is more in tune with Barelvi inclinations. Both of these discourses have been transmitted and (re)produced in this Lisbon mosque by certain segments of the congregation – the several imams, the members of the mosque commission and the supporters of both perspectives – but also by missionary activities of several men of learning and lay preachers that travel all over Europe, including Portugal. All these – migrants, missionaries, among many others – are transnational actors in a global public space where “orthodoxy” is being continuously produced and reproduced. Far from being something fixed and forever defined it is in a continuous process of becoming, it is in constant debate and redefinition. Furthermore, what is at stake is not simply religious truth also the making of pious dispositions and ethical subjects in a context frequently perceived as morally corrupt and threatening. References Allievi, S. 2003. ‘Islam in the Public Space: Social Networks, Media, and Neo-Coomunities’, in Allievi, S. and J. Nielsen (eds), Muslim Networks and Transnational Communities in and Across Europe. Leiden: Brill Publishers, 1–27. Appadurai, A. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Asad, T. 1986. The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam. Georgetown: Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. Bowen, J. 2004. ‘Beyond Migration: Islam as a Transnational Public Space’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 30 (5): 879–894. Cardeira da Silva, M. 2006. ‘Movimentos sociais em contextos islâmicos: Abordagens antropológicas’, Etnográfica, 10 (1): 73–83.

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Dassetto, F. 1988. ‘The Tabligh Organization in Belgium’, in Gerholm, T. and Y. Lithman (eds.). The New Islamic Presence in Western Europe. London and New York: Mansell Publishing, 159–173. Eickelman, D. and A. Salvatore. 2006. ‘Public Islam and the Common Good’, Etnográfica 10 (1): 97–105. Eickelman, D. and J. Anderson. 2003. New Media in the Islamic World: The Emerging Public Sphere. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Eickelman, D. and J. Piscatori. (eds.). 1990. Muslim Travelers: Pilgrimage, Migration and the Religious Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ewing, K. (ed.) 1988. Shari’at and Ambiguity in South Asian Islam. Berkeley: California University Press. Garbin, D. 2005. ‘Bangladeshi Diaspora in the UK: Some Observations on Socio-Cultural Dynamics, Religious Trends and Transnational Politics’, Paper Presented at the Conference Human Rights and Bangladesh, SOAS, June 17th. ——. 2004. ‘Migrations, Territoires Diasporiques et Politiques Identitaires: Bengalis Musulmans entre “Banglatown” et Sylhet’, Ph.D. Dissertation, Tours, Université François Rabelais. Gilsenan, M. 1982. Recognizing Islam: Religion and Society in the Modern Arab World. New York: Pantheon Books. Johnson, M. 2002. ‘Being Mandinga, Being Muslim: Transnational Debates on Personhood and Religious Identity in Guinea-Bissau and Portugal’, Illinois, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Illinois. Kepel, G. 1994. À L’Ouest d’Allah. Paris: Seuil. Lewis, P. 1994. Islamic Britain: Religion, Politics and Identity among British Muslims. London: I.B.Tauris. Loja, F.S. (2002),‘Islam in Portugal’, in Hunter, Shireen (ed.), Islam, Europe’s Second Religion. The New Social, Cultural, and Political Landscape, Washington D.C., Buchanan: Center for Strategic and International Studies, pp. 191–203. Mahmood, S. 2005. The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mandaville, P. 2001. Transnational Muslim Politics: Reimagining the Umma. London: Routledge. Mapril, J. 2011. ‘The Patron and the Madman. Migration, success and the (in)visibility of failure among Bangladeshi in Portugal’, Social Anthropology, 16 (3), 288–296. Metcalf, B. 2002. ‘Traditionalist’ Islamic Activism: Deoband, Tablighis, and Talibs. Leiden: I.S.I.M. ——. 1982. Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 1860–1900. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Metcalf, B. (ed.). 1996. Making Muslim Space in North America and in Europe. Berkeley: University of California Press. ——. 1984. Moral Conduct and Authority: The Place of Adab in South Asian Islam. Berkeley: California University Press. Mohammad-Arif, A. 2000. Salam America: L’Islam Indien en Diaspora. Paris: Editions CNRS. Nielsen, J. 2003. ‘Transnational Islam and the integration of Islam in Europe’, in Allievi, S. and J. Nielsen (eds), Muslim Networks and Transnational Communities in and Across Europe. Leiden: Brill Publishers, 28–51. Robinson, F. 1988. Varieties of South Asian Islam. Coventry: University of Warwick. Roy, O. 2003. El Islam Mundializado. Barcelona: Ediciones Bellaterra. Soares, B. 2005. Islam and the Prayer Economy: History and Authority in a Malian Town. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Tiesler, N. 2000. ‘Muçulmanos na margem: A nova presença islâmica em Portugal’, Sociologia: Problemas e Práticas 34: 117–144. Vakil, AbdoolKarim (2004), ‘Pensar o Islão: Questões coloniais, interrogações pós-coloniais’, Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais, 69: 17–52.



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Veer, P.v. d. 1994. Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India. Berkeley: University of California Press. ——. 2001. ‘Transnational Religion’, Working paper, avalaible at http://www.transcomm .ox.ac.uk. Werbner, P. 2003. Pilgrims of Love: An Ethnography of a Global Sufi Cult. London: Hurst & Company. Whitehouse, H. 2004. Modes of Religiosity: a Cognitive Theory of Religious Transmission. Walnut Creek: Altamira Press.

BLOOD, SACRIFICES AND RELIGIOUS FREEDOM: AFRO-BRAZILIAN ASSOCIATIONS IN PORTUGAL Clara Saraiva Religious Freedom and the Afro-Brazilian Religions in Portugal1 In the classic works on the Mediterranean as a ‘cultural complex’, Portugal, Spain and Italy are classified as Catholic countries, allowing for many comparative studies within this ‘Mediterranean enclave’ (Peristiany 1966). This idea dates from the sixties, however, and much has changed in Portugal since then. Following a period of minor change in the late sixties, the country turned to democracy after the 1974 revolution, bringing to an end almost fifty years of dictatorship under the Salazar regime. With the inauguration of the democratic process, Portugal embarked on a new phase of political and social freedom, including the freedoms of speech and association. Within two years the Portuguese elected a new President, a Prime Minister, and a parliament in which parties from a range of ideological backgrounds were represented. There were further changes in 1986, when Portugal joined the European Union. While it had previously attracted immigrants from the former colonies (many arriving as refugees from civil wars that began after independence, as in Mozambique and Angola), immigration in Portugal increased after its entry into the EU. This trend continued to grow in the course of the late 80s and into the 90s, as the country became the locus of a multicultural and multiethnic society.2 A new variety has also emerged in terms of religion. Churches or religious groups in Portugal now include Jews, Islamic groups (mainly Sunnis and Ismailis), evangelical churches (such as the Church of the Nazarene), several Pentecostal and Neopentecostal churches (including the IURD,3 Assembly of God and Maná churches), African churches (such 1 With thanks to Philip J. Havik for text editing. 2 Several studies have been conducted on Portugal as a host-nation for migrants from other continents; see, for instance, Bastos and Bastos (1999), Vala (1999), Machado (2002), Padilla (2003), Pires (2003), Gusmão (2004), Quintino (2004), Barreto (2005), Malheiros (2005) and Bastos and Bastos (2006). 3 Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus (Universal Church of the Kingdom of God).

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as the Tokoist and Kimbanguist churches4), and animistic practices brought by a range of African migrants (Pordeus Jr. 2000, 2009; Vilaça 2001; Mafra 2002; Bastos and Bastos 2006; Saraiva 2007, 2008). Among these are the rapidly expanding Afro-Brazilian cults, which originated in Brazil. From a count of circa 40 terreiros5 in 2008, there are now over 50 spread all over the country (although there is a larger concentration in the Lisbon area). These religions seem to have entered the country with the opening up of religious freedom in the late seventies. According to Pordeus Jr. (2000, 2009) one of the first mães de santo6 was a Portuguese immigrant in Rio de Janeiro, who became acquainted with such cults and was initiated there, bringing the religion with her when she returned home.7 She started a terreiro in Lisbon, and many of her first followers, filhos and filhas de santo, continued the expansion, some founding their own terreiros and making their practices known to the Portuguese public. The Afro-Brazilian religions come out of a process of mingling (or bricolage) between the African religions brought to the Americas through the slave trade. Many see them as religions of cultural resistance, in the sense that by paying homage to African deities they helped Africans not to lose touch with their ancestral origins. Although there are many different variants of Afro-Brazilian religions in Brazil, I will focus here on two syncretic cosmologies that are more common in Portugal: Umbanda and Candomblé. Possession and trance are extremely important and are seen as essential in both of these. In Candomblé the African deities descend upon their ‘horses’ to offer humans the blessing of their presence, dancing among them. These deities are part of the Candomblé pantheon and have a direct relation to nature, as each one is connected to the natural world. In Umbanda, the entities that descend upon their horses are rather archetypes of Brazilian society like the preto velho (the old black slave), and the caboclo (the Amerindian). They come down to talk and interact with people, give consultations and help them to overcome ailments or other life crises such as problems with love, money or health. 4 Research on Kimbaguist and Tokoist churches in Portugal is currently being carried out by Ramón Sarró and Ruy Blanes; see Blanes (2009) and Sarró (2009). 5 In Umbanda and Candomblé, the word terreiro refers both to the physical space of the cult house, and to the community of followers. 6 Priestesses in the Afro-Brazilian religions (literally “mother of the saint”). A male priest is a pai de santo, “father of the saint”. 7 Pordeus Jr. (2000) refers to Mãe Virgínia de Albuquerque as the first woman to open a terreiro in the Lisbon area, but others with similar life stories also returned to Portugal and started expanding Umbanda cults, often related to White Table practices (Pordeus Jr. 2009).



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Candomblé is perceived as being closer to the African matrix, namely to Nigerian Yoruba, whereas Umbanda is seen as having stronger associations with ‘European’ religions like Catholicism and Kardecism. Umbanda was created in the early 1920s in the southern cities, the growing urban capitals of Brazil – Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo – as the result of a mixture of Kardecist Spiritism, Catholicism and the Catholic cult of the saints, as well as Indian, oriental and African practices (Birman 1985; Ortiz 1988; Brown 1999). Its evolution is directly related to the development of Brazilian nationalism, and it is often referred to as a “truly Brazilian religion”. Umbanda went through an initial process of ‘whitening’ as the white elites who elected it as a symbol for nationalism strove to eliminate any vestiges of what was considered, at the time, primitive and dangerous – the African traces of animal sacrifices or incorporation by lower level entities (Brown 1999). Umbanda has since changed and given rise to a diverse range of variants that nevertheless maintain the original tension between Catholic, European elements on the one hand and more African elements on the other. Brazilian immigrants form the biggest single migrant group in Portugal,8 but the followers of Afro-Brazilian religions are mainly Portuguese.9 These Portuguese followers often become initiated in the cults and join the corrente, the group of mediums. How and why does this happen, in a country where such practices are a relatively new phenomenon? Several reasons can be listed here, in keeping with Ari Oro’s (1985) suggestions. The first is that that the practices of the Afro-Brazilian cults do not contradict pre-existing popular religious traditions that have deep roots in the Southern Mediterranean countries. The sorcière in France (Favret-Saada 1977), and the espírita or corpo aberto in Portugal and Spain, allowed for manifestations of ‘mediunity’ and for consultations with mediators who communicated with the other world in order to help individuals with their problems. These practices allowed the possibility of communicating with the supernatural and were not officially accepted by the Catholic Church. In Portugal, many such episodes took place in secret. Adherence to these practices was never recognized openly and publicly. Authors argue that the Afro-Brazilian religions appear as a continuation of previous traditions, rather than a rupture. (Pordeus Jr 2000, 2009; Saraiva 2010). Portuguese followers of Afro-Brazilian religions do not themselves feel that there is an 8 Twenty four percent of the total immigrant universe (SEF 2009: 28–29). 9 In most terreiros, besides the religious leaders, who are often Brazilians, there are perhaps two or three Brazilians in every group of around 100 people.

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implied break with existing practices. People feel they can visit the terreiro on Saturday and the Catholic church on Sunday with no problem at all. The ideology of Umbanda, for instance, based on the principles of charity and doing good for others, is seen as a continuation of Catholic practices. This is aided by the imagery in the temples, where representations of the African deities are mixed together with portraits and statues of Jesus Christ as Pai Oxalá (one of the most important Afro-Brazilian cult figures) and altars bearing images of the Catholic saints. It is also emphasized by the cult leaders and the vast literature on Umbanda doctrine and practices imported from Brazil. As one of the many books on Umbanda written by a famous Brazilian pai de santo states: (…) people go to the kind preto-velho or to the strong caboclo; the confessionary was substituted for the small bench of the preto-velho. In Umbanda one can speak of one’s frustrations, deceptions and anguishes with the medium. The Church does not attend to the people’s spiritual needs, (…) and therefore they go to the church for religious service, but engage with the mediums in the terreiros (Linares et al 2009: 66).

A second reason for the popularity of the Afro-Brazilian religions is that they are religions of affliction: they attend to life-crisis situations. As such, adherence generally starts with a consultation to overcome health, love or financial troubles. People return after their first visit in order to continue therapies and often end up becoming more involved in the group, or even being initiated. They tend to reinterpret their problems through the new perspective gained through their adoption of the new cults, and by reviewing their cognitive maps of rejection/inclusion within certain worldviews. Cures and solutions to crises are attributed to their conversion to the cult of the orixás. A third reason is the enchanted and seductive representation of people who cultivate the mysterious aspects of their performances (Oro 1995). The concern with empowerment through trance is shared by Umbanda and Candomblé alike, and is central to understanding the success of these cults in Portugal. Portuguese interviewees talk about their experiences in trance as exhilarating and life-changing. In addition, the potential to help others by using one’s capacity to incorporate certain entities is also valued. This ties in with the description of Afro-Brazilian religions by several authors as ‘emotional religions’, in that they allow for individual emotional expression and emotional catharsis in a way that was not felt to be acceptable in the traditional Catholic context. One informant underlines the value and importance of this sense of freedom:



blood, sacrifices and religious freedom133 There is a great freedom, a total freedom, opening…one can laugh, play or cry, one feels entirely at ease when talking to the entities. And I think that ­everyone in the terreiro feels that, there are no constraints to openly show what one feels. Not like in the Catholic cults, where one has to just repeat the formulae and behave in a proper way, but never show our inner selves… (Lino, 26, security guard).

A fourth reason is that the Afro-Brazilian religions favor the construction of both a personal and collective identity, and trigger self-perceptions of integration. The Saturday gatherings at the terreiros, where everyone shares a meal after the session, imply all the social aspects of commensality in ritual. People come together in an informal way and feel that they “belong to a family, the família de santo”. Finally, the Afro-Brazilian religions are charismatic religions. The legitimization and reputation of a terreiro is measured by the strength and charisma of its priest/priestess, and the way he/she acts and directs the temple. This brings us to the core issue of this text: the movement and tensions between the more African practices and those that are related to Catholicism and Kardecism. The Portuguese Scenario In contemporary Brazil, and to a lesser extent in Portugal, there are a large number of religious sub-cults, from the Catholic and Kardecist-related Umbanda practices, to the more Africanized Candomblé Keto. This corroborates what several authors have identified as the religious continuum of Afro-Brazilian religious clusters (Camargo 1961; Capone 2004b; Frigerio 2004; Schmidt 2008). In most cases, the cults amount to a mixture of practices originating from different roots and traditions. The differences between them lie more in the discourses and autonomy of the cult leaders and followers than in fundamental oppositions of principle and ritual (Maggie 2001: 111; Capone 2004a). Given that the plasticity of such religions is one of their main characteristics, diasporic situations present a particular test as they have to adapt to new types of followers, new settings and new social and cultural circumstances (Oro 1995; Pordeus Jr. 2000; Frigerio 2004). Alejandro Frigerio (2004) classes the expansion of the Afro-Brazilian religions towards the Latin-American countries as a ‘secondary diaspora’, with their initial movement from their African home grounds to the Americas as the first diaspora. He argues that, in a secondary diaspora, there is a tendency to re-Africanize practices and to relate to Candomblé as

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the pure and true African religion. This can be observed in the practices of the priests themselves, who turn to Candomblé as a means of augmenting their authority. Both priests and followers may turn to Africa as the source of all knowledge and religious proficiency – particularly Nigeria, which is seen as the birth place of Candomblé Keto. Frigerio states that this process of re-Africanization in new settings is the latest stage in the development of these religions and that it is instrumental in the creation of a world religion and of a truly multifarious community of worshippers. Frigerio also argues that the most notable sociological aspect of the spatial displacement in secondary religious diasporas is that the social standing acquired by the religions in the primary diaspora has to be regained. New narratives of identity and national belonging need to be constructed. Such narratives of belonging relate to two important aspects of the historical development of the Afro-Brazilian religions: the idea of Umbanda as close to the Catholic and European matrix, and Candomblé as more connected to an African background. Frigerio refers to James Richardson’s idea of a “conversion career” – meaning that conversion to a new religion must be thought of as a process, rather than as a single event – and expands on the notion that analysing the religious careers of followers of the Afro-American religions10 helps in understanding the complex character of their transnationalization. In this view, individuals generally undertake a series of sequential engagements with different variants of the Afro-American religions and thereby construct their religious career. This implies changes in their individual and collective identities, as they move from local variants – which are closer to the local matrices – to more ‘African’ ones. As the devotees progress, their ritual and theological knowledge increases, they establish relations with different spiritual beings and undergo identity changes at the personal, social and collective levels: “In this spiritual path, the religious community they are part of becomes larger and wider, as they enter ritual kinship networks which are, at first, local, and then increasingly transnational” (Frigerio 2004: 43). Frigerio also argues that some religious variants, such as Umbanda and Spiritism, are better suited to introducing individuals to the Afro-Brazilian worldview and acting as ‘cognitive bridges’ between the familiarity of folk Catholicism and the African variants that contain unfamiliar theological concepts.

10 Referred to here as Afro-American religions in general as Frigerio refers to cases outside the Afro-Brazilian complex, giving examples from Cuban Santeria among others….



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On the other hand, and apparently in contradiction with this, the reAfricanized variants are considered more suitable for purposes of legitimation, and are used strategically by individuals to move on in their religious careers. Frigerio defines Africanization as “the passage from a more syncretic variant like Umbanda or Espiritismo to a more African one like Candomblé, Batuque or Santeria”. Re-Africanization is practiced by individuals who already practice an African variant but are unsatisfied and, therefore, turn to Africa itself as the true source of theological and ritual knowledge. Frigerio further emphasizes that “through this process Africa comes to be regarded not only as the remote origin of the religious tradition but also as contemporary model for its practice. Current African (mainly Yoruba) religious beliefs and practices move center stage” (2004: 44). Seen as a search for the purer African tradition, Frigerio also sees this as having an important impact on the lives of individuals, the bonds they establish within the religious community, and on relations with the host society. His explanation in the case of the Southern Cone is also valid for Europe and for Portugal in particular. In Portugal the move towards a more African variant of religion as individuals progress from Umbanda to Candomblé is also seen as a means of empowerment, although not all pais de santo in Portugal do go through this process. Others prefer to remain loyal to the variant which is seen as being “closer to the Portuguese” (pai de santo C.). However, those who normally perform Umbanda rituals acknowledge the fact that they may sometimes practice Candomblé rituals if need be: I made my initiation in Candomblé as I felt I needed it. Umbanda is the mother of all things, but I felt I had to know more. I normally perform boris11 in Umbanda, but some individuals need to have them made within Candomblé. It is stronger (Pai de santo J.).

Umbanda, as noted above, acts as a “cognitive bridge” (Frigerio 2004) in moving from a traditional Catholic belief system to an Afro-Brazilian one. It is conceptualized by the Portuguese as the ‘possible exotic’ (Saraiva 2007). A grounding in Umbanda makes the transition smoother. Portugal follows a trend referred to by several authors: in most secondary diasporas, Africanized religious variants are generally joined together with those that are more syncretic, and the temples practice a mixture. In Portugal, many terreiros practice either a more African version of Umbanda, as in Umbanda Omolocô (which incorporates some African practices, closer to Candomblé 11 Ritual that enforces the individual’s connection with his/her spirituality and his/her orixá.

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Angola), or a more spiritist and Kardecist version of Candomblé, as in Candomblé de Caboclo. If Africanization has repercussions at the individual level, often as a quest for more magical power and a stronger connecton to one’s orixá, it also ties the individual into a wider group. When Afro-Brazilian religions become transnationalized their followers become part of a religious community that transcends local, regional and national spaces – what Frigerio calls an “incipient transnational community” (2004: 48). There are many different Afro-Brazilian cults in Portugal. In the terreiros I studied there were several versions of Umbanda, from pure White Umbanda to Umbanda Omolocô, as well as Candomblé Keto, and even Xangô and Jurema from Recife, in Northeastern Brazil (Pordeus Jr. 2000, 2009; Saraiva 2007, 2010a). In spite of the fact that most followers are Portuguese, there is a growing dispute concerning the legitimacy of such religions in Portugal. It is likely that this will continue to grow as the temples multiply. Most attacks emanate from the ignorance of the general public and above all the public perception of certain aspects considered ‘shocking’, such as the incorporation of animal sacrifice and the use of blood in rituals. The next sections will present the context in which Afro-Brazilian religious associations and federations are flourishing in Portugal, and the way they incorporate and adapt to discussions that have been going on in Brazil for centuries. These include the valorization (or denial) of African versus “whitened” religious variants, as well as more recent debates such as that on the relationship between the Afro-Brazilian religions and the environment. The ways in which priests and priestesses in Portugal relate to these ‘Brazilian discussions’ and reformulate them as ‘Portuguese discussions’ will be analysed. I will also look at the strategies they use to make the AfroBrazilian religions better known and accepted while affirming their own roles as religious leaders, and constructing and developing the religious identity of the Portuguese Afro-Brazilian cults. Afro-Brazilian Associations and Federations in Portugal The trend towards more Africanized versions of the Afro-Brazilian religions is tied to the creation of Afro-Brazilian associations and federations. These proliferate in Brazil and have started to appear in Portugal over the last few years, where it is now fairly easy (from a bureaucratic and administrative point of view) to start an association. As the cults have expanded, many



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terreiros and cult houses have felt the need to organize themselves in order to gain visibility and also to acquire a status that will grant them legitimacy and protection. Many have constituted themselves as “non-profitable cultural associations”, which entitles them to some rights and legal status. Notably, most are called “cultural associations”, and there is no specific reference to the religious aspect. On one hand, this broadens their scope., On the other is the argument that they should be able to call themselves “religious associations.” One pai de santo described the process his association went through: the Portuguese law has to acknowledge that Umbanda is a religion, with a history of over 100 years in Brazil, but is also a religion in Portugal. The religious commission first did not approve that we want to be entitled as a religious association. We had hired a lawyer and sent back documents proving that Umbanda is indeed a religion and were waiting for an answer. We have received the paperwork from the finances offices, saying that we are now a collective religious legal association: if this is so, than it means that Umbanda is now officially and legally recognized as a religion in Portugal, which is very good (C., Pai de santo Umbanda).

This particular Umbanda association (Associação Templo de Umbanda Pai Oxalá, ATUPO) was finally recognized in 2010 as a religious association.12 ATUPO is active in publishing a journal, Fundamento, both online and in paper form, and it organizes doctrine sessions for mediums, children, and the general public. With young people making up the majority of its members, it also comprises a “young peoples’ group” named FATUPO. One of the duties of this group is to provide assistance to the homeless and other forms of social support. They have also organized a “cure group”, which complements the work done at the weekly sessions (Saraiva 2010b). ATUPO has important connections with several Umbanda federations centered in São Paulo, such as the Associação Brasileira dos Templos de Umbanda e Candomblè (ABRATUR). With regard to the more African-oriented associations, the case of the Associação Portuguesa de Cultura Afro-Brasileira (Afro-Brazilian Culture Portuguese Association, APCAB) is striking. Up until 2010, APCAB actively 12 The same is happening with other Umbanda associations which are also very active in the social sphere, such as TUPOMI (Templo de Umbanda Pai Oxalá Mãe Iemanjá). TUPOMI is defined as a “civil and religious association” and includes the Exército de Oxalá (The Oxalá Army) which distributes clothing, food and medicine to the homeless in the Oporto area. TUPOMI is the Portuguese branch of União de Tendas de Umbanda e Candomblé do Brasil, a São Paulo Umbanda federation directed by one of the most famous Umbanda priests, Pai Jamil Rachid.

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maintained a website giving information about the association and emphasizing the social, cultural and civic aspects of its work. The site explained that the association was the result of a socio-cultural project, undertaken by a family whose main figures were a Yalorixá (Candomblé priestess) and her son. It stated that the association was created in accordance with the wish to build an organization that would work with civil society, the media and other formal and informal institutions of public interest to pro­mote the preservation and diffusion of the Afro-Brazilian culture and ­identity. The association’s objective of “preserving and publicizing the AfroBrazilian ethos, resulting from the process of the ethnic construction of Brazil, as well as promoting multicultural and intra-religious dialogue” was clearly stated, as was its wish to promote “a close relationship with the Afro-Brazilian reality, not only in its daily aspects – such as social and racial segregation, or problems due to a low economic and educational status – but also in its religious aspects, in particular in the Candomblé terreiros”. APCAB’s website also mentioned that it was formally recognized by the Portuguese government as the institution responsible for the preservation and supervision of the Afro-Brazilian cults, in line with the following regulatory articles: – line n, article number 4: “Promote and defend religions with an Afro origin, respecting ethnicity by means of ethics”. – line o, article number 4- “In case there are any associated temples, APCAB must supervise their activities, to prevent abusive practices, and inappropriate or illegal acts, or any that should devaluate the Afro-Brazilian culture in its religious sense”. – line q, article number 4- “Prohibit the presentation and use of any sort of objects, images or names referring to the Afro-Brazilian religiosity, in feasts or public manifestations of any sort, including special clothing or sacred moments, as in television broadcastings, when not previously approved by the Association”.

Another article (line s, article number 4) specifically referred to the duty to maintain social and cultural exchange with Afro-Brazilian cultural and religious communities. There was also reference to internal regulation, aimed at the creation of a National Code of Ethics, Discipline and Liturgy, and other regulations and instructions approved by the executive board. APCAB edited a magazine named Sem Correntes (Without Chains), which was publicized as “a vehicle for the promotion of the Afro-Brazilian identity in old and new contexts”. Its main aims were the promotion of intercultural dialogue, the dissemination of Afro-Brazilian identity, and the



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creation of a forum for debate and the diffusion of ideas in order to bring together the Lusophone countries. The magazine was discontinued but was followed by another named Ilé Àse, which “specialized in the African gods and Afro-Brazilian cults”. In December 2009 it was replaced by the journal Ígba Ábídí, a Yoruba designation, literally meaning “calabash of letters”. APCAB also aimed to combat religious discrimination and racism through action in the sphere of civil society. For instance, it announced an “intercultural schools’ prize” on its website, encouraging students to submit texts on intercultural dialogue: “Show us that for you we are all equal and different cultures should enter into a dialogue with each other. Say no to racism, xenophobia and religious intolerance. Participate and show that you are intercultural”. Its participation in meetings with the Comunidade dos Países de Língua Portuguesa (Community of Lusophone Countries, CPLP) (the Community of Lusophone Countries), in which NGOs related to the African diaspora in Portugal normally take part, was also a source of pride as such links emphasized APCAB’s defence of African ideals. Upon its official and judicial recognition as a religious collective entity in January 2010, APCAB created the Comunidade Portuguesa de Candomblé Yoruba (The Portuguese Community for Candomblé Yoruba, CPCY). CPCY continues the work of APCAB in defense of the Yoruba culture and traditions as well as inter-religious dialogue. Its website states that CPCY is the result of a long and bureaucratic process that culminated in 2010 with the acknowledgment of the Yoruba and Candomblé as a religion equivalent to Judaism, Catholicism, Buddhism, Hinduism and others. CPCY is described as a “religious collective association, recognized by the Ministry of Justice as the legal and institutional representative of Candomblé and Esín Ìbìle Youbá (Yoruba traditional religion) as well as the guidance of the public and private celebrations of rituals and ceremonies to the òrisàs divinities”.13 The statutes of CPCY reiterate its purpose to preserve the roots of the Yorùbà-Jejé traditions. Furthermore, its role as a defender of religious freedom and other civil rights is stressed.14 There are other associations which have fought for official recognition of the Afro-Brazilian religions, some competing with

13 Site accessed on 13 December 2011 at http://cpcy.pt/site/institucional/ (my adaptation and translation). 14 For instance, CPCY includes the Onírúurú Ako commission to promote the debate around sexual diversity and freedom. Site accessed on 13 December 2011 at http://cpcy.pt/ site/diversidade-sexual.

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those described above. FENACAB (Federação Nacional de Cultos AfroBrasileiros) is a Brazil-based federation that appointed one of the Portuguese pai de santo as the national coordinator for the Afro-Brazilian cults in Portugal. In February 2008 one of the Brazilian leaders of the federation came to Lisbon to invest him in his duties as supervisor. As leader of the Portuguese branch of FENACAB, this priest tries to attend ceremonies in different terreiros – especially inaugurations of new terreiros – thus creating bonds with other cult houses and affirming his own authority.15 From March 2008 onwards the Portuguese FENACAB website included the statutes of the federation, which stated the need for temples and priests to register and pay their fees as a means of protection against false or fraudulent temples and cult leaders. Although Umbanda is mentioned (as well as other cult variants such as catimbó and tambor de mina), the emphasis is clearly placed on Candomblé and especially on Candomblé Keto, which is seen as the purest variety. For both FENACAB and APCAB, Candomblé Keto is the one true African religion. As such, Bahia – the Brazilian region that is historically connected to the Keto cults (Silva 1995; Capone 2004) – is seen as the primary source. FENACAB itself is based in Bahia and stresses the fact that it was the first state to recognize Candomblé as a religion. It claims to have over 5,100 affiliated cult houses in the state of Bahia and over 15,000 throughout Brazil. The Portuguese leader was initiated and received his deká16 from a well-known Keto cult house in the Northeast Brazilian capital., Although based in Portugal, APCAB is also connected with Bahia and praises Nigeria as the land of the gods. The Fundação Europeia de Umbanda e Cultos Afro (European Foundation of Umbanda and African cults, FEUCA) is another Portuguese group, created by a Portuguese priest who is head of one of the cult houses. It describes itself as a non-profit civil and religious organization which aims to reject prejudice and to promote the integration and diffusion of all the Afro-Brazilian cult institutions in the European space, although it is still at a formative stage. FUECA’s mission statement defines its main objectives as the preservation of the spiritual, cultural and scientific values of the African traditional religion, and the interchange of ideas between European, African and Brazilian roots. As such, it defends the African religions’ respect 15 As was the case at the inauguration of a new temple in the Algarve, which I attended in March 2010. 16 A ceremony meaning that the individual him/herself is able to become a pai or mãe de santo and initiate others. Individuals must have been initiated at least seven years previously.



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for diversity and the non-hegemony of a single specific nation or ­expression. No punitive purpose is intended. On the contrary, it wishes to support the genuine values expressed by Afro-Brazilian cultures and religions within the European space. Although its members belong mainly to the AfroBrazilian spiritual community, according to FEUCA statements it does not consider itself to be a religious institution with a liturgical vocation. FUECA’s website invites potential members to share the contact details for their temples as well as their schedule for rituals so that they can be registered in the list of terreiros. The need for these details is justified on the grounds that FEUCA “receives plenty of requests for information on temples in Portugal and throughout Europe”. Its website is directly linked to that of the cult house of the priest who created the Foundation, and exhib­ its articles from international magazines that either expound on Umbanda in Portugal or on the proliferation of Afro-Brazilian religions in Ger­ many,  Spain, England and Italy. Although the emphasis is on Umbanda, FUECA does accept members from all of the different Afro-Brazilian cult varieties. So far, it has seven temples listed as members, three of which are in Portugal, three in Spain and one in Brazil. One of the Spanish temples is listed as a Candomblé center. Overall, FUECA aims to create a European congregation that will encompass both Umbanda and Candomblé cults. The internet functions as a powerful means of communication and diffusion for all of the cult houses, and is also a tool for tracking down other  terreiros. Some group leaders feel affinities with others and start working together, sometimes regardless of different religious ­orientations, as is the case with relationships between certain Umbanda and Candomblé terreiros in Portugal (Saraiva 2009). FEUCA, for instance, works with Rede Europeia de Umbanda e Cultos Afro (European Network of Umbanda and Afro-Brazilian Cults, REUCA), which is an online network of affiliates,  ­ providing connections between cult leaders and followers all over Europe. The same group of people have created the Lista Internacional de Terreiros de Umbanda e Candomblé (International Listing of the Umbanda and Candomblé Temples, LITUCA), a site listing Candomblé and Umbanda t­erreiros across Europe. In December 2011 this included cult houses in Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, Germany, England, France, Belgium and Italy.17

17 Accessed on 13 December 2011 at http://lituca.wordpress.com/lista-de-terreiros-na -europa/.

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The Afro-Brazilian religious associations and federations in Brazil developed as a way to protect and defend individual religious and civic rights (Silva 2006: 36–37; Brown 1995). Relations between the state and the AfroBrazilian religions have often been tense and full of contradictions. There were several periods of persecution during which terreiros were invaded by police and even destroyed. This happened in spite of the prestige and the supposed “superiority” of the West-African inspired Jeje-Nagô Candomblé (Matory 2005: 157), defended by the authors of Northeastern Brazilian Regionalism. At the same time, the history of the associations and federations in Brazil is related to the whole process of the construction of the ideology of the Brazilian nation-state, the ideology of négritude and of a centuries-old transnationalism. If there was a declared intention to extirpate alleged African ‘barbarism’ and ‘atavism’ on the one hand (Matory 2005: 163), there were also times when politicians protected practitioners of Umbanda and Candomblé. As Matory points out, “[t]hough Candomblé temples were treated unevenly by state officials, support by the Euro-Brazilian intelligentsia of the Northeast was more concerted” (Matory 2005: 164). Further, the organization of three Afro-Brazilian Congresses in the 1930s,18 the reputation attained by the books of Jorge Amado, and the involvement of intellectuals and Bahia university professors with Candomblé (Landes 2002) make it possible to say that “this was a period when the Black replaced the Indian as the indigenist trope par excellence in Brazil” (Bastide 1978). This triggered what Matory calls a “growing symbolic role for Candomblé in the national imaginary”, and an exponential demographic growth in Candomblé and Umbanda over the following decades. Showing how Blacks in the Bahia region were not simply descendants of poor slaves (the dark “folk” of the literary Regionalist imagination), Matory explains that there was a large community of literate international merchants and interlocutors in a circum-Atlantic, Anglophone-centered Black nationalism that went far beyond Gilberto Freyre’s simplistic image of the  “kind and submissive black”. The alliance between nationalists and transnationalists “established Northeastern culture as the classical Brazilian

18 In Recife, in 1934, organized by Gilberto Freyre; in 1937 in Salvador, organized by Carneiro and Ferraz; and in Belo Horizonte just before the outbreak of World War II, organized by Ayres de Mata Machado and João Dornas Jr.



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culture, preparing the ground for Candomblé itself to become a classic of Brazilian national civilization” (Matory 2005: 165). Along with the idealized view of Candomblé dating from the 1930s onwards, the development of Umbanda was also very important in the formation of the Afro-Brazilian associations and federations. Its development in the urban milieus of the Center-South, mainly due to the large migration of Northeastern workers and priests to the industrialized cities of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, contributed to it becoming “a genuinely Brazilian religion.” Incorporating Catholic and Kardecist principles, and created by an elite ready to extirpate those African elements that were considered backward, Umbanda offered an alternative to the “black model” defended by the Northeast Regionalists.19 Of course, there were basically two different understandings of what constituted a “true Brazilian religion”: for the Regionalists, it was the African model offered by Candomblé; for the white elite and other practitioners of Umbanda, it was Umbanda itself, since this incorporated all of the important Brazilian cultural archetypes and elements – from the old black slave to the indigenous practices – along with the Catholic and spiritist ideals imported by the Europeans. Divisions within Umbanda relate to tensions around the valorization or rejection of African elements. In the first stage of the development of Umbanda the tendency was towards “whitening” and the refusal to incorporate African elements such as animal sacrifices.20 But particularly from the 1950s onwards, the current of thought which valued African heritage became more important (Fry 1982; Birman 1985; Ortiz 1988; Brown 1985; Brown 1999; Matory 2005). Despite the growing popularity of Candomblé, and the new forms of transnationalism which developed during the 1960s and continue in the present day – namely, the flow of Afro-Brazilian priests travelling to Nigeria in search of their roots and the coming to Brazil of Nigerian priests and Yoruba language teachers – Umbanda made its mark. In the 1961 Second Umbanda Congress, Umbanda politicians and members of the parliament proclaimed Umbanda as “the Brazilian national religion” (Brown 1985: 27). Although in the 1950s and 1960s there was an increase in Candomblé temple federations (Matory 2005: 168) – and in spite of the fact that Umbanda 19 The political alliances of Umbanda federations and the multiple political negotiations of Umbanda leaders have been discussed in one of the Cadernos ISER, entitled Umbanda & Política, and in articles by Brown (1985), Concone and Negrão (1985), and Birman (1985). 20 In the first Umbanda Congress, held in 1941 in Rio de Janeiro, one of the main issues was the creation of a “white Umbanda” divested of the “backwards” African elements (Silva 2006; 37).

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is a much more recent religion than Candomblé – it was the administrative and bureaucratic model of Umbanda that was often used as a guide for the constitution and functions of the Afro-Brazilian institutions. Inspired by the Kardecist federations, Umbanda created its own, in order to provide legal assistance and defend its practitioners against police persecution, sponsor large collective religious ceremonies, organize events that would publicize the religion, impose order and regulation on doctrine and ritual practices, administer courses, and supervise the activities of the member temples (Brown 1985: 16–17; Silva 2006: 37). Brazil and Africa in Portugal As we saw previously, it is this latter model that the Portuguese organizations try to emulate. But the tensions that persist in Brazil between the more Africanized model of Candomblé and the more “whitened” model of Umbanda were also imported to the Old World. The Umbanda temples may outnumber those that practice Candomblé, but the heads of the three major Portuguese organizations mentioned above all still stress the fact that they have also been initiated in Candomblé (feito no santo), especially when being presented to other priests or on public occasions. Even if indirectly, they are maintaining the Regionalist idea of the superiority of Candomblé Keto, and thus reaffirming their leadership potential. In order to assert his/her authority, a pai or mãe de santo has to reinforce either his/her relationship with Brazil, or with Africa, or both. In the first case, he/she does so either by being Brazilian, or, as a Portuguese, by having lived in Brazil, in order to acquire the knowledge and expertise necessary to perform his/her role. This also implies that, whether they are Brazilian or Portuguese, they were initiated in the Afro-Brazilian cults in the Brazilian “motherland”. Just as Africa appears as a symbolic paradise and a source of legitimization for the cults in the New World (Capone 2004a: 30), so too Brazil emerges in Portugal as the source of these Afro-Brazilian cults, and as an important source of empowerment – above all for the cult leaders, who need to prove their efficiency and justify their reputation if they wish to increase their following. In terms of the way that followers and clients perceive the cult leader, the close relation the priest/priestess has with Brazil, demonstrated by the frequency of his/her travels or stays there, his/ her connections with terreiros overseas, and the number of fellow cult leaders that come to Portugal to visit his/her cult house, are all indications of the fame of the pai/mãe de santo.



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The relationship with Africa may be emphasized by cult leaders in two ways: either by following a hybrid line of worship (for example, a verion of Umbanda clinging to the African aspects of Candomblé) or, often simultaneously, by the Portuguese priests/priestesses who, invoking Portuguese colonialism and their own African background (a grandmother from Guinea or a mother from Angola), talk about how proud they are of this connection and how they learned and incorporated values and practices from their forebears. Many Portuguese returned from the former colonies after the 1974 revolution – especially from Angola and Mozambique, where violent civil wars erupted. These retornados (“those who returned”) had an amazing impact on Portuguese society. The population doubled within a few months, and with them also came many new cult practices and therapies. The claim of the African presence in Portugal is part of Portuguese history from the fifteenth century onwards, like the link with Brazil, having as its basis the presence of black slave populations in Portugal (Lahon 1999) and the history of Portuguese colonialism. It served as background for the creation of Gilberto Freyre’s concept of luso-tropicalism (Castelo 1998) – the idea that all territories colonized by the Portuguese had something in common and could develop a certain ethos as a result. This was meant to be a different kind of colonialism, based on good relations, the warm personality of the Portuguese and an open-minded attitude towards miscegenation between whites and blacks. This myth of a common past is rooted in the Portuguese imaginary and is passed on in the ideology of the terreiros. For instance, in one of Mãe Virgínia’s21 booklets, she states how the orixás, the inkises (Bantu divinities) and voduns (gods from Dahomey) are similar, since Africa, Brazil and Portugal constitute a unity. In her texts she expands on her theories of Umbanda Omolocô as a variety of Umbanda closer to the African matrix, since it is an intermediary between Umbanda and Candomblé Angola. This allows her to talk about her version of Umbanda as an original African variety, enforcing her personal originality and creativity (both as a cult leader and as a healer) while at the same time linking the three continents (Pordeus Jr. 2000). While the potential paradigm of a Portuguese ‘ideal’ version of the AfroBrazilian cults is still under construction, it connects representations and

21 The same priestess noted earlier as having been one of the first mãe de santo in Portugal (Pordeus Jr. 2000).

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concretizations from the three corners of the Atlantic – Portugal, Africa and Brazil – in a single symbolic unit, thus creating what Pordeus Jr. (as well as Guillot 2007) calls “a Portuguese variant of the Afro-Brazilian cults”. However, this cannot be detached from the discussion inherited from Brazil that centers on the “purity” of the cults (Dantas 1988). In turn this discussion is linked to the issue of the organization of the cult associations and federations in Portugal. Nature, Environment and Civil Rights Part of the understanding of Candomblé as a “genuine Brazilian folk religion” lies in its idealization as a primitive popular therapy for the ills of modern civilization, and the idea that it is close to nature and the environment (Matory 2005: 168). Several authors quote what is supposed to be a famous statement by Mãe Aninha, the founder of one of the most famous Candomblé temples, Opô Afonjá in Bahia: “Don’t even pluck a single leaf or snap the smallest branch from a tree, for it is like breaking an arm. A tree is like a person, and must be respected as such”. Indeed, the connections of the Afro-Brazilian religions with nature are clear. Each of the orixás are connected to an aspect of nature: for instance, Iemanjá is the goddess of the sea, Oxum of the lakes and rivers, Xangô and Iansã are related to thunder, Oxóssi to the forest, Ossaím to the leaves and plants, Oxumaré to the rainbow. They are also connected to the manipulation of flora, fauna and minerals, which are used in the rituals according to the wishes and recommendations of the orixás and other supernatural entities. Plants are not only used in religious ceremonies but also in the treatment of illnesses through healing rituals performed in the terreiros or elsewhere. Often associated with the proclamation of certain words or sentences that trigger their effects, flowers, plants, bushes, leaves, roots, seeds and barks are used in the preparation of medicines and prophylactic beverages or libations (Camargo 1989). A recurrent aphorism in the terreiros is “kosi ewe, kosi orixá”, meaning “without the leaves, there is no orixá”. Leaves are supposed to be one of the main sources of axé, the vital energy of the gods, and thus are used in liturgical and healing practices to restore or reinforce the person’s axé. Ritualists often state that they may heal or kill an individual by using certain leaves The “hot” leaves (associated with the orixás of the fire and earth, as Ogum and Exu) agitate atmospheres, intentions, emotions and individuals, and may cause harm, whereas the “cold”



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ones (connected to the water and air orixás, as Oxum and Oxalá) appease and tranquilize. Knowledge of the right leaves – those that are appropriate for the cult and its rituals – is thus one of the most important qualifications required to become a respectable pai de santo (Silva 1995: 209). Besides this, there is a holistic perception of the human “natural body”. The body is related to nature through the influence of the orixás on the individual. Each person has a main orixá de cabeça (“head orixá”, the god that owns the person’s head22) but also a juntó (an orixá that owns the person’s back, one that holds the person’s chest, and so on) for each part of the body. The body is thus conceived both as a manifestation of the supernatural and as directly tied to the natural world. But there are apparent contradictions in the way the Afro-Brazilian religions, with their natural aspect, relate to present-day environmentalism. The same religions that protect and venerate nature also sacrifice animals and pollute fields, forests, lakes and the sea: ebós (ceremonial offerings to cleanse people of bad fluids, often made with special foods) have to be dispatched and are often thrown away in forests or rivers; other offerings to the orixás and other entities, containing their favorite foods and objects, are left at crossroads or in other specific spaces in the wild; plants and leaves are taken daily from nature to be used in rituals; and the millions of votive candles that are lit and left in forests often cause fires and destruction. The offerings to Iemanjá, goddess of the sea, that are deposited on beaches on annual celebration dates (during December in the São Paulo region and February in the Bahia area) are another example. These include small vessels made out of plastic or polystyrene, carrying flowers and leaves cut from the wild, glass containers full of perfume, female accessories and jewelry. Far from being biodegradable, these pollute the beaches and the ocean. Afro-Brazilian priests defend themselves and their congregations while appealing for an ecological approach to nature. At the Eco ‘92 international environmentalist conference in Rio, one of the best known Candomblé priestesses convened a conference on “Ecology, Citizenship and African Religions and Cultures”. In April 1992, around eighty AfroBrazilian priests from different regions (São Paulo, Minas Gerais, Rio Grande do Sul) gathered at the Acervo da Memória e do Viver Afro-Brasileiro (Archive of Afro-Brazilian Memory and Life) in São Paulo to ensure that the Afro-Brazilian religions would not be designated anti-ecological (Matory 2005: 175). 22 The head is seen as an essential locus of decision and behaviour, where reason and emotion interface.

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Such episodes show how problematic these issues are, and how the cult leaders are obliged to organize strategies to assert their rights in Brazil. These concerns are also present and even amplified on this side of the ocean: as part of the European Union, for instance, Portugal must abide by certain specific rules and regulations on the environment. In the last few years, there have been several articles in the print news media explaining what Afro-Brazilian cults are and focusing on the charismatic personalities of cult leaders from a positive point of view. There have also been articles attacking the Afro-Brazilian religions. Most of these attacks are based on complaints registered with the Portuguese GNR (national guard/police) and refer to animal remains (blood, bones, feathers, skin), candles, and prepared foods, found by people who go on weekend hikes in woods, by lakes or by the sea in the perimeter around the urban area of Lisbon. The complaints refer to the encounters people have had with these (as they call them) macumbas,23 which they identify with “witchcraft and black magic”, and consider an insult to religious principles, i.e. the hegemonic Roman Catholic tradition. Furthermore, they invoke civil society concerns, such as the protection of the environment and animal rights issues,, which are subject to specific European Union legislation. The question of animal sacrifice and the clash of such practices with European law triggers the formation and consolidation of associations that defend the right to carry these practices out, within certain limits. Groups that practice African Candomblé argue that such rituals are necessary and are usual in Africa. They argue that they should not be criticized in a country where religious freedom has been accepted since 1974 and was reinforced in the constitutional revision of 2006.24 They claim that the problem is aggravated by fellow followers who, in leaving animal remains where they should not, fail to abide by commonly accepted principles. One way to avoid problems is to buy or rent a proper space that falls under their own jurisdiction; another is to ask permission for rituals to take place in certain

23 The term macumba, which at the beginning of the 20th century referred to the Bantu cults in Rio de Janeiro, has taken on a pejorative sense and is now connected to “low, black magic” practices. 24 See, for instance, the comments posted on the CPCY site on the 6th of December on the ongoing debate concerning the religious sacrifice of animals (accessed 13 December http://cpcy.pt/site/abate-sacrificial/). See also what is said on the same subject on the Etxaury website.(accessed 13 December http://www.temploetxaury.com/tema_o_ritual _sacrificio.htm). This is the Umbanda temple that heads FUECA.



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locations. There is an acknowledgement that “here [in Portugal] one has to have common sense in doing these things”: This is not Brazil, where people are used to see these things at crossroads and everywhere. There, it is part of peoples’ daily lives: but not here, not in Portugal, so one has to be careful (Pai de santo J., candomblé).

The Portuguese associations and federations publish articles in print and online concerning these issues. For instance, the ATUPO journal Fundamento has published articles on the cult of jurema and brings out a regular series of texts about each plant and its role in the rituals, emphasizing the importance of respecting ecological principles. Several priests talk publicly about the importance of carefully handling ebós and offerings, and the need to ensure that each terreiro has a space where things can be left without causing harm or polluting public and natural spaces: I do not admit that materials such as paper, plastic, glass or polystyrene are used in offerings. We cannot talk about orixá Oxóssi and do this. Our religion is a religion that is in unison with nature, not a vehicle of its destruction (C., Pai de santo Umbanda).

Some priests talk about the advantage of having specific sites where rituals can be performed without problems – as in São Paulo, where there are two such spaces, both named Vale dos Orixás (The Orisha Valley).25 These sites can be thought of as religious parks. They include both private spaces that are rented by the temples and religious communities for their rituals and public spaces where everyone can make offerings, like the Praça dos Orixás (Orixás square) or the Cachoeira de Oxum (Oxum waterfall). The advantages of such places are also recognised by Portuguese cult leaders: It would be great if we could come together and start a sort of Vale dos Orixás in Portugal. That would solve the problem with the European regulations, and the accusations that we do not respect nature, while it would also unite us more (C., Pai de santo Umbanda).

The defense of the Afro-Brazilian religions as “nature-friendly” is linked to a romantic view of their African origins and to stereotypes of black people as closer to nature. As seen above, however, these “natural roots” also imply certain rituals that may seem too ‘savage’ to European eyes. This brings us back to the African aspect of the Afro-Brazilian religions, and to the reasons

25 Connected to two different Umbanda federations, they are directed by two famous pai de santo, Jamil Rachid and Ronaldo Linares.

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why Umbanda has a higher number of followers in Portugal than Candomblé. Umbanda makes things easier for its followers: it is seen as being closer to the Catholic principles of charity and goodness, the shrines place the African orixás side by side with the Catholic saints, and people talk about Pai Oxalá as equivalent to Jesus Christ. Furthermore, Umbanda incorporates many practices that can be described as New Age and Neo-Pagan, which the Portuguese have become acquainted with through the recent spread of Neo-Pagan cults in Southern Europe (Fedele, this volume). Among these are the celebration of a close relationship with nature and the inner self, recognition of the importance of meditation, therapeutic practices with crystals and aromatherapy, and belief in the power of bad and good energies. Images praising the development of inner peace and attunement with nature appear on the internet sites of the temples, associations and federations, and in the messages shared by practitioners and association members. New Religious Scenarios Cult houses that practice Umbanda and those that practice more Africanoriented religious variants like Candomblé Keto are both establishing associations in Portugal or trying to gather priests and cult houses in new federations. These follow the models of the pre-existing Brazilian associations, especially in terms of the latter’s fight for religious freedom throughout the Vargas dictatorship (1930–1945) onwards up to the 1960s (Brown 1985: 30), and even continuing today with the recent attacks from Neopentecostal religions (Silva 2007). As such, the Portuguese associations are all committed to complete religious freedom and the protection of their affiliates against religious discrimination. They affirm the need to further Afro-Brazilian religions and culture within the European space, and defend themselves against accusations of being hazardous to nature. In addition, they emphasize the need of the cult leaders to develop their identities as priests and increase their charisma. In order to do this, they underline the religions’ diverse roots in Brazil and Africa, and stress their transnationalism: the bridge between Portugal and Brazil becomes a triangle when the associations reiterate their relation to Africa or when the priests and priestesses visit Nigeria as the motherland of Candomblé. The focus on Africa is seen as a quest for purity. As one pai de santo stated: “Here, in Portugal, everyone turns to Brazil as the



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reference…but in fact Brazil is a big mixture of things; this is the reason why we turn to Africa, and to Nigeria, as the pure source of our religion”. In fact, as we saw above, there are major differences between Portugal and Brazil. In Brazil, the African-oriented variants of the religions and particularly the Regionalists of the Northeast invoke their “African religious heritage”, which is seen as having been present from the outset in the development of the Afro-Brazilian religions. In addition both Candomblé and Umbanda priests, practitioners and intelligentsia claim the connection between the construction of the Brazilian nation-state and the development of the Afro-Brazilian religions. The same does not hold in the Portuguese case. Afro-Brazilian religions are not part of the European or Portuguese religious heritage, nor did they play a part in the construction of the Portuguese nation-state. Nevertheless, the importation of these religions from Brazil to Portugal begs questions that have long been discussed concerning other aspects of the relationship between Portugal and Brazil: the issue of racism (Almeida 2000), the construction of a brotherhood between the two nations (Feldman-Bianco 2001), and, most certainly, the much debated Freyrian concept of luso-tropicalism (Castelo 1998), which is transforming into a Luso-Afro-Brazilian tropicalism shaped by religious ideals. The acknowledgment of the internationalization of these religions and their diffusion throughout Europe has contributed to what can be called a public discourse on religious heritage that no longer dwells on the traditional Catholic background, or on the circulation of belief within the Mediterranean world, but opens up to new discussions and new worlds. The above discussion of the religious associations and their role in defending and promoting the Afro-Brazilian religions in Portugal shows how new religions are making their way into Europe, acquiring new followers and changing perspectives on religious issues. Not only do the pais and mães de santo relate to their Brazilian background – the cult houses where they were initiated and gained the capacity to become priests and priestesses themselves – and to the ties that their religions have with Africa, they also use such bonds to affirm their identity and authority. These cult leaders appear to validate Durkheim’s assumption on the power of religions to connect people (Sarró 2007); in this case, the connection goes beyond the physical communitas and creates a dynamic process of transnationalization that serves multiple purposes. The politics of the construction of influential religious networks in new settings of religious diversity reveals and reaffirms the existence of a powerful arena where

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PART TWO

(RE)CLAIMING SPACE

MOSQUE CONTROVERSY, LOCAL RESPONSES AND THE RELIGIOUS LIFE OF PAKISTANI IMMIGRANTS IN ATHENS Inam Leghari Introduction Almost all Western European societies have become more plural and multicultural owing to the process of contemporary migration and globalization. The process of so-called secularization, coupled with international migration and globalization trends, has challenged the hegemonic claims of Europe as the centre of traditional Christianity, resulting in the emergence of multiple and plural religious actors such as Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist and New Age religions in the European social milieu. In Europe, Islam has become the second largest religion because of an extensive labour migration. In Greece however, Islam is not just a migrantoriginated religion but also has an indigenous presence. Muslims in Greece are the second1 largest religious group, consisting of autochthonous populations and economic immigrants and refugees. The autochthonous Muslim population in Greece is not a homogenous group but consists of different ethnic and linguistic backgrounds, namely local minorities such as Turkic people, Pomaks2 and Muslim Roma. They number approximately 120,000 people in total3 and the majority are concentrated in Northern Greece, especially Western Thrace in the areas of Xanthi, Evros, and Rhodope. These autochthonous Muslims are part of the institutional landscape of Greece, enjoying both civil and citizenship rights. Besides the native Islamic presence, a new wave of Muslim immigrants has begun to make itself felt in Greece, where migration is a relatively new phenomenon. Along with its Southern European counterparts like Italy, Spain and Portugal, Greece itself was the source of significant emigration 1 See Cesari (2005). According to him, Muslims form 4–7 % of the total population in countries like Greece, France, Great Britain, Germany and the Netherlands. 2 A Slavophone Muslim group whose origins are the subject of disagreement among scholars. They inhabit the Rhodope Mountain villages in the Western Thrace. 3 See for example Alexandris (1988).

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until quite recently, when it became the focus of immigration from a wide variety of countries around the world. Until the late 1970s and early 1990s, foreign immigrants in Greece were relatively few in number. However, with the disintegration of the Eastern bloc, Greece has become a more multicultural and pluralistic society and has seen an influx of economic migrants from the Balkans and Eastern Europe that makes up the largest proportion of immigrants in Greece.4 During the short span from 1991 to 2001, according to the 2001 national census, the immigrant population in Greece, which used to be under 2% of the total population, increased to an estimated 10–12% (www.statistics.gr). The massive wave of immigration to Greece after 1990 can be explained by a number of factors:5  (1)  Immigrants have been diverted to southern European countries like Greece because of the introduction of stricter controls in northwestern Europe in the early 1970s. (2) Greece is accessible because of the centrality of its location, weaker border controls and easy entry into the European Union. It has 6,800km of coastline and 2,800km of mountainous border, which are difficult to patrol. (3) It is situated in close proximity to developing countries in Asia, Africa and the Balkans – places which are the centre of international changes and conflicts. (4) Improvements in the Greek economy, along with labour shortages and a low birth rate, mean that immigrants are needed to do the jobs that native workers no longer seem willing to do (such as construction work). (5) The specific character of the Greek economy, which has a large undocumented and informal sector, offers space and potential for irregular migration. Following the examples of other European countries such as Spain (1985), Italy (1987) and Portugal (1992), Greece enacted policies of massive legalization and amnesty for undocumented immigrant workers in 1998, 2001, 2005 and 2007. Through forced or voluntary migration, a non-indigenous Muslim population started to emerge in Greece. These Muslim immigrants are from diverse contexts and backgrounds. Many have migrated according 4 See Cavounidis (2002). 5 See also King (2000).



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to what has been described as ‘dispersal’ – immigrants journeying in search of livelihood (Cohen 1997). The majority of the Muslim immigrants in Greece are Sunnis who have moved from a ‘local Islam’ based around localized cultures and the geography of the homelands, to an ‘international Islam’ of Muslims from diverse countries and cultures. Broadly speaking, little is known about the contents and forms of Islam in Greece. Similarly, the official figures give us limited information about the exact number of Muslim immigrants. Thousands of immigrants from Pakistan, Egypt, Bangladesh, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan, Jordan, Sudan, Morocco and Lebanon, among others, live in Athens – as well as an estimated 500,000 immigrants from Albania6 who have mixed Christian, Muslim and non-religious orientations. Excepting the latter, the number of Muslim immigrants may total 200,000.7 Although present across the country, the majority of Muslim immigrants are concentrated in Athens, Thessaloniki and other urban centres, where work opportunities are greater, especially in the informal labour market. The new Muslim presence in the Greek capital is demonstrated by the changing urban and demographic landscape with ethnic shops selling Halal meat (ritually slaughtered meat), ethnic restaurants and other stores. The Muslim immigrant community in Greece is recent in comparison with communities in other European countries, but it is beginning to transform the ethnic and cultural milieu and the religious landscape of a country traditionally proud of its perceived ethnic and religious homogeneity. The presence of large numbers of foreigners in Greece, as elsewhere in Europe, has been met by many with apprehension and fear. Unlike their autochthonous Muslim counterparts, the majority of Muslim immigrants in Greece are simply residents without any citizenship rights. Migrants remain socially marginalized and under-protected and their position vis-à-vis Greek society remains tenuous and ambiguous, the focal point of passionate controversy and debate.8 Upon settling in a new and alien environment, immigrants and religious groups often put major efforts into rebuilding religious institutions in their new context and collectively try to organize themselves for the purposes of religious worship. However, places of worship in foreign environments have historically constituted the most controversial and symbolically laden

6 Post-communist Albania is an official member of Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), but its population includes mixed Christian, Muslim and non-religious orientations. 7 See Tsitselikis (2004). 8 Karakatsanis and Swarts (2007).

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arenas with respect to religious outsiders and cultural others. In many cases,9 in European nation states often defined by both religious (JudeoChristian) traditions and secular (liberal-democratic) ideals, initiatives to construct new mosques have triggered controversies with long-established residents and institutions. These conflicts also trigger heated debates about the place of Islam in Europe. Greece is not exempt from this. The so-called ‘Athens mosque controversy’ has come to be perceived as a highly sensitive issue. Moreover, mosque controversies also raise the concerns of religious groups who were absent at the historical points when the relationships in a particular country between state, society and religion were defined (Hervieu-Leger 2001). Formal and purposely-built mosques in the Western context are a visible but controversial sign10 of an Islamic presence (as with the headscarf), which may trigger controversies and heated debates among the European population. Despite differences in national, religious and legal contexts, these conflicts and debates in various public arenas across Western Europe are repeated with minor variations in themes and emphasis (Klausen 2005). Formal mosques also mark a shift in the sacred geography, evolution and localization of travelling Islam from the private to the public sphere.11 They are a marker of a changing religious landscape and a sign of growing religious plurality and of the visibility of Islam, which has become a reality in Europe. From the point of view of the long-established majority, a newly visible Muslim presence and the Islamization of space through the construction of mosques often creates fears of erosion and threat to the local way of life. Conflicts over mosque construction seem to be strongest in Southern European countries (Greece, Italy, Spain), where Muslim migration is a relatively recent phenomenon and the majority of the immigrant population do not enjoy citizenship rights (Cesari 2005; Allievi 2009). This text is concerned with the Athens mosque controversy and the main actors involved. It focuses in particular on Pakistani immigrants in Athens in the area of Kolonos, a working class neighbourhood near the city

9 See the special issue of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, volume 31, no. 6 (2005), devoted to the issue of mosque conflicts in different European cities. The editor argues that the refusal to build new mosques is justified due to problems of noise and traffic nuisance, incompatibility with urban planning and non-conformity with security norms. But beyond technical obstacles, resistance to the mosque is linked to a meta-narrative about Islam widely prevalent at national and international level in which Islam is systematically conflated with threats to international and domestic order. 10 See Pieterse (1997). 11 For these debates see Cesari (2005) and Fokas (2007).



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centre. Drawing on ethnographic research12 in Athens, this chapter also aims to show how these Pakistani Punjabi migrants organize themselves into and set up various institutions, such as informal mosques, ethnic shops selling Halal meat, and different transnational religious institutions. In order to explain the background to the controversy, I will first give a brief overview of Pakistani migration to Greece, and of the mosque as a central focal point for religious rituals among Pakistani immigrants. The Pakistani Immigrant Population in Greece Pakistanis are one of the various recently established immigrant groups in Greece. In contrast with Pakistani migration to the UK, their migratory flow to Greece is a relatively new development. However, compared with newer arrivals (post-1990), Pakistanis represent one of the older immigrant groups. Pakistani immigrants started coming to Greece as sailors or workers in the shipyards in Athens in the early Seventies, in accordance with bilateral treaties between the two countries. Initially they numbered only a few hundred people. Due to the lack of accurate data, the exact number of Pakistani immigrants in Greece is still unknown. According to one estimate, the total number of Pakistanis in Greece is between 40–50,000 people (Tonchev 2007). Another estimate puts the total at more than 70,000. These figures are difficult to confirm. Pakistanis migrating to Greece do not come as self-motivated individuals intent on improving their own socio-economic status, but as representatives of their biradaris’ (kinship groups), whose aim is to improve the position of their ghar (household) and other close relatives in the homeland. Most Pakistani immigrants to Greece originate from certain specific areas in the Punjab region, with the majority (approximately 60 to 70 percent, according to my key informants) coming from the villages of Gujrat and other barani (rain fed) areas like Kharian and Jhehlum. Again, however, there is no exact data available. When I asked about the reasons for migration from these areas, one informant stated: Most of the Pakistanis in Yoonan (Greece) come from the villages of Gujrat and its surrounding areas. Emigration in the beginning, took place from a context of poverty; in the latter, it was encouraged by economic dynamism

12 This dissertation research was carried among Pakistani immigrants on “religious practices and transnational religious networks” in the area of Kolonos. It was conducted over a period of 16 months, from February 2004 to June 2005.

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inam leghari and competition to become rich. This competition can be within village or biraderi (kinship group) level. So many villagers came here because of the “rees or dekha dikhi” (emulation) of other immigrants who went to other European countries and became rich. The other reason is returnee migrants with their ostentation which plays the imagination of those staying at home, in this way forms the symbolic push factor underlying the emigration from rural Punjab. Moreover, most of the agents who arrange for the Donkey or Game (human smuggling) are also from Gujrat and its surrounding areas like Kharian. The agents also know that people from Gujrat and surrounding Barani areas are ready to pay large sum of money because now migration to Europe has become a trend in these areas and most young men dream of going to Europe.

The success of returnees and of migrants stimulates emulation, as well as the popular imagination (Appadurai 1996). Thus, the roots of migration from Punjab to Europe in general can be traced from those regions which have historical traditions of migration and transnational connections dating back to the colonial times. Moreover, in areas of Northern Punjab such as Gujarat, Gujuranwala and the barani areas of Jhelum and Kharian where irrigation is difficult the population pressure on the land compels locals to migrate. These areas have always been densely populated. Because of the small size of agricultural holdings, and the conventional division of labour between the sexes, many households have long had a surplus of male labour. There is, therefore, a longstanding local history of men from such households supplementing their incomes by working as immigrants in other countries. The number of Pakistanis in Greece gradually increased in the late 1980s and reached its peak in the 1990s. Immigrants arrived as young single adult workers, most of whom found they had little alternative but to accept manual employment. This is still the case today. I refer to the kinds of jobs that Greeks do not want to do because of their poor employment conditions: long hours, low pay and social or physical isolation. The majority of Pakistanis have been incorporated regularly or irregularly into manufacturing industries (as welders, masons, labourers, mechanics and so on) and the agriculture and construction sectors. These immigrants are largely uneducated young rural labour migrants who live in poor and overcrowded bachelor housing and occupy the lower tiers of the Greek labour market, using social networks to find jobs and settle in their new environment. They are largely ‘first generation’ men with very low levels of family reunification, which is also a cause for concern. In a number of cases there appear to be insurmountable obstacles to family reunification, arguably owing to administrative and political reasons.



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Following the settlement process, these immigrants start to make efforts to establish ethnic and religious institutions, including mosques. The establishment of these mosques indicates the desire felt by immigrants for the reconstruction of Islam and their religious needs in the diaspora. In Islam, the mosque is a sine qua non for compliance with one’s religious duties.13 Informal Mosques: Changing a Factory Store into a Place of Worship in the Area of Kolonos In the absence of any official place of worship, the Muslim migrants in Athens pray at informal, underground or makeshift mosques which are not properly licensed. Dozens of these mosques have been set up in the Greek capital to cater for the needs of Muslim immigrants. The exact number of these makeshift mosques is unknown since they constantly shut down even as new ones open up. According to press reports, the number of unofficial prayer rooms in Athens ranges from 60 to 100. In order to cater for the devotional and religious needs of immigrants, the first makeshift mosque in Athens was established in 1985 by a Sudanese Muslim (Dr. Munir Abdelrasul) in Goudi, a neighbourhood of Athens. Similarly, in 1989 two informal mosques were established by two different Egyptian immigrants,14 one in the Piraeus district and the other in Athens city centre. Their numbers rose considerably from 1998 onwards due to the Greek policy of massive legalization and amnesty for undocumented immigrant workers. The mushrooming of informal mosques since then indicates the religious needs of immigrants and their desire for the reconstruction of Islam in the diaspora. These makeshift or informal mosques function in apartments, shops, garages, factories and stores: sites intended for quite different purposes which often do not comply with safety regulations. I encountered one such example in the course of my research in Kolonos. When these mosques are established in buildings originally designed for other purposes, only the interiors of these buildings are transformed into recognizably Islamic spaces. Invoking the terminology of vernacular architecture, the ‘storefront’ or ‘makeshift’ is extended to housing stock such as apartments and suburban homes transformed into markedly different spaces and for new uses – in this case, to sacred spaces functioning as

13 See Jolly (1988). 14 See http://www.islamonline.net/servlet/Satellite?c=Article_C&cid=1233567843 600&pag.

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mosques. The storefront mosque comes under the rubric of ‘non-pedigreed architecture’, a label designating the “vernacular, anonymous, spontaneous, indigenous” constructions of the informal, undocumented sector (Rudofsky 1964, cited in Susan 1996: 204). The distinctive feature of traditional vernacular architecture is that the design and construction are often done simultaneously, on site, by the same people. These mosques have been established and used by Muslim immigrants from Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Morocco, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Palestine and African countries. Despite Islam’s denial of national boundaries, the makeshift mosques in Athens have been created or established on national and ethnic boundaries and in most cases the turnout is also ethnically segregated. This can be explained by the fact that chain migration brought people from the same countries of origin to the same areas of residence in Athens. The informal mosques are normally situated in the working class immigrant neighbourhoods, in close proximity to immigrant residential clusters and other places of cultural reproduction and consumption like ethnic food shops and restaurants, video stores and calling centres. It is important to note that the mosque in Kolonos and other such mosques in Athens do not meet the requirements formulated in religious law for proper mosques. As the Imam of the mosque in Kolonos told me: The term Mosque should be reserved for buildings that have either been built specifically as mosques or originally have religious functions. This building should be owned by Muslim and owner should have dedicated (waqf) it for the purpose of a mosque. Here in Athens, there is no mosque from a religious point of view. They can be called as Jai Namaz, prayer hall or Musullah.

Despite this, the prayer halls in Athens are mostly referred to as ‘mosques’ in Muslim immigrant usage. These “Mosques without minarets” evoke a fractured image of ‘Islam on the move’ (Pieterse 1997). Mosques without minarets also evoke the image of a subculture on the margins. Among Muslims, the preferred image is “from prayers rugs to minarets” (Landman 1992, cited in Pieterse 1997: 187), a reflection of the gradual process of institutionalization of travelling Islam (Waardenburg 1988). One Imam told me that “a mosque within the confines of four walls and a ceiling is not a requirement for Muslim community to offer prayers, because God has made the whole earth as sanctuary for worship; the whole world is like a mosque”. On asking why the prophet made the first mosque during the Medina period, I was told: “since the mosque functioned as the centre of Islamic affairs and organization and thereby nurtured and sustained the Islamic effort.”



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In Kolonos, a big hall which had once been a factory was hired ostensibly as a library and then converted to a mosque. This mosque is called Masjadi-Quba, and was established in August 1994. Considered to be the first informal mosque established by Pakistani immigrants in Athens, it belongs to the Sunni Hanafi Islam and the Pakistani immigrants attending the mosque are from different working class backgrounds. The name given to the mosque in Kolonos is reminiscent of the first mosque (Masjid-i-Quba) in Islam, which the Prophet established during his hijra (migration) to Medina. Thus, mosques are also seen as a site of hijra and known as mahajars (migrant). They are given names like Masjad-i-Quba to recall the first mosque established by the prophet. This reminds us of how the founding event of the Muslim community, the hijra, a charged spatial metaphor in itself, is reconstructed again in Athens. The Greek authorities are aware of these mosques, and sometimes the Muslims are checked and monitored, as was the case under the security measures for the 2004 Olympic Games. Most of the mosques do not have a house of prayer permit but are tolerated by the authorities. In 2009, however, the Prefecture and Municipality of Athens fined a Pakistani warehouse owner in the neighbourhood of Nea Ionia €87.000 for turning a store into a place of worship without a permit.15 The monthly rent for the mosque is €300 per month, which is paid for by collective funding from the immigrant community members. Most informal mosques in Athens, especially in Kolonos, have a formal organizational structure in the form of a mosque committee. In this structure, financial responsibility is focused in the management committee and especially in the person of the chairman (president). He and his fellow committee members are the employers of any Imam or prayer leader whom they choose to take on. Power thus remains firmly in the hands of the mosque committee rather than the Imam. The room in Kolonos, which masquerades as a library, is too small to accommodate people at the busiest prayer-time of the week. On Fridays people spill out into the hallway and even the street outside. This problem also occurs all the time at Eid prayers. In these sessions the mosque is simply too small for the worshippers’ needs. Approximately 60 to 70 people can say prayers at one time in the Kolonos mosque. There are around 1,500–2,000 Pakistani immigrants living in the area. On telling me about the condition of Imams in Athens, one of my key informants (himself an Imam) added: 15 May 1, 2009, Ethnos.

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inam leghari In principle any man versed in Islam can become an Imam. Most of the Imams in Athens come here as workers like other immigrants. Since they have a better knowledge of religion than other immigrants, their services are requested by the people where there is a need in some immigrant area, in this way they become Imams. Most of the Imams in Athens are not paid for their services with exceptions of few Imams. So most Imams are workers like other Pakistani immigrants. Like most mosques of Athens, namaz or prayers are held three times a day instead of five times. In the morning and noon times there are no immigrants and Imams for prayers in most mosques as they are at work. Here we are confronted by the problem of living in a Christian society where Friday is not a holiday. So, when I was working in a factory, I had to ask permission to leave work for a few hours to lead the Friday prayers. The ergostasiarxis (factory owner) used to give me permission but later he did not give me the full salary unless I made up the time. The Imams are in difficult position in Yoonan (Greece), because they are neither paid by mosque committees nor by the Greek government. In other Western European countries, Imams are appointed by governments and they are paid for their services.

Mosques are everywhere visible and an important symbol of the world of Islam (Metcalf 1996). For immigrants, the mosque in a western context fulfils a much wider range of functions than in their country of origin. In addition to their basic purpose as a site for ibadat (worship), the mosque is also a gathering point to meet, socialize and exchange information. It is a physical space, an arena in which immigrants gather collectively, allowing reconstitution of social networks disrupted by emigration. Mosques can be places or spaces of religious and cultural reproduction. Religion may gain importance for some immigrants faced with insecurity and precarious tenure in the host society, with problems of belonging and identity, marginality, minority status, racism, stigmatization and discrimination. The reassertion of the global Muslim identity and its broader understanding among immigrant groups in the West may simply be a backlash and reaction to these conditions. In this context, the mosque may provide a source of companionship, social community, and spiritual comfort. As I will show in the following section, the mosque is a kind of micro-world where immigrants make explicit their religious cosmology and reproduce their traditions in an alien environment. The Religious Life of Pakistani Immigrants and the Role of Transnational Religious Networks The mosque contributes strongly toward the institutional completeness of a community, functioning as a religious institution, a social organization and an educational resource. Mosques are nexuses of faith and ritual where



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immigrants fulfil Islamic obligations, and are a centre for the Muslim community and its activities. As institutions, they structure the religious life and practices of immigrants in exile. The experience of being a migrant in the Pakistani diaspora is described by the word perdes (exile). The experience of foreignness (exile) has several facets. One is fear of selfloss. The migrant who is often single, moves into space in which no one knows him or her. One used to high measure of social control, the migrant suddenly finds him or herself in a realm in which social control is practically nonexistent. This often leads to feelings of disorientation (Schiffauer 2007: 71).

Stories circulate among earlier migrants about several hundred Pakistani workers in Athens who changed their religion and became Christian Orthodox in order to get legal papers. To be a Muslim in the context of displacement, diaspora and exile is thus a matter of individualization in which personal belief and internal conversion are more important than social conformism and social pressures. Against this background, the importance of religion in the foreign environment is that the immigrant is not abandoned and uprooted but can move in a universe of meanings that are actually known and familiar. The anomic experiences encountered by an immigrant in a foreign environment are balanced by the spiritual points of reference provided by religious doctrine. In a situation of diaspora and exile, for Pakistani immigrants the biggest challenges relate to preserving their faith while facing modernity, minority status, racism, discrimination and growing Islamophobia.16 The mosque may well become the answer to these challenges. Migration reduces migrants, first of all, to the status of homo economicus, where priority is given to working and saving money. In this context, interest in religious affairs is generally minimal among the male immigrants living in boarding houses and religious sentiments are expressed in avoiding non-halal meat. Many Pakistanis make an explicit association between pork and promiscuity. Thus they take great care to purchase halal meat from Pakistani ethnic shops situated in the immigrant neighbourhoods and in Omonia (the old city centre) in Athens. The fear of haram (forbidden) meat has led to the proliferation of these shops. For the rest, however, the men are preoccupied with survival, leaving little time for religious devotion.17 16 See the research report of the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia, which illustrates many manifestations of what it describes as Islamophobia in Europe (EUMC 2006). 17 See also Nelson (1987) and Lewis (1994) for the same argument about earlier Muslim immigrants in the UK.

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The Islamic life and practices of the Pakistani immigrants are a mixture of popular religiosity consisting of Sufi (mystic) cosmology, national customs, magic with an Islamic character, all combined into an Islamic interpretation and way of life which has grown up in South Asia. Pakistanis are mainly Sunnis belonging to the Hanafite Madhab and are followers of the Persian scholar Abu Hanifa. Within the Sunni Muslim tradition, Hanafi is one of four “schools of law”. Hanifites are divided into Deobandis and Barelvis. Both these sects have their origins in the post-war 1857 British India. The majority of Pakistanis in Greece are Barelvis.18 The Barelvis derive their name from Ahmed Raza Khan of Bareilly, India (1856–1921). The Barelvi religious ideology is based on folk Islam with an emphasis on Sufism, veneration of saints, glorification and love of the Prophet. The Prophet is considered a superhuman figure, an omnipresence who is hazir (present) and is not bashar (flesh), but nur (light), with unique foreknowledge (ilmu,l-ghai). The Deobandis, who also revere the Prophet, argue that he was the insan-i-kamil, the perfect person, but still only a mortal man. Deobandis are the second most numerous faction in Pakistan.19 The Deobandis take their name from the Indian town of Deoband, where the first Deobandi learning centre, Darul Uloom (House of Knowledge) was started in 1866. Deobandis have a puritanical bent in their interpretations of Islam and claim to represent Islam as founded in the Quran and Sunnah. In Athens, they are represented by a transnational missionary and Dawa movement called Tablighi Jama’at. The Barelvis groups in Athens are represented by three tendencies: the Da’wat-e Islāmī, Minhajul Quran20 (MUQ or the “method of Quran”) and the followers of diverse Sufi Orders (tariqas). These groups have their own informal mosques in Athens and they make attempts at proselytizing in the mosques by visiting often and providing islah (guidance) to immigrants. Tablighi Jama’at is a missionary movement of Sunni Islam that was founded by Maulana Ilyas (1885–1944) in 1926 in India. It is one of the important transnational Islamic movements (Kepel 1991; Metcalf 1993, 1996, 2001; Gaborieau 1999; Masud 2000) preaches a pious lifestyle to Muslims in Athens and elsewhere in the world and urges them to return to

18 See Sanyal (1996) on the Barelvi Islamic movement. 19 See for example Metcalf (1982) for more details regarding the Deobandis. 20 Founded in Jhang, Pakistan, in 1981 by the charismatic leader Tahirul Qadri. It has a presence and is popular among the Pakistani diaspora in Greece and elsewhere in Europe.



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the correct practice of Islam. The Da’wat-e Islāmī (“invitation to Islam”)21 is a Barelvi missionary movement started by Muhammad Ilyas Qadri (b1950) in 1981 in Karachi, Pakistan, but has spread widely with Pakistani migration to Europe and other parts of the world. It has established four centres in Athens and is very active in preaching among Pakistani immigrants. In Athens, these movements are shaping the religious life of immigrants and propagating their own particular understandings of correct Islamic practice while competing between one another for influence. There may be similarities in the preaching methods of both missionary organizations, as preaching is done by volunteers and self-financing itinerant groups who travel to mosques and immigrant neighbourhoods while urging people to become better Muslims. Despite these similarities, Tablighi Jama’at and Da’wat-e Islāmī can be seen as two competing models of dawa activity. There are other ways of expression of Islam among Pakistani immigrants in Greece, like Sufi tariqas. Religious life and practices in the Pakistani context and elsewhere in Muslim world cannot be explained only by the five pillars of Islam but also rests essentially on a mystical (Sufi) tradition. Most Sufis come to Greece as branches of the Qadiriaya, Chishtiyya and Naqshbandi orders. Pakistani immigrants in the diaspora attend the lectures of visiting Sufi saints and ask for protective amulets, healing and baraka (divine blessing or power inherent in Sufi saints or sacred objects) from visiting Pakistani pirs (literally meaning “old man” in Persian, is an honorific given to sufi masters). They also participate in the ritual processions of eid milad-un nabi (the commemoration of the Prophet’s birth and death), zikr sessions (the Sufi practice of remembering God by repeating his names) and urs rituals at the celebrations commemorating the birth or death of Abdul Qadir Gillani, Ahmed Raza Khan Barelvi, Sultan Bahu, and so on. These rituals are held in almost all the Barelvi mosques in Athens. Sufis in Athens may have local leaders but they also maintain devotional ties to their dead or living saints in Pakistan (Werbner 2003) or elsewhere (Riccio 2001). Thus they maintain strong transnational ties to their country of origin. In this context, these transnational religious movements develop a diasporic character in the form of imaginations and representations of a homeland. The above mentioned transnational networks use the mosque as the centre of their activities. As such, the informal mosques play an important role in the organisation of Muslim communities both locally and transnationally. 21 www.dawateislami.net.

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The Greek Context: The Athens Mosque Controversy and Local Responses Ever since Greece gained independence from the Muslim Ottoman Empire in 1821, not a single mosque has operated officially in the capital or its surroundings. The only purpose-built mosques22 in Greece are in the northern area of Thrace, which is the home of an historical Muslim minority. The cultural and religious rights of this minority (including establishing mosques) are protected under the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne.23 The growing Muslim immigrant population in the capital (consisting of immigrants and refugees from South Asia, the Middle East, Africa and a small number of Muslims from Thrace) has not been able to practice its religion in any officially authorized mosque. The Muslim population in Athens also faces the problem of their being no Muslim cemeteries in the city. They must send their deceased either to Thrace or to their country of origin, which is expensive. The religious practice of Muslim immigrants in Athens is largely hidden from public view because it takes place in prayer rooms located in the cellars of apartment blocks or other makeshift spaces. As mentioned above, most prayer rooms in Athens are illegal due to the fact that they have not been given a “house of prayer permit” by the Ministry of Education and Religious Affairs. The initial plans to construct the first official mosque in Athens were set in motion three decades ago. These triggered heated debates, negotiations and failed projects which have not yet been resolved. Successive Greek governments since the 1970s have promised to build a mosque but all such plans have been rejected. For three decades, the Arab League and Muslim Ambassadors have been lobbying the Greek government on the issue of mosque construction. A first agreement was signed with Saudi Arabia in 197824 and a mosque was to be constructed in the Athens neighbourhood of Marousi in 1983, but the reactions of the local population led to its cancellation. The issue surfaced again ahead of the Athens 2004 Olympic Games. In 2000 it was again decided by the Greek government, in accordance with Article 7 of the law on the issues of preparation of the Olympic Games 22 See for example the report Conflicts over Mosques in Europe: Policy, Issues and Trends (Network of European Foundations 2009). 23 According to the Lausanne treaty of 1923 there was a large-scale compulsory population exchange between Greece and Turkey involving millions of people. The Muslims living in Western Thrace and the Greeks of Istanbul and the Aegean islands at the Imvros and Tenedos were exempted from the exchange. For the Muslim minority in Western Thrace and the Greek Orthodox minority in Istanbul, the treaty protects their cultural and religious rights such as establishing places of religious worship. 24 See www.kspm.gr.



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2004, that the first official mosque and cultural centre was to be established. According to the plans, the mosque was to be built near the Athens airport during the games, in order to provide a place of worship for competitors. According to the master plan, the mosque was to be constructed in the Peania area, which is about 20km east of the centre. This plan ran into trouble and provoked heated debates in the Greek press owing to opposition from different sections of Greek society, with the main opposition coming from the Greek Orthodox Church, the local population and some members of parliament and political parties. The general applicable legal framework for religious communities in Greece with non-Orthodox backgrounds establishing religious places of worship includes two laws dating from the 1930s during the dictatorship of I. Metaxas.25 These laws are valid to this day. According to the Royal Decrees 1363/1938 and 1672/1939, all religious places of worship which belong to non-Orthodox faiths are required to have house of prayer permits issued by the Ministry of National Education and Religious Affairs on the consultation and recommendation of the Orthodox Church of Greece. The decision is based, among other things, on whether the religion is ‘known’. According to the law, the Orthodox Church, Islam, and Judaism are the only known religious groups considered to be “legal person of public law”, while other religious groups are considered “legal persons of private law”. Responses from the Greek Orthodox Church In many European societies, religion and the state are firmly separated. But this is not the case in Greece, which is now the only official Orthodox Christian country in the world (Campbell and Sherrard 1968). From the outset, Orthodox Christianity and the Greek language have been deemed to be the key determinants of Greek identity (Clogg 2002). Article 3 of the 1975 Greek Constitution declares the dominant religion in Greece to be the “Eastern Orthodox Church of Christ”, while Article 13 guarantees freedom of religious belief and practice in respect of all known religions, although proselytism is proscribed (Clogg 2002: ix). The Greek Orthodox Church claims the allegiance of nearly 97% of the Greek population, and wields considerable political power. The Church’s position regarding the mosque controversy was made clear by the late Archbishop of Greece Christodoulos, who stated: “The people are not ready to see a minaret in downtown Athens”.26 25 Ionnis Metaxas (1871–1941), General and Prime Minister of Greece from 1936–1941. 26 http://csmonitor.com/2003/1014/p07s02-woeu.html.

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The local bishop in the district of Peania, along with the local population, opposed the idea of the mosque construction. Metropolitan Agathonicos, in his 1999 annual report, wrote about the issue as follows: I owe to you, my beloved flock, to include in my annual report an issue of great importance and interest. I would like to inform you of an issue which will result in numerous problems and realignments. I am referring to the Athenian central mosque and Islamic cultural centre, which is to be built on a top of hill in Peania. Our holy metropolis in cooperation with the local authorities and the local population will strongly react to the effort to adulterate the religious, cultural, social and traditional structure and life of the citizens of Mesogia… I call on the citizens of Mesogia to struggle in order to prevent the establishment of foreign, dangerous and heretical elements in our religion…27

Similarly, the local population protested against the proposed site for the mosque. The local mayor Paraskevas Papacostopoulos added: “No one asked us if we wanted this. Nearly everyone is against the mosque”. Papacostopoulos has sought court injunctions to stop building work after coming to office on an anti-mosque platform. He claims that the choice of location is arbitrary, arguing that “There are no Muslims in Peania”. The mayor has attracted the support of the Church, which has agreed to the mosque in principle but does not agree on the location. “Does the first image of Greece a foreigner sees [as he gets off a plane] have to be a Muslim mosque?” asked Orthodox Church spokesman Father Epifanios Economou. The Archbishop of Greece called for the construction of a magnificent church near the airport “to manifest the Greek Orthodox stamp of our homeland at this crucial point in the transit of persons”,28 while the bishop of Thessaloniki Anthimos described the building of the mosque as “clear suicide”.29 Responses of the Members of Parliament and Political Parties The biggest opposition party at the time, Nea Democracy (ND), opposed the mosque project due to the choice of site. George Kalos, ND Member of Parliament in charge of religious affairs, said to news reporters: “The Olympic Village is to be built 15km north of the capital and the 27 “M. Mantas, Gia to Mousoulmaniko temenos tis Peanias’, politis ton Mesogeion”, March 2000. 28 See newspapers Eleftherotypia (September 14, 2003) and Kathimerini (October 16, 2003). 29 Eleftherotypia (August 2, 2004).



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planned mosque would be too far from the village for the athletes to use it”.30 The Greek communist party (KKE) and the Coalition for the Left and Progress (Synaspismos), which are both left-wing political parties, stressed the need for the mosque to be built, but in the city centre. They also stressed the need for separation between the Church and the state. One member of the ruling party at that time stressed: “There should be reciprocity. To open a mosque, they should give us the keys to Aghia Sophia” (Aghia Sophia is a famous Byzantine church in Istanbul, now a museum). The above example shows us that the mosque issue, and the perception of Islam in Greek public opinion, evokes memories of the Ottoman Muslim state (Tourkokratia) and Greek/Turkish relations. In this climate of opposition from different segments of Greek society, especially from the Greek Orthodox Church and residents in Peania, the project to construct a mosque for the Olympic Games was scrapped. In a surprising change of opinion, the Church of Greece then claimed that it would support the construction of a Muslim cemetery and mosque in Attica. However, its opposition to the possible separation of Church and state led to heavy criticism in Parliament.31 A newspaper reported: The Church of Greece had been opposed to the creation of Muslim prayer sites in Greece but the Holy Synod issued yesterday a statement saying that this long-held policy was about to change. (…) As a result, the Church will give up land it owns in the area of Schistos, western Athens, for the building of a Muslim cemetery, the Holy Synod said. The decision was made out of respect for “the needs of these people, since this is what our C5hurch teaches us; to show our love and help to all people – without discrimination – who are God’s creatures” according to the Father’s statement.

In 2006 again, the new draft law regarding the establishment of the mosque was submitted to parliament by the ruling centre-right party New Democracy.32 Finally, the law 3512/2006 was passed in the parliament, which proposed that the Athens mosque be constructed in Eleonas, an area not far from the city centre. According to this plan, the mosque would be constructed on land owned by the Greek Navy and would be run by a nonprofit organisation staffed by the Greek state, which would fund the whole project including appointing and paying the Imam.

30 See ‘Athens overrides objections to the mosque’, Reuters, 1 June 2000. 31 Kathimerini (December 16, 2005). 32 Parliamentary proceedings, November 2006: 1230–1231.

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Still Waiting for the Mosque Since 2006, the mosque has remained on paper. The Ministry of National Defence refuses to move its storage facilities out of the area so that the Ministry of Education and Religious Affairs can start building. Muslim groups in Athens have raised their concerns over the countless delays. After the centre-right lost in the national elections and the new Socialist Government took office in 2009, the mosque project continued to be up in the air. Due to these delays, Muslim groups have tried to organize themselves in what has often been described as ethnic mobilization or the politics of recognition through immigrant associations. The immigrant associations negotiate, protect, and advance their legal, cultural, religious rights while mediating and lobbying policy makers and power brokers in the receiving society. As the chairman of the Muslim association of Greece told one local newspaper: “Thirty years have passed we are still waiting for the construction of mosque. If our demands for the mosque construction are not met, we are going to take issue first with the President and then with European Court of Human Rights.”33 Conclusion In this essay, I have tried to describe the mosque controversy and main actors involved. The construction of the formal, approved mosque has been part of a process of making new claims upon the public sphere and public space, a process that has become embroiled with non-Muslim (Greek) concerns over a visible Muslim presence. Because of the Greek memory and the perception of Islam as linked with the past Ottoman Muslim state (Tourkokratia), coupled with geo-strategic issues with Greece’s most significant “other”, Turkey, the Mosque has become a contested place. The immigrant population in Athens which is of non-Turkish origin finds itself caught in this age-old rivalry. Local authorities and the representatives of the local church reported extensively in the press take the role of ‘defending’ native population from imposition of a religious establishment that constitutes a symbol of past oppression and a threat to Greek national identity and unity. The phobia elements are played up both by the local politicians and clergy through questioning the longer term consequences of mosque’s presence and tapping into the current threat of international terrorism (Triandafyllidou & Gropas 2009: 23). 33 See for example Kathimerini, May 31, 2009.



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It also illustrates the difficulty of coming to terms with growing religious diversity in a country where multiculturalism and religious diversity have become a reality but also a site of struggle. The mosque issue reflects past fears and preoccupations with new challenges posed to Greek society In many European countries, as is profusely claimed, religious practice continues to be in decline as a result of the secularization process, so much so that some scholars claim that the one thousand year-old connection between Christianity and European civilization is coming to an end, predicting a post-Christian Europe.34 Europe’s religious landscape is going through drastic changes (Pollacks 2008). The spectacular rise of Islam, and to a lesser extent Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh and New Age religions, are good examples. Islam is becoming the second largest religion in Europe, and as part of this change mosques represent urban visibility. In Greece, Orthodox Christianity remains the dominant religion. In reality, however, the Greek religious landscape is now pluralized – one of the outcomes of globalization (Berger 2007). Taking the mosque as the focal point for religious rituals among Pakistani immigrants, I would like to conclude by quoting Peter van der Veer in that Religious organization is one of the few forms of collective life among migrants, so that paradoxically, migration to the lands of unbelievers strengthens the religious commitment of the migrants. Mosques, temples and Gurdwaras are central symbols of pride and cultural resistance against racist denigration. A striking fact about migrant life in the West is its institutional completeness, from mosques to groceries and banks (Van der Veer 1994: 119).

References Alendris, A. 1988. To mionotiko zitima 1954–1987, Oi Ellinotourkikes Scheseis 1923–1987. Athens: Gnosi & ELIAMEP. Appadurai, A. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Campbell, J. and P. Sherrard. 1968. Modern Greece. London: Benn. Casanova, J. 2006. ‘Religion, European Secular Identities and European Integration’, in Bymes, Timothy A. and Peter J. Katzenstein (eds), Religion in an Expanding Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 65–92. Cavounidis, J. 2002. ‘Migration in Southern Europe and the Case of Greece’, International Migration 40 (1): 48–52. Cesari, J. 2005. ‘Mosque Conflicts in European Cities: Introduction’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 31 (6):1015–1024. Clogg, R. 2002. Minorities in Greece. Aspects of Plural Society. London: Hurst. Cohen, R. 1997. Global Diasporas: An Introduction. London: UCL Press. 34 See Casanova (2006).

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European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUCM). 2006. Muslims in the European Union: Discrimination and Islamophobia. Vienna: EUCM. Gaborieau, M. 1999. ‘Transnational Islamic Movements: Tablighi Jama’at in Politics?’ ISIM Newsletter 3:21. Hervieu-Léger, D. 2001. La religion en Miettes ou la Question des Sectes. Paris: Calmaan-Levy. Jorgen, N. 1987. ‘Searching for identity?, New Community 13 (3). Karakatsanis, N.M. and J. Swarts. 2007. ‘Attitudes toward the Xeno: Greece in Comparative Perspective’, Mediterranean Quarterly 18 (1): 113–134. Kepel, G. 1991. Les Banlieues de l’Islam: naissance d’une religion en France. Paris: Seuil King, R. 2000. ‘Southern Europe in the Changing Global Map of Migrations’, in King, R., G. Lazardis and C. Tsardanidis (eds), Eldorado or fortress? Migration in Southern Europe. London: Macmillan. Lewis, P. 1994. Islamic Britain: Politics and Identity among British Muslims. London and New York: I.B. Tauris. Masud, M.K. (ed.). 2000. Travellers in Faith: Studies of the Tablighi Jamaat as a Transnational Islamic Movement for Faith Renewal. Leiden: Brill. Metcalf, B.D. 2001. ‘“Traditionalist” Islamic activism: Deoband, Tablighis, and Talibs’, in Calhoun, C., P. Price and A. Timmer (eds), Understanding September 11. New York: The New Press, 53–66. ——. 1996. ‘New Medinas: the Tablighi Jamaat in America and Europe’, in Metcalf, B.D. (ed.), Making Muslim Space in North America and Europe. Berkeley: University of California Press, 110–27. ——. 1993. ‘Living Hadith in the Tablghi Jamaat’, Journal of Asian Studies 52: 584–608. ——. 1982. Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 1860–1900. Berkeley: University of California Press. Pieterse, J.N. 1997. ‘Travelling Islam: Mosques Without Minarets’, in Oncu, A. and P. Weyland (eds), Space, Culture and Power. London: Zed Books, 177–200. Riccio, B. 2001. ‘From “Ethnic Group” to “Transnational Community”? Senegalese Migrants’ Ambivalent Experiences and Multiple Trajectories’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 27 (4): 583–99. Sanyal, U. 1996. Devotional Islam and Politics in British India: Ahmed Raza Khan Barelwi and his Movement, 1870–1920. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Schiffauer, W. 2007. ‘From Exile to Diaspora: the Development of Transnational Islam in Europe’, in Azmah, A.A. and E. Fokas (eds). Islam in Europe, Diversity, Identity and Influence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 68–95. Slyomovics, S. 1996. ‘The Muslim World Day Parade and Storefront Mosques of New York City’, in Metcalf, B.D. (ed.), Making Muslim Space in North America and Europe. Berkeley: University of California Press, 204–216. Tonchev, P. (ed.). 2007. ‘Asian immigrants in Greece. Origins, Present and Perspectives’ at www.idec.gr/iier/new/asian_migrants_en.pdf (accessed December 2009). Triandafyllidou, A. and R. Gropas. 2009. ‘Migration, Identity and Citizenship. Approaches for Addressing Cultural Diversity in Greece’, Working Paper Available at http://emilie. eliamep.gr/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/wp6_emilie_greece_20-july-2009.pdf (Accessed January 2010). Tsitselikis K, 2004. ‘The Religion of Immigrants: The case of Muslims’, in Paul, M. and D. Christopoulos (eds), The Greece of Immigration. Athens, Review-KEMO, 267–302. Van der Veer, P. 1994. Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Waardenburg, J. 1988. ‘The Institutionalization of Islam in the Netherlands’, in Gerholm, T. and Y.G. Lithman (eds), The New Islamic Presence in Europe. London: Mansell, 8–31. Werbner, P. 2003. Pilgrims of Love. Anthropology of Global Sufi cult. London: Hurst & Co.

MULTIPLICITY OF WOMEN’S RELIGIOUS EXPRESSION: ALBANIAN MUSLIM WOMEN IN THE FORMER YUGOSLAV REPUBLIC OF MACEDONIA Nora Repo One of the oldest Islamic presences in Europe can be found in the Balkans, a fact that tends to remain unrecognized and forgotten. Religious diversity has been a Balkan reality for several centuries. In 2008 and 2009 I visited several times the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia,1 located in the heartland of the Balkans, and conducted a field study on the religiosity of Albanian Muslim women in the aim of completing a doctoral thesis in the subject of comparative religion.2 In addition to literature, the content of this article is based on the empirical material3 gathered during this time in the field. The fieldwork was carried out in the north-western parts of the country where the majority of the Albanian-speaking population lives, mainly in the capital Skopje and in the city of Gostivar and surrounding areas. My observations concerning women’s Islamic religiosity are principally based on thematically structured in-depth interviews with Albanian women. Nineteen women interviewed were between the ages of 22 and 60 and had somewhat variable backgrounds. Most of the women (13) lived in the capital area and five of them in the nearby villages. Two of the women lived in other Macedonian cities and four in other villages. Most of them (18) had high school education. Fifteen either aimed at a university degree or already had one. Nine of the informants stated that they were students and five of them were active in professional life outside the home. One 1 Henceforth referred to as the Republic of Macedonia. 2 The title of my thesis is An Islamic Mosaic - Women’s Identities in Transition. Albanian Muslim Women in the Former Yugoslavian Republic of Macedonia (2012). 3 The material consists of 22 interviews. Some were conducted with the assistance of an interpreter while others were conducted in English. I also kept a field diary during my stays. The material gathered is archived in the archives of Åbo Akademi University in Finland. Both men and women acted as informants in the aim of obtaining a wider understanding of the Islamic presence in the Republic of Macedonia as well as detailed information about Muslim women’s religiosity. The nineteen interviews conducted with the Albanian women were structured with the help of a questionnaire which developed throughout the research process.

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woman had her own firm and there was one pensioner, who had previously been active in working life. Three of the women were housewives. Until recently, the everyday religiosity of Muslim women has been relatively unexplored, but it is increasingly becoming a subject of rising scientific interest. Furthermore, women’s religious life and their general situation in the Balkans have, until now, inspired not very numerous researchers, who would have introduced their results to a wider international audience. In this article I aim to illustrate the polyphony of Albanian women’s Islam and the transition it is going through in the Republic of Macedonia, as well as to increase the understanding of the dynamics of different groupings within Macedonian society, which reflect the place and meaning given to religion by women in the interviews. As I understand it, the diversity of Albanian women’s religious expression in the Republic of Macedonia could be linked to several factors. These included traditionally strong regional characteristics and identities, which had a historical dimension, as well as the revival of religious life in the formerly socialist country – a phenomenon that has enabled greater contact with the global Umma. Political objectives might give meanings to issues of belonging to a certain group. The uncertain economic situation might create contexts in which economic needs and religious lives intertwine. Differences in religious expression could also be perceived when the educational background, the social environment (rural-urban) and the generation to which believers belong were observed more closely. In the sections that follow, I will first briefly present the societal background within which Islamic religiosity of the women is articulated. I will discuss the main influences the relatively recent changes in Islamic religious life have had on Islam in the Republic of Macedonia and particularly among Albanians. Secondly, I will demonstrate some of the mosaickind of ways of interpreting and living according to Islam that the Albanian women described, as well as how Muslim women negotiated different forms of Islamic occasions and spaces in the Republic of Macedonia. Societal Fractures In order to contextualize religiosity in the Republic of Macedonia, one needs to take a closer look at the fabric of society. The Balkan peninsula is one of the world’s ethnically, linguistically and religiously most com­ plicated zones (Poulton 1991: 1) and the population of the Republic of Macedonia, which comprises a mixture of ethnic and religious groups,



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corresponds well to this general view. Of the 2.022.5474 inhabitants in this relatively new democracy, approximately 64.18% speak Macedonian5 as their mother tongue and 25.17% are Albanian-speaking. Other languages spoken, according to the census of 2002,6 are Turkish, Serbian, Romani, Vlach and Bosnian (cf. Census 2002 Book XIII, 34). Macedonian uses the Cyrillic alphabet while most of the other linguistic groups employ the Latin one: two different alphabets are a part of everyday life in the country. This linguistic diversity overlaps with religious diversity: 64.78% of the population are Orthodox Christians, 33.33% are Muslims, and the census also shows a small number of Christians belonging to Catholic and Prot­ estant denominations.7 Altogether the country has 18 registered religious communities.8 The Republic of Macedonia withdrew from the disintegrating socialist Yugoslavia via referendum and declared independence in 1991. Two years later it was recognised by the international community under the provisional name of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (Poulton 2000: 177). Now a parliamentary democracy, it is struggling to improve and fortify its societal structure under challenging circumstances. These have both internal and external dimensions, which often are coloured by tense political relationships with most neighbouring countries (cf. for example Friedman 1997: 1444; Iseni 2007: 23–24; Rasku 2007; Tamminen 2011). The Macedonian gross national income per capita ranks among the lowest in Europe. A proportionally modest return on tax collection weakens the state’s administrative structures. The rate of unemployment is as high as 32.2% (2010) and in terms of work women remain in a weaker position than men (Macedonia in Figures 2010, 29 and 52). These figures do not include the impact of the grey economy and the support provided by family members living abroad, both of which have an influence on the Macedonian economy. However, visa restrictions limit the potential of inhabitants to work abroad and thus to improve their economic status (CIA’s World Fact Book 2011, Field diary). Approximately 31.1% of the Macedonian population live in poverty (Macedonia in Figures 2010, 54) and the predictions of the 4 Population estimates in 2011 are 2.058.539 (Website of the State Statistical Office accessed the 28 August 2012). 5 Referring here to the South Slavic language. 6 There are differing opinions on the accuracy of this census, for instance regarding the number of Albanian-speaking inhabitants and the visibility of minorities. 7 Catholics 0.35%, Protestants, 0.03% and other 1.52% (Census 2002 Book X, 335). 8 Most likely there are other groups aiming to become recognised religious communities whose applications are being reviewed. This development is a consequence of the recent changes in the laws on religious communities.

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ramifications of the 2008 financial crisis on the Balkan area have not been positive (cf. Le Courrier des Balkans 2009a). Furthermore, according to Savka Todorovska, the period of societal transition in the Republic of Macedonia has had a negative impact on women’s position. Changes have adversely affected their economic situation, their employment, and evaluation of their work (Todorovska 2009). During recent years the status of minorities in the Republic of Macedonia, and particularly that of the Albanian minority, has improved. This has been supported by the conditions of the internationally-brokered Ohrid Framework Agreement (see for example Ragaru 2008: 48; and Report by the Commissioner for Human Rights 2008: 21–22) that was signed in 2001 to end the armed conflict between Albanians and Macedonians, the two biggest ethnic groups in the country (Brunnbauer 2002: 2–4). During the whole period of independence the Macedonian politics certainly have not lacked intensity, and most political parties seem to be formed around a particular “ethnic soul”.9 The influence of politics can be felt at all societal levels and political issues tend to define the individual’s place in society and his/her opportunities for employment and social ascent. Corruption poses problems and people often express frustration when their voices are not being heard in the societal discussion (Field diary). The dis­cernible ­distrust between average citizens and the political elites is probably largely due to the nature of Macedonian political life, which since 1991 has been des­ cribed as “a mixture of clientelism and community-based ­politics” (Ragaru 2008: 48). Also, the social security system remains modest, and issues around human rights and their implementation are topics of continuous discussion (Field diary, Report by the Commissioner for Human Rights 2008). Concerning the effect that politics have on interethnic relations, Nadège Ragaru states: In order to create legitimacy, politicians are often tempted to shift poli­ tical  debates from social and economic issues – over which they have only limited leverage – toward symbolic and national issues that can offer easy political gains. Sadly enough, interethnic relations are held hostage to these political strategies, thus fuelling both interethnic mistrust and political frustrations in all communities (Ragaru 2008: 48–49).

These societal situations in the Republic of Macedonia could be placed in the prolonged continuum, originating since the 1980s, which has been 9 Friedman notes that in 1990 the Socialist Republic of Macedonia was the only Yugoslav republic in which the ethnic-based parties did not gain an electoral majority (Friedman 1997: 1444). Writing in 2007, Iseni states that all of the ethnic groups, with the partly exception of the Macedonians, had created political organisations with ethnic bases (Iseni 2007: 24). This has changed little ever since.



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characterized by two main features: an affirmation of national identities and the authorities’ attempts to regain control (cf. Clayer 2001: 185–186). In the framework of the democratization process in the Republic of Macedonia, Nathalie Clayer (2001: 191–192) discusses centripetal currents (creating internal cohesion within groups) and centrifugal currents (separating groups from each other within a larger community) that she could discern within the Macedonian Muslim community,10 Observing the societal framework as a whole, one could assume that similar kinds of currents might also be identified in relations between other sections of Mace­ donian  society beyond the religious dimension, generating antagonisms and dynamically changing loyalties between various entities and groups. These tendencies seem to be particularly nourished by the ongoing mutual distrust between groups, which often has ethnic basis. There seems to be an important lack of concrete contacts between different societal groups. For instance certain geographical or residential areas might be ethnically relatively homogeneous (Field diary). Ragaru states that although interethnic relations have gradually recovered since the conflict in 2000–2001 the “social distance between communities has on average increased” (Ragaru 2008: 42). A general lack of solidarity could also be observed between different religious groups, of which especially the smaller groups might suffer. Adding to the equation are the differing interpretations and understandings of historical events and of the numerous conflicts that have taken place in the region that the groups have. Collective and private memories might reinforce the perceptions of threats towards the group’s cultural or religious existence and identity. Insufficient attention directed to the rights of all minorities in legislative terms, as well as the pursuit of personal or financial gain within administrative structures, help to maintain tense relations between groups (cf. Brunnbauer 2002; Field diary; Lehti 1999). The above mentioned factors all contribute to a situation in which cohesion within groups increases and distances between groups take on greater importance. The antagonism that can be observed between Macedonians and Albanians is probably the most significant (cf. Ragaru 2008: 42), but other ethnic groups are affected as well. Bridging attempts are slowed

10 Clayer sees these currents as arising from the impact of the formation of new groups and movements within Macedonian Islam, and of the change in administrative staff of the Islamic Religious Community, the umbrella organization gathering all the Macedonian Muslims. The new leaders have tended to exercise a more centralized control over religious activities, and this has occasionally caused disagreements, which have scattered the Macedonian Muslim community (Clayer 2001: 192).

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by the denial of the existence of recognized Macedonian (Slavic) cultural, linguistic and religious identities in international as well as national contexts.11 The characteristics of the Albanian community also play a part in this process. From the outside, it might often seem closed-off and patriarchal.12 Also the more important urbanization of the Macedonian-speaking population creates a disparity vis-à-vis the more rurally emphasized lifestyles of many Albanians. However, concrete distances between cities and villages in the Republic of Macedonia can be modest. Thus, urban and rural spheres are more and more drawn together, when people for instance live in the villages and work in the cities. As an indicator of group relations one can observe the number of mixed marriages, which remains small and endogamy among Albanians, which is traditionally high (cf. Brunnbauer 2002: 14–15). The status of other minorities has often been left in the background while negotiations concerning the rights of the two largest ethnic groups have taken place.13 The relationship between Muslims and Christians in the Republic of Macedonia can be placed both in a local and a global context. Albanians are mainly Muslim, while Macedonians are Orthodox Christian. The global conflict between Islam and the “West” influences the positions taken locally by different actors. On one side there is a desire to prove the “European nature” of Balkan populations; on the other, there can be nostalgia for the Ottoman era. Islam might also be seen as a disruptive element, impeding societal development.14 New alignments in the relationship between the religious and the national (or nationalist) identities have also surfaced in the organisational structures and politics of the Islamic Religious Com­ munity in the Republic of Macedonia. This umbrella organisation that gathers all the Macedonian Muslims has, from time to time, displayed a tendency to “Albanize” the religious life of Muslims in the Republic of Macedonia (see for example Clayer 2001).15 Albanians form a clear majority 11 I am referring here to the statements concerning the artificial nature of Macedonian identity (Field diary). 12 This patriarchal element is however common across the entiere western Balkans. 13 Many of the Albanian women I interviewed repeatedly expressed their concern for the rights of Roma. 14 This is an opinion that is often more discernible among Christians. Clayer notes that this opinion can be also to some extent shared by Albanians, particularly in Albania and in the Republic of Kosovo (Clayer 2001: 207). 15 Bougarel explains this phenomenon through a desire to “re-Islamise” Balkan Muslims, fortifying the link between Islam and national identity and leading to a certain kind of “nationalisation” of Islam. He also highlights the work needed to overcome the ethnic divisions among Balkan Muslims (Bougarel 2005: 14).



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of the Muslim population. However, to improve the recognition given to the smaller Muslims groups, both linguistic and ethnic, might help to prevent possible tensions. This also relates to the doctrinal diversity that can be discerned within the Macedonian Muslim community. Questions linked to belonging and identity play a central role in the process of societal re-organization. Societal fractures and a lack of broader cohesion might offer fertile ground for various extreme ideologies (such as nationalist, religious fundamentalist, or pro- or anti-Western), which mainly tend to advance quick and often short-sighted solutions to complex problems. If astutely applied, religion could contribute to healing infected relationships instead of widening gaps between different societal groups. In the next section, I discuss the “return of Islam” and the possible effects it has had on the everyday religiosity of Albanian women. Albanian Women and the “Return of Islam” Albanians form the majority of Balkan Muslims. Their number is estimated to be between 4 and 4.5 million in the peninsula, with most living in Albania, Montenegro, the Republic of Kosovo and in the northwestern parts of the Republic of Macedonia16 (Bougarel and Clayer 2001: 18).17 The end of socialist Yugoslavia meant a shift not only in the relationships between Islam and different national identities but also in the ­relationships between religious and political actors (cf. Bougarel and Clayer  2001:  41). During the decades following the collapse of the communist regimes, Muslim populations in the Balkans have changed from being non-­sovereign religious minorities to autonomous political actors. Xavier Bougarel argues that this change has resulted in political parties “that represent these populations and voice their national claims, and lead to a growing ‘­nationalisation’ of Islam and Islamic religious institutions. Together with the restoration of religious freedoms, this political and national awakening of the Balkan Muslims explains the increased visibility of the Islam in the regions” (Bougarel 2005: 26). However, religious freedom in socialist Yugo­slavia did increase to some extent over the years for instance due to the changes 16 Greece also has an Albanian minority. 17 Majority of Albanians in the Republic of Macedonia are Muslim and a small number of them are Christian (Bougarel and Clayer 2001, 18). There are a number of Roman Catholics living in the capital, Skopje, and a few Orthodox villages can be found around lake Ohrid in the south (Poulton 2000: 82). The Macedonian Muslim community also encompasses Bosnians and Macedonian Muslims (also known as Torbeshis or Pomaks) as well as Turks and Roma (Clayer 2001: 179).

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in legislation and it could therefore be said that Islam started already to ­experience a certain revival during this period (see for example Popovic 1986). In addition, Islamic buildings remained a part of the Yugoslav ­landscape despite socialist anti-religious policies. Bashkim Iseni attributes the increasing interest in Islam to several factors: historical facts, the ­general political situation, the corruption of the political elite, the poverty of the Muslim populations, and the relations between governmental actors and religious communities. Reinforcing antagonisms bet­ween different groups have been favourable to a withdrawal of the Muslims into their own group(s) in terms of both religion and identity (Iseni 2007: 29, 31 and 33). In common with many other people in the Balkans, a number of Albanians and their families have experienced life as part of a diaspora outside the Republic of Macedonia. In my opinion, this could affect responses to questions of identity, and might increase the inclination towards isolation. When against the challenge of integrating into a foreign environment, one’s own cultural heritage may become more central. In parallel, however, life in diaspora might increase knowledge of different social environments and introduce new elements to Albanian culture. All of these factors were certainly important, but they did not exhaustively explain all the choices made and positions taken by Albanian women in relation to questions of identity or religious experiences on the individual level. The majority of Muslims in the Republic of Macedonia are Sunnites who belong to the Hanafi school of Islamic legal thought.18 The most important of the tarikats19 in the Macedonian territory is the Bektashi Community. Bektashi tarikat has a particularly close relationship with Albania, where the world centre of the community is situated. The Islamic presence in the Republic of Macedonia is additionally diversified by the relatively small number of believers belonging to other tarikats like the Halveti, the Rufa’i and the Sa’di,20 as well as the Holy Seat and Crown of Erenler Tarikat Religious Community, the latter bringing together mainly Romani-speaking 18 The globally most widespread Islamic school of law. 19 Tarikat is a Turkish form of the Arabic word tariqah, which means a way, path or method. Tarikat, which can also be understood to mean an order or a brotherhood, is usually considered to form part of the inner mystical dimension of Islam, tasawwuf, also known as Sufism. 20 Popovic mentions also the presence of Melami centres in the Macedonian territory in 1989 (Popovic 2002: 7). In the current circumstances, very probably there also is a small number of members belonging to the Naqshbandi tarikat and the Shi’ite Ehli Beyt association (Field diary; cf. Popovic 2002: 13–14).



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believers. Relationships with the Muslim communities in neighbouring countries are facilitated by lower language barriers and similarities in cultural heritage as well as due to similar developments that one can observe on their respective religious fields since the beginning of the societal transition (cf. Clayer 2001: 227; Bougarel and Iseni 2007: 9–12; Field diary). In addition, there are new religious actors and organizations which have entered the country or been established after 1991 and which all tend to bring with them their own Islam (cf. Clayer 2001). The traditional mixture of Islamic influences that come together on Macedonian soil forms an interesting balance. In the predominantly Sunni environment the most important minority is constituted by the Bektashi tarikat, which respects the 12 Imams; a characteristic that can be found in Shi’a Islam. While the Sunni tradition often underlines the significance of religious practice, the Bektashi way tends to emphasize the responsibility of the individual in leading a spiritual life. Conversely, religious hierarchy has less importance in Sunni understanding, while shaykhs or babas21 have a central role as spiritual guides in the Bektashi path (Field diary). Most of the Albanian women interviewed were Sunnites of the Hanafi school. Two had a mixed background, meaning that some close family members were either Christian or Bektashi,22 while a further two came from Sunni families but had discovered the Bektashi path later in their lives. The younger women seemed to be better informed about religious issues and expressed enthusiasm for continuing to learn more. Most of the women (15) defined their families as being religious. Two considered their families very religious, while one woman’s family was not very interested in religious issues. One woman described the religiosity of her family by stating “we believe in God”. In a Macedonian context where the traditional religious institutions are to some extent challenged by the impact of new religious actors and the “nationalisation” of Islam, religious practice is becoming more diversified. Bougarel thinks that these developments have however neither increased people’s religiosity in general nor returned to the Islamic religious institutions their historical structuring role (Bougarel 2005: 26). I would, nonetheless, challenge this view as most of the women I interviewed felt that interest in Islam in the Republic of Macedonia is increasing. Even though 21 Baba is a Turkish word for father. It is a title that is used for spiritual leaders in some of the tarikats, particularly among the Bektashis. Shaykh is an Arabic word that means a senior or elder. Older spiritual leaders in the tarikats are called shaykhs. 22 Meaning here grandparents, parents or spouse.

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religion often remains a communitarian expression, it is currently increasingly lived and expressed on the individual level in the Balkan states (Bougarel and Clayer 2001: 42). As an example we can observe what one of the Albanian women said about her understanding of religion as more private and individual in nature: NR [Nora Repo]: So would you consider religion or religiosity to be a private  matter or a collective collective factor? Zahra: I think it’s a private matter. NR: And could you tell me like why do you consider it that it is that way do  you have an opinion about that why do you feel it’s that way? Zahra: Because I I don’t need pressure from anybody […] it’s my private aa  world and aa how I feel […] maybe collectively… NR: Hmh [nodding]. Zahra: But I don’t agree with everything okay? If they tell me something this  this this, I have my own things. NR: Hmh. Zahra: Like I said I am not too religious okay? I believe in God, I believe in lot  of things in our religion but aa, I still have my own private thoughts. (Zahra, 59 years old, village dweller)

The fifty-nine-year old Zahra who lived in a village clearly expressed her positioning towards “mainstream” Islam: she had her own opinions and thoughts regarding religion and could not be dictated to from the outside on how to be and to behave. She even used the word “pressure” when referring to collective religiosity. Islam seemed to be an important part of Zahra’s life and she wished to keep it mainly private. Zahra had also lived elsewhere and expressed the feeling of “being different” in relation to the larger Macedonian Muslim community. Additionally she had a mixed religious background, which might influence the way she positioned herself to religious issues. Thus, all of these aspects most likely reflected on her answers and on her identity negotiations. The twenty-four-year old Mahabba’s view on the same issue was relatively opposite as she thought that religion was offered and accessible to all people equally and therefore it could not be a private issue. She also pointed out, when asked about the differences in religious practice between the generations, the significance that each person’s own interpretation of religious literature had on their understanding of religious issues: Mahabba [through an interpreter]: She [Mahabba] thinks that there are such a different ways of percepting and treating the religion and aa she [Mahabba] says so ‘cause there are different kind of readers and literature and everyone can read their own way and permeate it in their own way ‘cause everyone has a different kind of perceptions and a standing and thoughts. (Mahabba, 24 years old, village dweller)



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For younger Mahabba, identification with a larger Islamic community might be of greater importance than to Zahra. In her view Islam was given to everyone equally and everyone could make his or her own interpretations how to live according to it. However, despite the emphasis Mahabba put on the collective aspect of religion, the individual view was acknowledged and given room in her interpretation. The richness of the Islamic religious tradition offers believers a variety of different interpretative opportunities. Within the Albanian community in the Republic of Macedonia, the role of religion is being re-defined and discussed. Clayer distinguishes between three ideological orientations that have molded these processes: 1) the rejection of Islam, or occidentalisation, which aims at promoting the originally Christian roots of the Albanian population and hence its European nature; 2) a pluriconfessional ori­entation which seeks to emphasize the multi-confessional and tolerant nature of the Albanian population, in which religious identity is considered secondary to the national identity and which also tends to promote the nation’s European qualities; and 3) an Islamo-nationalist orientation. In this third orientation, the turn to Islam (or Islamisation) of the Albanian popu­ lation  in the Ottoman and even pre-Ottoman period is understood as a conscious attempt to protect the national identity against external influences (for example Slavic or Greek) as well as an intellectual move towards the Islamic culture, which at that time represented progress (Clayer 2001: 228–232). Furthermore, Clayer sees Albanian Muslims in the Republic of Macedonia as belonging to three distinct categories: 1) older or elderly village-dwellers, who have a strong religious identity, expressed through traditional Islamic ways of living that are linked with Kanun23 legislation; 2) the first generations of the communist period, who are partly urbanised and who have internalized Islam as a part of their cultural heritage even though it may be less widely practiced; and 3) younger, highly urbanised generations who are influenced by nationalist ideology with atheist features. Religious consciousness and practice in this group is weaker, while the sense of national identity is stronger (Clayer 2001: 208). Each of these ways of expressing religious identity, and their repercussions, as results of Islamic religious life’s dynamic interaction with other societal elements and individual perspectives in contemporary circumstances could be met

23 The most famous customary law, Kanun, among the Albanians was that of the Code of Law of Lekë Dukagjini, Kanuni i Lekë Dukagjinit, which dates from the 14th century (Castellan 2002, 34).

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in my interview material. However, the majority of Muslim women I spoke to had liberal, reformist or more individual24 views on Islam. These women often expressed contentment and pride of their religious background. They frequently tended to give time and attention in order to gain better knowledge of Islam and sought to find new ways of articulating the religious with contemporary life. Altogether, each of the developments summarised above have led to contrasting interpretations and ways of living according to Islam in the Republic of Macedonia. In the next section I will discuss what kinds of meaningful ways the Albanian women had to express their Islamic religiosity. Multiplicity of Albanian Women’s Religious Expression The conditions under which I conducted my field study were influenced by the global polarization between Islam and the “West”, and the Albanian women often addressed and reflected on widespread misinterpretations of the “true essence of Islam” in the discussions we had. The women also expressed concerns as for giving me the right information about Islam in order to avoid possible misunderstandings. The reigning “Western” stereotype of an oppressed Muslim woman was clearly contradicted by the people I met in the field. The Albanian women were mostly satisfied and happy with their lives despite the demanding overarching societal framework. However, they also emphasised women’s issues in the Macedonian society and within the Albanian community as deserving more attention. The women also elaborated on the human rights granted to everyone under Islam, regardless of gender. From a “Western” perspective it might be harder to understand the gender complementarity that is often considered part of the Islamic way of living, and which to some extent differentiates the expectations placed on men and women. Most of the ways of religious practice described by the women followed the mainstream Islamic tradition; some of them were more influenced by local customs and traditions than others. There was a consciousness of gender differences in terms of women being less visible in public places of religious practice, particularly in the mosques: women seemed to frequent

24 Some of these views might even be interpreted as secularized.



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the tekkes25 more often, for example when they visited türbes26 or came to meet with the baba. Men and women had slightly different roles in the Islamic transition rituals and religious celebrations and there was some divergence in everyday religious praxis, such as small differences in prayer positions and clothing and possibilities of using time, described all in all as relatively marginal by the women I spoke with. The Albanian women also thought that women had an important role in the upbringing and religious education of children. It is easy to assume that one nation shares one common religiosity, However, in the case of Albanians this risks first of all ignoring the impact of historical and political developments, which have differed in the each of the Balkan states, where Albanian population lives. Albanians in the Republic of Macedonia are often described as more traditional and as having stronger links to religion, characteristics that have become more clearly discernible in recent years (cf. Iseni 2007: 26 and 33). Hawwa, a twenty-twoyear-old university student who lived in a city, discussed the importance of Albanian cultural tradition: Hawwa [through an interpreter]: […] It’s a characteristic for the Albanians in  Macedonia […]. NR: Hmh [nodding]. Hawwa: That they do keep towards the traditional things […] the Albanian  population is aa people that are the mostly towards traditional ways. NR: Hmh. Hawwa: And aa they are so strongly keep[ing] for that tradition […] usually  there are Albanians that go towards tradition being an Albanian mostly  than a Muslim. NR: Hmh. Hawwa: So it’s not a society or a community where should be like a Muslim  and then Albanian I would like to be like that but for now it’s not like that  it’s more Albanian than Muslim. (Hawwa, 22 years old, city dweller)

For Hawwa, being a Muslim seemed to be more important than being an Albanian. From her perspective the traditional ways of life in the Republic of Macedonia fortified the Albanian rather than the Muslim identity. She however appreciated more her Muslim identity than the Albanian one and wished that the general emphasis on identities would change to the same direction. 25 Turkish word for an establishment that shelters the activities of a tarikat. 26 Turkish word for the tomb of an often spiritually remarkable person. These sites are believed to have a special spiritual power known as baraka.

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In general references to Islam in Albanian nationalist ideology remain marginal (cf. Bougarel and Iseni 2007: 7). More traditional ways of living in the Republic of Macedonia can be at least partly traced back to historically important regionality.27 Furthermore, Balkan geography which has made communications difficult has been favourable to the birth of compartmentalised rather than unified communities (Poulton 2000: 8–9). Later on, in Yugoslavia, increasing national awareness both among the different ­populations and at the political level resulted in a three-tier system of national rights for: (1) nations of Yugoslavia, (2) nationalities of Yugoslavia and (3) other nationalities and ethnic groups. The system introduced new ways for defining the relations and borders between different groups and comunities (cf. Poulton 1991: 5). In the interviews, women often highlighted the all-encompassing nature of religion, which permeated their lives extensively. Gender identity was repeatedly seen as less meaningful than religious identity. For many of the women, religious values formed an important moral basis for life. How this was enacted in everyday life varied. Social responsibility and family relationships were often mentioned as an important part of being a good Muslim and a believer extended with good and correct behaviour, which took into consideration others and their needs. The importance of Islamic religious praxis was underlined in the material, for instance by Hawwa who stated: Hawwa [through an interpreter]: […] Islam Islamic religion I don’t know for  the others she [Hawwa] says. NR: Hmh. Hawwa: If you just believe and you don’t do practice it has no understanding  it’s not meaningful. (Hawwa, 22 years old, city dweller)

In Hawwa’s opinion it was not enough simply to believe in order to be a Muslim; one needed also to act according to one’s faith. The Albanian women mentioned a range of activities, events and values as being parts of their Islamic ways of living, such as praying, fasting, observing dietary 27 Ethnic identity has tended to be seen as particularly important, but it seems that during the Ottoman period other expressions of belonging, for example regional allegiances, were more significant (Clayer 2007: 23–25 and 29 and 31). For the Albanians who were members of different confessional groups and whose language longed for a stronger literary heritage, the sense of belonging to one family and lineage has been very significant. Clayer describes this system as patriarchal, patrilinear and patrilocal (Clayer 2007: 23 and 25). The regional dimension has also been meaningful as a contact surface between the individual and society (Clayer 2007: 30).



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restrictions, behaving correctly towards others and helping them, avoiding conflicts or, if conflicts would occur, trying to solve them, respect for older people, for parents and between spouses, religious celebrations, rites of transition, honesty, and dressing appropriately. Only two of the women I talked to wore a veil. Muslim women in the Republic of Macedonia tend to “dress decently” and avoid wearing garments such as miniskirts or t-shirts without sleeves or with open necklines. Some feel a calling to wear the veil, when others are more comfortable also wearing a dress that covers their figure. To emphasize their femininity, and perhaps also in order to observe better Islamic recommendations, some women prefer to wear a long skirt rather than trousers possibly to add an emphasis on the difference between the genders. The veil can also be worn as a statement of identity and of belonging, or be a traditional choice. Different ways of dressing can however also mirror the tensions between different ethnic groups in society, as well as the wider polarisation between Islam and the West. For example, one of the interviewees thought that women might experience social pressure if they chose to wear the veil. Twenty-two-year-old university student Nuriya, who lived in a village, said: Nuriya [through an interpreter]: She [Nuriya] says I would like to put the veil  to to wear the veil you know [interpreter smiles with the interviewee]. NR: Hmh, and now you cannot do that? Nuriya in English: You can do not do that? […] Nuriya [through an interpreter]: What she [Nuriya] speaks for fakultet  [Albanian word for faculty] [smiles] […] she she [Nuriya] can’t […] ‘cause if  she [Nuriya] goes like that in faculty they’ll do problem to her. NR: Okay. Nuriya: It will be a problem for her [for Nuriya]. NR: Okay. [Interpreter starts to ask the following question] NR: I would like to know like why would it be a problem? [Smiles]. […] Nuriya: She [Nuriya] thinks that the professors will offend something or say  something to her insult her in any kind of way. NR: Hmh. Nuriya: And that they will make a problem with her marks. (Nuriya, 22 years old, village dweller)

Thus, Nuriya doubted that a visible expression of her Muslim identity would be badly received in a non-Muslim environment and affect her results at the university. The issues of religious prejudice and stereotyping were also raised by another university student Hawwa:

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nora repo Hawwa [through an interpreter]: […] Because I am a Muslim they always have prejudices […] I would like to change like a to have a respect for ev for any religion. NR: Hmh. Hawwa: To aa erase those stereotypes and prejudices about my religion and so on NR: Hmh. Hawwa: […] To have […] to have the two ways respect between the religious different kind of religions […]. (Hawwa, 22 years old, city dweller)

These excerpts illustrate the uncomfortable situations that these women had faced, or expected to face, in response to their faith or to particular public manifestations of it, as with the veil in Nuriya’s case, in a predominantly non-Muslim environment. Some of the Albanian women chose not to pay too much attention to expectations pertaining either to clothing or to other religious duties such as praying or fasting. Conventions that were seen as being dictated by tradition more than by religion itself, such as women’s possibilities to leave the household or to receive inheritance, could be experienced as limiting. However, also Islam had been used to justify factors that narrowed the lives of women, for instance limiting their access to education and their possibilities to work. Thirty-five-year-old Nawal, who lived in a city and had a university degree and an active working life told about her experiences: Nawal: It is expected from me to to start praying [smiles] too go covered NR: Hmh. Nawal: With shamija [a small white scarf that covers most of the hair and is usually worn at home] as they call it not to go dressed like this [points at the clothes she is wearing and laughs]. NR: Hmh, okay [smiles]. Nawal: And aa to stay at home… NR: Hmh. Nawal: Not to work but I am not such like […] Nawal: I would like to change a lots of things. NR: Hmh. Nawal: You know the women should have more rights. NR: For the? Like? Nawal: Like aa when I’m I’m I’m giving you an example at my house [a comment in Albanian] if I am driving the car… NR: Hmh. Nawal: And I am working from eight ‘til four in the afternoon. NR: Hmh. Nawal: My mother-in-law is saying “well you are working so long”.



multiplicity of women’s religious expression193 NR: Hmh. Nawal: [lowers her voice] Why should people think of that it’s not good. NR: Hm. Nawal: I worked ‘til that time, they should respect me that I’m working ‘til that  time. NR: Hmh. Nawal: You know or for example if I wanna go out when I think that I I need  to go out and someone is arguing at home why she is going out, the  women[s] are not going out each time for example twice a day. NR: Hmh. Nawal: If you go out at work and come at home you shouldn’t go outside  [laughs] any more […] [Interviewee talks about the qualities the persons who give religious education  or religious role models should have] Nawal: I can take a man as an example. NR: Hmh. Nawal: He is teaching all the life. NR: Hmh. Nawal: You know. NR: Hmh [smiles]. Nawal: So what is which is positive. NR: Hm. Nawal: It doesn’t matter to which religion belongs. NR: Hm. Nawal: I mean you can take it [lowers her voice]… NR: Hmh. Nawal: For something which is positive but something which is negative even  if it belongs to your religion it’s not necessary to be accepted. (Nawal, 35 years old, city dweller)

Nawal’s comments highlight how some Albanian women might invoke pressure or censure from their communities or families as a result of certain activities or choices: leaving the circle of the household, having contacts with the opposite gender, as well as issues linked to clothing and religious practice. Nawal, who described herself as a believer and as religiously liberal, distanced herself from the stricter religious interpretations and reserved space for her own views about Islam and having a Muslim identity. In her opinion, the potentially negative aspects of religion could be given less or even no emphasis at all. Furthermore, this excerpt from Nawal’s interview shows opinion differing across age groups, demonstrating that representatives of older generations might be more conservative in certain respects. The twenty-four-year-old Fatima was a university student and a village dweller. She saw herself as a believer, a Muslim following the Hanafi school and a searcher for the truth. In her interview Fatima said that Muslim

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women within the Albanian community were not given the rights accorded to them by Islam. For this reason, she did not have much respect for the Albanian cultural traditions. This statement could be seen as striving to create a clearer division between Albanian tradition and religion in order to enlarge women’s sphere of influence. In this sense, Ann Sofie Roald’s obser­vation that “the religious and ethnic identity cannot be isolated from other social influences” and that “claims to ethnicity, religiosity and gender might become means of expressing frustrations with prevailing cultural norms” is at least partly applicable in the Macedonian context (Roald 2001: 9). Islam as a personal choice often seemed to inspire and strengthen the spiritual well-being of the women interviewed. There were also rising amount of possibilities to improve knowledge the women had regarding Islam and religious values could contribute in giving more space and opportunies for the Albanian women than what the cultural context did. The twenty-four-year-old university student Mahabba thought about the situation: Mahabba [through an interpreter]: […] Aa it’s aa she [Mahabba] says that aa  it only the position and the placement that the Islam gives to the Muslim  female. NR: Hmh. Mahabba: It’s like that nobody else can give it to you […] it’s that high position  that gives the religion itself […] even that Islam gives that this kind of  placement and aa aa aa position to the female it’s not that ev in everyday  life that is practiced. NR: Hmh. Mahabba: It’s not that female today it has that position. NR: Okay. Mahabba: That it it should be by religion. (Mahabba, 24 years old, village dweller)

For Mahabba, who described herself as a Muslim and a believer, Islam seemed to represent the ideal, which did not necessarily materialize in everyday life in the Republic of Macedonia. By contrast, the fifty-nine-yearold Zahra saw changes as already having occurred: NR: What is it like to be an Albanian woman in the society you live in? In  Macedonia. Zahra: They are very free most of them aa lots of them they have educated  themselves we still have some aa old fashioned but, who don’t send the  kids to school, the Albanian woman has very big role today in our society  they have their own voice. (Zahra, 59 years old, village dweller)

Zahra regarded women’s lack of education or a negative attitude towards learning as a sign of an old-fashioned way of thought. She thought that the



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Albanian women of today were much better off than they were before. The thirty-year-old Aida who was highly educated and lived in a city saw the general situation of women in the Republic of Macedonia more critically: Aida: […] Here somebody needs to do something for the women. NR: Hm. Aida: Most of the families are, the womens are not… NR: Hm. Aida: Are not respected at all, they don’t even attend to school, they don’t get  education. NR: Hm. Aida: They only stay at home, raise childrens and for me personally not, but  eighty percent of the women, not eighty, okay sixty percent, of the women  are like that. NR: Hmh. Aida: All sit home, you haven’t seen their face even [smiles]. (Aida, 30 years old, city dweller)

Aida strongly did not feel that she herself belonged to or identified with the women she described as having limited rights and opportunities. She also emphasized the question of education. Aida saw many Albanian women’s lives as being constrained within the walls of the household, where their only task was to raise children. This picture corresponded well to the general perceptions the Macedonian (Slavic) population might have had regarding the Albanian community, albeit from a distance. However, Aida was the only woman among the interviewees to accentuate  this perspective. This may have been due to her own dissatisfaction  with  the general situation, or to her knowing more about the situations of other women. Alternatively she perhaps wished to make an important distinction between the women she described and the social group to which she felt she belonged, when distancing herself with her remarks. In the next section I elaborate how the Albanian women negotiated of different forms of Islamic occasions and spaces. Women Negotiating of Different Forms of Islamic Occasions and Spaces Important societal changes have seemingly taken space also in the more personal ways of leading an Islamic life in the Macedonian society. In a two-way manner religion seems now to be breaking out of the individual sphere where it was mainly placed during the socialist era, when the obligations to the state were often put before religious obligations even by the religious authorities. Islamic religious practice is reaching now the public

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sphere more visibly and Islam has become more perceivable within it. (Cf. Bougarel and Iseni 2007, 6; Bringa 1995, 199–200) At the same time interpretations of and decisions regarding Islam and Islamic ways of living are taken at more individual level. Muslims in the Republic of Macedonia seem to be renegotiating their position in the society in many ways and Muslim women can now for instance wear a scarf in photos for their I.D. papers (Field diary; Le Courrier des Balkans 2009b). Many of the women interviewed expressed a wish for religious practice to be given more space in everyday life and in the public sphere for instance through establishment of prayer rooms at universities. Until recently, Muslim women’s religious practice has tended to be located more in the private sphere, but changes have occurred too. The mosques, which have predominantly been spaces for men, have started to receive more female believers. Hawwa and Nuriya described their situations: Hawwa [through an interpreter]: As a praying doing a namaz. NR: Hmh. Hawwa: It’s a essential thing of being a Muslim so I usually do that prayer at  home aa it’s not that it’s we have mosques for praying but still I would like  to change the […] I I still haven’t come to the point […] to to push down to  press down those barriers like the mentality. NR: Hmh. Hawwa: Of our people that it’s not how to say how to describe it it’s not a  shame to go the the female to the mosque to pray but I still have not come  to the point to go at the mosque and pray together with them […] (Hawwa, 22 years old, city dweller) [Question concerns the places linked to the religious practice and the visiting  frequency] Nuriya [through an interpreter]: She [Nuriya] says the mosque. NR: Hmh. Nuriya: Where she [Nuriya] feels best when she prays […] and home […] and  at home she says the best. NR: Hmh. Nuriya: And sometimes here [space where the interview was taking place]  when she [Nuriya] has no time to go like home. NR: Yeah. Nuriya: […] At the mosque rarely at […] at home and here most of all  everyday. NR: Okay. (Nuriya, 22 years old, village dweller)

Hawwa thought that the local mentality to some extent inhibited women’s access to public Islamic spaces and she wished that she herself could act differently and play a part in changing this. For Nuriya, the mosque had



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particular significance as a space for religious practice and she had a special feeling when she prayed there. However she visited the mosque rarely and prayed more often at home or on the premises of an NGO. Hence, despite the wishes of these young women to frequent the mosque more regularly they still seemed to hesitate doing so. In terms of religious education, Albanian women studied issues related to Islam in mektebs (Islamic primary education), medreses (Islamic high school), at an Islamic faculty or through their participation in dars (religious lectures). Women received some of this education, particularly the mektebs and dars, at the mosques. It was often delivered on a voluntary basis, which meant that both the quantity and quality could vary. Overall, however, a greater range of religious activities was offered to Muslim women than there had been previously. (Field diary; Interviews). The building of new mosques in the Republic of Macedonia has increased the opportunity to hear the ezan, prayer call, in areas where it was previously unknown and to receive Islamic education in new locations. Islamic bookshops have also become more common and a variety of publications are available in local languages, as a result of work done by local publishers with Islamic values and foreign financial support. The religion’s regaining of public space can also be observed in radio and TV programs, although these are still quite small in number, as well as in the public holiday calendar (Field diary; cf. Clayer 2001: 198). Organizations with Islamic backgrounds or values could have women’s sections to arrange different activities for Muslim women, like lectures or charity events. The growing interest in religion and religious education had also inspired the Islamic Religious Community in the Republic of Macedonia to open new medreses for girls in Gostivar, Skopje and Tetovo (Field diary). Religious education was also implemented in primary schools in 2008, but this was stopped one year later due to a petition concerning its unconstitutional nature (Le Courrier des Balkans 2009c). According to some women, there had been a general improvement in attitudes towards higher education for Albanian women over the last decades within the Albanian community. Twenty-five-year-old university student Zainab, who lived in a city but was originally from a village, thought this might be connected either to the Albanian population being better integrated into Macedonian society or to the influence of experiences that Albanians had had while working abroad. Abroad the Albanian diasporic communities had seen women participating in working life on an equal footing with men, and that in order to do so women had to be educated. (Zainab). To some extent, this shift might also be inspired by the Islamic worldview and

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by the Qur’an that is interpreted to place much weight on the importance of learning. The reigning separation between religion and politics in Macedonian society – despite that religious and political rhetorics occasionally intertwined – was evoked by the Albanian women in the interviews. Hawwa for instance stated that: Hawwa [through an interpreter]: […] The politicians are not religious at all. NR: Hmh [smiles]. Hawwa: At us […] there are some of them but most of all are not […] there is  no[t] a connection between the politic and religion […] the politician[s] in  Macedonia they don’t aa act or do like based on their religion. (Hawwa, 22 years old, city dweller)

Many of the Albanian women thought that politics and religion were not linked. Amala, however, had an opposite view. Thirty-five-year-old Amala had a university degree, lived in a village and worked in a city. She stated [through an interpreter]: “Here politic[s] was always included inside religion”, at least to some extent (Amala). Amala considered herself religiously liberal. She felt that the two ought to be separated from one another, and religion placed more in the private sphere. This was in her opinion better, because politics should serve everyone equally, regardless of their religious attachment. Some of the other women hoped that Islam would have a moral impact on political decision-making, encouraging motivations other than party’s political gain or personal, mainly economic, benefit. Many times there seemed to be a lack of more concrete contact between the official religious institutions and the Muslim community. The women’s descriptions of their religiosities and religious practice showed that they were not necessarily connected to a certain community: a Muslim did not at all times know, or need to know, what exactly occurred at the higher levels of the religious institutions and structures. As Bougarel states, it can be difficult to see a connection between the level of religiosity of the Balkan Muslims and for instance “the legal status of Islamic religious institutions and the extent to which Islam is central to their politicisation” (Bougarel 2005: 16). Bougarel thinks also that there is an increasingly visible interest toward spiritual life in the Balkans, but its character is being “blurred by new national, cultural or festive, dimensions” (Bougarel 2005: 16). I would not say that the importance of Islam for the Albanian women interviewed for my study could be easily linked to this statement: detailed information about Islam, personal conviction, devotion and choice were too centrally placed in the narratives of the women. Also, the national, cultural and religious identities in them could be largely kept apart.



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The Albanian women brought forward the meaning of Islamic celebrations and the visible presence of religion at transitional moments in life. Sunnites mentioned particularly the celebration of the month of Ramadan (in Albanian Ramazan) and that of the two Eids (in Albanian Kurban Bajram and Ramazan Bajram, or Bajram i Ramazanit), the birthday of Prophet Muhammad, Islamic New Year and other Great Nights. The women closer to the Bektashi tradition also celebrated Sultan Nevruz (the birthday of Imam ‘Ali), Matem (ten days of mourning in Muharram month) and Ashura (the tenth day of Muharram month) (cf. Clayer 1990: 81). The social dimension in most of these was central: festivities mainly took place within the family, with relatives and close friends, and often included a common meal. Sometimes the Qur’an was read or recited and a lecture or mevlut, a Sunni event in which the history of birth and life of Prophet Muhammad is central, was given. The Bektashis also read Hadikat-i Su’ada (epic of the 16th century poet Fuzuli that tells the accounts of the Prophets, cf. Abiva, 2009) during the ten days of Matem, which were dedicated to fasting. Some of the Islamic celebrations are taken into account in the public holiday timing in Macedonian working life. Twenty-two-yearold university student Farah, who lived in a city, described the celebration of Bajram: Farah: Amm what is particular about the the two of Baj Bajrams the Eids […] it’s that it it’s like a must it’s like a tradition to make bakllava [oriental sweet] […] to prepare those […] and sweets that is it’s must […] must have the sweets you know and any any kind of candies sweets and cookies and so on […] and in the morning when we wake up all the family we wake up early everyone prays the morning prayer […] and there is a special prayer about the Bajram aa males usually go at mosques and mosques are full […] and the women stay at home they pray they wait for the males to come back we have the breakfast very rich breakfast […] like it’s a dinner actually it’s a dinner ‘cause you have a lot plenty of foods that you have prepared at night […] and eating today […]’cause at aa you won’t have a time to eat the dinner ‘cause aa there will come people to visit you. (Farah, 22 years old, city dweller)

Food, prayer and visits were important elements in Farah’s description of celebrating Bajram. Men and women participated in the celebrations on an equal footing, but only men went to the mosque to pray. The social dimension included also visits to close relatives and neighbours, and it was important to be together. In addition to celebrations, rites of transition, education and the impact of societal dynamics, Islamic tradition could also be experienced as offering security and permanence in uncertain societal circumstances on an

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individual level. The level of education could also affect religious practice, in the sense that traditional cultural and, to a certain extent, religious elements were often more strongly preserved in environments where people had received less education. In the Republic of Macedonia, a lower level of education could also often be linked to a weaker economic situation. One issue raised in the interviews was that the choice to become a member of a certain Islamic group was sometimes seen as being influenced by economic factors. Some Islamic groups received economic support from abroad, and some people thought that members of these groups received remuneration for their membership (e.g. Aida; Field diary; Interview 10). In addition to level of education, regional differences, economic motivations and societal circumstances, the women thought that gender, the generations or Islamic groups one belonged to, could influence the understanding one had of Islam (Field diary, e.g. Qadr, Aida). Defensive reactions can surface easily when one does not feel the central elements of one’s identity secured and accepted by surrounding environment. Islam is often placed in an inferior position fortified by global negative connotations with terrorism in the Macedonian societal context. This casts a shadow over the coexistence of and relations in between different groups and their building of a common future in the Republic of Macedonia. On the basis of my observations, however, Islam in the Republic of Macedonia – where the Albanian community was characterized by more traditional ways of life than in the other Balkan states – was mostly experienced positively by the Albanian women interviewed. Farah and Qadr describe in the following their views on the Islamic image of man as God’s highest creation, which could promote the women’s positive self-presentations: NR: How does your religion perceive the human being? Farah: It’s aa, you are the perfect creature. NR: Hmh. Farah: The the miracle of the world [smiling]. NR: Hmh. Farah: Yes, you are the miracle of the world. NR: [Smiling]. Farah: That is how it is perceived and everything it’s aa bent on you like. NR: Hmh. Farah: It’s aa made for you you just live and follow the rules. (Farah, 22 years old, city dweller) Qadr: How it sees the human being? NR: Yes. Qadr: Aa born as an angel pure as a water [smiles].



multiplicity of women’s religious expression201 NR: Hmh. Qadr: Protected by Allah. NR: Hm. Qadr: Guide be Allah aamm human being hmm very smart but only if you  know to use it of course. NR: [Smiles]. (Qadr, 26 years old, village dweller)

Conclusions What it meant to be an Albanian Muslim woman in the present day Republic of Macedonia had many nuances, with decisions concerning religious devotion that were more and more taken on an individual level. The cultural heritage of the Albanians has traditional patriarchal characteristics, which, at least to some extent, are shared by the populations across the western Balkans. But the influence of this heritage is now shifting in a continuum of deep societal change and traditional gender roles are being increasingly challenged. Changes in women’s status and opportunities can be mirrored on family structures. In the patriarchal traditions, women often are seen as responsible for bringing up children and for passing the tradition on. Concepts of change can thus be experienced as a threat to basic social unity of family and its continuity. (Cf. Dahlgren 1999: 91) The “return of Islam” in the Republic of Macedonia has sparked a transition in the relationship between national and religious identities. Greater freedom, as well as a societal context in which people are not unified as Macedonian citizens but are dispersed in smaller ethnic, religious and social groups, could also encourage people to search for more religious ways of living. In societally uncertain situation religion could represent an ideal worth striving for and holding onto. The Albanian women articulated Islam in their narratives in different ways: when on the one side interest in Islam was increasing, on the other side religion simultaneously seemed to become more individualized. Thus, Islam could function as part of the believer’s traditional cultural identity and heritage, fortify a sense of belonging to the Albanian community, or represent a matter of personal convictional and moral choice. Despite there being some gender differences in religious praxis, the women I interviewed emphasised the principle of equality of all in Islam. Religion was considered a far-reaching all-embracing aspect of life, although it might be expressed and emphasized in different ways. For

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instance for the interviewees, being a Muslim could be more important than being a woman. Islam could impact on how one behaved and what kind of social responsibility one was willing to take on. Also acting according to faith’s recommendations could be central in morally linked questions and social relationships or when choosing a spouse or a doctor. However, the Albanian women also distanced themselves from Islamic traditions and thought that not everything should be accepted without questioning. In addition, they often wished to distinguish between the Albanian cultural tradition and Islam. The status of Albanian women was seen to have improved over recent decades, but the women thought there was still work to be done regarding women’s opportunities in the Macedonian society and within Albanian community. Muslims seemed to negotiate for their place in society and this became particularly visible in the public sphere, when women visited religious spaces or studied at Islamic establishments. These negotiations were conducted on two levels: (1) within a wider society as Muslims who wanted to live and express one’s faith and as Albanians, but also as women, who reached for equal possibilities and (2) within the Albanian community as Muslims and women for instance in relation to some roles in Islamic celebrations and clothing, as well as regarding access to education and religious spaces, and possibilities to leave the household freely. The women saw education and economic independency as having key roles in changing and improving the situation. In present day Republic of Macedonia the lives of Albanian women in the villages, more so than in the cities, can still be understood as somewhat limited – within the public sphere in particular. In some areas the Kanun legislation may still affect community life. Increased levels of education, the slightly better economic situation and improved communication technology offer tools to counter social pressure and question the expectations that might be imposed. In general in Albanian culture the decisions and opinions of the family and the community could be of paramount importance. However, the unique nature of the individual family in terms of how it interprets, lives and expresses its cultural heritage should not be ignored. These aspects define to a great extent the space of women, which is dynamically different in different contexts. In contemporary circumstances Islam can function as a way of empowering the woman within a patriarchal tradition. According to the women interviewed Islam could give women more freedom than the ways of life that were more anchored in cultural tradition, for example in questions of inheritance, employment and economic independence.



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The lack of access to religious and other types of education might also offer fertile ground for extreme ideologies, which could be further fuelled by general frustration and dissatisfaction. In the Republic of Macedonia greater attention has been given to some educational issues in recent years, although much remains to be done in this field. Improving the economic situation will most likely also play a crucial role in countering the general, political and economic frustration. In the Macedonian context, the fractured nature of the societal body has an impact on the role of religion as well as how it is emphasised. Minorities often seem to be more aware of their religious and ethnic identities and adherences as they are able to mirror themselves against the majority. In the Albanian women’s narratives Islam as a moral choice had an impact on the public sphere as it regulated or framed the positioning and behaviour of Muslims vis-à-vis others. For example, Islam was made visible in forms of dressing, be it a scarf, a veil, a longer coat or a long skirt or religious premises. Islam could also be heard when the mosques were calling Muslims to prayer or in religious expressions used in daily speech. It could also be tasted in the food prepared according to Islamic regulations. Islam the Albanian women described was in a multifaceted way a lived religious  praxis and moral choice in the contemporary Macedonian society and made an important contribution to the country’s multidimensional diversity. References Abiva, H. 2009. ‘Bektashism and Its Presence in Albanian Lands’. Available at http://www .bektashi.net/history-bekbalkans.html (accessed December 6, 2009). Bougarel, X. 2005. ‘The Role of Balkan Muslims in Building a European Islam’, Working Paper, Brussels: European Policy Centre. Available at http://www.epc.eu (accessed May 6, 2009). Bougarel, X. and N. Clayer. 2001. ‘Introduction’, in Bougarel, X. and N. Clayer (eds), Le Nouvel Islam balkanique. Les musulmans, acteurs du post-communisme 1990–2000. Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 11–75. Bougarel, X. and B. Iseni. 2007. ‘Introduction’, Politorbis. Revue de politique Étrangère 43 (2): 5–12. Available at http://www.eda.admin.ch/eda/en/home/doc/publi/ppol/polit.html (accessed May 5, 2011). Bringa, T. 1995. Being Muslim the Bosnian Way Identity and Community in a Central Bosnian Village. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Brunnbauer, U. 2002. ‘Implementation of the Ohrid Agreement: Ethnic Macedonian Resentments’, Paper, European Centre for Minority Issues (ECMI). Centre for the Study of Balkan Societies and Cultures (CSBSC). Available at http://www.ecmi.de/jemie/ download/Focus1-2002Brunnbauer.pdf (accessed September 5, 2008). Castellan, G. 2002. L’Histoire de l’Albanie et des Albanais. Crozon: Éditions Armeline. CIA’s World Fact Book. 2011. Macedonia. Available at https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/ the-world-factbook/geos/mk.html (accessed October 14, 2011).

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Clayer, N. 2007. Aux origines du nationalisme albanais. La naissance d’une nation majoritairement musulmane en Europe. Paris: Éditions Karthala. ——. 2001. ‘L’Islam, facteur des recompositions internes en Macédoine et au Kosovo’, in Bougarel, X. and N. Clayer (eds), Le Nouvel Islam balkanique. Les musulmans, acteurs du post-communisme 1990–2000. Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 177–240. ——. 1990. L’Albanie, pays des derviches. Les ordres mystiques musulmans en Albanie à l’époque post-ottoman (1912–1967). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Dahlgren, S. 1999. ‘Islamilaisen naiskuvan monet tulkinnat’, in Rotunaisia ja feminismejä Nais- ja kehitystutkimuksen risteyskohtia, toim. Jaana Airaksinen ja Tuula Ripatti. Tampere: Vastapaino, 87–110. Friedman, V.A. 1997. ‘Macedonia’ in Kontaktlinguistik/Contact Linguistics/Linguistique de contact; 2 Halbband/Volume 2/Tome 2. Berlin NewYork: Walter de Gruyter, 1442– 1451. Available at http://home.uchigago.edu/~vfriedm/cv.htm/#publications (accessed September 5, 2008). Iseni, B. 2007. ‘Entre nationalism laïc et instrumentalisation des institutions religieuses islamiques’, Politorbis. Revue de politique Étrangère, 43 (2): 13–38. Available at www.eda .admin.ch/politorbis (accessed January 9, 2009). Lehti, M. 1999. ‘Bosnia ja Makedonia. Historialliset kummajaiset kansallisvaltioiden maailmassa’, in Balkan 2000, Näkökulmia ja taustoja Kaakkois-Euroopan nykytilanteelle, toim. Vesa Saarikoski. Turku: Åbo Akademis Tryckeri, 19–45. Popovic, A. 2002. ‘Les confréries mystiques musulmanes dans les Balkans’, Paper presented at the Colloque international Le role du Soufisme et des confréries musulmans dans l’islam contemporain. Une alternative à l’islam politique? Turin 22–21–22 novembre 2002. Available at http://www.scribd.com/doc/94679/Les-confreries-mystiques-musulmanes -dans-les-Balkans?page=32 (accessed November 30, 2009). ——. 1986. L’Islam balkanique. Les musulmans du sud-est européen dans la période postottoman. Berlin: Osteuropa-Institut. In Kommission bei Otto Harrassowitz – Wiesbaden. (Balkanologische Veröffentlichungen Band 11). Poulton, H. 2000. Who are the Macedonians? London: Hurst & Company. ——. 1991. The Balkans Minorities and States in Conflict. London: Minority Rights Publications. Ragaru, N. 2008. ‘The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia: between Ohrid and Brussels’, in Batt, J. (ed.), Is there an Albanian Question? Ed. Judy Batt. Paris: European Union Institute for Security Studies (EUISS), 41–60. Available at www.iss.europa.eu (accessed December 1, 2008). Rasku, M. 2007. On the Border of East and West Greek Geopolitical Narratives. Diss. Jyväskylä. University of Jyväskylä. Repo, N. 2012. An Islamic Mosaic - Women’s Identities in Transition. Albanian Muslim Women in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. Ph.D. Dissertation, Abo Akademi University. Roald, A.S. 2001. Women in Islam. The Western Experience. London: Routledge. Tamminen, T. 2011. Esteitä Euroopan tiellä. Nimikiista Kreikan kanssa heijastuu myös Makedonian sisäpolitiikkaan. The Finnish Institute of International Affairs (FIIA), Briefing paper 83, toukokuu 2011. Todorovska, S. 2009. The Factual State of Women in the Republic of Macedonia. Presentation, June 2009. National Council of Women of Macedonia – UWOM. Translated by D. Rustemi.

Primary Sources Census of Population, Households and Dwellings in the Republic of Macedonia, Book X, 2002. Skopje: State Statistical Office. Census of Population in 2002, Households and Dwellings in the Republic of Macedonia, Book XIII, (2002). Skopje: State Statistical Office.



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Macedonia in Figures (2010). Skopje: State Statistical Office. Le Courrier des Balkans. Le Portail francophone des Balkans. 2009a. ‘La Banque mondiale voit l’avenir en noir pour les pays des Balkans’ (posted April 14, 2009), http://balkans.courrier .info/article12638.html (accessed May 22, 2009). Le Courrier des Balkans. Le Portail francophone des Balkans. 2009b. La Macédoine autorise le port du voile sur les passeports’ (posted January 21, 2008), http://balkans.courrier.info/ article9602.html (accessed May 22nd, 2009). Le Courrier des Balkans. Le Portail francophone des Balkans. 2009c. ‘Macédoine: la Cour constitutionelle suspend l’enseignement religieux à l’école’ (posted April 27, 2009), http://balkans.courrier.info/article12726.html (accessed May 22nd, 2009). Report by the Commissioner for Human Rights, Mr Thomas Hammarberg, on his Visit to “The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia” 25–29 February 2008. Strasbourg, 11 September 2008, CommDH (2008) 21, Available at https://wcd.coe.int/ViewDoc.jsp?Ref =CommDH(2008)21&Language=lanEnglish&Site=CM&BackColorInternet=9999CC&Ba ckColorIntranet=FFBB55&BackColorLogged=FFAC75; (accessed February 4, 2009). The website of the State Statistical Office. Available at http://www.stat.gov.mk/Default_en .aspx (accessed August 28, 2012).

Empirical Material (Filed in the archives of Åbo Akademi University) Field diary 2008–2009 / IF 2008/013:3 Interviews 1.–22. 1. Fatima, woman, 24 years old, village dweller / IF mgt 2008/084 and IF 2008/014:1 2. Amina, woman, 23 years old, village dweller / IF mgt 2008/085 and IF 2008/014:2 3. Miriam, woman, 23 years old, city dweller / IF 2008/013:1 4. Mahabba, woman, 24 years old, village dweller / IF mgt 2008/086 and IF 2008:014:3 5. Nuriya, woman, 22 years old, village dweller / IF mgt 2008/087 and IF 2008/014:4 6. Aisha, woman, 25 years old, city dweller / IF mgt 2008/088 and IF 2008/014:5 7. Hawwa, woman, 22 years old, city dweller / IF mgt 2008/089 and IF 2008/014:6 8. Sabah, woman, 39 years old, city dweller / IF mgt 2008/090 and IF 2008/014:7 9. Khadija, woman, 53 years old, village dweller / IF mgt 2008/091 and IF 2008/014:8 10. Reference person concerning information about the Islamic presence in the Republic of Macedonia / IF mgt 2008/092 11. Reference person concerning information about the Islamic presence in the Republic of Macedonia / IF mgt 2008/093 12. Reference person concerning information about the Islamic presence in the Republic of Macedonia / IF mgt 2008/094 13. Farah, woman, 22 years old, city dweller / IF mgt 2008/095 and IF 2008/014:9 14. Amala, woman, 35 years old, village dweller / IF mgt 2008/096 and IF 2008/014:10 15. Wafa, woman, 31 years old, village dweller / IF mgt 2008/097 and IF 2008/014:11 16. Zahra, woman, 59 years old, village dweller / IF mgt 2008/098 and IF 2008/014:12 17. Nawal, woman, 35 years old, city dweller / IF mgt 2008/099 and IF 2008/014:13 18. Qadr, woman, 27 years old, village dweller / IF mgt 2009/044 and IF 2009/027:1 19. Habiba, woman, 60 years old, city dweller / IF mgt 2009/045 and IF 2009/027:2 20. Aida, woman, 30 years old, city dweller /IF mgt 2009/046 and IF 2009/027:3 21. Hanifa, woman, 31 years old, city dweller / IF mgt 2008/013:2 22. Zainab, woman, 25 years old, city dweller / IF mgt 2009/047 and IF 2009/027:4

ALLAH’S PLACES IN MADRID: FROM SPANISH TRANSITION TO RECENT DAYS Virtudes Téllez Delgado December 6th, 1978, millions of Spaniards said ‘yes’ to the referendum by which democracy and a new constitution was endorsed. In doing so, 40 years of dictatorial rule ended, and a new model of society was designed. Franco defined Spain as a traditional catholic country that represented ‘the spiritual reserve of the West’ (del Olmo 2000: 31–32), the Spanish Constitution of 1978 changed that definition into one in which general plurality was the norm around the country, and religious plurality was recognized as a national feature of it. In this chapter, I will focus on my fieldwork with young Muslims in Madrid. But firstly I will describe the Spanish religious law modifications from the latter years of Franco’s dictatorship to this day. Secondly, I will stress the socio-demographic processes that have happened in the meantime. Finally, once the legal and social contexts have been explained specified, I will analyze two socio-political and identity processes observed among members of young Muslim associations founded in Madrid over the last decade. By means of this example we will be able to consider how this particular group of young Muslims feels to belong to Spain and look to normalize the ‘Muslim image’ within the Spanish imaginary. From National-Catholicism to Religious Pluralism (1939–2010) At the end of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), a dictatorship was established all over the country. Franco’s government reduced, even tried to make disappear, any internal differences. But, at the end of this political regime, in 1967, a relevant legal shift happened. The Law of Religious Freedom was enacted in order to recognize and allow the religious practice of many Arab Students who, taking advantage of good diplomatic relations between Spain and Arab countries, arrived in Spain to study Medicine, Law and other disciplines in different Spanish universities. Thanks to this same law, Muslim people from Ceuta and Melilla (two Spanish cities located in the North of Africa) saw the legal recognition of

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their beliefs and practices (Jiménez-Aybar 2004: 30–31; Elena Arigita 2006: 565–566). In spite of this law, Islam, as an admissible religion for Spaniards, was not allowed until the political period known as the ‘Transition’ to democracy, when the personal choice of the conversion to Islam was considered (del Olmo 2004: 128–129). Afterwards, the Spanish Constitution, ratified in 6th December 1978, defined Spain as a plural, religious country. From this moment, other legal innovations were carried out regarding religious pluralism. In 1980, the Law of Religious Freedom was reformulated in order to make its articles compatible with the new legal framework. In doing so, three religious minority groups obtained new religious rights, such as Spanish citizenships. These were Muslims, Jewish, and Protestants. Each one of these  groups saw how, slowly but surely, their claims for equality were taken  into consideration by the State, now in charge of equating their rights  and responsibilities with those of the Catholic Church (JiménezAybar 2004: 21). In the case of Islam, Spanish converts and Muslim Arab students –who arrived in Spain in the 60s and 70s– were identified by the Spanish government as representatives in charge of negotiating new civil and religious rights for Muslims. On 14th July 1989, the Spanish Government awarded Islam the category of “notorio arraigo” (from now on, ‘deeply rooted’) religion, i.e. the recognition that the Muslim religion has a sufficient number of believers, and its faith is spread far enough around the country to prove its establishment among Spanish society. Three years afterwards, by means of the Spanish State Religious Cooperation Agreement with the Spanish Islamic Council (CIE) –signed on 10th November 1992– this statement was confirmed with the assumption that Islam holds a centuries-old tradition in Spain and a prominent importance for the construction of ‘Spanish identity’.1 This agreement and the recognition of ‘deeply rooted’ religions were also granted for Protestants and Jewish people (López et al. 2007: 26). Interestingly, all of this took place on the 500th anniversary of the ‘Reconquista’, a time in which the Catholic Kings of Spain threatened to expel any non-Catholic who resisted conversion to Catholicism. Such recognition aimed to repair the historic obliteration made toward the three 1 “Exposición de Motivos” in Acuerdo de Cooperación Religiosa del Estado Español con l a Comunidad Islámica de España (ratified by the law 26/1992, 10th November, BOE 12th November), available on Internet (Ministry of Law, http://www.mjusticia.gob.es/cs/Satellite/ es/1215197982464/Estructura_C/1215198063872/Detalle.html , 8th February 2013).



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biggest religious minorities of Spain (Jiménez-Aybar 2004: 21, Arigita 2006: 564–565). The ways, in which these agreements envisaged dealings with Muslims living in Spain, were an innovation and set an example for other European countries (Ramadan 2002: 189–194, Jiménez-Aybar 2004). Inside the fourteen articles and additional regulations of the Spanish State Religious Cooperation Agreement with the Spanish Islamic Council, many religious rights were considered such as the protection, respect and inviolability of mosques and worship places (e.g. cemeteries); the honouring of an imam’s confidentiality; the civil recognition of Islamic marriages; the provision of Muslim Chaplains for Spanish Muslim soldiers, jailed inmates and dying patients in public hospitals; the Islamic teaching in public schools and universities; the management of Islamic schools in compliance with the Spanish Law; tax exemption pertaining any financial transaction defined as usury by Islamic texts; the granting of breaks during working hours for Ramadan and Friday prayers; the alternative to choose different dates to attend exams scheduled during Islamic festivities, as well as the exemption from school attendance (providing request in advance); the preservation and the encouragement of cultural, artistic and historic Spanish Islamic heritage, and the provision of ‘halal’ food, as well as the respect of Islamic food restrictions in the army and public schools.2 All of these newly acquired rights were to be managed through the Spanish Islamic Council (from now on, CIE). This institution was created in 1992 because of governmental requirements. In those days, regional associations of Muslims were agglutinated within two Muslim national federations (the Spanish Islamic Communities Union –UCIDE– and the Spanish Islamic Religious Entities Federation –FEERI–). In order to treat both equally­in present and future negotiations, the Spanish Administration “imposed” the condition of having a representative Muslim negotiator institution before signing the Spanish State Religious Cooperation Agreement. This is why representative members of these two federations joined to create the CIE. Unfortunately, a later disagreement among them hindered the implementation of some of the rights recognized by the Agreement (Moreras 2002; Jiménez-Aybar 2004: 98–102; Arigita 2006: 565– 567, 571–575). As a result, the CIE carried out for years as a legal institution only active in form, not in practice. Governmental Administrators have tried to solve this impasse several times. In 2009, the General Office of

2 Íbidem.

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Religious Affairs pertaining the Ministry of Law (an institution in charge of minority religious communities), held negotiations with different religious entities in order to make the CIE bigger and to incorporate, with this aim, a more diverse group of Muslim representatives inside (Arigita et al. 2009: 19). More recently, in November 2012, the organization chart of the CIE has changed. The new Board of Directors has announced the redaction of new statutes to provide for the creation of a standing committee composed of 36 members representing the 1428 Islamic religious entities that are registered.3 However, the governmental discourses, attitudes and decisions were not always taken with the same aim. The conservative party took office as of 1996 and this intended a different approach pertaining the management of Spain’s Muslim groups. The recognition of Islam in Spain was restrained. Islam was gradually linked with immigration, and immigrants were in turn associated with a lack of civic safety, as well as the increase of Spain’s convict population (Moreras 2005: 233). As a result, the newly elected government (the Popular Party) put off some religious agreements. Furthermore, its discourse placed Islam as a foreign religion, thus making it seem as if it were a matter of social integration and assimilation (ibidem 234–236). The Popular Party continued with such an excluding discourse throughout its two terms (1996–2004) in power. Nevertheless, three days after the 11th March bombing attacks of 2004, there was a new change in the government. The socialist party came to power and with it, president elect, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, retook the recognition of Spain’s cultural, social and religious pluralism. In accordance, he proposed a new scheme under the name of ‘Alliance of Civilizations’ that was intended to be implemented both nationally and internationally.4 Resulting from this new initiative, on 15th October 2004, the government created the Pluralism and ‘Coexistence’5 Foundation, following a proposal of the Ministry of Law. Since its creation, this foundation has worked, first, to implement complete religious freedom in Spain. Second, contributed to the implementation of cultural, educational and social integration projects, especially those belonging to ‘deeply rooted’ religions. This foundation

3 http://www.webislam.com/articulos/79960-el_nuevo_rumbo_de_la_comision _islamica_de_espana_cie.html (8th February 2013). 4 This scheme tries to overcome the Huntington’s thesis of ‘Crash of Civilizations’ (1993). 5 ‘Convivencia’ is the Spanish word that I have translated by ‘Coexistence’. Specifically, ‘To live together with’ is the idea that ‘Convivencia’ concept refers.



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sponsors activities organized by communities, churches and local entities aiming to promote social integration and awareness regarding religious minorities.6 Thanks to the effort of this foundation, the political idea of a religious plural society is much more visual in Spain. Recently, since 2007, the foundation sponsors different researches seeking to discuss and analyze religious variety in Spain. Its main goal is to achieve a shift in social mentality by which the Spanish society is able to assume its religious pluralism as an internal feature, rather than external. Some of the Foundation’s reports are summarized in the collection ‘Pluralism and Coexistence’ (see footnotes) where we can find the social and demographic details of minority confessions in ten Autonomous Communities from the Spanish State (i.e. Comunidad Valenciana, Cataluña, Comunidad de Madrid, Canarias, Castilla-La Mancha, Navarra, Murcia, Andalucía, País Vasco and Aragón).7 Also, in Foundation’s website, there is a list of the 33 different religious confessions in Spain.8 Some of them are: Protestants, Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Sikhs, Sephardic people, Confucio believers, Mormons, Anglicans, Taoist, etc. Although some of their believers are of Spanish nationality, the emergence of various confessions is related to the socio-demographic shifts in Spain, from the founding of democracy to this day. Plural Features of the Spanish Society under the New Democratic Government (1978–2010) In 1978, when the Spanish Constitution defined the country as a religiously plural one,9 Spain had an estimated population of 37 million inhabitants.10 Currently, in the last census 1st October 2012, the number increased to 46,116,779.11 This increase was associated, apart from birth rate, to immigration taking place in Spain, mainly from the incorporation of the country to the European Union (European Economic Community in those days) and the later economic prosperity, taking place from 1995, to 2008.

  6 http://www.pluralismoyconvivencia.es/quienes_somos/ (8th February 2013).   7 http://www.pluralismoyconvivencia.es/publicaciones/materiales/coleccion _pluralismo_y_convivencia/index_1.html (8th February 2013).   8 http://www.pluralismoyconvivencia.es/glosario/ (8th February 2013).   9 http://noticias.juridicas.com/base_datos/Admin/constitucion.t1.html (8th February 2013). 10 http://www.ine.es/jaxiBD/tabla.do (8th February 2013). 11 http://www.ine.es/jaxiBD/tabla.do (8th February 2013). Last count of 1st October 2012.

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However, many of these new nine million inhabitants are foreigners (5,648,671).12 Unsurprisingly, Spain’s religious pluralism increased due to the new population, which varied in ideological and religious terms. It should be noted that it is impossible to specify the quantity of inhabitants Spain has in every religious confession because, from the Spanish Constitution sanction to this day, no one can be forced to declare his/her ideology, religion or worship.13 This is the reason why religious data only can be calculated approximately, as it is assumed from the predominant faith of countries of origin. Indeed, this renders any approximation inaccurate, as not all citizens from a specific country practice its predominant religion (Lora-Tamayo 2001; del Olmo 2004: 124; Téllez 2007: 16). In the case of Islam, these estimates amount to a total of 2,000,000 ­inhabitants.14 The majority comes from Morocco, although there are other relevant countries of origin, such as Algeria, Pakistan, Syria, Senegal and Mali. Moreover, Spanish Muslims also need to be taken into account (either converts or migrants’ descendants). Catalonia is the geographic region with the highest number of Muslims, followed by Andalusia, Madrid, Valencia and Murcia. Other regions also have Muslims but their number is less than half of the regions mentioned (Arigita et al. 2009: 14–15). Many young Muslims have been born in Spain, or came to the country in their early childhood. To quantify them is nearly impossible, given that they are Spanish citizens and thus, there is no foreign country of origin from which to assume a religion This is why young Muslims rates range from between 100,000 and 200,000 young Muslims living in Spain (ib. 42). Mosques, local oratories and religious or social and cultural associations mainly represent their visibility in social places. The number of these entities cannot be précised either. Many of them were registered years ago but are not active now, although they still appear as such in registry offices. Roughly, there are 1428 Islamic religious entities,15 13 mosques, 422 local oratories and 14 cemeteries around the whole the country (Arigita et al. 2009: 26). In Madrid, there are 2 big, purpose build, mosques, which stand 12 This figure was taken on 1st February 2009. Since the crisis of economy started in 2008, the Spanish government has implemented politics to give political and economical support to foreigners who planned to come back to their countries. Due to these politics, presumably, the number of foreigners will be a bit different when the Spanish Statistics Institute will publish the last count, in May 2013. 13 http://noticias.juridicas.com/base_datos/Admin/constitucion.t1.html (8th February 2013). 14 http://www.webislam.com/articulos/79960-el_nuevo_rumbo_de_la_comision_islamica _de_espana_cie.html (8th February 2013). 15 Ibidem.



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as the banner of Islam in the city. The oldest one, Abu-Bakr Mosque, was inaugurated in 1988. The other, Omar Mosque, was opened in 1992 as a part of the Islamic Cultural Centre of Madrid. Muslims are also present in religious, social and cultural associations created throughout the last 40 years. Within them, it is easy to point out three trends. The first one is represented by associations created by Muslim migrants settled before the transition to democracy. Associations of Spanish converts symbolize the second trend and recent Muslim migrants (that arrived in Spain over the last three decades) represent the third one (Moreras 1999: 89–96). However, it is my contention that a new trend can be added to these three trends, i.e. one that represents young Muslims from different origins and backgrounds (Moroccan migrants and students, Moroccan migrants’ descendants and Spanish converts) working together for same goals throughout the last decade (Téllez 2008: 134). Social Participation of Young Muslim Associations in Madrid16 From March 2006 to March 2007, I carried out a fieldwork-based research with young Muslims who decided to create or revitalize their s ocio-­cultural associations after the 11th March bombings of 2004. During this fieldwork, I worked with three associations. One of them was formally constituted just after participating in a spontaneous mourning demonstration that took place in the three train stations affected by the bombings (Atocha, El Pozo and Santa Eugenia). The other two were mainly created or revitalized in order to spread a positive image of Islam, Moroccans and Muslims. The majority of their members were Muslims who were born in Spain (Muslim migrants’ descendants or Spanish converts to Islam) or arrived at the country in their early childhood. There was also a representation of Moroccan university students. It should also be noted that education level of the m m members of these three associations was quite high. Doctors, Ph.D. students, graduates or university students were the norm among a very few minority of workers. 16 The information in this section and the last one belong to the ethnographic research I did from March 2006 to March 2007 in Madrid. I was able to carry out this research thanks to the grant I received from the Spanish Research Council (CSIC) to collaborate with the Project I+D MEC HUM 2005-3490 “The Mourning Archive: The creation of an ethnographic archive in the aftermath of 11th March bombing attacks in Madrid”. This section, for the most part, belongs to a new version of the article “La juventud musulmana de Madrid responde: Lugar y participación social de las asociaciones socioculturales formadas o revitalizadas después de los atentados del 11-M” (2008).

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The social participation of the associations’ members I worked with during my fieldwork shows the ways in which they use the Spanish rights and duties collected within the framework of the law. At the same time, this corpus of laws establishes the limits of their claims and practices as social agents (Suárez-Navaz 2004: 141). This is why the legislation and the social and cultural context, in which they developed in Bourdieu’s terms (1972: 175–255), can be understood as the elements that work as the structure structured structuring of the associations agency. Bourdieu’s concept will be useful to explain issues related to the social participation of these associations. At this moment, I will go deep to the theoretical concepts and  then I will reflect them in relation with data obtained during my fieldwork. Practices and their genesis are the decisive conditions in order to build an experimental science able to work on the dialectic established between the processes of internalisation and externalisation of a phenomenon. In this light, practices are meaningful if they are understood as the externalisation process of their internal content, as well as the internalisation process of those things they reflect to the outside (Bourdieu 1972: 175). Practices can thus be understood as a double manner. On the one hand, practices can be structures useful to build a particular kind of environment. On the other, practices can be regularities present within a structured social environment, i.e. practices build an environment and the environment builds them. Subsequently, habitus are building, along this symbiotic process, i.e. durable willingness systems that work as structured structures that are prone to operate as structuring structures (Bourdieu 1972: 175). Following this way of thinking, the practices mentioned above are fixed by the future (or explicit goals contained within a plan or a project) and are useful to react to constantly renew unexpected situations. In this vein, practices are fixed by their consequences, implicit in advance. Thereby, habitus are organized as strategies that never can be the result of a real strategic intention (Bourdieu 1972: 175). At the same time, as habitus can be objectively harmonized by a group, practices can be objectively agreed by this group without a direct interaction or explicit agreement among its members (ib. 181). Consequently, as habitus is a product of history, its individual and collective practices shape the way of thinking created by history, i.e. collective actions produce the event they are a product of (ib. 185). By means of these main concepts of the Bourdieu-ian theory of practice, I am able to explain the methods of social participation of the associations observed during my fieldwork. Their members organized or were invited to collaborate on acts mainly related to topics pertaining: young Muslim



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women in Madrid, the ‘Arab woman’, intercultural relationships in Madrid and the whole country, the social situation of migrants’ descendants in Spain, the social and political daily life in Palestine, the social, political and religious state of Islam and Muslims in Spain and Europe, and HispanoArabs or Hispano-Moroccan relationships. This kind of social and political participation can be understood, on the one hand, as an internalisation process of the outside (or the incorporation of limits and a way of taking part in the society), and on the other, as an externalisation process of their inner life (or their social presentation through association interests shaped by external structures). Therefore, the main subjects chosen by associations’ members represent the interest that society as a whole attributes to them –Islam, Morocco, Muslims’ daily life in Spain and Europe, etc.– as well as these subjects working as the trigger and the shape of activities organized by them. Thereby, the kind of participation of the associations’ members shows their original willingness, which will determine their practices in turn, according to the social and cultural context they are part of. This symbiotic process is possibly due to habitus and works as a matrix of perceptions, considerations and actions that produce practices that work towards reproducing regularities of their members who, apart of their different origins, share a common element –Islam, Spanish citizenship or the fact of being university students. Moreover, since habitus is understood as a product of history, we can comprehend why associations’ members chose the subjects spread by the mass-media to organize different activities. In doing so, these members are seen as their own representatives, and take on this role of being self-represented, wherever they are. From these cases, three concepts are emphasized in a Madrilenian and Spanish contexts, i.e. ‘Muslim’, ‘Moro’ and ‘Moroccan’. Usually, the way of being labelled comprises a negative stereotype that has been the trigger of many activities carried out with the goal of thinking about the adequate way of transmitting it in order to revert its negative connotations within society as a whole. This reflective process has been made by means of three different dynamics observed among the associations. Firstly, some of the young Muslims of these associations have publicly engaged in acts related to Muslims, in the name of their Muslim culture and religious background. Secondly, others have decided to go deeper into the knowledge of their religion in order to show, through their behaviour, the best Muslim conduct to the rest of the society. And thirdly, others have considered their social and political participation as general citizens, taking part in any local claim, related, or not, to Islam and Muslims.

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It is easy to understand why young Spanish Muslims have a main role in this reflective process. They belong and they feel part of a context where the social and political civil rights of Muslims have been recognised over the last three decades. They are Spanish and they are a present part, or the future, of the Muslim population of the country. They have lived or experienced the history of Madrid (and Spain for that matter) since they were born in the country, or they arrived in their early childhood. They know which image of Islam and Muslims they want to stress. Thinking about Being ‘Muslim’ in Madrid17 From my visits to events and meetings of the three associations mentioned before, I realized the relevance of religion in the construction of the identity of my informants. Those who were already Spanish wanted to stress on their Spanish nationality and culture, as well as their Islamic religion. Their goal was to conciliate both of them without any problematic process. The fact of being ‘Muslim’ and the meaning and practice of this concept were frequently reflected in their events. This is the reason why I focused my interviews on this subject (from 2006 to 2009). Many times, stigmatized ideas of Muslims were brought face to face their own image of Moroccans and Muslims. Quite a lot of times, the international terrorist attacks of New York, Madrid and London were mentioned as a cause of the stigmatized idea they refer above. Here, we can read some statements of three young Muslims (Arwa, Sami and Layal), members of two different associations. […] Unfortunately, well, everyone, everyone knows, since the unfortunate events of the 9/11, 11-M, 7J and such, eh, took place…, Islam well, I have seen, the image clearly given by the media. No, we cannot blame anyone, because it is really a bit of guilt around the world, right? But there is one, a great interest on the part of certain sectors of society in which the West and we live in general, right? Western society in which we live […] think Islam is violent, when in reality, here, who is coming, thank God, as a result of such facts, what has been achieved, apart from…, make Islam seem more violent, is that many people are now curious about Islam. Then they have approached and have known many people have become, there are many people who have convinced themselves, or there are many people who have been convinced and have seen the truth, right? What is Islam, when in fact it is far from what we have always wanted to sell, right? That is, violence, terrorism, which is degrad

17 For this section I have referred to the book chapter “La crisis como génesis: ser hoy joven musulmán en Madrid” (Téllez 2010)



allah’s places in madrid217 [sic], degrading to human rights … When in fact the opposite is true, right? The system of life that means Islam is the opposite. Islam is peace, is love, especially love, love to God, love of neighbour, love for others, love of brothers, love everybody, is uh … submission, of course submission, but not submission to the people, among us, after all … we are all equal in the smallest matters, right? But submission to God who wants it all for us, wants only good for us. So I think that there is a double-edged sword because in what it has tried to do is boost the image of Islam, but at the same time it is achieved when people feel more interest and see books known to scientists, to knowledge in the end of the day. And … and that’s what me, on the other hand, I must admit that I too, my change to Islam, somehow, to take things a little more … to learn a little more about my religion was a result of this type of wave, right? I’m not going to be less. I’ve been like all those, as I mentioned, all those people who have been curious in the wake of these events, or the image of Islam we want to transmit, right? Because of that, then you have more curiosity, you learn you seek knowledge, you go to the source of knowledge and, you are opening the eyes, right? […]18

Arwa is a 25 year-old Spanish woman born in Madrid. Her parents come from Morocco. She always studied at public schools in Spain. She got her Law degree recently. As she says, she started to be interested on her religion after the attacks. Arwa’s words show two social effects following the terrorist attacks that have taken place in the West during the last decade. On the one hand, she stresses the spread of a negative stereotype within Islam and Muslims. On the other, she remarks a general interest of having a much more specific and accurate idea of Islam emphasized. Meanwhile, Sami, a 32 year-old Moroccan Ph.D. Student of Law in Madrid points out the need to clarify the erroneous idea that people, in general, which identifies terror and violence with Islam and Muslims: […] What we have done as a group, we have convened a, a protest in Puerta del Sol, can not remember exactly what day, but I remember I called some associations and NGOs to do so. We tried to make the Moroccan Students Association, which were very few and … I remember I called to.., Association of Moroccan Immigrant Workers in Spain (ATIME) to try something, a big demonstration, and I talked to the president and he told me exactly that we could not do something like that at that time because the atmosphere was strained. Something like that benefits no one and I do not know … and… Manifestos already had gone and written in the press and everyone says that rejected terrorism and… We had no need to do anything, but no, I did not agree with him, well me and my colleagues, I am not alone, and at the end we left, very little, few people on a Saturday, I think or a Sunday morning in front

18 This statement belongs to an interview I did later, on 22nd May 2009.

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virtudes téllez delgado of … of … eh … in Puerta del Sol, at the square in which the flowers were, and each of us had written something and each of us had drawn… poems and many things. Then we went out there and we did a demonstration … front of the … uh … there. Well, I remember that not many people came, but most of the students came and people who had got the news came too. We did not have much time for organizations to disseminate more. We sent messages to ourselves by e-mail and by telephone, mobile messages as well, mobile. Well, it had been more or less in the press after a… good acceptance and some media came … and at least one has said, has shouted no to terrorism, we must not condemn the entire Muslim population and the entire Arab population and the entire Moroccan population by an act of some who have done something on their own, they do not represent the Moroccans or Muslims or Arabs, or no one. They represent only themselves […]”19

Arwa and Sami, and the rest of members of this kind of associationism, are young people and young adults from 20 to 30/35 years old, mainly born in Spain, with a higher education (normally university graduates), Muslims by family heritage or by conversion, who claimed to be Spanish citizens and worked to change the stereotyped image of Moroccans and Muslims in Spain. Their statements are examples of self-affirmation and a redefinition process of the collective symbolic imaginary arising from social crises and cultural shifts. By means of these crises and shifts we can observe a community’s behaviour that looks to strengthen and reformulate a better image of themselves, as well as looking to reject their bad image. In this case, this bad image is spread by terrorists acting in the name of their religion, and by the mass media in the process of analysing the event. The reaction of these young people was to redefine the ‘Muslim’ concept, not in opposition to non-Muslims, but in opposition to the terrorist who sought to be a part of them, which they fully rejected. This identification process can relate to what Arfuch (2002: 11) has called “the otherness of the self”, which appeared in times of crisis, displacement, insecurity and uncertainty of present and future. So, following a mirror metaphor, “those” (the terrorist) would be represented by the loss of quicksilver that “sickens”, disfigures and distorts the image that the “we” (the non-terrorist Muslims) reflect in the mirror, which “they” (non-Muslims) see. Thus, the “we” intends to reflect the desired image to the wide society, facing the “they” and covering the glass again with mercury of “we” to rebuild a new image. Given the above situation of the rejection of behaviours that are presupposed internally from the outside, but are rejected from the inside, a movement was created with the aim of clarifying the characteristics of the 19 From Sami’s interview extract, (31st August 2006).



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group. This goal looks to build an implicit difference that would act as a defence of the global broadcast imaginary reflected in the media (Gupta and Ferguson 2001 [1997]: 45), as an agency, i.e. a capacity for action conveyed by the associations’ members in order to have an impact on society. The important thing here is not only an image of features and ideas defended or excluded, but also the transforming power that the purpose brings to redefine and to perform the meaning of a concept. This relevant fact drives us to Mahmood (2001: 212) when she states that the set of capabilities inherent in a subject and the skills that define their social agency are not exempt from the rule existing prior to the operations of power, but result from such operations. Thus, the social agency of these associations’ members is not only synonymous with resistance to power relations, but also the capacity for action enabled and created by certain specific relations of subordination. Thereby, these relations of subordination promote the emergence of a wish-fulfilment that models agency. Structures of power and subordination determine the appearance of this wish and make it look like a social construction determined by them (Mahmood 2001: 210). This fact can be understood within the stigmatized Muslim minority as a will (inevitably connected with the hegemonic structures of power) of showing to the superstructure that they are not outsiders, but a part of the inside whether the superstructure is defined in the way they want to do, not as the superstructure does. In response to this search and internal struggle, every association adopted a different role and practices in their social participation. In all of them, we can identify three trends. The first one chose to reflect on the meaning of the term ‘Muslim’. The second one prefers to carry out social projects that allow further definition reasserted by themselves from the conclusions drawn from their behaviour. The third one looks to mix both practices within their social and political participation. In all cases, unlike Modood (2005) observed in the Muslim community in Britain after the July 2005 bombings in London, it is not necessary to reinforce the loyalty and belonging feeling among young Muslims in Madrid, because actually they are those who claim, again and again, they are a part of the society of Madrid and Spain. This claim of ownership is inherent to Layal’s words. Layal is a Spanish of 23 years old who was born in Madrid. Her parents come from Morocco. She studied in one of the Arabic schools of Madrid during her childhood. She currently studies Journalism in a public university of Madrid. I asked her if she felt a part of Spain due to her attachment with what she defined as ‘the way by which Spanish people discuss’ and she replied:

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virtudes téllez delgado […] It is somewhat complicated, because I at first I do not feel Moroccan, among other things because I’m Muslim and that is that above all. I think my identity is Muslim. And then, there’s a country of origin where you were born. Morocco, I love my family there. I’d take there months and I’d never get tired, but I only feel identified with some things of that society, in other things I do not. Like here, there are things that I am not identified, but there are other things I do. […] In principle yes, because I am Spanish, because I was born here. Is that I can not say I’m Moroccan because it is that I have not lived there, I can not say no … I know them pretty well because I try to observe more or less their society. I like it a lot. But I do the same in a village than in Toledo. I do it also here […]20

Another fragment of Layal’s account takes us to the same point. Along the interview she told me that one of her university professors stated in front of her that a Muslim could be neither Spanish nor European because Islam is not a religion of European tradition. I asked her how she felt when he said that and she answered: […] He did not refer to them as French Muslims, but Muslim immigrants in France. And a guy from the class asked him why he talked about them as immigrants. And he answer: because a century ago there were not French Muslims. I said, yes, and? […] I would not mind to be Moroccan, but how can I be one if I never lived in the Moroccan society? It’s just like that. My family has taught me many Moroccan cultural traits but those are just the reason why I argue with them. Those traits are not part of the religion […]21

From Layal’s words we can notice how the choice of certain definitions and images is determined by context and by an interest in making allegiances according to her own interests and expectations. When she and others decide to identify themselves as Spaniards they look for a better place and a better image among society as a whole, i.e. as Prat stressed for any stigmatized group (1997: 32, 196), they look to remove their outsider image and include it inside the conventional cultural and symbolic borders. This search for legitimacy and hegemonic incorporation means what was defined to stigmatized people by Goffman, who thought these process tried to get rid of the stigma or body signs imposed by the outside, i.e. to get rid of all these own features that show the stigmatized as wicked, dangerous, weak and odd, and subsequently underestimated (Goffman 2001 [1963]: 11–12). This effort looks to get over the ‘discredit’ and ‘discreditable’ condition of stigmatized people (ib. 14). It explains the need and the wish

20 Some information taken from the interview I did on 28th December 2008. 21 Íbidem.



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to show another definition, even to them, totally opposed to that one given to those that have decided to commit violent acts in the name of their religion. This process is special among young Muslim generations that were born in Spain. On the one hand, they are seen as “ordinary” citizens in society because of their citizenship. But, on the other, they are seen as foreigners and strange people because their religion forms one of the minority religious groups. When stigmatized people –Muslims, in this case– assume their stigma, they feel more insecure in the contact with other people non-stigmatized. In this relation, the stigmatized thinks that the non-stigmatized will not deal with respect with s/he (Goffman 2001 [1963]: 24–25). In this case, the assumption of a social stigma justifies the foundation of associations in which they can rely on moral support and acceptance as any ordinary person. In this light, they can use a superior strength to achieve the inner transformations mentioned above. Conclusions To conclude, in this chapter we can notice the social, political and legal changes that Spain has undergone from democracy transition until recent days (1978–2010). I have tried to present how Spanish governments have made efforts (or not) to promote the necessary conditions to construct the society described by the Spanish Constitution. By means of these efforts, Spain’s religious pluralism is very much valued nowadays. The pluralism of religions around the current territory of Spain is recognized as a feature of the country. Actually, these efforts belong to the legal framework. In spite of this, the wrong link between Catholicism and Spanish citizenship is still present among many Spanish people. From the experience of the young Muslims mentioned above, we should pay attention to new Spanish groups who struggle to change the monolithic idea of the existence of a homogenous society in Spain. The stigmatized idea of Islam, Moroccans and Muslims in Spain is the trigger these Muslims identified to keep working with the aim of overlapping this stereotyped mentality. The ways in which these young Muslims take part in Spanish society show that they are very much aware of the ways in which Spanish institutions work, the images and discourses that exist about them, as well as how to incorporate them as part of themselves. In doing so, they show others that their presence in Spain is not an integration matter but an assumption of diversity.

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Young Muslims mentioned here show how their social and political participation as well as their religious and identity reflective process are a living proof of the wish and “reality” to belong to a plural, religious country, i.e. the wish to include the idea of plurality within the whole society’s image, not only within the legal frame. It would be significant to take in account how they demarcate from terrorists and others who contribute to stigmatize their social, political and religious role. In the redefinition process mentioned above, they identified themselves as exemplar citizens and not as foreigner criminals. The current government seems to be conscious of this attitude and tries to establish the recognition and the possibility of having a religious plurality among the Spanish people. However, the Spanish society needs to move beyond standardization, leaving all feelings of mistrust out of the equation. This is the time of short and productive steps. The big steps have been already done by the Spanish Administrations. Let’s start to move in order to talk about a Spanish future where religious plurality, among others, is not a threat, an attempt or a challenge, but a normalized and possible reality. References Arfuch, L. 2002. Identidades, sujetos y subjetividades. Buenos Aires: Trama editorial/ Prometeo libros. Arigita, E. ‘2006. ‘Representing Islam in Spain: Muslim Identities and the Contestation of Leaderships’, The Muslim World 96: 563–584. Arigita, E., et al. 2009. Musulmanes en España. Guía de referencia. Madrid: Casa Árabe-IEAM. Bourdieu, P. 1972. Esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique. précédé de trois études d’ethnologie kabyle, Ginebra: Librairie Droz. Del Olmo, M. 2004. ‘Un efecto inesperado de la globalización: los conversos españoles al Islam’, in Ortiz, C. (ed.). La ciudad es para ti. Nuevas y viejas tradiciones en ámbitos urbanos. Barcelona: Cuadernos de Antropología, Temas de Innovación Social, Anthropos, 119–134. ——. 2000. ‘Los conversos españoles al Islam: de mayoría a minoría por la llamada de Dios’, Anales del Museo Nacional de Antropología VII: 15–40. Goffman, E. 1963 (2001). Estigma. La identidad deteriorada. Buenos Aires: Amorrortu editores. Gupta, A., & J. Ferguson. 1997 (2001). ‘Beyond “Culture”: Space, Identity and the Politics of Difference’ in Gupta, A. & J. Ferguson (eds). 1997 (2001). Culture, Power and Place. Explorations in Critical Anthropology. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 33–51. Jiménez-Aybar, I. 2004. El Islam en España. Aspectos institucionales de su estatuto jurídico. Pamplona: Navarra Gráfica Ediciones. López, B., et al. 2007. Arraigados. Minorías religiosas en la Comunidad de Madrid. Madrid: Editorial Icaria. Lora-Tamayo D’Ocón, G. 2001. Extranjeros en Madrid capital y en la comunidad. Informe 2000. Madrid: Delegación Diocesana de Migraciones/ASTI. Conclusions on Internet (http://www.madrid.org/iestadis/fijas/informes/infdoc00.htm).



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Mahmood, S. 2001. ‘Feminist Theory, Embodiment and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival’, Cultural Anthropology, 6 (2): 202–236. Modood, T. 2005. ‘Remaking Multiculturalism after 7/7’, Open Democracy Website, 29 September, 2005. Article on Internet (http://www.opendemocracy.net/conflict-terrorism/­ multiculturalism_ 2879.jsp). Moreras, J. 2005. ‘¿Integrados o interrogados? La integración de los colectivos musulmanes en la España en clave de sospecha’, in Pedreño, A., & Hernández, M. (eds). La condición inmigrante: exploración e investigaciones desde la Región de Murcia. Murcia: Universidad de Murcia, Vicerrectorado de Extensión Cultural y Proyección Universitaria, 227–240. ——. 2002. ‘Limits and Contradictions in the Legal Recognition of Muslims in Spain’, in Shadid, W.A.R. and Koningsveld, P.S. (eds.) Religious Freedom and the Neutrality of the State: The Position of Islam in the European Union, Leuven: Peeters. ——. 1999. ‘Musulmanes en España. Más allá de la memoria histórica: la viva presencia musulmana en España’. Article downloaded from: (http://allserv.rug.ac.be/hdeley/ moreras2.htm). Prat, J. 1997. El estigma del extraño. Un ensayo antropológico sobre sectas religiosas. Barcelona: Ed. Ariel Antropología. Ramadan, T. 2002. El Islam minoritario. Cómo ser musulmán en la Europa laica. Barcelona: Ediciones Bellaterra. Suárez-Navaz, L. 2004. Rebordering the Mediterranean. Boundaries and Citizenship in Southern Europe. United Kingdom: Berghahn Books. Téllez, V. 2010. ‘La crisis como génesis: ser hoy joven musulmán en Madrid’, in Estévez, B., Navarro, M., Sánchez, A. (eds.) Claves actuales de pensamiento. Seminario Internacional de Jóvenes Investigadores. Madrid/Mexico: Editorial Plaza y Valdés, 107–120. ——. 2008. ‘La juventud musulmana de Madrid responde: lugar y participación social de las asociaciones socioculturales formadas o revitalizadas después de los atentados del 11-M’ in Revista de Estudios Internacionales Mediterráneos (REIM) 6: 133–143. ——. 2007. El asociacionismo como respuesta de los jóvenes musulmanes de Madrid a los atentados del 11 de marzo en Madrid (DEA dissertation –unpublished).

NEW CHRISTIAN GEOGRAPHIES: PENTECOSTALISM AND ETHNIC MINORITIES IN BARCELONA1 Mar Griera Introduction Religious diversity is increasing all over Europe and Muslims are the most visible minority in this new scenario. However, a closer look to the European religious field reveals that Christianity, contrary to what it may seem, it is not completely losing ground in the European soil. Thus, altough common assumptions give priority to the link between migration and Islam or take for granted the increasing irrelevance of Christianity in the European scenario, a more accurate diagnosis shows a different picture. Along this line, it should be acknowledged that the growth of immigra­ tion flows not only has encouraged the settlement of Muslim communities in Europe but has also strongly strengthened the presence of Christian churches on the territory. According to the research project “Mapping Migration, mapping churches” (2008), nowadays in Europe there are more migrants with a Christian background than with a Muslim one. In addition, it is crucial to highlight that there are still some vibrant Christian communities all around Europe in spite of the fact that the traditional Christian churches have lost part of its ancient power. To some extent, and at least in Spain, the Christian field is becoming polarized between, on the one hand, a big majority of people who identify them­ selves as Christians in the surveys but rarely go to church and, on the other hand, some growing minorities of ‘militant’ Christians that make their Christian identity the center of gravity of their daily lives. To better capture the role and the characteristics of these growing Christian minorities, it is necessary to take into account that two different trends overlap in current Europe: first, the rise of some Catholic move­ ments aiming at rebuilding and recreating a Christian identity in Europe 1 A preliminary version of this chapter was presented at the “monthly seminars” of the Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs (Boston University). I am especially grateful for the comments of Prof. Peter Berger and Prof. Marilyn Halter. I would also like to thank the editors of the book for their valuable suggestions.

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and determined to make their voices heard. This way, movements such as Opus Dei, the Neocatechumenal Way or the Legionarios de Cristo have gained efficiency in recruiting new members and in fostering a Catholic discourse in the public sphere. However, I will not deal with them in this chapter. Second, and in spite of their growth remaining unnoticed by the majority, many new Protestant churches are set up in the urban periph­eries of the cities and many protestant missionaries coming from southern countries are leading the creation of new communities. Thus, new vibrant churches are gaining relevance and are reshaping the European Christianity. A first glance at the Barcelona Protestant field shows that most of these recently created churches are Pentecostal and, in most of them, the major­ ity of the adherents belong to an ethnic minority. To some extent, in today’s Barcelona, to be Christian, to be part of an ethnic minority and to participate­ in an ethnic church is almost synonymous with belonging to a Pentecostal community. In a way, as I will argue later on, there is an ‘elective affinity’ (Weber) between ethnic minorities and Pentecostal Churches. David Martin (1994), on his work on Latin American Pentecostalism, already suggested the existence of an elective affinity between Pentecos­ talism and ethnic minorities. In addition, many other authors have explored the characteristics of this link in different contexts. The principal aim of this chapter is to explore how and why this elective affinity crystallizes in the context of the city of Barcelona, putting the emphasis on two main issues: on the one hand, the new geographies of Christianity in Barcelona and the major characteristics of the city’s protestant map; and on the other hand, the main factors and mechanisms that explain the success of Pentecostalism among ethnic minorities. The chapter is structured as follows: first, I will explore the Barcelona religious map giving some information on recent changes. Second, I will focus on describing and analyzing the current situation and the historical evolution of the protestant field in Barcelona. Afterwards, I will analize the relationship between ethnic minorities and Pentecostalism by looking at who are the ‘carriers’ of the new ethnic Pentecostal churches and to the success factors of Pentecostalism among ethnic minorities. Finally, I will conclude with some considerations on the changing face of Christianity in Barcelona. The chapter is based on data collected through three different research projects: on the one hand, statistical data come from a project named “Mapping religious minorities in Catalonia” supervised by Professor Joan Estruch. The project is funded by the Catalan government and has the aim



new christian geographies227

of mapping religious minorities in the country. On the other hand, the chapter is also based on an ethnographic fieldwork undertaken within African Pentecostal churches in Catalonia developed during 2002–04 and punctually updated later. Finally, some data of the chapter derives from a project named “Evangelical Churches in Barcelona”, which is in progress nowadays, funded by the Barcelona City Council. Contextualizing: Barcelona and the Religious Map In order to capture the particularities of Barcelona’s religious map, it is nec­ essary to pay attention to three different elements: the growth of immigra­ tion, the secularization process and the diversification of the religious field. In recent years, immigration has risen sharply, placing Barcelona among the cities with the fastest increase of immigration rates in Europe. The percentage of foreign population in the city of Barcelona is 18,1% of the population nowadays, while in 2000 it was 4,9%.2 Newcomers are mainly from Latin American countries (Ecuador, Bolivia), followed by Morocco, China and Rumania. Moreover, it is important to take into account that both the rate for immigration rise and ethnic origin diversity become higher if the population of the suburbs around Barcelona such as Hospitalet del Llobregat or Cornellà, are included in the counting. To sum up, Barcelona is experiencing deep changes and ethnic diversification is transforming the face of the city. Obviously, this has profound consequences in the configu­ ration of the city’s religious map. Furthermore, the influence of immigration on the religious map becomes even stronger if we take into account that, as Morales et al. (2008) have shown, Barcelona’s immigrant population give religion a greater role into their everyday lives than autochthonous population. To properly portray the Barcelona’s religious map, it is also important to bear in mind the fact that the Catalan society is highly secularized. In fact, only 55% of the population identify themselves as catholic in Catalonia (Idescat, 2005), while the Spanish average is 77,3% (Pérez-Agote 2007). Likewise, the Spanish average of the pupils who opt for catholic confes­ sional education in primary schools is 79,9%, while in Catalonia is 50,9% (MEC 2005). To some extent, Catalonia is leading the secularization process

2 Data is from 1/01/2009. See http://www.bcn.cat/estadistica/catala/dades/inf/pobest/ pobest09/part1/t11.htm (August, 2009).

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in Spain, placing the Catalan society as one of the most secularized societ­ ies in Europe. We do not count with exact data about the levels of secular­ ization in Barcelona, but we can infer that they are similar, or even higher, than the Catalan ones. Concerning religious minorities, currently there are more than 222 reli­ gious minorities worship places in Barcelona (ISOR, 2009). In the following table, it is noted that Protestantism is leading the number of religious minority centers in Barcelona from a far distance of the other religious minorities. Table 1 also shows data related to centers which are not worship places but are linked to religious minorities, such as religious NGOs, religious radios or TVs, hospitals, etc. It is remarkable that more of 80% of these centers belong to the Protestant community. In short, a quick analysis of the Barcelona data reveals that Christianity has an almost hegemonic role in the city religious map. Not only because of the predominant presence of Protestant centers but also for the role played Table 1. Religious minorities worship centers and other religious centers (Barcelona, 2009). Worship centers

Other centers

Total

111 18 22 23 11 9 4

47 8 3

158 26 25 23 13 9 8

6 4 4 4 2 2 1 1 222

1 2

Protestantism Islam Buddhism Jehovah Witnesses Hinduism Orthodox Churches The 7th day Adventist Church Other Christian groups Taoism Others Judaism Mormons Sikhism Brahma Kumaris Baha’i Faith Total Source: ISOR & Generalitat de Catalunya.

2 4

1

7 6 4 4 3

68

1 1 290



new christian geographies229

by groups such as the Jehovah Witnesses, the Orthodox Church or the Seventh Day Adventist Church, among others.3 A glance at the following table, that contains data about the year of foundation of the current reli­ gious minority centers in the city, provides more information about the Barcelona’s religious field. On the one hand, the above table shows that the substantial growth of minority worship centers has taken place in recent years. This way, 89 reli­ gious minorities worship places have been created from 1996 to nowadays. However, it is important to keep in mind that althought most of the reli­ gious minority groups have experienced their major growth during the past decade, most of them began their task in the city many decades ago – at the end of the Dictatorship or the beginning of the Democracy. On the other hand, the table also shows that Protestantism is the only religious minority

0 0 2 6

0 0 1 2

0 1 0 1

0 0 0 2

0 0 0 1

0 8 0 8 1 33 8 65

0 11 2

0 39 6

0

2 14 2

0

2

9 89

0 2 0 1 22 4

2 4 0 2 11 9

0 1 1 0 1 11 18 4

0 2

1 5 19 4 23 222

Total

0 0 1 0

Jehovah

Judaism

0 8 0 0 6 0 0 22 2 0 32 1

Sikhs Taoism

Islam

Baha’i Faith Hinduism

0 0 2 0

Orthodox

0 0 1 8

Protestantism

7th D. Adventists

0 0 0 1

Mormonism

Buddhism

XIX century 0 Since 1936 1 Dictatorship 1 From 79 3 to 95 From 96 2 to 2009 n/a 3 Total 10

Brahma Kumaris

Others

Table 2. Year of foundation of the religious minorities worship centers (Barcelona, 2009).

Source: ISOR & Generalitat de Catalunya.

3 Obviously, taking into account the Catholic Church strengthens even more this obser­ vation on the hegemonic role of Christianity in the city. Currently, there are 141 Catholic Parishes in Barcelona and 120 other Catholic Churches See http://www.bcn.es/centre _interreligios/equipaments.html, (November, 2009).

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mar griera Table 3. Doctrinal distribution of Protestant churches (Barcelona, 2009). Doctrinal branch Anglicans Brother’s assemblies Baptists Independents Interdenominational Lutherans Mennonites Methodists No determined Pentecostals/Charismatic Presbyterians Quakers Unitarians Total

Worship centers 2 16 9 9 6 1 1 1 3 56 4 1 2 111

Source: ISOR & Generalitat de Catalunya.

community in the current Barcelona that has its roots in the nineteenth century city.4 It is also important to take into account that this increasing relevance of religious minorities in the city comes together with the emergence of pas­ sionate debates on the role of religion in contemporary societies. The rise of new controversies on religious minority issues has given major visibility to religious minority groups and has placed the accommodation of reli­ gious diversity in the policy agenda. However, not all religious groups have the same visibility and while Islam is overrepresented in the public sphere, Protestantism remains almost invisible. The Protestant Field: Evolution and Main Characteristics To understand the current shape of the Barcelona’s Protestant field, first and foremost, it is necessary to uncover the historical process of the 4 However, the data have to be taken with caution since only the religious worship cen­ ters which are still working have been considered. To some extent, because of not having included in the counting the worship centers that have had a short live, data can hide the fact that there is a great dynamism within the city’s religious field.



new christian geographies231

development of Protestantism in the city. The Protestant scene has been forged at slow burn from the end of the XIX century and the current denom­ inational map is closely linked to the historical evolution of the city. To some extent, four periods can be drawn in the Barcelona’s Protestant history that helps to interpret the current denominational distribution and allow better understanding of the features of the field. The first period began with the arrival of European missionaries that founded some small churches during the last decades of the XIX century. At the beginning of the XX century, Protestantism was gaining relevance and new churches were built as well as many Protestant institutions such as schools or social and cultural organizations were set up in the city. However, at that time, Catholic Church was very powerful in the country and religious freedom was extremely restricted. With the aim to promote a more secular, tolerant and opened society, Protestant leaders joined forces with the leftist movements and undertook a strong battle against conservative factions (Bastian 2004; Griera 2009). During the Republican Period (1931–36) religious freedom began to be considered a right and many steps were taken to improve the everyday life of religious minorities. The main denominational groups of this époque were Methodist, Baptist and Brother’s assemblies. (González 1968; Estruch 1969). The second period we could distinguish started with the Spanish Civil War, which that led to the Franco’s dictatorship. Catholicism played a big role in legitimizing the Dictatorship and Catholic authorities worked handby-hand with the Dictator. Religious minorities were defined as a threat to the ‘national identity’, they were strongly persecuted, forced to act clandes­ tinely and publicly stigmatized. The city Protestant churches were forced to close their doors and evangelical leaders were kept under strict surveil­ lance. Some churches survived celebrating religious activities in private houses and transmitting the faith stealthily. However, many churches dis­ appeared during the Dictatorship and many pastors and adherents went to the exile or left the Protestant community. (Estruch 1968; Clara i Resp­ landís 1994). To some extent, the approval of the 1967’ act on religious freedom – still under the dictatorship – opened the door to the revival of the ancient com­ munities and inaugurated the third period of Protestantism in the city. In a way, even though the religious freedom was limited, a new Protestant sce­ nario began to flourish. The arrival of the democracy in the late seven­ ties  gave new impetuous to the city’s Protestantism and not only many new missionaries arrived from abroad and many churches were opened, but also Protestant leaders joined forces to promote a Catalan evangelical

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common organization (Consell Evangèlic de Catalunya) with the will to give cohesion to the flourishing community and to claim for their rights (Griera 2006).5 Within the description of this period it is important not to disregard that it was then that Pentecostalism began to gain an increasing presence into the city due, to a large extent, to two factors. On the one hand, some North American Pentecostal denominations such as the Church of God or the Assemblies of God sent missionaries to Barcelona and succeded in creating prosperous churches in the poorest neighborhoods. On the other hand, the Filadelfia Evangelical Church (IF) started to have some suc­ cess among Gypsies’ communities becoming a direct competitor of the Catholic Church. At this point, it is necessary point out that the relation­ ship between what Willaime (2001, 2007) has named the protestantisme établi (established Protestantism) and the Pentecostal churches was hostile from the beginning, as the first did not want to include the prosperous Pentecostal churches into their organizations and regarded them with suspicion. The fourth period that is possible to distinguish in relation to the devel­ opment of Protestantism in the city is the one that began into the mid nineties. From this time to nowadays, as it has been already mentioned, migration flows towards Barcelona have increased substantially. The ethnic diversification of Barcelona’s population has had a strong impact into the Protestant community. Many new adherents have joined the already exist­ ing churches, incorporating new ways of doing things and generating new challenges for the preexistent churches. Moreover, many migrants have taken the initiative to found new churches in the city by means of gathering together migrants and, in some cases, even autochthonous population. In this scenario, Pentecostalism has performed better than other denomina­ tions in recruiting new members as well as in leading the creation of new churches. This brief description on the evolution of Protestantism in the city helps to better grasp the characteristics of the current Barcelona’s Protestant field. Likewise, the table below contributes to shed more light upon the historical roots of the city’s Protestant churches. To conclude, three different elements need to be emphasized: first, the historical churches – the ones that arrived in the first period explained – are 5 Since then and until now the “Consell Evangèlic de Catalunya” (Catalan Evangelical Council) has been working as the Catalan government’s official interlocutor. It has also played a role in promoting links between different churches and in fostering recognition for the historical offenses that protestant believers suffered under the Dictatorship.



new christian geographies233

No determined

0 0 0 1 0 0 1

0 1 0 0 0 0 1

0 0 0 0 0 0 1 5 0 1 20 3 0 31 0 1 0 1 3 56 4

Total

Methodists

0 1 0 0 0 0 1

Unitarian

Mennonites

5 0 0 1 0 0 6

Quakers

Lutherans

0 0 2 2 4 1 9

Presbyterians

Interdenominational

1 1 5 1 1 0 9

Pentecostals

Independents

1 1 1 2 0 8 0 3 0 1 0 1 2 16

Baptists’

XIX Century Until 1936 Dictatorship From 79 to 95 From 96 to 2009 n/a Total

Brother’s Assemblies

Anglicans

Table 4. Data of foundation of the Protestant churches (Barcelona, 2009).

0 0 1 0 0 0 1

0 0 0 0 2 0 2

8 6 22 32 39 4 111

Source: ISOR & Generalitat de Catalunya (2009).

the ones that currently gather middle or upper class population; on the contrary, the last churches founded in the city mainly join together those who are in the lowest rung of the economic ladder. Second, the historical churches have in some way monopolized the public and the political repre­ sentation of Protestantism in the city and have been acting as official inter­ locutors for the whole community. This overrepresentation of ‘historical Protestants’ within the powers-that-be has endangered some tensions between the ‘established churches’ and the Pentecostal ones (Bastian 2007; Griera 2008). Finally, it is important to remark that historical churches have been losing ground over the years and are nowadays becoming irrelevant in the current Protestant scenario, while Pentecostalism is gaining force.6 Gathering Momentum: Pentecostal Ethnic Churches in Barcelona In the previous sections of the chapter it has been showed that against the clichés in vogue, Protestantism – and not Islam – has a dominant position in the city’s minority religions map. Along this line, it is important to remark 6 Jean-Paul Willaime point out the same for the case of France “Given the relative decline of established Protestant churches, the ‘militant’ Protestant churches, especially in the form of Pentecostalism, have expanded greatly since the 60s” (2004: 14).

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that the preponderant role of Protestantism is not only a consequence of their longer presence in the city but also, above all, an effect of the substan­ tial growth of Pentecostal churches in recent times. In this sense, fifty-one churches of the seventy-one that have been built in the city since 1980 belong to Pentecostalism. In short, if one actor has to be labeled as the driv­ ing force of the current diversification of the Barcelona’s religious map, this is Pentecostalism. The success of Pentecostalism in Barcelona is strongly linked to the increasing presence of ethnic minorities in the city. Currently, newcomers from southern countries lead or are in a majority in around 70% of the Barcelona’s Pentecostal Churches. It is also important to acknowledge that

Anglicans Brothers Assemblies Baptists Independents Interdenomi­ national Lutherans 1 Mennonites Methodists No determined Pentecostal Presbyterians Quakers Unitarians Total 1

British Catalan/Spanish Catalan/Spanish Gypsies Colombians Koreans Mixed Nationalities Ecuadorians North Americans (US) Filipinos Ghanaians Nigerians No determined Rumanians Chinese Total

Brazilians

Germans

Table 5. Ethnic and national distribution of Protestant churches (Barcelona, 2009).

1

14 8 5

2

2

1 1 3

2 16

1

1

1

4

1 1

9 9 6

1 1 1 1 3 4 2 1 5 1 56 4 1 1 1 1 2 2 38 11 2 4 26 2 1 5 2 1 11 1 2 111 1 1 1 1 6 11 2 1 20 1 1 3

Source: ISOR & Generalitat de Catalunya



new christian geographies235

around 20% of the Pentecostal Churches belong to the Gypsy community and only in the 10% remaining, Spanish/Catalans (non Gypsy) members are in a majority (ISOR, 2009). The following table collects information regarding the national and ethnic distribution of Protestant churches in Barcelona. To sum up, the great majority of the Barcelona’s Protestant ethnic churches belong to Pentecostalism. Likewise, most of the Pentecostal churches are ethnic minority churches. Data shown in this chapter is specific for the Barcelona’s case but the same correlation between ethnic churches and Pentecostalism can be observed in Catalonia as a whole (Griera 2009).7 Therefore, it can be said that an elective affinity (Weber) among ethnic minorities and Pentecostalism is taking place and is giving a prominent role to Pentecostal ethnic churches in the Barcelona’s religious map.8 The New “Carriers” of Pentecostalism in Barcelona “Ethnic Pentecostal churches” are not a homogenous phenomenon and there are noteworthy differences between communities depending on multiple factors. An examination of Barcelona’s Pentecostal scenario per­ mits us to distinguish three main ‘carriers’ in the field. First, it is important to take into account that the central role that Pente­ costalism has taken among the Catalan Gypsy community has become a major force in spreading Pentecostalism all over the city. Currently, there are 11 Filadelfia Evangelical Churches distributed over the city and the pen­ tecostalization of the gipsy community is not a stagnant process, but still a growing one. At this point it should be acknowledged that the beginning of the expansion of Pentecostalism among Catalan Gypsies dates back to the 1960s. It has been documented that the Filadelfia Evangelical Church (IF) has its origins around 1956 in France when Clément Le Cossec – a nonGypsy pastor from the Assemblies of God – began to preach among the gipsy population.9 A few years later, the first Pentecostal Gypsy church of 7 Along this line, Jean-Pierre Bastian pointed out that “Statistical analysis of the ‘Religious Entities Register’ in Spain (…) also highlights the growth of Pentecostal churches, especially in the metropolitan areas, and the close relationship between Pentecostalism and ethnicity” (2007: 46). 8 Bernard Boutter (2007) in an analysis done in the context of France also underlines the success of Pentecostalism among ethnic minorities. The author even stresses that, in some cases, Pentecostalism gains major relevance in the host country than in the home country (eg. among Antilleans in France). 9 The Gypsy Pentecostal movement was linked to the Assemblies of God until 1968. In Spain the movement was registered with the name of “Iglesia de Filadelfia” in 1968.

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Catalonia was created in a small rural town (Balaguer) near the border with France. From then on, 72 churches have been created in Catalonia, which are almost exclusively composed by Gypsy population. All of them belong to the Filadelfia Evangelical Church (IF), an organization that was created with the aim to join together the Iberian Pentecostal Gypsy churches.10 According to the existing data, 55,6% of the Barcelona’s Gypsy population belongs to the IF (Garriga 2000: 174). Although there are some researches that stand out that the percentage could be around the 70% (Garriga and Carrasco 2003; Méndez 2007). Secondly, ethnic Pentecostal churches are growing as a consequence of the evangelization task of the so-called “migrants with a mission” (Waehrisch-Oblau 2000). This concept refers to migrants, mainly coming from the global south, which have led the creation of new churches in Barcelona. In this category, it is important to differentiate between two dif­ ferent patterns: on the one hand, there are the independent churches that have been created by pastors that undertook a migratory process for eco­ nomic reasons and that, later on, have decided to foster a Pentecostal church. Most of them were not pastors in their homeland – some of them were not even Pentecostals- and have “heard the call” after some time in the country.11 On the other hand, there are the churches that have been created by pastors sent (and paid) by a foreign (transnational) church with the spe­ cific aim to promote a branch of such denomination in the country. Many transnational churches began their task in the city after the petition done by some migrants – that belonged to this community in their homeland – to the Church’s headquarters. Good examples of these kinds of churches are the Church of Pentecost that fosters together migrants from Ghana; or the Iglesia Pentecostal Unida en España that joins together Latin American migrants – mainly from Colombia. Third, it should be acknowledged that there are also churches led by Catalan/Spanish pastors that have undergone a process of substantial transformation in a few years. Most of them were churches with few Canton Delgado (2004: 72) explains that the Church initially tried to be registered as “Misión Gitana” or “Movimiento Evangelico Gitano Español” but the Spanish Ministry of Justice rejected these names. 10 For a deepest analysis on the Filadelfia Evangelical Church in the Iberian context see Méndez (2005, 2007); Canton Delgado (2001, 2006); Blanes (2006, 2008). To better grasp the particularities of the Catalan Pentecostal Gypsies, see Marfà (2008). For an analysis of the Catalan Gypsy community see Sánchez Aroca (2003). 11 Afterwards, most of them have attributed a transcendental meaning to their migration process and have interpreted it as the will of God. It is also important to mention that most of them are ‘self-proclaimed’ pastors that base their religious activity in his charisma.



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adherents at the beginning of the nineties; however, they have recently grown a lot years thanks to the arrival of many Pentecostal migrants from southern countries. Two different dynamics can be detected in these churches: on the one hand, there are churches in which the arrival of migrant followers has been so important that nowadays, the presence of Catalan/Spanish adherents is just anecdotal.. Thus, despite the pastors being mainly Spanish-born, the members are mainly from another coun­ try.12 On the other hand, there are churches in which the presence of new­ comers from southern countries has encouraged the creation of a subsidiary church within the preexistent church. The emergence of a subsidiary church is usually seen as a solution to the adaptation problems between the new/old followers, especially when the new followers are from the same region or country. Usually, the subsidiary church uses the same prem­ ises as the “mother” church, shares some activities and it is lead by the same pastor. However, the Sunday worship celebration is held separately, there is a leader from the country of the majority of the subsidiary congregation and the subsidiary congregation has some autonomy to adapt the running of the community to the cultural/geographic origin of the majority. In the Barcelona city, it is possible to find Rumanian, Asian and Latin American churches subsidiaries of a Catalan Pentecostal church.13 However, it is important to point out that, as Boutter has shown for the case of France, Pentecostal migrants tend to create their own churches and are reluctant to become dependent on a local church.14 ‘Ethnic’ Churches: What does it Mean? In relation to the use of the adjective ‘ethnic’ to characterize these churches it is necessary to point out that the vast majority of these churches shun being labeled as ‘ethnic churches’. Their ‘Christian’ identity is seen as some­ thing that transcends cultural, ethnic and national categories (WaehrischOblau 2000). However, while Gypsy churches are not reluctant to accept

12 They are usually from Latin American countries to make sure that the language is not a barrier between the pastor and the congregation. In this sense, there are not any mixed churches or any church with a Spanish-born pastor in Barcelona with migrants from coun­ tries such as Nigeria, Ghana or Asian countries. 13 Currently there are a Portuguese subsidiarian church of the Assemblies of God, a Rumanian subsidiary church of the Church of God and a Philippine church dependent, also, on the Church of God. 14 In this sense, Boutter points out that “a fundamental question remains: why African, Haitian and Caribbean migrants prefer to create their own religious communities and are reluctant to integrate themselves into the French churches?” (Boutter 2004: 291).

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that their main distinguishing feature is their rooting in the Gypsy commu­ nity and their Gypsy character, the migrant churches usually do not want to emphasize their ethnic identity. It is also worth noting that while the Filadelfia Evangelical Church (IF) focuses its missionary task among Gypsies, the migrant churches put strong efforts to build non-diasporic churches. Therefore, while Spanish or Catalan converts are accepted in the IF but not always specially welcomed, the incorporation of Spanish/Catalan converts into the migrant congregations is perceived as an emblem of the church’s success.15 However, it is important to make notice that ethnic boundaries and meanings are constantly redefined and are the object of subtle and com­ plex negotiations into the confines of the church. This way, while Latin American or African pastors expressly state in the interviews that their churches can not be considered ‘ethnic churches’, the congregants make abundant allusions to the similar cultural origin of the churchgoers as one of the crucial factors that attracted them to this church and not to another, or explicitly refer to their ethnic origin as an explanative-factor of the spe­ cific ‘religious-style’ of their congregations. Moreover, they even identify their ethnic/cultural/national origin as the keystone of their ‘stronger reli­ giosity’ when they compare to autochthonous population. These ambiguities embedded around the role of the cultural and ethnic identity in the context of the church are well captured by Burdick when he says that “tension exists between Pentecostalism and the development of strong social identities… Pentecostalism encourages believers to see them­ selves as belonging to a transcendent worldwide brotherhood of the saved. Such a view is at odds with the ethnic project, for the universalizing insis­ tence that before Christ every human being is the same is in tension with a focus on group-centered discourse” (1998: 123, quoted by Lorentzen and Mira 2005: 60). It is also relevant to make clear that “Ethnic and cultural homogeneity often seem to win out over mixity, much like what takes place in the United States” (Fath 2005: 15). This observation that Fath made for the case of France is also valid for the Catalan ethnic churches. However, it should be nuanced by pointing out that what in an European context could be 15 However, it is important to highligt that there are also noteworthy differences among migrant churches themselves. For instance, while the Ghanaian Church of Pentecost tends to focus its evangelization task and the style of its celebrations to Ghanaian (mainly Ashanti) population (see also Fancello 2009), there are some other churches, like the independent Nigerian church, that make many efforts to attract authoctonous population (doing the wor­ ship in English and translating it into Spanish; evangelizing in public places, etc.).



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interpreted by ‘ethnic homogeneity’ in an African or Latin American con­ text could be perceived as richly diverse. That is to say, in some cases Latin American or African churches in Barcelona join together members coming from different ethnic origins and backgrounds that would have rarely belonged to the same church in their homeland. However, in the context of Barcelona they altogether build new meanings for their Latinity or Africanness that transcends the ethnic boundaries and the geographic bor­ ders of their continent of origin.16 A look at the Gypsy case shows the pic­ ture from an other angle because while Latin American or Africans tend to widen the meanings of their ethnic or cultural identity because of being in a context of immigration, the members of the Filadelfia Evangelical church have built new boundaries to their ethnic identity due to the arrival of new Gypsies from Rumania. As Marfà (2008) indicates, Catalan Gypsies show strong distrust towards Rumanian Gypsies, do not recognize their churches as “truly Pentecostal churches” (and they do not even let them use their premises occasionally)17 and also call them ‘rom’ (and not Gypsies), using it in a pejorative sense. Along this line, it should be noted that the use of the ‘ethnic’ category in this chapter can generate some epistemological or theoretical controver­ sies. However, and taking it with caution, the use of the ‘ethnic’ category allows us to uncover some similarities relating to the Barcelona’s Pentecostal churches that meet two conditions: first, that gather together population with a similar cultural, geographic or national origin and, second, that these cultural, geographic or national origin are in a minority position within the Catalan/Spanish society. From this point of view if, for instance, the German or the British Protestant churches had been Pentecostals, they would have also been included in this category. Nevertheless, it is impor­ tant to point out that many of the characteristics that nowadays share the Barcelona ethnic minority Pentecostal churches are not only due to the fact that they join together members of an ‘ethnic’ minority but also because the majority of the adherents are low-income people who live in poor con­ ditions in the context of Barcelona.18 16 These are mainly the churches that in the table 5 appear as ‘mixed nationalities’; most of them are Latin American churches and some African that join together Latin American followers coming from different countries. 17 In a neighboring city of Barcelona (Badalona) the confrontation among the Filadelfia Church and a Gypsy Rumanian church has reached a point where the relationship between both groups has become so conflictive that mediators, hired by the City Council, have had to intervene. 18 The rooting of Pentecostalism among the poorest is well-known. In this sense “The majority of Azusa Street converts, like the majority of converts in Latin America, Africa, and

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Ethnic Minorities and Pentecostalism: A Pattern for Success To unveil the factors that foster the elective affinity between Pentecostalism and ethnic minorities it is crucial to highlight that, as Hunt pointed out, what is unique about Pentecostalism is its flexibility (2002: 22). In a way, Pentecostalism shows a unique ability of adaptation in different contexts due to their theological19 and organizational flexibility. Most bibliography on Pentecostalism underlines this feature as the key variable to understand the current success of this Protestant movement in the contemporary world. In this sense, the elective affinity between Pentecostalism and eth­ nic minorities can be explained by the adaptation capacity of Pentecostalism to the necessities, the cultural particularities and the structural conditions of ethnic minorities in Barcelona. However, in order to properly examine the factors that explain why Pentecostalism has struck a chord within eth­ nic minorities in Barcelona, it is necessary to go beyond the simple observa­ tion of its flexibility. The Pentecostal pattern of success among ethnic minorities in Barcelona is conformed by a correlation of three different fac­ tors that altogether build an elective affinity between these two conditions (ethnic minorities and Pentecostalism). However, before proceeding with the analysis, it is important to make clear that in this chapter I focus only on the factors that specifically link ethnic minorities and Pentecostal churches and that there will be many other factors that should be taken into account for analyzing the success of Pentecostalism in general terms. Thus, in the following paragraphs, the attention will be given specifically to the three factors that play a role in explaining the success of Pentecostalism within ethnic minorities in the context of Barcelona. First, it is necessary to take into account that it is through Pentecostalism that ethnic communities can challenge the place that is assigned to them in the context of Barcelona; that is to say, to put into question their role as ‘passive players’ in the religious field and the perception of them as the ‘victims’ of the globalization process. elsewhere, have been rural migrants to cities, people at the lower end of the social class scale, or rural stay-at-homes displaced from the center of their own worlds by social change” (Martin 1990: 190–191). 19 As Robbins point out “Aside from its emphasis on tongues, Pentecostal doctrine (…) described as the fourfold, foursquare, or “full gospel” pattern of Pentecostal theology, it stresses that (a) Jesus offers salvation; (b) Jesus heals; (c) Jesus baptizes with the Holy Spirit; (d) Jesus is coming again (Dayton, 1987). Along with a strict moralism, these are the core Pentecostal doctrines, and they are elements of the religion that have proved immensely portable, seemingly able to enter any number of cultural contexts without losing their basic shape (2004: 121).



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It is worth stressing that the growth of ethnic Pentecostal churches in Barcelona can be seen as a consequence of what some authors have called a ‘reverse missionary effect’. The British sociologist Rebecca Catto (2008) has pointed out that the idea of ‘reverse mission’ arose in Christian mis­ sionary circles to designate the increase of missionaries now working in countries from which they originally received Christianity.20 To some extent, it is also possible to broaden this metaphor in order to use it to point out that those who were historically perceived as “passive takers” of the missionary task, have become the carriers of new forms of Christianity. For instance, while Gypsies were traditionally considered as “someone who has to be evangelized” by the Catholic Church (Mendez 2007) they have chal­ lenged this position and are exerting their own agency in promoting Christianity within the Gypsy community. Catholicism left almost no room to the Gypsy community for having their own voice within the institution, while Pentecostalism permits the Gypsy community to keep the control over all aspects of the church. Similarly, the African, Latin American or Asian citizens not only exert their own agency in promoting new forms of Christianity in their homelands, but also want to be carriers of Christianity in the Western World, challenging the historical colonialist perspective over mission. To some extent, the organizational flexibility of Pentecostalism is a key variable to understand why Pentecostalism and not other forms of Christianity such as Catholicism or Jehovah Witnesses become a suitable way to challenge the historical subaltern position of these groups. It is also through Pentecostalism that those who could have been the victims of the globalization process take advantage of living within this glo­ balised world. Many authors have noticed both the ability of the Pentecostal movements to operate in a globalized world and their role as a globalizing force in contemporary societies. On the one hand, Pentecostal organiza­ tions have their own agency in promoting the globalization process. They are creating transnational networks that transcend the traditional geo­ graphic boundaries (Levitt 2007). This way, for instance, the Filadelfia Evangelical Church (IF) is sending missionaries to places like Chile or Rumania with the aim to evangelize the Gypsies’ communities there and to extend their church beyond the boundaries of the Iberian Peninsula. Furthermore, it should be acknowledged that the transnational ties are not 20 Following Robbins “Despite its originally Western provenience, just a hundred years after its birth two thirds of P/c’s 523 million adherents live outside the West in areas such as Africa, Latin America, Asia, and Oceania, as do most of the nine million people who convert to it each year (Barrett and Johnson 2002)” (Robbins 2004: 117).

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reduced to just one way or one way back. Rather, Barcelona’s Pentecostal ethnic churches are taking many complex shapes forming a dense and dynamic network of churches connected between them by different types of bonds. To some extent, these complex transnational ties can be better illustrated by explaining the concrete case of a Nigerian pastor that after having created an independent church in Barcelona, has fostered the cre­ ation of a branch in his homeland and a church in London. At the same time, he keeps a strong connection with a Pentecostal Church from the US and sends money to the pastor of his original church in Nigeria. It should also be noted the ability of Pentecostal organizations to adapt themselves to the rapid changes promoted by globalization. This way, Pentecostal churches show an extraordinary ability for using the character­ istics of the new global environment for their purposes. In this sense, the Barcelona’s Pentecostal churches are the ones that do the most intensive use of new technologies like, for instance, the use of video recorders, com­ puters or internet in their celebrations and activities, as well as the use of new ways of evangelizing through new technologies (youtube, twitter, etc.) (Bastian 2006). Likewise, the Pentecostal ethnic pastors take the world as a ‘small place’ and travel abroad frequently invited by Pentecostal communi­ ties (likewise, they usually invite foreign pastors to preach into their com­ munities in Barcelona). Concerning traveling and keeping contact with foreign churches, the ethnic Pentecostal communities stand out over the rest of the Barcelona Protestant churches.21 Pentecostal churches are also becoming a platform for organizing social assistance networks in a context where many of their members are in a situation of social exclusion, marginalization and poverty. Thus, Pente­ costalism also allows that those who were clients of ‘social assistance’ net­ works become the promoters of these social assistance networks. As a responsible of the FACCA – a federation linked to the Filadelfia Evangelical Church (IF) – pointed out, “Caritas (the Catholic Church social assistance organization) do a good work in helping Gypsy population but we think that we can do it better as we are inside the community and we know more accurately the necessities and the way to reach Gypsy population” (June, 2009). To some extent, they do not want to be reduced as ‘mere clients’

21 In relation to African Churches, Adogame and Chitando point out that “the increasing mobility and itinerancy of African religious Readers, freelance evangelists and members between the homeland and diasporic spaces is noteworthy here. The complex peregrination partly demonstrates an instante of religious transnationalization of African churches in diaspora” (2005: 258)



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of social assistance organizations; they also want to be the providers. Furthermore, they claim that to better help people to overcome situations of marginality it is crucial not only to provide relief supplies but also to offer spiritual support. In their opinion, the aseptic character of the major­ ity of the social assistance organizations weakens the capacity of these organizations to help people to overcome marginality, since it is only through orienting oneselves’ life towards God that one can confront diffi­ culties successfully. In some way, through the Pentecostal churches they challenge not only their position as clients of the social assistance networks but also the hegemonic views on the better ways to relief poverty and marginality. In a second place, it is necessary to underline that the option for Pente­ costalism helps ethnic minorities to reshape their ethnic identity by recon­ structing the meanings of their cultural and social distinctiveness in a positive way. Likewise, the doctrinal flexibility of Pentecostalism facilitates to creatively readapt the religious celebrations and the running of the church to the cultural backgrounds of the churchgoers. Through Pentecostalism, ethnic communities are able to turn what socially or traditionally have been perceived as weaknesses, into strength. To some extent, Pentecostalism is a good strategy for minorities to rebuild their identity and to give a positive meaning to their specificities. This is well illustrated by the ability of the Gypsy Pentecostal communities to resignify their own history of persecution, marginality and nomadism as signs that show that, like Jews, they are ‘chosen’ people by God (Gay y Blasco 2002). In a similar vein, migrant pastors explain their precariousness and the racism that they suffer in Barcelona as tests of God while they give to their migratory experience a religious transcendence. “To bring God to Europe” becomes a self-imposed responsibility and a spiritual duty by migrant pastors and migrant Pentecostal churchgoers – what, seemingly, helps them to compensate or to provide a transcendental meaning to the precariousness associated to their migratory experience (Griera 2008). It is also not worthless to point out that Pentecostalism helps to better define the meanings and the boundaries of the ethnic community and to give them a broader sense in the global world. In this way, the meanings of the ‘Gypsisness’ are redefined (and reasserted) in the context of the church. Along this line, Willaime point out that “for an important number of families and individuals the adhesion to Pentecostalism has implied a ‘Gypsification’ through the acquisition of cultural traits (lanquage, music, but also clothes, food, craft skills…” (Willaime 1993: 439). Likewise, through Pentecostalism a new boundary is being built between the ‘good Gypsy’

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(the convert one) and the one that is still ‘uncivilized’ and in the ‘back­ wards’ (Gay y Blasco 2002). However, at the same time their belonging to Pentecostalism helps the Gypsy community to foster new links with the global Pentecostal community by linking symbolically their churches to an “imagined community of Pentecostals” who all together fight against the devil. However, it is important to remark that this link is not only symboli­ cal and de-territorialized since the Filadelfia Evangelical Church has estab­ lished many collaborations with Spanish and Catalan Pentecostal churches. On the other hand, in the case of African and Latin American churches their cultural, geographic or ethnic particularities are set aside (or, better, are declared as set aside) in benefit of their Pentecostal identity. In this sense, in a context where their ethnic identity is a factor of social exclusion, they reject this category in favour of an identity built on the distinction between those who are “real Christians” and those who are in the “side of the ignorance” (or the devil). To some extent, Pentecostalism can be adapted to the particularities of the different ethnic communities and it helps to subtly redefine the boundaries and the bonds of the community. Along this line, as many authors have shown, the doctrinal and organiza­ tional flexibility of Pentecostalism helps to build congregations suffused with cultural values and practices of the ethnic community. To some extent, although it is clear that cultural values and practices are redefined and reconstructed in the context of the church, it is still possible to affirm that some continuity exist between them. As Hunt (2002) pointed out, ethnic Pentecostal communities take advantage of the similar cultural and social background of their members in order to build a ‘homogeneous club’ which generates the feeling of familiarity and warmth. In a third place, it is important to mention that through Pentecostalism, ethnic minorities are able to re-educate the community to the requirements of capitalism. However, this re-education, far from being an imposition from above/from outside, becomes a movement that arises from the community and it is seen as legitimate by the community. Thus, into the activities and celebrations of the Filadelfia Evangelical Church (IF) it is not unusual to find explanations about the best way to dress for going to work, about the importance of education22 or about the ethics of work. Something similar

22 In this way, for instance, the Catalan Government has signed an agreement with the Catalan Filadelfia Evangelical Church stating that pastors have to be comitted to fighting against school dropage and absentism among Gypsy children and, in exchange, the Catalan Government provides funds and political recognition to the community. (See http://www20 .gencat.cat/docs/Sala%20de%20Premsa/Documents/Arxius/6920.pdf, November 2009).



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happens to the migrant churches where the necessity to strictly follow the laws of the host country or the importance of giving a ‘good image’ of one­ self in the workplace are common advices given by the pastor to the con­ gregation. Along this line, Lorentzen and Mira, in their analysis of a Latin America Pentecostal Church in San Francisco, stress the role of the church in persuading migrants on the need to strive to be ‘exemplary migrants’ (2005: 62). In addition, it’s necessary to remember that the high implication of the followers in the running of the Pentecostal church can become, in some way, a school for discipline, participation and ethics.23 These factors help to understand why in Pentecostalism we may have “the re(-) creation of life in community from this very foundation. If this is the case, then the poorest and most excluded can be primary agents of such reconstruction, whether or not they perceive their struggle in this way” (Shaull and César, quoted by Vasquez 2003: 171). A reconstruction that is based simultaneously on the continuities, ruptures and reconcepualiza­ tions of the churchgoers cultural backgrounds, done in a creative (and somehow empowering) way in a context of a globalized, diverse – and sometimes hostile – city. In a certain way, to analyze the role of Pentecostalism among ethnic minorities implies to confront oneself with the multiple paradoxes embed­ ded in it, what can make the analysis more challenging but also more complex. This way, on the one hand, while Pentecostalism helps ethnic minorities to challenge and counteract their subaltern position in the reli­ gious field and in the diaspora context, also promotes an “exemplary par­ ticipation in the dominant system” driven churchgoers to adopt a compatible behavior with the capitalism context (Lorentzen and Mira 2005: 63).Therefore, it is necessary to take into account the Pentecostal ­ability to combine contestation with adaptation in order to properly com­ prehend its role among ethnic minorities. On the other hand, Pentecostalism helps ethnic minorities to transcend their ethnic boundaries in favour of an “imagined Christian community” that drives them to symbolically break with the past (Meyer 1998) and with the cultural, ethnic and geographic loyalties attached to it. However, the new Pentecostal identity and the new

23 Along this line, Gifford (2004) states that Pentecostal members “they elect their own officers, they learn to exercise Leadership themselves, thus developing Leadership skills. They learn to participate in, and run meetings, to conduct Business, to handle Money, to Budget, to compromise, to formulate and “own” a course of action, to implement it, to cri­ tique results, to change direction in the Light of experience” (quoted by Schlemmer et al. 2008: 23).

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meanings, new symbolisms and new narratives that come with the conver­ sion are also built on the work on this same past. In fact, we could not understand why, as Fath (2005) indicates and I have already quoted, “cul­ tural homogeneity often seems to win out over mixity” and why Gypsy churches and African churches in Barcelona, despite sharing a ‘family resemblance’, simultaneously show non-negligible differences among them, if we don’t take into account that these ‘mundane’ loyalties or belong­ ings (like the cultural, ethnic or geographic) play a role. To some extent, from the worship style to the metaphors of the devil or the God passing by the way of running the church are embedded by the cultural, ethnic and geographic belongings of the community in spite of the Pentecostal leaders and churchgoers emphasis on the necessity to completely break with the past for embracing a modern Pentecostal and universal Christian identity. Before finishing, it is noteworthy to state that tto better grasp the mean­ ings, the implications and the complex shapes of this relationship between ethnic minorities and Pentecostal churches it would be necessary to under­ take long-term research on these communities and to deeply explore them in different European contexts. Some Final Remarks Barcelona’s religious geography has deeply changed in recent years and Pentecostal ethnic churches are playing a crucial role in reshaping the city’s religious map. To acknowledge the central role of these churches in trans­ forming the religious face of the city challenges some common assump­ tions about the role of religion in contemporary European societies. First, for a long time Europeans were convinced that ethnic minorities would follow the secularization path and would progressively leave their religious affiliation (or at least, diminish the religious fervor) (Berger et al. 2008). However, a look at Barcelona’s ethnic Pentecostal churches shows that religious fervor not always diminishes; rather in some cases it can become stronger. Second, debates on the public sphere generally obviate the role of Christianity in the country, while putting the attention on the increasing presence of Muslim believers. However, a more accurate analysis of the current religious scenario shows that Pentecostal churches, and particular­ ity the ethnic Pentecostal churches, are the ones that are experiencing the greatest growth in the context of Barcelona. Third, historically public representation of ethnic minorities operated through secular civil society organizations. Moreover, when immigration



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began to increase in Barcelona in the beginning of the 1990s, governments promoted the creation of ethnic secular organizations. However, nowa­ days, religious minority groups are gaining relevance in this field. In some cases, even the religious organizations are competing with the secular ones for being considered as the legitimate representatives of these ethnic minorities. A case point is the role played by the FACCAT-Agape – a federa­ tion that belongs to the Filadelfia Evangelical Church (IF) – as a representa­ tive of the Gypsy community. It has become an official interlocutor of the governments and work as a partner of the Catalan and Barcelona city gov­ ernment in implementing many social and cultural programs for the Gypsy community. This increasingly central role of the Filadelfia Evangelical Church (IF) has generated some tensions with some other Gypsy secular associations and with other evangelical bodies.24 Migrant churches have not been as successful as the Gypsy church in their claims for being consid­ ered as interlocutors for the migrant community. However, it is too early – most of them have no more than 10 years of life in Barcelona – to evaluate their capacity to be awarded with this recognition. To conclude, it is important to point out that the highly secular environ­ ment of Barcelona is not an antidote for the reproduction of an elective affinity between ethnic minorities and Pentecostal churches. However, fol­ lowing Berger’s sociological observations (1999), what is still at stake is to know why to be autochthonous and not to belong to an ethnic minority effectively works as an antidote to Pentecostal evangelization in the con­ text of Barcelona. References Adogame, A. and E. Chitando, 2005. ‘Moving among Those Moved by the Spirit’, Fieldwork in Religion 1 (3): 253–270. Aubré, M. 2004, ‘Quel raport à l’ethnicité pour les filiales européennes de l’EURD?’, in Bastian, J.P. (ed.), La recomposition des protestantismes en Europe latine: entre emotion et tradition. Gèneve: Labor et Fides. Bastian, J.P. 2006. ‘La nouvelle economie religieuse de l’Amerique latine’, Social Compass 53 (1) : 65. ——. 2004a. La recomposition des protestantismes en Europe latine: entre emotion et tradi­ tion. Gèneve: Labor et Fides. ——. 2004b. ‘Le lien maçonique des dirigents protestants espagnols 1868–1939’, Revue d’Hisotire et de Philosophie Religieuse 84: 265–285.

24 In fact, it has been perceived as an intrusion by the Catalan Evangelical Council that historically had monopolized the political representation of the whole Catalan Protestant community.

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Berger, P.L. 1999. The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics. Grand Rapids, ILL : Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. Berger, P., G. Davie and E. Fokas. 2008. Religious America, Secular Europe? A Theme and Variations. Aldershot: Ashgate. Bizeul, Y. 2004. ‘La dimension ‘ethnique’ du protestantisme française” in Bastian, J. P. (ed). La recomposition des protestantismes en Europe latine: entre emotion et tradition. Gèneve: Labor et Fides. Blanes, R.L. 2008. ‘Satan, agent musical Le pouvoir ambivalent de la musique chez les Tsiganes évangéliques de la péninsule Ibérique’, Terrain 50. ——. 2006. ‘The Atheist Anthropologist: Believers and Non-believers in Anthropological Fieldwork’, Social Anthropology 14 (2): 223–234. Boutter, B. 2004. ‘Pentecôtisme et ethnicité en France, in Bastian, J. P (ed.), La recomposition des protestantismes en Europe latine: entre emotion et tradition. Gèneve: Labor et Fides. Cantón Delgado, M. 2001. ‘Gitanos Protestantes. El movimiento religioso de las iglesias. Filadelfia” en Andalucía, España’, Alteridades 11 (22): 59–74. Cantón Delgado, M., C. Marcos Montiel, S. Medina Baena, M. Cabezas and R. Ignacio. 2006. ‘Gitanos pentecostales. Una mirada antropológica a la iglesia filadelfia en Andalucía’, Relaciones: Estudios de historia y sociedad, ISSN 27 (105): 279–283. Catto, R. 2008. ‘Has Mission Been Reversed? Reflections on Sociological Research with NonWestern Christian Missionaries in England’, in Spencer, S (ed.), Migration and Mission: Papers Read at the Biennial Conference of the British and Irish Association for Mission Studies. Sheffield: Cliff College Publishing. Clara i Resplandis, J. 1994. Els protestants. Girona: Quaderns de la Revista de Girona. Diputació. Estruch, J., J. Gomez, M. Griera and A. Iglesias. 2005. Les altres religions. Minories religioses a Catalunya. Barcelona: MediterrÓnia. Estruch, J. 1968. Los protestantes españoles. Barcelona: Sal Terrae. Fancello, S. 2009. ‘Migration et plurilinguisme: Parler en langues dans les Eglises africaines en Europe’, Social Compass 56 (3): 387. Fath, S. 2005. ‘Evangelical Protestantism in France: an Example of Denominational Recomposition?’, Sociology of Religion 66 (4): 399. Garriga, C. 2000. Els gitanos a Barcelona. Una aproximació sociològica. Barcelona: Diputació de Barcelona. Garriga, C. and S. Carrasco. 2003. Els gitanos a Badalona. Una aproximació sociològica. Barcelona: Diputació de Barcelona. Gay y Blasco, P. 2002. ‘Gypsy/Roma Diasporas. A Comparative Perspective’, Social Anthropology 10 (2): 173–188. Gonzàlez, J. 1968. El protestantisme a Catalunya. Terrassa: Ed. Horeb. Griera, M. 2009. ‘From Religion to Religions. Public Policies and Religious Minorities in Catalonia’. Ph.D. Dissertation. Sociology Department. Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Unpublished. ——. 2008. ‘Are you a real Christian?” Stereotypes, Distrust and Distinction Strategies between “New” and “Old” Protestants in Catalonia’, Etnográfica 12 (2). ——. 2006. ‘Recomposicions del protestantisme català: de la dictadura al tombant de segle’, Quaderns de l’Institut Català d’Antropologia 7. Hunt, S. 2002. ‘Deprivation and Western Pentecostalism Revisited: The Case of NeoPentecostalism’, Pentecostudies 1 (2). IDESCAT. 2005. Baròmetre d’opinió política. Barcelona: Centre d’Estudis d’Opinió, Generalitat de Catalunya. ISOR. 2009. Minories Religioses a Catalunya. Unpublished Report. Jackson, D. and A. Passarelli. 2008. Mapping Migration, Mapping Churches. Brussels: Churches’ Commission for Migrants in Europe & Nova Research Centre. Lawrence, S. et al. 2008. Dormant Capital. Pentecostalism in South Africa and its Potencial Social and Economic Role. Johannesburg: Center for Development and Enterprise.



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Levitt, P. 2007. God Needs No Passport. Immigrants and the Changing American Religious Landscape. New York: The New Press. Lorentzen, L.A. and R. Mira. 2005.‚ El milagro está en casa: Gender and Private/Public Empowerment in a Migrant Pentecostal Church’, Latin American Perspectives 32 (1): 57–71. Marfà i Castán, M. 2008. ‘De lejos y de cerca: Diferenciaciones y negociaciones identitarias entre gitanos catalanes y Romá procedentes de Rumania’, in VV.AA., La política de lo diverso: ¿Producción, reconocimiento o apropiación de lo intercultural?. Barcelona: CIDOB. Martin, D. 1990. Tongues of Fire: The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America. London: Blackwell. MEC. 2005. Estadística de las Enseñanzas no universitarias. Report available at http://www .mec.es/mecd/jsp/plantilla.jsp?id=310&area=estadisticas (Accessed October 2007). Mendez, C. 2007. ‘La presencia de la iglesia católica en la historia de los gitanos. Congreso Virtual’, in La Escolarización del Alumnado Gitano en los Países de la Unión Europea: Mitos, Realidades Y Retos. Available online at http://www.disacnetsolutions.net/cdd/congreso/ docs/cm01.pdf (Accessed November 2009). ——. 2005. ‘Por el camino de la participación. Una aproximación contrastada a los procesos de integración social y política de los gitanos y las gitanas en Catalunya’. Ph.D. Disser­ tation. Anthropology Department, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona. Unpublished. Meyer, B. 1998. ‘“Make a Complete Break with the Past”. Memory and Post-Colonial Modernity in Ghanaian Pentecostalist Discourse’, Journal of Religion in Africa 28 (3): 316–349. Morales Diez de Ulzurrun, L., E. Anduiza Perea, E. Rodríguez Ortiz and J. i San Martín. 2008. ‘Capital Social, pautas identitarias y actitudes hacia “los otros”: la incorporación cívica de la población de origen inmigrante en Barcelona y Madrid’, Panorama Social 8: 119–142. Pérez-Agote, A. 2007. ‘El proceso de secularización en la sociedad español’, Revista CIDOB d’Afers Internacionals 77. Sanchez Aroca, M. 2003. Estudi sobre la població gitana de Catalunya. Barcelona: Fundació Pere Tarrés. Vasquez, M. 2003. ‘Tracking Global Evangelical Christianity’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 71 (1): 157–173. Währisch-Oblau, C. 2000. ‘From Reverse Mission to Common Mission… The Immigrant Protestant Churches and the “Programme for Cooperation Between and Immigrant Congregations” of the United Evangelical Mission’, International of Mission 89: 467–483. Willaime, J.P. 2004. ‘Protestantisme établi et protestantisme de conversión: les recomposi­ tions du protestantisme en ultramodernité’, in Bastian, J.P. (ed.), La recomposition des protestantismes en Europe latine: entre emotion et tradition. Gèneve: Labor et Fides. Williams, P. 1993. ‘Questions pour l’étude du mouvement religieux pentecôtiste chez les Tsiganes’, in Belmont, N. and F. Lautman (eds), Ethnologie des Faits Religieux en Europe. Paris: CTHS, 433–445. Wilson, B. 1970. Sociología de las sectas religiosas. Madrid: Guadarrama.

SIKHS IN BARCELONA: NEGOTIATION AND INTERSTICES IN THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A COMMUNITY Sandra Santos Fraile Sikhs as a distinctive community in Barcelona go unnoticed by the local population. Only some who live close to the Sikh temples know they exist, although those who watched the report on Sikhs in a local television program showing recently arrived communities in the city1 (called nouvinguts in Catalan) may also recognize Sikhs who wear the turban and beard. In a context where the host community is most worried by and distrustful of other majority groups of immigrants such as Moroccans and Pakistanis, whom they associate with conflict, delinquency and illegality, Sikhs are perceived as ‘immigrants’ but, in general, they are not distinguished from Hindus or even from Pakistanis. The Sikh community is neither one of the most numerous immigrant communities, nor does it make political demands, and therefore it does not receive a lot of attention from the host community. However, there is an increasing Sikh population in Barcelona, as well as in other Spanish provinces such as Valencia and Gerona, albeit in smaller numbers. The number of Sikhs is estimated at 5,000 in Catalonia, with the great majority settled in Barcelona, and 10,000 in the whole of Spain.2 This chapter tries to offer a brief overview of the Sikh community in Barcelona. It endorses Steven Vertovec’s argument that religious and other socio-cultural dynamics develop distinctively within the realms of migration and minority status, diaspora and transnationalism (2009: 136). Thus, this study is based on the notion that the Sikh community in Barcelona is an immigrant and diasporic community, which has a minority status in Spain but belongs to a wider transnational global community. I take into consideration Vertovec’s approach, explained as follows: 1 I refer to the program “Els nous Catalans” that is currently being broadcast on channel TVE2 in Barcelona. 2 This is an estimation made by some institutions for their own purposes. As there is no statistical data that considers population by religious belonging, or by concrete place of birth in India (which could be helpful, considering that the majority of Sikhs come from Punjab – they are either born there or their ancestors are), it is impossible to have accurate data. Many of them are also ‘undocumented’, and are invisible in official statistics.

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sandra santos fraile I consider migration to involve the transference and reconstitution of cultural patterns and social relations in a new setting, one that usually involves the migrants as minorities becoming set apart by ‘race’, language, cultural traditions and religion. I refer to diaspora here especially as an imagined connection between a post-migration (…) population and a place of origin and with people of similar origins now living elsewhere in the world. (By ‘imagined’ I do not mean such connections might not be actual. Rather, by this I emphasize the often strong sentiments, narratives, memories and mental pictures according to which members of diasporas organize themselves and undertake their cultural practices. (…)). By transnationalism I refer to the actual, ongoing exchanges of information, money and resources –as well as regular travel and communication– that members of a diaspora may undertake with others in the homeland or elsewhere within the globalized ethnic community (ibid. 136–137).

In the first part of this chapter I will state briefly the characteristics of the Sikh community as a global and transnational community. I will look at why Sikhs come to Spain and at the general characteristics of the Sikh community in Barcelona. Later, I will explain the relevance of gurdwaras or Sikh temples to the community – both for those who have recently arrived and for those already established in Barcelona. This will help us understand their composition as a religious community as well as the role of the Sikh religion in migration. In the last part of the chapter I will discuss the possibility of considering Sikhism as a link between Punjabis and the local population, using the concept of interstices as places – sometimes urban places but also social spaces of interaction – where people from different cultures meet and maintain contact. These interstices are places in between, capable of producing new practices or processes of hybridization, as Canclini (2005) proposes. This study is derived from the research I have been carrying out for my doctoral thesis,3 the main focus of which is the Sikh community in Barcelona. In this research I work from a perspective of multi-sited ethnography. I have spent more than 18 months of fieldwork in Barcelona, London, Delhi and Punjab, observing the changes that appear within the Sikh community following the migration process, especially regarding the body and bodily practices. The first part of the research consisted of a general ethnography of the Sikh community in Barcelona, due to the inexistence of any previous work about this community.4

3 This doctoral research is possible thanks to the support of the Ministry of Education through its FPU Scholarship Program with the Reference AP2500–1400. 4 See Santos (2007).



sikhs in barcelona253 The Sikh Community

The Sikh community is mainly characterized by belonging to a specific religion that is related to a place of origin and a specific culture. By ‘Sikh community’ I refer to a group of individuals who belong to a global and transnational community, which is not tied to a specific country of residence and which has theoretically unlimited membership since it includes any person who identifies him or herself with the Sikh religion and more generally with Punjabi origin or ancestry, the latter of which is essential. The limits of the community are not defined by the space in which its members are settled or which they inhabit, but by the religion and the origin of any person, in any place around the world, who identifies him or herself with them.5 This conceptualization of the ‘community’ matches Judith Brown’s definition of the South Asian community: South Asians abroad cannot be understood just as local ‘ethnic minorities’ in the countries to which they go, as so often they are compartmentalised for policy makers and journalists. They are involved in a dense network of local and global connections which make them truly transnational people, at home in several places and responding to opportunities and challenges both local and global, and keenly aware of the emerging role of South Asia in a changing world environment (Brown 2006: 8).

Moreover, my proposed definition of ‘community’ is somewhat analogical with that offered by Baumann in his book Contesting Culture, where he talks about ‘self-evident’ communities of culture (2003: 72–73), in the sense that Sikhs are defined by themselves and also by other Asians as a reli­ gious community characterized by their own distinctive culture. In other words, the community is defined mainly by religious criteria. However, the concept of community stated here differs from that of Baumann in two respects. Firstly, the idea of community is not restricted to people living in a specific place (in this case, Barcelona). Secondly, the establishment of the community in Barcelona is not preceded or defined by a dominant discourse, as it was in Southall (where Baumann relates the discourse to the British annexation of India), but by the practices around and through the gurdwaras or Sikh temples. Due to a lack of knowledge and information concerning Sikhs and Sikhism in Spain in general, a previous discourse 5 In spite of this, an increasing number of Western people follow the Sikh religion. They are known as gora Sikhs. I do not include them in this definition of the Sikh community because I do not consider the two groups (Sikhs from India and Western Sikhs) to share the same sense of community.

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does not exist in this context. Within Sikhism we find different groups of belonging, defined as sects, which differ from the mainstream orthodox group. In turn, this is considered a sect by other groups.6 Nevertheless, in their formation as a community in Barcelona, Sikhs resort to their community as a category of ascription and identification common among ethnic groups, which as Barth (1976: 10–11) asserts, is used by their members and that also organizes interaction among individuals. In this sense, and following Barth’s (ibid. 10–16) widely-used definition of the ethnic group, the Sikh community and its members identify themselves and are identified by others as a distinctive and differentiated group: a group which is endogamous, shares basic cultural values, and creates an arena for communication and interaction. However, as Baumann states, ethnicity is not an identity given by nature but an identification created through social action. As well as stressing distinctive aspects of language, behaviour, body language and style, in certain contexts ethnic groups can also reject attributes of their ethnicity or ethnic identity. This is how we should address ‘changing identity’ or ‘contextual ethnicity’ according to Baumann (2001: 35–36). As we will see, some of the Sikh community’s cultural features are used by its members as signs and emblems of difference, while others are being negotiated. In the Southall case, Baumann (2003) shows how the recognition of the Sikh community as a “clearly bounded, internally homogeneous group” came as part of a dominant discourse, and how it was later enshrined in British law. In Barcelona these characteristics are created and negotiated by the daily practices of the members of the community. These are the same practices by which the community negotiates its establishment as such. Judith Brown states the importance of the South Asian religions in the diaspora for a number of reasons. She points out that: religion is a powerful determinant of linkages and divisions within the diaspora. (…) Shared religious belief and observance can add another dimension or layer to the rich social life built up in the diaspora as it reinforces kinship and neighbourliness: but of course religious difference, in the same way, divides South Asians from each other outside the subcontinent, as on it, though not in any absolute or all-encompassing sense (2006: 93).

Sikhs come from India, specifically from the north-western state of Punjab. As noted above, beyond forming a collective group, Sikhs form a community  – more precisely a religious community characterized by a common 6 See McLeod (2004).



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origin and language as well as a long history. Religious practice is the fundamental element in their constitution as a community, affecting and organizing many aspects of daily life. Thus, being a Sikh goes far beyond merely defining the individual by his or her beliefs. A Sikh is also defined by a philosophy and an all-encompassing way of life. However, as we will see, the practice of this philosophy, and the way of life that it involves, are means of negotiation that are always susceptible to change depending on the context. Baumann’s metaphor of religion is illustrative here: it portrays religion not as an immutable baggage, but as a sextant that allows its practitioners to locate and calculate their changing position in relation to the context. As he states, when the believers change their position, or when they observe that they have changed in their new context, the course of the belief and the religious practice will change (2001: 93–104). The establishment of the Sikh community in Barcelona differs in many respects from that described by Ballard and Ballard (1979) for Sikhs in Leeds.7 As a result of disparate host society contexts and opportunities offered by the globalized world regarding travel, media and new technologies, the establishment of early migrants in Britain and in Spain has been very different. These factors may also have caused differences in the later establishment of the communities in Leeds and Barcelona as a whole and in their organization around religion. In Barcelona, we also find that some of the changes referred to by Baumann can be observed through interstices that operate as meeting points produced between the Sikh community and the host society. On the basis of the Sikh belief, “there is only One being and Truth is its Name”: “The Ultimate Reality”, which exists in no physical form and which transcends time, space and gender. It is through the “Divine One” that the universe was created and continues to exist. Its Words were transmitted by the ten gurus (from Guru Nanak to Guru Gobind Singh) and now are preserved in the Sikh Holy Book, the Adi Granth or Guru Granth Sahib. The Guru Granth Sahib is considered the last and eternal Guru, and Sikhs

7 One of the most interesting differences is the effect produced by the double migrants from East Africa in Leeds. Ballard and Ballard describe how these double migrants encouraged the use of the turban and the organising of the diwan (religious service) which led to the creation of the first gurdwara (Sikh temple): “they [the migrants from East Africa] had established a tradition, as a minority group in East Africa, of maintaining separate moral and religious standards and of preserving their ethnic identity” (1979: 37). Obviously this background influenced the development of the community in Leeds. In Barcelona we find neither these “double migrants” nor their influence because the majority of Sikhs come directly from India or from other places in Europe where they cannot regularize their legal situation.

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consider and venerate it as a living Guru, treating it with the highest respect and turning to it for guidance and inspiration. Sikhs focus on living their faith where fellowship, community and family life are at the centre of Sikhism, and consider other Sikhs to be their brothers and sisters (Kaur Singh, N.-G. 2004: 8–9). Why are they Coming to Barcelona? According to their own testimonies, the firsts Sikhs arrived in Barcelona in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Since then their number has increased notably, with the population of the Sikh community beginning to rise more quickly around the year 2000. Those who arrived first did not deliberately choose Barcelona or Spain as their final destination, but came to Barcelona as a result of the border policies of their preferred countries of destination (the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada, and later other countries of Central Europe). First coming as tourists and subsequently settling in Spain, they then attracted others. Motivations for moving to Spain are directly related to the search for socio-economic improvement, and the prestige, izzat,8 related to having migrated and the acquisition of land and/ or a new and ostentatious house are important incentives. Aside from this, we can find some cases of migration related to political or religious dissidence and the events that took place in the aftermath of Indira Gandhi’s murder.9 We also find that in their discourse many Sikhs talk about corruption and bribery in India, and the difficulty of accessing qualified and government jobs,10 as other important reasons that drive them to decide to migrate. However, once some Sikhs have settled and obtained permanent jobs and residences they are the greatest factor of attraction for other members of their families and for their fellow countrymen. It is interesting to note that, in contrast to Ballard and Ballard’s (1979) observations regarding the first generation of Sikh immigrants in Leeds, those who come to Barcelona do not do so as a temporary move to save money before returning home. They do their best to establish themselves and regularize their situations in order to settle here along with their wives

  8 Izzat can be translated as prestige, honour, and status.   9 For instance, among the informants we have a family that, although they came to do tourism, they had to settle in Barcelona as a consequence of the violent repressions that occurred after the murder of Indira Gandhi by her two Sikhs bodyguards in October 1984. Sikhs usually refer to these facts as “the Sikh holocaust”. In the end this family decided to settle in Barcelona indefinitely. 10 Government jobs are very highly valued as they also imply good incomes, and other benefits such as the access to better health care, good schools for children, etc.



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and children. They see Barcelona – and Europe in general – as a land of opportunity for them and their families. Characteristics of the Sikh Community in Barcelona The Sikh community in Barcelona is predominantly made up of men of working age, with an estimated 70% male and 30% female. This is due to the fact that men generally emigrate first. Once they are settled and have regularized their labour situation, those who have wives and children bring them over; those who do not have their own nuclear families go to India to marry there and subsequently bring their new wives.11 However, in the last years an important increase in the proportion of female immigrants has taken place. This number rises proportionally to the number of males who have migrated to Spain, their greater job stability and their access to marriage, a phenomenon that will allow us to talk about a progressive feminization of the Punjabi immigration. Another key characteristic of the Sikh community in Barcelona is that although Sikhs share the same geographical origin, the same religion (albeit with some nuances and even internal divisions) and the same culture, there is notable diversity within the community. This diversity is due not only to differences in the specific place of origin (it is not the same to be a Sikh from rural Punjab as being one from Delhi, for example), but also due to differences in caste or socio-economic background. Despite the fact that Sikhs have historically gained recognition as prosperous and good workers, we can find important differences between those who have greater economic resources (who can travel often and lead what is considered a better lifestyle) and those who live in more precarious situations and who are usually recent arrivals (for example those who sell beer cans on certain streets). Consequently, we find among Sikhs living in Barcelona businessmen in the building industry who employ their fellow countrymen, owners of shops and restaurants, hired workers in commerce and catering or factories, labourers, unstable workers, unemployed people and many others. There is also great diversity regarding the level of education. Although not all are educated, it is not difficult to find young qualified men with irregular legal situations who occupy precarious jobs. What seems to be the overall

11 Some Sikh men resort to marrying European women in order to regularize their situation. In some cases, after having children and divorcing, the man marries again but in this case in India with a woman from there. Also, one of my main informants explained to me that it is usual to marry Portuguese women in exchange for money. She explained that they marry in Norway, where they can marry in a few days without significant problems.

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trend is that the educational qualification they have is neither useful nor rewarded in the jobs they carry out. Women usually work at home, doing household chores or as dressmakers for their fellow countrywomen, but once again we find notable diversity. Those who have been living in Barcelona for longer discover the advantages of working outside the home (usually in small family shops, in industry or also as domestic workers for their fellow countrywomen). While it seems to be a cultural pattern that women have access to formal education and a profession before marriage, once married they do not tend to develop professionally. However, this situation is thrown into question by young women who have been living in Barcelona for a long time and who have experienced here a part of their socialization process. In a way, this helps them to reflect on or question the roles that women and men fulfil. The following vignette from my field-notes is illustrative. Shuda is one of my closest informants. Her mother is always trying to teach her how to cook, but Shuda refuses: Shuda explained to me a dream that her mother had had. In the dream, Shuda agreed to marry but set some conditions: she wouldn’t stay at home; she and the groom should share the domestic work, she wouldn’t be cooking but she would bring take-away food home and she would work outside the home. Those were her conditions, and if they are not accepted, she would not marry. As the groom did not accept the conditions in the dream, in the end they do not marry (Field-note, 2nd December, 2006).

These girls who have grown up in Barcelona and are still unmarried insist on the importance of their economic and personal independence. This is why they find themselves caught in a dilemma when considering marriage. Furthermore, they explicitly accept that marrying a Sikh man from India would lead to conflicts due to perceived cultural distance. Although being of the age considered appropriate for marriage (approximately between 18 and 23 years old), they often continue their academic development in order to defer marriage and, at the same time, work in jobs related to their chosen profession. They postpone the question by saying “let’s see what happens”.12 However, they do not refuse marriage. They accept that the time to marry will arrive and that their family will arrange the marriage. They are aware that marriage is not merely a social agreement between a man and a 12 Considering the short period of time Sikhs have been in Spain, the second generation is only now approaching adulthood and their twenties. Thus it is difficult to state or to estimate changes in the patterns of thought and conduct from those of their parents. Nevertheless, some changes are becoming evident as the example given shows.



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woman, but a strong link between two families and a consolidation of the structural values of and within the community. Great importance is attached to appreciation of the family, which is the core of the social structure, and family is valued more than the individual. Sikhs attend the Sikh temple or gurdwara as a family (except in the cases of men who live in Spain without family) and important decisions are taken by the family, such as those regarding migration or marriage. Furthermore, the family exerts care and control over daughters, a faculty that is extended to the community and that increases when young girls approach the age for marriage. As a result, young girls are not allowed to go out alone or late in the evening; their friends are subject to family control as are all other kinds of relationships, even work relationships. With regard to sons, they will inherit the family wealth in equal shares ensuring the continuity of the lineage.13 Thus sons have a major role in the family, especially first-born sons, who are considered responsible for caring for their parents. As a result, very young male sons enjoy more freedom than their sisters and their opinions and actions are highly valued. On the whole, the younger generation, as stated by Ballard and Ballard (1979: 43–46) regarding Sikhs in Leeds, retain similar values regarding obligation and loyalty to family and to the community. Besides the importance of the family in the Sikh culture, the community has an essential role. The sangat or congregation is not only the social place where decisions relating to the community are taken, but it is also the space for solidarity, for transmission and maintenance of traditions, ethics and social values. All of this is materialized in the Sikh temples as physical places, but relationships and solidarities also transcend local limits. Sikhs maintain frequent contact with their families and place of origin, not merely by telephone and internet, but by regularly sending money to help increase, improve, or maintain the family properties and structure. They also maintain this connection with the community on a transnational level, both with India and with the diaspora, giving money to assist economically and ethically with the creation of new temples, schools, old people’s homes, health centres, and so on. Frequent visits to the homeland and other communities in the diaspora are other habitual ways of keeping strong links worldwide. These links become especially evident during key events, for example the incident on the 24th of May in Vienna, where orthodox Sikhs

13 As daughters traditionally have to abandon the family house when they marry, they are excluded from the inheritance.

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entered a Ravidassias14 temple to shoot two visiting sants (holy men) from India who were giving a sermon.15 As a consequence of this tragic incident, in India the Punjab erupted in violence and the government imposed a state curfew, sending the army to restore order. Punjabis belonging to the Ravidassia community in other countries went to Vienna to show their solidarity with the group affected, among them a delegation from Barcelona. Another example of these links was during the organization of the great langar16 set up on the occasion of the 2004 Universal Forum of Cultures celebrated in Barcelona, which, due to the weaker organization of the Sikh community in Barcelona, was organized by Sikhs from Birmingham and Canada. In the same way, television, especially via satellite, is a common information resource which helps connect Sikhs from different countries. Programs recorded in different places around the world and broadcast on many Punjabi channels can be watched in every Sikh home in Barcelona. By the same token, it is not unusual that Sikhs from London and other places in Great Britain come to record in gurdwaras in Barcelona or during a festival or celebration. Similarly, radio encourages and helps maintain the virtual and informative connection through programs produced by Punjabis, both locally and internationally. A local example is the program Un Pont Cap al Punjab (“A bridge to Punjab”) broadcast every Saturday from a Barcelona radio station. In addition, different Punjabi radio stations frequently broadcast information about the celebrations and events happening in the places of the diaspora. New technologies, as well as the improvement of means of transport, therefore support the expansion and the cohesion of Sikhs in the diaspora (including in Barcelona) and help create connections with their place of origin. All this contributes to recreating and maintaining the links within a community that has an important history of migration going back to its beginnings. In this way the Sikh community is a diasporic community which leans on elements of post-modernity, as Appadurai (2001) states. Following this argument, the Sikh community of Barcelona can only be analyzed and understood within a wider, complex sphere such as that of 14 A Sikh sect characterized by their following of Ravidass Ji, whom they consider a Guru. Orthodox Sikhs consider Ravidass Ji to be a Bhagat (or Sikh holy man whose compositions are included in the Guru Granth Sahib) but not a Guru. The sect is also characterized by a lower caste membership, as Ravidass Ji was a member of a lower caste. 15 Concerning the origin and significance of these facts, see Lum (2009). 16 Free meal served in every gurdwara to all regardless of caste or creed.



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globalization, migration or diaspora. The fact that Sikhs are in Barcelona, and the ways they establish themselves there, are directly related to the stage of postmodernity. Appadurai points out that this stage is char­ acterized by great fluxes – particularly migratory fluxes and fluxes of information – and their interconnections, which restructure the life of societies worldwide. These fluxes also contribute to the construction of a new cartography that implies the de-territorialisation linked to transformations in technology, migration, finances and the media (Appadurai 2001: 11–13). This interconnection between media (mass media and electronic media) and migration defines the core of the link between globalization and the modern and also creates the context that helps Sikhs, like many other diasporic groups, continue their survival strategy as a group and advance socio-economically as individuals. In the Sikh case, this is supported by communitarian and religious rules which help maintain the cohesion, strength and potential simultaneously of individuals and of the community. From a global perspective the Sikh community is thus a religious, diasporic and supportive community. Locally, the community is a place for the maintenance and reinvention of tradition and values. It also places limitations on the independence of individuals and reinforces the roles that members must fulfil depending on gender, caste and origin – although sometimes these roles can be questioned. The Sikh Identity and Appearance … Our clothes define us as much as we define ourselves through our clothes, and differences in dress do not merely suggest that ‘we’ are different from ‘them’, but also naturalise these differences and thereby become the very basis and proof of difference itself (cf. Hodder 1982) (quoted in Tarlo 1996: 318).

As mentioned above, some people in Barcelona are able to recognize Sikh men by their turbans and long beards. But not all Sikhs are bearded and wear the turban. Among Sikhs, there is an important distinction between keshdharis (those who wear the turban and do not cut their hair17) and sahajdharis or mona Sikhs (those who have cut their hair). This expresses not merely a dissimilarity in physical appearance, but also

17 Outside of India they are normally confused with Muslims.

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implies a differentiation within the community: a different understanding of the practice of Sikhism, issues of Sikh identity, and its relationship with modernity. Hence we find that the use of the turban is negotiated within the community and with the host society depending on the context.18 With respect to their individual religious involvement, which is reflected in their physical appearance, Sikhs can decide between being amritdhari, kesh-­ dhari or sahajdharis – all of these entailing different levels of involvement with and understanding of the practice of their religion. Amritdhari are those who have passed through the amrit rite (a rite of initiation established by Guru Gobind Singh, the tenth Guru) and who wear the Five Ks (the kesh, the uncut hair; the kanga, a wooden comb; the kirpan, a dagger; the kachhera, a form of underwear; and the kara, a steel bangle).19 Keshdhari are those who wear the long hair, beard and turban but who have not necessarily taken the amrit.20 Finally, sahajdharis Sikhs are those who have cut their hair and beard, usually taking the view that to be a Sikh or to follow Sikhism it is not necessary to wear the turban and the Five Ks. Some sahajdharis Sikhs argue that to become amritdhari implies a purity and a practice of orthodox life which they themselves say they do not perform. Others have previously worn a turban but have taken it off and cut their hair after coming to Barcelona, arguing that they experience difficulties finding a job or integrating with the host society while wearing it. Recently, however, it is possible to find Sikhs who did not wear the turban in India but who have decided to wear it here, in order to integrate themselves into the Sikh community. Image and attire are therefore an important issue when we talk about the characteristics of the Sikh community in Barcelona, with their physical appearance linking them to an ethnic identity. The same is true for Sikh women. Clothing has a particular relevance regarding women. It establishes generational differences and also holds significance for the group identity. Usually, Sikh women wear shalwar kamiz, a traditional dress also called suit or punjabi that is everyday wear in rural areas of Punjab: 18 In Beetham (1970) we see how different strategies of negotiation are used in the relationship between Sikhs and the host society in their struggle to use and gain acceptance for the turban, depending on the context. See also Santos (2009). 19 According to the SGPC (Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee, an orthodox committee which watches over the maintenance, the administration and the rules of Sikh temples and other institutions of the community) and the Rahit Maryada (a disciplinary code created at the end of the seventeenth century by Guru Gobind Singh and approved in 1945 for the SGPC), these are the symbols that identify one as Sikh. 20 The baptismal nectar that is spilt on the neophyte during the rite. The word means “the immortality nectar” or “sacred water”.



sikhs in barcelona263 What is clear here is that the great majority of women use shalwar-kamiz. I have only seen some young girls, and usually of a high social position wearing ‘western clothes’. Older women don’t seem ever to wear ‘western clothes’. Also the use of the bindi21 is very usual here. The bindi and the tihka22 can be classified as ‘containers of meanings’ too (in the sense that, traditionally, if the bindi was red, it meant the woman was married; or maybe that the person who wears the tihka – being a man or a woman – has been in a Hindu temple. Or those who wear it –the tihka – have enjoyed the “ceremony of brothers and sisters”, the rakhi)23 (Field-note, Punjab 28/08/07).  Anand has been explaining to me that she likes wearing jeans and t-shirts but when she was 15 her father told her that she had to wear only ‘suits’ because of the boys. In fact, she, her mother and her four sisters always wear ‘suits’ (Field-note, Punjab 09/09/07).

The shalwar kamiz was worn traditionally by Muslim women and gradually adopted by many Hindu women following the Muslim conquest of northern India. Eventually, it became the regional style for parts of northern India, as in Punjab where it has been worn for centuries. Parminder Bachu states that in the past decade it has acquired particular significance as a high fashion form of dress for younger South Asian women in the international diaspora communities and in the subcontinent (1999: 355). The shalwar kamiz consists of a long tunic or camisole reaching to the knee (kamiz), with trousers (shalwar) and a scarf (dupatta) used to cover the head in the temple and other sacred spaces. In Barcelona, the shalwar kamiz is usually worn by Sikh women who have come from India and who have experienced most of their socialisation processes in Punjab, especially in rural areas. Their daughters, on the other hand, prefer to wear ‘western clothes’24 on a daily basis: teenagers, young girls and women who spend a lot of their time in public spaces because of their work, or because they attend school or university, wear every day. However, the shalwar kamiz is required wear for attendance at the temple on Sundays – a place for reencountering the community and traditions – as well as any other Hindu festival. The requirement and use of this traditional dress in the temple is not only evidence for the idea of community and belonging to the group,

21 A spangle worn on the forehead. 22 A kind of red or orange dye that is put on the forehead by priests in Hindu temples or as a part of some festivals or celebrations. 23 By contrast, in Barcelona it is very uncommon to find a woman wearing the bindi or the tihka. 24 Despite this, some items of clothing are not allowed, like skirts, miniskirts, t-shirt or tank-tops. However, sometimes girls do wear these when they are sure that nobody from their family or from the community can see them.

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but also for the maintenance of tradition that is expressed in an explicit way in the temple as a sacred place. In addition, the use of this suit implies belonging to a generational group – that of adult women - which has connotations regarding their social role within the group. For example, girls are exempt from this form of dress until they reach adolescence. It is after this turning point that the use of the shalwar kamiz becomes compulsory, as they are then ‘complete individuals’ with a fundamental role within the group as carriers of family honour and the future nexus with other families within the community. As such, there are certain rules and obligations they have to observe. Despite the established migratory tradition among Punjabis, concern over the danger of the disappearance of the community, as well as community values, always exists in the diaspora. Concerns about their raison d’être are also an issue. Some males of the group and/or the family try to put pressure on young women to wear shalwar kamiz every day, arguing that they have to keep their values and traditions.25 In their view, the physical appearance of women is key to the maintenance and reflection of their traditions and culture through the female body. Interestingly, in other parts of India, the shalwar kamiz has different connotations depending on the local and geographical context: for example, it may be worn only by Muslim women, or it may be widespread as a school uniform for girls in towns. Alternatively it may be worn by Hindu girls partly as a gesture of emancipation and progressiveness, or as an indication of their fashion-consciousness.26 Young girls who habitually wear ‘western clothes’ in Barcelona, then, are often persuaded by male members of their extended family to wear the shalwar-kamiz instead by making reference to ideas about identity, belonging and membership. What is also interesting that Sikh women wear the same attire for the same reasons, but make use of a different discourse to distinguish themselves from other groups. They state that they can very 25 Sikh women have performed the role of conserving and transmitting cultural traditions, including through the use of clothes. This could be generalised to the broader Indian context –although different individuals and groups also have used clothes to distinguish and differentiate themselves. As Emma Tarlo (1996: 320–322) explains, in India, in different times and contexts, women have been encouraged or praised for their loyalty to the use of Indian dress and for being keepers of Indian clothing traditions as opposed to Western dress. For instance, by the mid-twentieth century, while many village men were turning to Western-style clothes, women were more conservative in their dress for two main reasons: ideas of female modesty, and attempts by Indian men to protect their women from the tainting influence of the West. 26 See Tarlo (1996).



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easily distinguish a Punjabi woman from a Pakistani woman (the latter wear shalwar-kamiz in the same Muslim tradition) by observing their dresses, a distinction I was unable to make at the beginning of my fieldwork. They explained to me that Punjabi woman always wear very clean shalwar-kamiz and have each part of the dress in harmony with the others. In addition, they wear the trousers long enough so that they brush the ground. In contrast, in their view, Pakistani women do not wear such nice suits, but ones that are sometimes dirty, and their trousers are too short: “They [the suits] are different”, they said. When I asked Shuda what other changes she had observed among Sikh women here she said that they stop putting a lot of make-up on their faces. They prefer to use less make-up. She also said that women who come from India dress better than Pakistanis, who wear flip-flops and less modern or fashionable clothes (Field-note, Barcelona 11/03/08).

Once more we can observe the use of clothes and attire as something that distinguishes Sikhs from others – from the host community or other migrant groups - and as a sign of identity and identification. However, Sikhs also feel that keeping their traditional attire in Barcelona is an impediment to finding a job. Women recognize that they could not wear shalwar-kamiz to work, except those who work in shops owned by Hindus which sell products imported from India. In addition they avoid the use of henna on their hands, which is considered decorative in festivals or celebrations, but which some women also like to wear on an everyday basis for its association with ideas of purity. Similarly to women, some men also vary what they wear depending on the context in which they are going to participate. In Barcelona they wear ‘western clothes’27 for everyday, while on Sundays for the temple and inside the house they wear kurta-pijama,28 especially those who go to participate in the religious liturgy.29 They explain that they have had to renounce an appearance that identifies their community and has important religious connotations, as represented by the turban, uncut hair and beard, for two main reasons. The first and the most important reason is the difficulty of finding a job because employers do not see it as an adequate appearance for work, especially in those professions involving contact with the public. 27 Nevertheless, as Tarlo explains, European styles been incorporated into Indian men’s wardrobes to the degree that most now consider them part of Indian dress (1996: 331). 28 A regional male suit from Punjab that consists of a large shirt and wide trousers. 29 In Punjab, the use of kurta-pijama to attend the temple would not be considered very appropriate, as it is a suit to be worn around the house.

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The second reason is because people usually mistake them for followers of Osama Bin Laden. In view of these situations, Sikhs admit and assume that their host society is ignorant of their religion and culture. They defend this religion and culture through a discourse that is repeated constantly by Sikhs themselves as well as by those unconnected to Sikhism but who know about it: that Sikhs are fundamentally peaceful people and very good workers. As Emma Tarlo states: Understanding the dual processes of differentiation and identification is central to understanding the development of any clothing tradition, for clothes are literally a means of classification –whether of individuals, groups, castes, classes, regions or nations. And in the same way that clothes draw boundaries which exclude those dressed differently, so they encompass and include those dressed in the same way. This is the process of identification (1996: 318).

The use of ‘western’ clothes or styles by men on an everyday basis (except those who perform the religious ritual) can therefore work as a symbolic mediation or identification with the host society, with which they necessarily have to interact in order to cope in the employment market. It is the same in the case of young women whose work involves facing the public and who have a preference for ‘western clothes’. While the role of men is to perform as intermediaries within the host society, the role attributed to women is that of the keepers of values and traditions of the community, although this is contested for the women who are ‘in-between’. In part, all this is done through identification and distinction via the use of clothes and attire, to which Sikhs accommodate strategically in order to establish themselves in a different country while maintaining their own traditions and culture. Gurdwaras in Barcelona: A Place for Re-encountering and Recreating the Community As stated at the beginning of this chapter, Sikhs go largely unnoticed amidst Moroccans, Latin Americans, South Africans, Pakistanis and other Asiatic people in Barcelona. They go unnoticed amidst the bulk of immigrants who wander through or who just hang around the narrow streets of the Raval in Barcelona, or in Badalona, which are places frequented by foreigners. These people work in precarious jobs and manage grocery and other stores that compete in prices and opening hours with shops owned by locals. In this context, the creation and existence of gurdwaras offer Sikhs an adequate



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place to recreate the sense of community and a space to meet and share experiences, wishes, aspirations and ambitions with fellow Sikhs. The first gurdwara in Barcelona was created in 1992 in Sants, a central neighbourhood. Later, another was opened in the Raval, and after that two more in Badalona.30 The latest was opened in Hospitalet, after moving the gurdwara in Sants (although this is still open) because of the need for a bigger space. A further new temple is in the process of opening in Badalona, where there is a large concentration of Sikhs. This is not mere chance. The Indian population tends to concentrate itself in very specific places, and the location of these Sikh temples corresponds with Sikhs’ residential preferences.31 The inverse also applies, with some Sikhs tending to take up residence close to existing gurdwaras. Many Sikhs have expectations regarding the creation of a big temple in the city, prospectively covering an area of 3,000 square metres. They are currently trying to negotiate with the Catalan institutions by asking for the assignment of a plot of land, stating that they have the resources to construct the temple and that they will also receive support from Sikhs in the United Kingdom.32 A gurdwara is not merely a space or building meant for religious purposes. It is the place where the Guru Granth Sahib is located and which serves for the encounter of people around the Guru and for the performance of worship. Moreover, it provides a place for meeting and mutual support within the community, channelled by the practice of sewa.33 In fact, gurdwaras are places open to all, regardless of caste, origin, gender or creed, as long as certain ritual practices are performed to enter the temple. Any person who wants to come into the Sikh temple has to have a bath or shower before coming to the gurdwara; once there, he or she must take off his/her shoes and wash his/her hands. Head covered and feet bare, he or

30 Badalona and Hospitalet are municipalities surrounding Barcelona. 31 As Ballard and Ballard (1979: 22) explain for Leeds, initially many Sikhs lived in densely packed all-male households in inner-city areas. When their wives and children arrived they usually moved into less crowded conditions. Nevertheless, it is common to find more than one family living together for some time until resources allow each family to have a house of their own. 32 According to the Catalonian institutions, the difficulty with of this project is the lack of availability of free spaces in the city. Additionally they state that it would set a precedent for other communities to make similar demands. They justify their decisions on the basis that the Sikh community in Barcelona is not organized enough and they try to encourage them to solve this situation. Aside from this, the economic support of Sikhs in Britain is important further evidence of the links and the support between Sikhs in the diaspora. 33 Voluntary services that theoretically are offered on behalf of humanity, but in practice are usually used to the advantage of the community and carried out in the gurdwaras.

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she will bow fully until the head touches the ground, showing respect to the Guru. A contribution, either in cash or in food, is made to the langar, the communal meal or kitchen. After this, the entrant will sit on the floor in the appropriate place (depending on gender).34 People can stay sitting listening to the kirtans,35 reading the Adi Granth, or can do sewa. Although theoretically sewa is done equally by men and women, in Barcelona it is always and exclusively done by men. Once the lecture of the Adi Granth and the praying of the Ardas36 has finished, the sewadars37 will share out the karah parshad38 among the sangat or congregation. At the end, it is required to participate in the langar, the communal meal where all people eat together sharing the same food regardless of race, caste or creed, although keeping their gendered places. Thus the Sikh temple is a sacred place, and to access or to stay there it is necessary to go through a series of purifying rites which allow the transition from the profane to the sacred space. The symbols on the doors or the signs on the building form the first separation between these two worlds. The doors or signs are usually marked with a khanda39 or with the spelling of Ik Onkar, the Supreme Reality, the Creator. These symbols do not merely identify the place as belonging to the community, but are the first indicators of the existence and the location of this sacred space. Always half open and half closed, the doors have a separating function but at the same time symbolize access to both the sacred and the profane, in the same way as Mircea Elíade describes the threshold of a church in any modern city: “est à la fois la borne, la frontière qui distingue et oppose deux mondes, et le lieux paradoxal où ces mondes communiquent, où peut s’effectuer le passage du monde profane au monde sacré” (1965: 28). Therefore the temple, as sacred space, is the place where the community crystallizes. Those attending are no longer just immigrants within the diverse population of Barcelona, but a religious and cultural community with shared practices, beliefs and ethics. Besides being a place for meeting and for carrying out religious celebrations, the Sikh temple has other uses 34 While in the diaspora places for men and women are usually separated (often by a large carpet that goes straight to the Guru Granth Sahib), in India men and women sit together without this distinction. 35 Singing of hymns in praise of God, consisting of verses from the Adi Granth and accompanied by musical instruments such as the tabla (drums) and the harmonium. 36 Prayer with which most Sikh rituals culminate. 37 Those who are doing sewa. 38 Sacramental food served and shared at the end of the Sikh service to express equality and membership. 39 A double-edged sword used as a symbol of Sikhism.



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that are fundamental for Sikhs as a community. They provide shelter to those who have just arrived in Barcelona or who come with scarce resources, without enough money for board and lodging: they can settle temporarily in the gurdwara for as long as they need to. The temple is a space for shelter and communal solidarity. Moreover, for those who are already estab­ lished, it is also a space for the maintenance of the traditions and values of the community and their transmission to the youngest members. During the week, for example, children and young people can learn to sing kirtans and play the harmonium or the tabla. In Barcelona this is still done in a very precarious way compared with the gurdwaras in London, for instance, where due to their background and resources they have more developed infrastructures. There they have their own libraries, community halls, places to learn Punjabi and Gurmukhi,40 as well as other activities and educational courses related to their practices and traditions, such as gatka.41 The existence of different gurdwaras in Barcelona is not only due to the increase in the number of community members. New temples are also opened as a result of disagreements within the community. Indeed, attendance at one or another temple seems to be determined by family bonds and other ties, issues which are related to levels of caste, although they are not normally recognized as such. By the same token, temples help to identify people socially. When talking about somebody the first question is “which temple are they from?” Although conflicts exist within the community and between different gurdwaras, when a decision affecting the whole community must be taken, a meeting among representatives of the different temples will take place. But the participation of all or some gurdwaras in the meeting will depend on the strategic alliances or conflicts existing between the temples at that moment in time. In any event, Sikhs assume that everyone – every family - has to collaborate in the creation and the maintenance of the gurdwaras, contributing a proportional share of their income depending on their circumstances and economic solvency. This is ultimately materialized in services rendered to the community as a whole, once again creating communitarian solidarity. The gurdwaras thus appear as inevitable reference points in the community. They provide physical and social spaces in which Sikhs can share and develop their cultural and religious practices without being questioned by the host community. They form a microworld in which Sikhs can make

40 Spelling in which the Adi Granth is written. 41 A martial art seen in some Sikh festivals or celebrations.

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their cosmogony explicit and reproduce their traditions in an distinctive environment. Furthermore, it is via these places that the Sikh community is created and individuals become part of a collective. Despite its conflicts and disagreements, this collective forms Sikhs into an interrelated and organized group in the host society they live in, but in which they scarcely participate outside of work and education. Gurdwaras are also as nerve centres for information and the organization of the affairs of the community in relation to both the host society and to the diaspora. They act as managers and distributors of information, as community meeting places, and as places for younger people to practice and learn traditions. They are able to provide economic assistance when members request it for those who are underprivileged or when there are other needs in the diaspora.42 They offer welfare, accommodation and maintenance for both those who lack economic resources and for the new arrivals who cannot settle on their own. They manage and act as a channel for issues faced by the community and its members, establishing order in the community and carrying out corrective or punitive measures when the community considers it necessary.43 Moreover, it is through the gurdwaras that the community reproduces and maintains the caste system, since the castes are ulti­mately identified with certain temples. For instance, one of the temples in Badalona, the Ravidassia temple, is considered to be frequented by people who belong traditionally to untouchable castes44 such as Chamars (traditionally tanners, shoemakers and leather workers). People who today attend this temple used to go to the gurdwara located in Calle Hospital, which is mostly attended by Jats (the caste of agriculturalists and landowners). After a conflict involving a caste issue, they decided to open a new temple in Badalona that would be more devoted to Ravidass, who also belonged to a low caste. Nowadays, this temple is also frequented by other Scheduled Castes such as Lubanas (who traditionally carried dead animals45), Bazigars (belonging to a gipsy tribe who specialised in acrobatic 42 For example to open new gurdwaras or to help a family whose husband has passed away. 43 For instance, in cases where other gurdwaras consider that rules and conventions are not being followed, or when one of their members needs to be reprimanded for pre-defined offences. 44 Later explicitly recognized by the Constitution of India as Scheduled Castes. 45 According to some of my informants, Lubanas traditionally were carriers of dead animals and considered a Scheduled Caste. This is radically different to the description given by Bansal and Singh (2003: 300–302) in the volume dedicated to Punjab in People of India, in which they make an ethnographic survey of 95 communities of present day Punjab. According to this survey, Lubanas were the carriers of cattle and also specialized in the trade



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performances), Valmikis (sweepers), and so on. By the same token, there are other castes related to other temples, including those associated with craftsman and service castes (such as the Tarkhans, traditionally carpenters), priests (Brahmans) or castes of businessman and landowners (Sainis). Meanwhile, as stated above, Sikhs go largely unnoticed among the diversity of Barcelona and do not receive a lot of attention from the host community. But there are exceptions to this. The Nagar Kirtan is a public exhibition that Sikhs perform on the birthday of their Guru Nanak, the founder of the Sikh religion. The Vaisakhi is a festival that celebrates the beginning of spring time and coincides with the celebration of the birth of the khalsa, a military and religious brotherhood promulgated by Guru Gobind Singh in 1699. In these celebrations, Sikhs go out on the street in a ceremonial procession with their Sacred Book. To the rhythm of percussion, songs and the exhibition of their qualities in fighting with swords and other weapons (while practising gakta), they distribute food and nonalcoholic beverages to everyone they meet on the streets, vindicating their religious, martial and hospitable identity at the same time as they attract the attention of the host community and show that they are a specific and differentiated group. Following Barth (1976) we may say that these exhibitions help construct the social representation of the community. This particular representation is constructed by stressing specific cultural elements, and the image of the community is dynamic and constantly re-created due to the community’s coexistence with different cultural groups. Another exception to the invisibility of Sikhs as a differentiated community outside their temples lies in the encounter with those people who are not of Indian origin but who approach Sikhism. Although this is a limited phenomenon and is difficult to generalize from, I agree with Provansal and Miquel when, quoting Alain Tarrius, they argue that “micro-social phenomena and behaviour have a heuristic and anticipatory value of those transformations that act on the social body” (Provansal and Miquel 2005; my translation). These interactions, though minimal, can been seen as a prelude to the possible dynamics of interaction and complex constructions of identity in a situation where various cultures co-exist. The encounter I refer to here usually stems from the practice of kundalini yoga46 by ‘western’ individuals, which produces an encounter through of salt. In the Encyclopaedia of Sikh Religion and Culture (Dogra and Mansukhani 1996: 281) Lubanas are described as the carriers and hawkers of the mountains. 46 This is usually taught and practiced in schools owned by Western people known as ‘white Sikhs’, or gora Sikhs, because they are dressed in white. The existence of this group

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its use of some of the constitutive elements and other characteristics of Sikhism. This finally becomes a new modality that we could call a ‘westernized Sikhism’, which draws from ‘traditional Sikhism’ those elements that are functional to it, but which questions and reformulates those that are not.47 Interstice: Sikhism as a Point of Interrelation with the Host Community This ‘westernized Sikhism’ may have a dual potential. On one hand it may constitute a gap, a space ‘in between’, a point of encounter between two different and differentiated cultures. On the other hand it may be (simultaneously) a consequence of the interrelations between both parties: immigrants and natives. Based on Nuria Benach’s premises, I allude here to the concept of ‘spaces in between’ - the ‘spaces of mixture’ or ‘interstitial’ spaces (cf. Benach 2005). This refers to the places of contact between cultures and the process of hybridization that occurs especially in urban spaces, but that rarely appears in scholarship where there is a focus on the idea of a predominant culture existing in opposition to other minority cultures. Scholars seldom write about these points in between, the interstices where cultures and their inhabitants meet and which supply spaces for the construction of new identities that are not necessarily based on the exclusion of ‘the other’ (ibid.). Although Benach refers mainly to public urban spaces that favour intercultural relations between members of the host society and immigrants, as places for contact and as spatial interstices that cancel out alterities and favour the development of new identities (in Tello, Benach and Nash 2008: 91), I extend this idea to the social spaces where people from different cultures meet. In the words of Pratt, these are “contact zones (…) social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination –like colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out across the globe today” (quoted in Tello, Benach and Nash 2008: 94).

has been mentioned by some authors, for instance La Brack (1999: 374), Cole (2004: 158), Cole & Singh Sambhi (2006: 186) and more extensively by Kaur Takhar (2005). 47 This ‘westernized Sikhism’ is practiced by people from the West (born and socialized in the West) and is a form of Sikhism different from that practised by people of Hindu origin. We are talking about two different groups which have some principles and practices in common but which normally do not mix, and which consider each other to be different and distinct.



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However, these social spaces also favour the exchange of experiences, interests and values of different communities (ibid: 95). Moreover, following the concept used by García Canclini (2005), these social spaces can produce processes of hybridization. From this perspective, we can refute the idea of the incapacity of interaction which the Colectivo Ioé posed for the Asiatic and Spanish cultures: Spain has been much less linked with the Asian continent – and their multiple cultures - than the African and American continents (with Christian and Arabian cultures). This aspect can influence the behaviour of Asian collectives in Spain which usually don’t participate actively in the Spanish sociocultural dynamic but which instead shut themselves away in their own closed circles of their country of origin. Nevertheless, Spanish society hasn’t shown a great capacity to relate to these Asian cultures either (Colectivo Ioé 1987: 144; my translation).

In the case of Sikhs in Barcelona I would argue that points of interstice are produced, allowing some people from the host society to approach and participate in the gurdwara in ceremonial rituals and the communal meals – both of which produce the sensation of ‘community’, and through which it is very easy to interact with other members. The interstitial space also produces strategic interactions, such as the creation of a Sikh Council of Catalonia headed by a ‘western Sikh’, the master and owner of a school of yoga. His role as president of the Council is still very precarious. The Sikh Council acts as a mouthpiece as well as having a managerial function. It facilitates the communication or resolution of needs and disagreements before administrative bodies or local government, even though the need for representation in this way seems to be decreasing as some Sikhs improve their Spanish. In any case, these interactions are capable of generating close and stable relationships, even mixed marriages.48 Regarding the consequences of interrelations, ‘westernized Sikhism’ ultimately combines elements from both the culture in which Sikhs from India participate, and from western culture. Furthermore, it allows the creation of a new social space in which some western people find and practice a kind of mysticism, applying existentialist techniques which they claim help them to feel better in their daily lives and attain a certain harmony with the cosmos which they would not otherwise find within their own culture. As stated above, this ‘westernized Sikhism’ is approached through the practice 48 Such marriages are not free from controversy within the Indian Sikh community. In addition, while it is more common to find a Sikh Indian man marrying a Spanish woman, the reverse is rare.

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of the kundalini yoga, which uses Sikhism as the framework in which practices and corporal exercises are inserted to confer a mysticism that makes it transcendental. Sikhs from India who live in Barcelona do not practise kundalini yoga, but it is true that it has its origins in India. It was exported to the West by the master Yogui Bhajan at the end of the sixties. In Barcelona, kundalini yoga is taught and practised in schools of yoga and in some civic centres. It combines some of the rites and ceremonies that belong to the tradition of Sikhs from India and that are performed in the gurdwaras. Nevertheless, there are a number of important differences between the rites and ceremonies practised in Sikh gurdwaras and those performed in kundalini yoga centres, since in the latter there are alterations and contestations of those Sikh practices that clash with the western culture. I refer, for instance, to the role of women, which is absolutely passive in the gurdwaras but active in the western modality. In a Barcelona gurdwara, it seems impossible that a woman could read the Guru Granth Sahib or participate actively in the proceedings of the religious ritual; further, as stated above, we do not find women doing sewa on Sundays. Western women not only teach and practise kundalini yoga, but they also take an active part in the performance of the rituals. They can also appear as critical and non-conformist, reacting to aspects of traditional Sikhism they do not agree with. Although Sikhs coming from India do not practice kundalini yoga in Barcelona, this may change with time. The interrelation that exists through Sikhism may favour cases such as those in Southall in London, where some Indians not only take up kundalini yoga but also become masters and find a revitalization of their own religious tradition in this westernized Sikhism. However, the interaction that exists between Sikhs and the local population also entails modifications in the practice of the most traditional Sikhism, such as the celebration of special religious programs on the occasion of local festivities like New Year’s Eve or the Spanish Christmas. Baumann presents religion as “the convictions of living and changeable people (…) not an immutable heritage, but a situation in a context” (2001: 91–94). Hence, the differences we observe in the constitution of Sikhs as a religious community in Barcelona: an inner process of self-definition and construction through their practices and discourses, but without a previous dominant discourse like that observed by Gerd Baumann in Southall. Following Baumann (2001), and as I have argued throughout this text, religion and religious practices are created and recreated as well as identity and ethnic membership. Religion can be thought of as a sextant that



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helps people manage and negotiate new or changing contexts. If we observe these processes of negotiation, we can find interstices which act as meeting points between different groups - even if they are sometimes limited, or not immediately visible. With regards to culture, Baumann states that if people stopped creating and recreating it would cease to exist. In addition he states that all cultural creation is also a form of recreation. Even from its most conservative position, culture puts old customs into new contexts. In doing so, it modifies the importance of these customs. People frequently change and adjust, refine and rebuild their practices (Baumann, 2001: 40). The same applies to religion when we consider it a category of cultural identity. Finally, I would like to propose a link with my argument at the beginning of this chapter where I stated that a Sikh community does exist in Barcelona (and we must remember that initially they do not chose Spain as their first destination) and that this is the result of a bigger, more global phenomenon and the aspects of the post-modernity. Other issues impact on the process of migration and community-making including government policies in both the European Union and countries like the United States, such as the toughening of migration policy in central European countries since 1973, as well as the restrictions imposed by the United States and Canada around the same time. In Spain policy regarding national borders was relatively undefined until 1985. These factors have all influenced and motivated transformations in some previously established diasporic routes. Thus Sikhs come to Barcelona as a part of their diasporic dynamic, encouraged by a globalization processes that favours the expansion of the ethnic group worldwide. As a result, as Appadurai states, they become a diasporic community, able to produce effects and create new practices in the host society. The host society adopts new elements imported from the Sikh community of India and reformulates them for its own use, as in the case of westernized Sikhism. At the same time, changes and doubts are produced in the immigrant group. Underlying this is the creation of interstices or meeting points between the ethnic-religious minority and the host society as the result of their interaction with each other. As social scientists, we have the need and the responsibility to find and demonstrate the existence of these interstices which help us reveal that which is common, routine, and banal, but also that which is invisible. These interstices constitute a reality that, as Tello, Benach and Nash (2008: 12) explain, is hidden and outside the dominant discourse of immigration and immigrants. But they are part of the reality of migration itself.

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Appadurai, A. 2001. La modernidad desbordada. Dimensiones culturales de la globalización. Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Bachu, P. 1999. ‘Multiple Migrants and Multiple Diasporas: Cultural Reproduction and Transformation among British Punjabi Women in 1990 Britain’, in Singh, P. and Z. Singh Thandi (eds), Punjabi Identity in a Global Context. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 343–355. Ballard, R. and C. Ballard. 1979. ‘The Sikhs: The Development of South Asian Settlements in Britain’ in Watson, J. L. (ed.), Between Two Cultures. Migrants and Minorities in Britain. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 21–56. Bansal, I.J.S. and S. Singh. 2003. ‘Punjab’, in K.S. Singh (ed.), People of India. Volume XXXVII. Anthropological Survey of India. New Delhi: Manohar. Barth, F. 1976. ‘Introducción’, in Barth, F. (ed.), Los grupos étnicos y sus fronteras. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 9–49. Baumann, G. 2003 (1996). Contesting Culture. Discourses of Identity in Multi-ethnic London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——. 2001. El enigma multicultural. Un replanteamiento de las identidades nacionales, étnicas y religiosas. Barcelona: Paidós. Beetham, D. 1970. Transport and Turbans. A Comparative Study in Local Politics. London: Institute of Race Relations and Oxford University Press. Benach Rovira, N. 2005. ‘Diferencias e identidades en los espacios urbanos’, in Nash, M., R. Telló and N. Benach (eds), Inmigración, género y espacios urbanos. Los retos de la diversidad. Barcelona: Bellaterra. Brown, J. M. 2006. Global South Asians. Introducing the Modern Diaspora. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. García Canclini, N. 2005. Culturas híbridas. Estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernindad. Barcelona: Paidós. Cole, Owen. 2004. Understanding Sikhism. Edinburgh: Dunedin Academic Press. Cole, O. and P. Singh Sambhi. 2006 (1995). The Sikhs. Their Religious Beliefs and Practices. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press. Colectivo Ioé. 1987. ‘Los inmigrantes en España’, Documentación Social. Revista de Estudios Sociales y de Sociología Aplicada 66. Dogra, R. C. and G. Singh Mansukhani. 1996. Encyclopaedia of Sikh Religion and Culture. New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House. Eliade, M. 1965. Le sacré et le profane. Paris: Gallimard. Kaur Singh, N. 2004 (1993). Sikhism. World Religions. New York: Facts on File. Kaur Takhar, O. 2005. ‘Sikh Dharma of the Western Hemisphere’, in Sikh Identity. An Exploration of Groups Among Sikhs. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 158–179. La Brack, B. 1999. ‘California’s “Punjabi century”: Changing Punjabi/Sikh identity’, in Singh, P. and Z. Singh Thandi (eds), Punjabi Identity in a Global Context. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 373–386. Lum, K. 2009. ‘A Minority within a Minority: the Ravidassia Sikhs’, Paper available at http:// www.sikhs-in-europe.org (accessed July 19, 2009). Provansal, D. and C. Miquel. 2005. ‘Mujeres extranjeras emprendedoras. Competencias e identidades urbanas en Barcelona’, Paper Presented at the Workshop Intersticios. Contactos interculturales, género y dinámicas identitarias en la Barcelona actual, University of Barcelona, March 11–12, 2005. Santos, S. 2009. ‘The Sikh bodies: A case of Embodiment and Ostentation of Religious Identity’, Working Paper. ——. 2007. ‘La comunidad sikh en Barcelona. Una aproximación etnográfica’, Ph.D. research dissertation, Programa de Doctorado en Antropología Social y Cultural. Facultad de Geografía e Historia, Universidad de Barcelona. Tarlo, E. 1996. Clothing Matters. Dress and Identity in India, London: Hurst & Company.



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Tello, R., N. Benach and M. Nash (eds.). 2008. Intersticios. Contactos interculturales, género y dinámicas identitarias en Barcelona. Barcelona: Edicions Bellaterra. Vertovec, S. 2009. Transnationalism. London and New York: Routledge. VV.AA. 2009. ‘La població estrangera a Barcelona’. Report by the Ajuntament de Barcelona, Departament d’Estadistica, March 2009.

SHOULD WE TALK ABOUT RELIGION? MIGRANT ASSOCIATIONS, LOCAL POLITICS AND REPRESENTATIONS OF RELIGIOUS DIVERSITY: THE CASE OF SIKH COMMUNITIES IN CENTRAL ITALY Ester Gallo and Silvia Sai Religious Pluralism: A Threat and a Resource1 In his analysis of different European political cultures, Melotti compares countries marked by longstanding tradition of immigration – such as France and UK – with emerging Southern European destinations like Italy. A point of interest in the author’s discussion is the relation traced between the rhetoric promoted by Italian public institutions of Italy ‘as an idyllic passage to a peaceful multicultural society’ (1997: 85) and the general Italian policy that strongly affirms immigrants’ right to sustain their national and religious identities. This, we would add and will try to show, under certain ‘conditions’. Compared to the French model, Italian political culture of migration emerges as less ‘assimilationist’, in that religious identities are publicly acknowledged as important resources, potentially enriching the national social landscape. At the same time, the recognition of diversity does not necessarily make Italy similar to Britain. The importance placed in the latter context to the separation and preservation of the ‘British way of life’ differs indeed from the emphasis recently given by Italian religious (CEI, Vatican) and secular institutions (National and Provincial Governments and City Councils) to migrants’ religions and religiosity as an important ‘point of reference’ for the rediscovery of Italian traditions. As one may expect, what Melotti terms as the ‘rhetoric of good will’ (ibidem) does not portrait the whole picture. What remains as a key feature in the Italian immigration policy and public debate is the unresolved and often contrasting plurality of positions, alongside an alarming institutional incompetence to deal culturally and politically with the phenomena, as recently exemplified by our Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s assertion that ‘Italy will never be a multicultural society’.2 1 This article has been written and revised jointly by Ester Gallo and Silvia Sai. In particular, sections 1, 5, 8 and 9 have been written by Ester; sections 3,4,6 and 7 by Silvia; section 2 jointly by Ester and Silvia. 2 L’Unità, 10th May 2009.

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It seems to us that within Italian public discourses religion emerges as a subject that embodies simultaneously a problematic as well as a positive nature, ambivalent qualities as a potential threat and resource. On the one hand, in fact, recent debates have been dominated by the ‘Islam question’, despite the fact that Christianity is the main migrant religion (Caritas Dossier Statistico 2009) alongside significant religious presence such as Sikhism. In contemporary Italy, religion is publicly perceived as a ‘structural difficulty’ for integration, as ‘Italian-ness’ is forged upon ethnic and religious identity, the latter expressed through what can be called ‘diffuse’ and ‘banal’ everyday Catholicism. Secular assimilationist projects à la Français leave the place to a project where religious pluralism should coexist with the recognition that Italy has a dominant Catholic culture. This makes religion a delicate subject, often addressed as an ‘inviolable domain’. Religious diversity should not put into question the main national ‘Catholicoriented’ values, which find their historical roots beyond the recent (1948) constitutional recognition of Italy as a secular State. On the other hand, the ‘invasion syndrome’ (Melotti 1997: 77) is mitigated by the emphasis given to religious diversity as having positive effects on Italian society and youth, in that it calls for a new ‘re-discovery’ of the religious character of ‘Italianness’. In this line, the main political actors – the State and the Catholic Church – have only recently tried to address ‘the problem’, respectively in terms of integration [Carta dei Valori, May 2007, (Charter on the Values and Significance of Citizenship)]; legislative debate on ‘Norms of Religious Freedom and Repeal of Admitted Cults Legislation’, [Commission on Constitutional Affairs, November 2006] or pastoral care [Caritas Migrantes, (Dossier Statistico Immigrazione, 2007)]. This article would like to offer some preliminary insights on how religious difference is constructed and acted upon by migrants and local society. The paper brings together three different ethnographies of Sikh communities in Central Italy: Rome (1996–1998 Gallo), Reggio Emilia (2004-present, Sai) and Terni (2008-present, Gallo). It analyzes the interplay between Sikh associations, Gurdwaras (Sikh temples), civil society, Catholic parishes and regional and local political institutions in producing different and often conflicting meanings of religious diversity and how this has changed in the last decade. In developing a comparative perspective, we attempt to trace continuities and discontinuities across different national localities with respect to the role played by religion in migrants’ histories of encounter with local society. Our paper moves from the recognition that, at present, regional locality constitutes one of the most relevant arenas where religious difference is recognised and acted upon by migrants,



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institutional actors and civil society. On the one hand, in fact, the ongoing national debate on multiculturalism frames the context where religious difference is understood and represented. On the other, we suggest, is the locality (Region, Province, Council) that offers an insight on the many ways in which the relation between ‘Italian-ness’ and religious diversity is experienced by different actors. In this respect, Berlusconi’s and Northern League’s claim for a religiously and culturally homogeneous society may find some resonance in immigration centres such as Bergamo, where Sikhs admit to have faced open racism. At the same time, the same claim may be counteracted in other contexts by a more complex – though not less ambiguous – attempt to allow different religious communities a space of public visibility. In that respect, the case of Sikh communities reveals to be particularly interesting. It reflects migrants’ attempt to find legitimacy in the locality through process of mimesis and, at a later stage, translation of Sikh religious histories, practices and symbols in order to make them understandable and usable by Italians. Sikhs have constantly tried to bridge the meanings of their own religion with the ones of Catholicism, thus creating spaces of translations and dialogue. It is indeed worth noting how Sikhs in Italy have framed their own images through the analysis of national and local public discourses on religion – in that showing to be good anthropologists of the Italian society – and choosing to embody those parts that could best be conciliated with their own religion without, as one informant told Ester, ‘betraying or denaturalising our beliefs’. We suggest that this confidence in practising religion has been achieved through the active production of an articulated and complex relation between a sought-after membership into the locality and the development of vital translocal networks within the national territory. In this respect, Sikh strategies in Italy continues a longer tradition among the South Asian diaspora of using ‘religion as a key-marker of self identification and a basis of self-organisation’ (Weller 2004) and to develop a multi-layered and adaptable networks with the homeland, local society as well as non-South Asian organisations (Clarke, Peach and Vertovec 1990; Bates 2001). Interestingly, what emerges as a constitutive feature of Sikh communities is not only their degree of dispersion and dynamic change in different localities, as recently shown by Ferraris (2009). Equally important is a relation between key religious centres – such as Novellara, Rome, Vicenza – and minor but developing centres – such as Terni or Bergamo – framed by a certain degree of autonomy within hierarchical dependence. Hence, as we will show, Sikh religious organisations are flexible in adjusting to the peculiarity of each locality, and at the same time in using translocal networks to strengthen both their

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contextual membership and their potential internal mobility. Whilst we cannot deal here in detail with the complex relations between translocal national links and transnational networks, we underline how the creation of the locality through the construction of religious places has proved to use transnational networks as an authenticating and stimulating force, whilst at the same time imposing a dominant locally oriented project of adaptation and recognition that confers to each environment a unique specificity. Research Strategies We started to exchange fieldwork notes and our reflections on Sikhs in 2004. Our interest towards Sikh migration in Italy moved initially from the intent to understand the role of kinship ties in sustaining incoming flows, although the topic of religious belonging permeated most migrants’ life histories and self-representations. During her research in Rome, Ester looked at how religious practice and belonging were subject to change, mimesis if not masking in a context of high degree of instability in terms of labour, housing and bureaucratic processes, as well as of increasing public condemnation of illegal migrants. Thus, her approach to religion was in a way mediated by an overwhelming concern with the strategies of survival adopted by pioneer migrants, at a time when first Sikh migrants struggled to find a kind of geographical and working stability within a highly segmented, exploitative and irregular (lavoro sommerso) labour market. A different and more structured focus on religion has been developed by Silvia, who has documented the institutional and political processes involved in the construction of the important gurdwara in Novellara, alongside important religious events often jointly organised through collaboration with local religious and secular institutions. From a different perspective, religion re-emerges as a determinant feature in the context of migrants’ associations, as documented by Ester in her ongoing research on associations and social capital in the Umbria District. Hence, we are looking here at religion through a joint perspective combining the role it plays in life histories, institutional processes and associational life. Fieldwork in Rome was conducted by Ester between 1996 and 1998 in connection with her two-years BA graduation thesis project, and compared Sikh migrants in Rome with South Indian Malayali Siryan Christians.3 A 3 See Gallo 1998.



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total of 46 semi-structured interviews (38 men and 8 women) were carried out with Sikhs on key topics such as migration strategies, the role of kinship in migration, labour experiences, housing strategies and religious practices and political positions with respect to India and the demand for Khalistan. Alongside this, frequent participation to gurdwara activities and family celebration as well as informal conversation constituted an integral part of the research. The encounter with Sikh communities in her natal district (Umbria) was recently linked to a broader research funded by the Regional Council for Social Research on the relation between migrants’ associations, local political institutions and the development of social capital. The research, currently in progress, requires a comparative perspective between Indian Sikh, East African, South American and Eastern European associations vis-à-vis local political and educational institutions. It aims, among other things, at documenting the role played by religion in associations’ activities and in the development of national translocal and transnational networks. In relation to the Sikh community of Terni Ester has so far interviewed five families, various members of the Gurdwara Singli Sabha Sahib – the recently formed Sikh association related to the local gurdwara – and Italian neighbours, employers and friends. Alongside this, structured interviews with local authorities have been conducted, amongst the most important the city Major, members of the provincial government, of national health institutions, of trade unions and of political parties. Frequent visits to the gurdwara during festivities and in ordinary days are going on. Silvia’s ethnography draws from two longstanding and interconnected researches. The first (March 2004–April 2005) resulted in the B.A. thesis in Cultural Anthropology; the second (May 2007–March 2009) will end up in a Ph.D. thesis in Social Anthropology. The first time Silvia approached the Novellara Sikh community was during spring 2004. The idea of visiting the Sikh temple in Novellara came after reading a news report in the local newspaper that described that ‘big’ community in her province. She remembers going to Novellara with her car a Sunday morning, and asking a petrol station attendant where the Sikh temple was: “The Indian church, you mean? Over there, you’ll see it, it’s always overcrowded”. By that time, in fact, the ‘Indian church’ had achieved visibility and had and started to be integral part of the social and geographical landscape. From that moment onwards Silvia’s relationship with the ‘field’ has never ended. She decided to choose her closest informants among the ‘basis’ of the community, that means people who are within the community, directly involved in its ­activities whilst not part of the leadership. Hence, in not embodying the official image of the religious organisation, they voiced an often different,

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s­ometimes critic, perspective on the community life. During the first research period, Silvia focused on the relations between kinship networks and the migration process, with a special interest on transnational marriages. At that time, her closest informant was a nuclear family of three people (mother, a 16 year-old girl and a 13 year-old age boy4). The household’s children have been among the first to be born in Italy. Its parental network was significantly extended in Italy and abroad, being the family one of the first to arrive in Italy at the beginning of the 1980s. Silvia was ‘adopted’ by the family to become someone who had to be educated about Sikh customs, religion, and about maintaining a proper behaviour at the temple. In October 2007 she approached the community for the second time with the intent of analyzing the Sikh community in its connections with the local society (local political, religious institutions and civil society). This time field relations were framed by the acceptance of Silvia as a friend, and no more as an external researcher. Like in the previous research, the key informant (a 40 year-old man) was in strict contact with the leadership, but at the same time excluded from it, being himself native of a different region in Punjab and part of a different and lower caste, which was underrepresented in the Novellara community. Given the focus of Silvia’s research, the interviewees were more prudent and sometimes suspicious about her questions. The community in general, and her informant in particular, tended to ‘control’ or ‘direct’ her research more than during my previous fieldwork, for example suggesting for her to talk with some persons and not to others, or avoiding and ignoring certain themes during interviews. Sikhs were concerned about the consequences of their statements and she was seen as someone through which they could influence and shape the public image and discourse about them. Slowly, they began to ask her to act as a spokesperson in few public occasions, or to mediate with local administrations or Italian civil society (like visitors at the temple). While in the first research Silvia spent much time collecting life histories at private home according to the focus of the research, during the second fieldwork she used to conduct structured and informal interviews mostly at the gurdwara, sometimes at private homes. Most of the interviews were done with key persons of the community. She has been regularly present at the temple during ordinary time and in specific occasions such as religious events or festivals. Finally, she also attended official and informal meetings between the community and the Italian local administration.

4 The father died in 1995.



the case of sikh communities in central italy285 Sikh History and the Diasporic Consciousness…in Brief

Sikhism is based on the teachings of ten Gurus5 who lived between the XV and XVIII century in Punjab, the northwestern region of India. When the last Guru died in 1708, he appointed as the last eternal Guru, the Guru Granth Sahib, the sacred text compiled by previous Gurus. Thus, the vast majority of Sikhs6 today recognise the scripture as a living Guru, and the ultimate source of authority. Guru Nanak’s (1469–1546 the first Guru) teachings constitute one of the strongest influence on Sikhism. He criticised superstitions, rituals, pilgrimages and priest-craft, all elements that still now characterise this religion. Guru Nanak has been influenced by many wise people of his time: poets, mystics and sants, like Kabir and Ravidas,7 who referred to the bhakti movement, a reform movement which insisted on the personal devotion to God through internal devotion as a way to exit the circle of birth and death.8 Importantly, Guru Nanak also criticised the caste system. Central to Guru Nanak’s teachings was the nam, the name, considered as the self-expression of the divine. Along with a constant spiritual practice, rooted on meditation and on the practice of repeating the nam, Guru Nanak invited to an active commitment to life’s ordinary activities, as work, family responsibilities, and helping others through the seva (voluntary service). His message insisted on the equality of human beings, man and women, and of different background. The ethics of sharing, equality and community are expressed through the langar (free kitchen), a prominent feature of sikh practice. Langar is an essential part of every gurdwara where the food is cooked and eaten by Sikhs from different caste origin.9 As many authors have argued (Dusenbery 1995; Tatla 1999), the relation between Sikhs, their territory (Punjab) and their history is one of divisions and struggles, marked by losses and martyrdom which forged, though with different features over time, a ‘diasporic consciousness’ (Vertovec 1997). This consciousness rests upon Sikh relations with their homeland and

5 All are conceived of as physical embodiments of the same Guru. 6 There are some groups within or parallel to Sikhism, who define themselves as Sikhs but do not fully accept the teachings of Guru Gobind Singh, the tenth Guru. 7 Both were from low caste origin. 8 Bhakti movement spread across North India during the late medieval age and spawned into several different movements. Bhakti saints are revered by Sikhs and some their verses are included in the Guru Granth Sahib. 9 The institution of langar is seen as a sort of social reform, in that it enters the heart of the caste system and its hierarchy through categories of purity/impurity.

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­ istory, whereas present Punjab has constantly undergone several reduch tions of its borders.10 At the end of the British rule, Sikhs presented many internal divisions, fact that prevented the possibility to propose a unitary request for a Sikh State. In 1947 the partition marked the division of Punjab between the newly founded state of Pakistan and the newly independent state of India. As noted by Dusenbery, this tragic event11 signed the rise of the ‘rhetoric of territoriality’ which has progressively united Sikhs in a compact geographical unit (1995): everybody was aware that “Sikhs belong to Punjab and Punjab belongs to Sikh”. This rhetoric insisted on a ‘lost homeland’ and on a past political sovereignty and unity, which dated back to the reign of Ranjit Singh12 (Grewal 1990). This sort of ‘golden age’ is usually put into contrast with the period of wars and struggles experienced by Sikhs under different rulers in Punjab, first of all under the Mughal emperors. Indeed, the lives of the ten Gurus, which spanned from 1469 to 1708, coincided with the Mughal Empire in North India (1526–1707). In that respect, Guru’s lives and Sikh religion have been strongly influenced by the Muslim rulers, particularly Guru Arjan (fifth), Guru Tegh Bahadur (ninth), and the two sons of Guru Gobind Singh were also martyred. In 1699, in response to his father’s death at the hands of ruling Mughals, Guru Gobind Singh (tenth) created the khalsa, a martial-bureaucratic apparatus, a community of ‘pure’. Khalsa Sikhs are those who have been initiated, or baptised, by taking amrit (holy water) through a ceremony called amrit sanchar. Through the process they become ‘saint-soldiers’ and are ordained to follow a code of conduct and to wear the five religious symbols (‘5 k’): kesh (uncut hear and beard), kanga (a small comb), kirpan (sword), kara (steel bangle), kangha (short trousers).13 The turban does not belong to the khalsa code, but falls in religious practice (Restelli 1989; McLeod 1999). Throughout history, khalsa Sikhs, while remaining a distinct numerical minority, have been politically dominant; still in present time, preachers at gurdwaras keep alive the martial and martyr ideals (Nesbitt 2005: 59) through the

10 The last re-drawing of Punjab’s map was in 1966. 11 The partition led to a dislocation of Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims (12 million people) across the new borders: the number of people who died, lost their houses and properties cannot be determined exactly. For sure, this is one of the ‘forgotten episodes’ in the collective national memory, though still alive in those people, as Sikhs, who directly experienced it. 12 Ranjit Singh was the first Maharaja of the Sikh empire in Punjab. His reign (1799–1849) emerged after a period of military expeditions by different sikh component army (misls), affiliated with the Sikh Khalsa Army, into territories once controlled by Mughals. The empire extended in the historical Punjab and appeared to be basically secular. 13 These symbols have a sort of military origin as thought to be functional for warriors.



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s­ tories of Gurus’ martyrdom and military battles.14 In more recent times, the episode that has profoundly marked Sikh diasporic consciousness refers to 1984, when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ordered the army to storm15 the Golden Temple16 in Amritsar in which insurgents pro-Khalistan17 had barricaded. Sikhs perceive and remember the episode as a terrible violation of their most sacred place. The attack was then avenged on 31 October through the assassination of Indira Gandhi by her two Sikhs bodyguards. In the resultant violent and bloody riots in Dehli, Sikhs were literally hunted down.18 The diasporic consciousness is thus built upon a ‘hurt memory’ of the different historical episodes which, along with a sense of belonging to a common and distinct religion,19 represents a central feature of the modern Sikh diaspora.20 Sikhs in Europe and Italy As a Sikh informant once asserted during an interview with Silvia, “Sikhs have been always migrating”. Despite that, the first Sikh migrations, that took place during the British rule in Punjab, started quite late if compared to the mobility of other Indians.21 At the end of the nineteenth century, Punjabi Sikhs became part of those two million and a half Indians who until then were employed as ‘indentured labourers’ in British colonies (Clarke, Peach and Vertovec 1990; Cohen 1997). At that time, Punjab started to experience a gradual enrichment that allowed some farming families to 14 Images and descriptions of the brutal martyrdom of the Gurus are displayed in many gurdwaras. 15 Through the military operation called ‘Blue Star’. 16 The Harmandir Sahib, informally called ‘the golden temple’ due to its golden surface made by Ranjit Singh, is considered the most holiest shrine by Sikhs. 17 The Khalistan movement was the most militant expression of the Sikh national consciousness and proposed a Sikh nation-state encompassing the Indian Punjab and some surrounding Punjabi-speaking areas (Restelli 1989). 18 At least 3000 deaths within one week (Restelli 1989: 153). 19 The idea and practice of Sikhism as a distinct religion separate from Hinduism was advanced especially in the twentieth century. 20 The concept of ‘diaspora’ has expanded from its classical meaning and has come to define all groups of people who reside in countries others than those of origin. As Nesbitt notices, using the term diaspora does not refer to a “single sharply defined faith community” as, particularly regarding the lowest caste “the Sikh-Hindu divide has sometimes been ambigouous and shifting” (2005: 87). 21 The ‘delay’ is due to the fact that Punjab was annexed by English in 1849, about a century after the other parts of India (Tatla 1999: 46). 22 The migration project, in all its historical phases, has to be understood in relation with the familiar context, both when it is in continuity and in rupture with the family.

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invest in the emigration of a son in the colonial empire (Cohen 1997).22 The main destinations were the Far East, North America, East Africa.23 Meanwhile, the British army began a mass recruitment of Sikh soldiers, the latter being appreciated as a ‘martial race’ (Peers 1997). After the independence in 1947, United Kingdom, North America, Canada and some western European States began to import workers.24 This represented an important ‘pull factor’ for Sikh “largely economic and voluntary” migration following the dislocation after partition (Tatla 1999: 6). Today the Sikh diaspora represents nearly the 5% of the total Sikh population, a high percentage if compared to the Hindu diaspora (Nesbitt 2005). United Kingdom, United States and Canada, along with Australia, are the areas where Sikhs are today mostly present. At the same time, Sikh presence tends to be locally concentrated in specific areas. Half of Canada’s Sikhs live in British Columbia (Nesbitt 2005), whilst in the UK they live mostly in cities such as Birmingham, Manchester, Edinburgh, Leeds, London, Bristol, Cardiff and Glasgow. Migration patterns and strategies of territorialization differ according to historical and national context. The Sikhs’ experience of settlement in California during the first years of the XX century – where many Sikhs married Mexican-Catholic women since they were not allowed to bring in wives from Punjab (Leonard 1992) – was quite different from that of lowcaste Sikhs migrating in the U.K. before 1950s to work as peddlers, or that of Jat Sikh – a rural class of landowner – emigrating in the UK during the ‘60’s (Singh and Tatla 2006). Overseas Sikhs have often aimed at organizing themselves into religious associations based on gurdwaras which are defined not only as places for collective worship but also as centres where to preserve and transmit a Sikh identity and a collective memory, offering a vast range of activities and social services (Singh and Tatla 2006). Some authors have pointed out how factional rivalries internal to Sikh communities have often led to the establishment of several gurdwaras in the same area, through a process of diversification (Ballard 2000). Despite these divisions, Sikhs have gained high public profile in various receiving societies and have led many struggles for recognition, especially in UK, USA and Canada. Particularly, Sikhs have insisted with diverse institutions on the

23 Most of the Sikh workers employed in East Africa settled there as other East African Asians. Around 1970, most of those Sikhs emigrated in the U.K. after the independence of those African states such as Kenya and Tanzania (Bhachu 1995). 24 U.K. 300.000 Sikh in 1981; Canada 67.000 Sikh in 1981; USA 60.000 sikhs in 1980 (Tatla 1999).



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right to carry religious symbols, primarily the kirpan, the turban and long beard, those symbols that recurrently contrast with different national legislation. In 1976 UK, the Motor-cycle Crash-Helmets (Religious Exemption) Act allowed Sikhs to wear turban instead of motor-cycle helmets; in 1994 in Canada Sikh working in the Royal Mounted Police were allowed to wear turban, while in the UK Sikhs may wear a small kirpan (Nesbitt 2005; Singh and Tatla 2006). If Sikh settlements in these countries of old immigration reveal a high degree of self-organisation and of successful relations with western institutions, Sikh communities in other countries of recent migration, such as Italy, are at the very beginning of this path. The first Sikhs arrived in Italy at the end of the ‘70’s, at a time when the post-war economic growth had created more work opportunities for Italian people who, now nouveau riche, were inclined to refuse specific job sectors25 that started to become attractive for immigrants (Einaudi 2007: 62). Importantly, the restrictive immigration policies adopted by other European countries pushed immigrants towards Italy which, being traditionally an emigration country, found itself to be unprepared to receive constant immigrant flows and, as a result, had a quite weak immigration policy. Individual Punjabi men started entering Italy with tourist visa, a work permit or undocumented (Bertolani 2005; Denti et al. 2005). At this stage the relationship with the Italian territory was fragmented and framed by dispersion and with a high level of internal mobility. Many Sikhs, in fact, engaged in what might be called a ‘national itinerant migration’ that led them to move continuously on Italian territory. After arriving in Rome, a privileged initial stage of migration, the widespread irregular employment opportunities (Einaudi 2007) and the work in the circus, led them in southern regions like Puglia and Calabria (Denti 2005). Most Sikhs progressively aimed at moving towards Northern Italy and those who set up directly in the North were generally those who had already spent several years in other European countries (Gallo 1998). As a result to the availability of more stable job opportunities in the factories of the North, the 1990s witnessed to progressive stabilisation of the Indian presence in this area that began to play a primary role in catalysing migrant flows. Since then, many Sikhs regularised their position or entered in Italy with the Martelli Law in 1990 (Law 39/1990), which represented just the first 25 These ‘socially undesirable’ work sectors referred mainly to manual works, such as domestic, agricultural, generally unskilled labour, alongside part of unqualified jobs in the building sector.

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of several amnesties in Italian immigration policy. As in other locations of the diaspora, Sikhs in Italy26 tend to be locally concentrated, mainly in the Pianura Padana (Padan Plain, in Emilia and Lombardia),27 Lazio agricultural areas (Agropontino and Latina),28 Toscana29 and Veneto.30 The choice of areas where to settle was, and still is, strongly influenced by chain migration based on kinship networks31 and by structural factors of the territory, especially in terms of work opportunities.32 If in the Padan Plain the main occupations are to be found in agriculture (including stables) and small or medium industries (with high demand for unskilled labourers), in the North-Eastern areas Sikhs are employed in the industrial districts of furniture and tanning (Tomasini 2005), while in Central Italy they tend to be employed in the agricultural sector. Beside this, it has to be mentioned that the level of Indian entrepreneurs in Italy is increasing as several Punjabis are running small business (mainly shops) or are committed into importexport activities. Thanks to their relative territorial concentration, Sikhs in Italy have been able to organise into what we can call ‘communities’. Household -oriented migration has progressively encouraged family reunions, not least because since the mid 1990s this became one of the few legal means to reach Italy. Centres of aggregation for the Sikhs in Italy mainly coincide with the places of worship, the gurdwaras, which in Italy are more than twenty (formal and informal). These sites create a network of Sikh communities in Italy fuelled by frequent contacts, reciprocal visits and meetings. In recent years, Sikhs are trying to organize themselves into a national community which may be playing an active public role within Italian public space.

26 According to the last statistic Report by Caritas/Migrantes (2009), Indian residents in Italy are 91.855. This data doesn’t count undocumented persons. As for other countries, ­statistic data regarding religious/ethnic minorities are difficult to define as their presence is normally calculated on the basis of their percentage in the country of origin (i.e. Sikhs in India are the 2% of the total population and the same percentage is applied to Sikhs in Italy). 27 In Emilia Romagna the total number of Indian residents (data on 13.12.2008) is 12.854 persons, placing India as foreign nationality at the 8th position. In Lombardia Indian residents total 37.041 persons (13.12.2008, Caritas/Migrantes 2009). 28 Indian residents in Lazio are 9.636 (13.12.2008, Caritas/Migrantes 2009). 29 Indian residents in Toscana are 4.077 (13.12.2008, Caritas/Migrantes 2009). 30 Indian residents in Veneto 12.378 (13.12.2008, Caritas/Migrantes 2009). 31 Network based on kinship, family, clan and regional origin are significant in determining Punjabi diaspora (Gallo 1998; Bertolani 2005; Sai 2008). 32 Bertolani (2005) shows how these two elements, parental and labour opportunities, are often interconnected.



the case of sikh communities in central italy291 Fear and Mimesis: First Sikh Migrants in Rome

In late 1990s Rome, some features in the relation between religion and mobility emerged as relevant in Sikhs’ narratives.33 First, the topic of religion emerged to be closely linked to experiences of physical vulnerability that bridged experiences of persecution in the post-1984 India with experiences of discrimination in the new Roman context. In this respect, whilst religion will later in the 2000s prove to be a relevant source in the establishment of social networks (Anwar 1998) with local institutions and other community across the national territory, in the 1990s prevails a tendency to confine religious activities within the domestic sphere and gurdwara. Second, and related to the first, is the tendency to hide visible expressions of religious difference and to ‘de-ethnicize’ in public the growing presence of single and often unmarried men, whereas condition of illegality, wearing ‘exotic’ clothes such as the turban and meeting together in public urban spaces was equated by the local society as a dangerous affirmation of extraneous masculinity. This should be understood in the context of Rome as a pole of attraction for first arrivals. The significant majority of the interviewed men arrived in Italy illegally, and only few directly from Punjab. Many had previous experiences of migration in Germany and France (only few came from UK), whilst others came from Greece, Russia and the Gulf. In both cases, however, previous destinations were often not places where Sikh men had extended family ties or have the intention to settle, but step points where to work in order to repay the debt contracted at the time of their departure from India. Once repaid the initial debt through months of manual labour, they were allowed to approach local Sikh (or from other nationalities) brokers to reach further places. Italy was considered a less dangerous country, in that it was easier to enter and to find a job and also a less racist place. Nevertheless, it was looked at as a temporary destination in the effort to reach the US. For many, leaving India and coming to Italy meant an itinerant migration that could take from 1 to 5 years. Most of

33 At the time of Ester’s fieldwork, the Sikh community there were not official disaggregated data on Sikh migration in Italy or Lazio district. According to the few data available (Caritas Dossier Statistico 1996, 1997, 1998) the Indian presence in Lazio was estimated to be around 5,000 units, only considering regular migration. Out of this, according to unofficial data (Pontifico Consiglio Migranti – Vatican Institute for Migrants; Indian Embassy) nearly 2,000 people were Syrian Christians Malayali and the remaining Sikh from Indian Punjab. The incidence of irregular migration among Sikhs was estimated to be high, and nearly other 2,500 units should have been added to the picture. See Gallo (1998) for a more detailed picture.

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them came not directly from Punjab but from Delhi and Mumbay, and had arrived in Italy during the second half of the 1980s.34 Memories of persecution were still vivid and were directly linked to the decision to leave India, accepting to resign one’s own destiny in the hand of brokers who could arrange the escape from the cities. S. reached Italy in 1987, after three years of literal slavery, working to repay the debt to a broker under the threat to have his family killed in Punjab. S. left Delhi a few months after Indira Gandhi’s assassination and after the killing of his brother. He had a cousin already working in Rome in a bakery,35 who convinced him to come to Italy ‘where life was relatively easy’ and, importantly, due to the lack of a consolidated Sikh community, his anonymity and security could be better guaranteed. Interestingly, in fact, whilst kinship ties and a sense of fraternity, alongside exploitative relations of economic dependence, constituted a source of mobility towards our country, the lack of a visible public presence in Italy was somehow reassuring for many who considered themselves as refugees. Nonetheless, the fear of recognition in the new context and the problem of being Sikh in public permeate S.’s narratives of his first years in Rome: I had this constant feeling of…always wanted to hide from people. People should not have known that I was Sikh, and I felt angry and frustrated about that. In India and also in Germany…we were blamed also by our own community, some of us were also assaulted by other Sikhs as they thought we were responsible for what was happening in India…Others helped us a lot… you see, it is always in both ways. […] I knew that in Rome many Italians did not know about us….but I still had this feeling that I should not have wore the turban or other things…you felt it physically that people did not like…I remember once I was looking for a job in a restaurant and the owner was asking me why I was wearing the turban and the little knife…you see…and I tried to explain my religion and what Sikhs are…he was simply not interested, he said that this is a Catholic country and that people do not like those ‘strange things’…that’s what he said…’36

34 Among the 46 interviewed people only 6 had come in the 1970s and from other European countries. They were living in Rome with their family and were running business in the city centre. Among them two were also acting as brokers. 35 Among the 38 men interviewed 25were working in the city in Italian bakeries and sweet industry (pasticcerie), 5 in South Asian run business (restaurants and shops) and 8 were in the rural area of Agropontino working as manual labourers. Among this, 29 out of 38 has been employed in circus or horse business soon after their arrival. No woman was working at that time. 15 out of 38 had reached Rome after having worked in Southern Italy, mainly Caserta Province and in Sicily. 36 Rome, Interview with S. on 22nd January 1997.



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Expressions of religious and ethnic belonging were perceived by S., as many others arrived in that period, as obstacles to local acceptance, if not to personal security, attitudes that brought constantly Sikh men to parallel and link their experiences in India and Rome. Contrary to expectations, racism and physical assaults was experienced by those who had found initial housing in the city suburbs, often perpetrated by extreme right-wing (neofascist, sometimes self-defining as nazi-skin) young men. K., arrived in Rome in 1986, found provisional lodging in a dismantled building in the southern side of the city where many irregular migrants were living. Before they were forced to leave the place by the police they had been attacked at night-time by a neo-fascist gang: It was as a continuous nightmare, especially because most of us there had left India to find some peace…they were calling us dirty, they said they did not want Muslim or black people in their city. A friend of mine who did not want to remove his turban after the arrival was beaten…37

Already in 1990s Rome, the fear of being identified as Muslim – although it would increase after 9/11 – is another recurrent reason for deciding to hide certain expressions of religious and ethnic difference. Moreover, physical vulnerability was worsened by everyday forms of discrimination enacted at institutional level by both Italian and Indian authorities. As official data about Sikhs was not available and no Sikh associations existed at that time, Ester spent the first months contacting Indian officials in the Indian Embassy to gather data and to find first local contacts. She remembers the long cue of Sikh men standing in front of the embassy for bureaucratic purposes and the usual comments of many non-Sikh Indian employees telling her to “be careful in doing research with Sikhs as they were violent and non reliable people”38 made by Indian employees. With a certain embarrassment she recalls her first meeting with the then Vice-Ambassador – who happened to be a Malayali – telling her without taking into much consideration his institutional role to conduct the research exclusively with Malayali families as: Sikhs are dangerous people, you cannot trust them and you have to think about your safety…only men are here and moreover they are ignorant, not educated, and you will not get proper information from them…39

37 Rome, Interview with K. on 3rd February 1997. 38 Rome, Interview with S.K., a South Indian employee of the Indian Embassy, on November 1996. 39 Rome, Interview on 28th November 1996.

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In a parallel, Sikhs were often lamenting bad treatments by people at the Embassy, such as arbitrariness in helping with documents, verbal harassment and enormous delays in dealing with bureaucratic procedures. Two interrelated elements are worth noting in the demeaning representation of Sikh promoted at institutional level, as they are also embodied in Italians perceptions of the relation between urban spaces and gender migrant identity. The first one refers to the more reassuring family dimension of migration, that more easily made migrants’ presence in the city acceptable and legitimate. In that, Malayali migration in mid 1990s – for its being framed by family reunion and the formation of extended women-centred kinship networks, alongside by frequent employment within the domestic sector – was taken by Indian authorities as well as by many Italian employers as the symbol of reliable and positive migration (Gallo 2006).40 In contrast, the fact that Sikh men were mostly migrating alone, leaving their family in India, and were still in the process of finding their own labour niches within the local labour market, made them more elusive to social control. Indeed, the very fact of choosing a de-ethnicizing code of dressing and self-presentation was linked to the practical necessity, at least in the first few months following the arrival, to ‘stay public’ in some key areas of the city. Until the early 2000s – when the area started to undergo a process of ‘renovation’ through the closing of the local-ethnic market, the increase of home rental prices and an anti-migrants housing/business policy – the area close to the Central Termini Station, particularly the neighbourhood surrounding Piazza Vittorio (Quartiere dell’Esquilino) used to catalyze first arrivals in search of a place where to sleep to and to find first job contracts. For many illegal migrants, Piazza Vittorio constituted a place where to approach new brokers – who had started running small business in the area since the early 1980s – in order to have documents or to find connections towards rural areas and to be employed in the agricultural sector. Italians living in the area recall with a certain disappointment the fact of finding ‘men with the turban’41 sleeping outside and working in the daily market, and the sense of insecurity42 in living in the area. Illegality and common male presence in public places was indeed associated with a dangerous masculinity by the neighbourhood’s opinion, which resulted sometimes in 40 Although, some Indian officials expressed their willing that Malayalis, being well educated, deserved better employment opportunities in the city. 41 Piazza Vittorio was known. Among other things, as “the square where there are ‘those with the turban’” (“la piazza dove ci sono quelli con il turbante”). 42 The topic of ‘Italian security’ will later become one of the main arguments of the rightwing parties, as in the last European (2009) and National (2008) election campaign, often following episodes of harassment and sexual abuses apparently conducted by migrant men.



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police intervention. This had a considerable impact on the feeling of insecurity of many Sikhs and on the decision to ‘hide the turban’ and to adopt a low profile assertion of their identity in the new context. The public expression of religious identity was indeed perceived by Sikhs as a threat to personal security as well as inhibiting the possibility to build relations with the locality. After few months of reciprocal scrutiny, Ester was finally invited to the gurdwara which, contrary to the Malayali Syrian Christian Parish – which at that time was given the permission to be established in the hearth of the city centre (Trastevere) – was located at the outskirts of the city. The temple was built on a dismissed industrial shed and was attended once or twice a month. It was yet to become a regular place of worship and meeting. Overall, Rome seems to have constituted throughout the 1990s a first pole of attraction, from where to move towards quieter areas. Despite the fact the Roman community has grown in the past ten years, Ferrari recently highlights how the city remains ‘a region of transit rather than a place of settlement’ (Ferraris 2009: 307). At the same time, the high dynamism of the community and its flexibility to adjust to changing situations – alongside the increasing presence of family units in the region (ibidem) – make it difficult to predict with certainty possible future developments. It is worth noting two important aspects recently underlined by Ferraris’ research among Roman Sikhs. The first is the dynamic use of urban and rural spaces through the creation of networks that span across both realities and the individuation of suburban niches where to constitute a sense of community, whilst still fragmented and temporary. Second, is the peculiar relation established with local society through the conversions Italian into Sikhism, a point about which we hope to know more from the author. A comparison with the Sikhs of Novellara reveals to be particularly useful not only to emphasise continuities and discontinuities between different Sikh groups within the national territory, but also the recent institutional development of Sikh’s community organisation and the role played by religion in the process. Territorialization and Emplacement Through Religion: The Growing Community of Reggio Emilia Sikh migrants who today gather around the gurdwara of Novellara43 were the first in Italy to organize collectively for common prayer and, years later, 43 Novellara is a town of 13.000 inhabitants in the Province of Reggio Emilia, EmiliaRomagna region, Northern Italy.

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to build their own place of worship. In this sense, the community of Novellara44 is considered the father of all other temples throughout Italy. Attempts to find legitimacy in the locality have experienced different phases through time, from an initial mimesis to the institutionalisation and an organised public presence. We will hence focus here on the territorialization and emplacement of the Sikh community in Reggio Emilia, specifically with the processes through which social networks are established both locally and transnationally as well as on how the promotion of a public image through religion is received by the local society. The first Sikhs settled in the Reggio Emilia province at the end of the 1970s. Many of them, mostly young adult men, were employed in circus families. Some arrived from other parts of Italy, mostly the Centre-South, following available employment opportunities in agricultural work and industries. Some others came from European countries which no longer offered the same possibilities as in previous decades. Within a relatively short time complex migrant networks – mostly based on kinship and clan (got) – produced a consistent flow of arrivals in the area. During this initial phase migrants experienced a ‘detachment from religion’, especially regarding religious practices. K. Singh arrived in 1984 directly in Italy, following the experience of some relatives of his father: Before it was difficult, there was no time for religion, to pray in the morning, evening. We could not even wash always, and be clean before praying. Neither we could bid, we had little money for us. I also used to eat meat45… I lived with Sardinian shepherds who ate meat, even in the morning, amid the sandwich.46

Similarly, exterior religious symbols were neglected, or consciously removed, in many cases even before the departure from Punjab, as remembers T. Singh: My dad went to buy a new turban for my trip. The tailor asked him why he wanted a turban, as his son, that was me, had just cut his hair. My father didn’t know that and when he returned home, I was eating, he tore the turban away from my head to see if it was true. He was very angry and drove me out of

44 Here I use the expression ‘community of Novellara’ referring to all Punjabi Sikhs who regularly or occasionally attend the gurdwara there and, even though coming from other parts of the Province or even from other Provinces and Regions, consider it their reference worship place and group. 45 Vegetarianism is a rooted and felt practice among Sikhs, particularly Khalsa ones. 46 Novellara, Interview with K. Singh on 12th of October 2004.



the case of sikh communities in central italy297 home. Then, my uncle, his brother, told him to let me in, as in those days -it was 1984- it was not safe to leave a Sikh on the street47

Many Sikhs thought of exterior mimesis as a way to be more easily accepted in the new context. However, between the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s – as a result of family reunions and of the growing number of Punjabi that followed the immigration amnesty48 – Sikhs started to organise into collective ‘domestic prayers’. Compared to Rome – where urban alienation, higher rates of unemployment and a longstanding history of right-wing movements perpetrating racial discrimination increased Sikhs’ shakiness and delayed attempts to build official religious places – many Sikhs found the semi-rural area surrounding Novellara more reassuring. At that time, no Sikh temples were present in Italy, except from the one in the Rome province – run by Italian converts – and an occasional temple at the outskirts of the city. The words of one of the leaders of the temple are particularly significant in this respect: And there [in Rome] came one of our priests from England. On his way back, he went here too, saw that we are many in Reggio Emilia… and said: ‘You’re enough people here, take a temple too, so at least people who drink can modify their behaviour’. And so people began to think about it.49

In 1990 Sikhs started to look for a place of worship, and eventually found an old mill in Rio Saliceto, where nearly 100–150 people started to go every Sunday. Contacts with the homeland and the diaspora (especially with Great Britain) were activated to find – through travels and shipping – those objects which could transform the setting into a proper place of worship: a copy of the sacred text, the Guru Granth Sahib, iconographic images (of the guru or Sikh martyrs), musical instruments and objects for the kitchen. However, it soon became clear that the community was growing so fast that a new place was needed. In 1997 the community found a larger space to rent in Novellara and, after a year, it purchased a land nearby on which to build a new a gurdwara. The gurdwara, said to be the second biggest in Europe, was inaugurated in 2000 with great ceremony and the participation of many local and national Italian political authorities.50 The building of a worship place had two main consequences in terms of relations within

47 Novellara, Interview with T. Singh on 15th of November 2007. 48 Here we refer to the first significant immigration amnesty included in the so-called ‘Martelli Law (Law 39/1990). 49 Interview with R. Singh on the 7th March 2008. 50 Romani Prodi, then President of the European Commission, was also present. .

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the locality. First, it signed the first successful attempt of territorialization/ emplacement by a Sikh community and the official beginning of a recognised Sikh community in Italy. Importantly, the construction of the new temple started to attract many Punjabis from other parts of Italy and abroad, who wished to join a growing religious community where to “feel confident in practising religion”. Moreover, the public space was meant to allow many to find useful networks in order to improve ones’ own status, obtaining a better job work, find a house and send children to a good school. Secondly, the task of managing the temple implied a number of institutional practices that transformed a religious informal community into a real institution. The latter was increasingly located within an emerging network of relations that included different Italian subjects: local administrations, parishes, police forces, health care institutions, other migrants groups. Since the beginning of the 1990s the gurdwara community had started to organise into an association with specific roles, aims, responsibility, statute and budget. Towards the end of the decade many Sikhs started to wear religious symbols again, such as the turban and the beard, and to respect religious practices, such as vegetarianism or the avoidance of alcohol: I used to drink beer and to eat meet. Also at dinner, at home, with my wife and sons. When I ate meat I felt like drinking. My children rebuked me, watching movies where people drank and did bad things and asking me if I wanted to be like that. One day my son told me that if I stopped drinking, they would stop eating meat. I accepted, I realised that it was a way to give me courage to make this choice. I realised that if I did, when my children grow up and maybe start to smoke or drink, I may have more authority on them.51

As a result of the increasing stability of the community, more religious authorities from the diaspora and from India started to visit regularly the gurdwara of Novellara. Those missionaries, sants and preaches promoted a return to orthodoxy with a visible wearing of symbols. During those visits, collective amrit pahal rituals were organised for those who wish to be baptised for the first time, but also for some amrit-dhari Sikhs who have neglected religion practices during the migration process and hence decided to undergo a ‘second baptism’. The increasing tendency to become amrit dhari – although it interests so far a minority of Sikhs – has to be understood in local terms too, as a sign of increased social status, successful migration and re-appropriation of a public identity. Being amrit-dhari 51 Interview with T. Singh on the 2nd of December 2007.



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implies responsibilities and commitment to the community (through the seva, for example) and a full respect of a code of conduct. Having a good family, money, a decent work that allows some free time, are all elements that favour a ‘correct’ religious practice and behaviour. Sikh Promotion of Public Image Through Religion. Sikh presence in public space and relations with Italian institutional representatives started before the inclusion of the Sikh Baisakhi Festival within a multicultural program promoted by the local centre-left administration of Novellara. Actually, contacts between the Sikh temple and institutional representatives had been active since 1998, when the local parish invited Sikh leaders to attend the Christmas Mass at the main Novellara’s Catholic Church. Since then, frequent reciprocal visits and symbolic actions of mutual respect have taken place between the Catholic Church and the gurdwara. In 2004, for the first time, Sikh performed a nagar kirtan, a religious procession through the streets, in occasion of the Baisakhi. Nearly 5.000 Sikhs participated, arriving from Northern Italy and abroad, and walked through the street of the small town of Novellara. The event has been repeated in subsequent years, enriched by performances of gatka,52 alongside speeches by Italian and Sikh leaders. As a consequence, Sikhs became much more visible to the Italian society, both through direct participation of Italians at the Baisakhi, and through TV channels and media in general. In 2005 the local administration launched a multicultural program aimed at promoting exchanges between different communities’ religious and ethnic festivities. As a consequence, Sikh Baisakhi started to be celebrated twice, through the nagar kirtan first, and at the council theatre some days after. Sikhs also started to be involved in town festivals53 within the surrounding area, where they presented ethnic performances such as bhangra dance, Punjabi cooking and music. The folkloristic framework common to many of these public events generally reinforces the stereotype of Sikhs as exotic, distant from the Italian culture but at the same time amusing and entertaining with their “colours, beautiful dresses, food and oriental fragrances”. It’s worth noting that there’s a constant overlapping between religious and ethnic dimension, both in the representation and self-representations of Sikh identity. 52 Martial art. 53 For instance in occasion of public holidays or patron saint’s day festival.

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Sikhs who are involved in the promotion of the Sikh image – through ­cultural and ethnic aspects (such as dance and sport) – hold a position of responsibility within the gurdwara as well. Thus, the gurdwara remains at the centre of networks with Italian society, with regard to ethnic and religious events, allowing Sikh temple association to adapt to different public contexts and to requests from the Italian society. Despite this, Sikhs’ interest in the promotion of a public collective image is primarily based today on a self-representation as a religious group.54 The community of Novellara is very concerned about how its image is conveyed in public events. It draws advises for an appropriate adjustment to the new society and for the preservation of a religious identity from Sikh communities of the diaspora that have a longer history of settlement in other countries than India. The organizational structure, materials used and some other aspects of these public events,55 all show similarities with other events organised in the diaspora. Nevertheless, Sikhs deal with a specific locality that forces them to reelaborate models coming from abroad. Sikhs perceive religion as an important aspect in the relation with the Italian society. Whenever they refer to the local priest of Novellara they do it with great respect and deference. Don C., a priest, is the referent for the dialogue and encounter between the different religious community in Novellara and Sikhs recognise him a high moral authority. Italy is seen as a religious country, not much because of the Italian society,56 but because of the presence of the Pope, respected as a significant source of authority in Italy. These are the words of a man of 40 years old, arrived in Italy in 1990: You know, I went to Rome once, and I met the Pope [John Paul II], with some other Sikhs, he was great, very kind. You know, he said such beautiful thing about Sikhism and India, he was a very good pope. If he was still here, I’m sure he would help us with the Italian government, regarding the recognition of Sikhism.57

For many Sikhs the Catholic Pope is perceived as a sort of ‘Minister of Religion’ within the Italian State, a person with high political power and authority in religious affair. As J. Singh emphasised:

54 This is not the case generally speaking, but those Sikh religious Punjabis had been more powerful and capable of capitalising community resources on the religious side. 55 The use of banners, leaflets, people collecting rubbish and distributing food and drinks, invitation of representatives on speeches. 56 On the contrary, many adult Sikhs complain about the detachment many Italians show towards religion, by never going to Mass on Sunday, for example. 57 Novellara, Conversation with H. Singh on the 20th November 2007.



the case of sikh communities in central italy301 We have asked many years ago for the recognition of Sikhsim by the Italian State, but until now, nothing has moved. I think we should go to talk to the Pope. Could you help us contacting him? I’m sure that if we convinced him, if he understood how are our religion and our problems in Italy, with the turban and the kirpan, than he could do something. It would be sufficient that he talks at the TV, and then to Berlusconi, and it’s done.58

Compared to countries like France, Sikhs in Italy seem to feel more confident in sharing and manifesting in public their religious identity. Locally, this is also encouraged by the political institutions through the aforementioned multicultural program of shared religious festivals. Political administrations hold the view that religious diversity may be perceived positively, in that it calls for a new re-discovery of the national values and of the religious character of ‘Italian-ness’. Here below excerpt from the interview with the Mayor of Novellara, openly atheist: Sikhs in some way are making us re-discover our ‘religiosity’, in the sense that religion is now a guarantee element related to the crisis of politics and of certain ideals, especially in regard to young people living the world of globalisation, full of empty messages […] where perhaps there isn’t a political experience as I experienced as adolescent, that gave me the passion for politics, the values we believe in, the Constitution, anti-fascism, in other words values that my family passed on me, which today no longer exist as a family experience… This tradition no longer exist… what remains? Well, the message of consumerism. So then, at least [there’s] the religious message, both for a young Catholic boy, and for those guys who are away from their country but are here, maybe without being able yet to build their own identity… which models do they have? At this point, it’s better to have the value of faith, still based on the positive feelings of love towards others, to behave well because maybe you go to heaven, but at least you behave well. Thus, the contribution of religious values coming also from these immigrant communities is necessary and needs to be recognised, to be exploited, because the risk is apathy.59

In the view of some political authorities,60 religious pluralism should be present in the public arena, and needs to be encouraged and managed. Sikhs, for their part, try to promote a positive image of their religion, especially during public occasions but also when approaching visitors at the gurdwara. During a visit at the gurdwara organised by the Town Council in 58 Conversation with J., 17/2/2008. 59 Novellara, Interview with the Major, on the 15th of March 2008. 60 This view is strongly supported by the mayor and the Counsellor of Culture (2009-), previous Councillor for Political Inclusion and Participation (2004–2009). Other political representatives, though a minority, do not agree and criticize the importance given to religion in the name of secularism of public administration.

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September 2008, two groups of about 15 Italians came for the visit. In that occasion, Sikhs depicted Sikhism as a religion open to everybody as it is symbolized by the four doors, one for each cardinal point, of the gurdwara. When asked about caste or combined marriages, Sikhs tended to ignore the question. When asked again they refused the importance of caste, as well as practice of gender discrimination, attributing these features to cultural tradition which draws from Hindu tradition. This pluralism is hence constructed through the obliteration of internal forms of inequalities (such as caste or gender) – that, as Sikh are aware of, can more easily attract local society’s criticism – as well as through the tracing of a common history with Italians. In August 2007, Sikhs gathered in the war cemetery of Forlì to commemorate publicly their Sikh soldiers died during the WW II, while fighting in Italy, giving a public speech that remembered how: Italy is not a new country to Sikhs, they, in fact, have known many parts of it during the XX century. These sites [the war cemeteries] are home to the Sikh soldiers who died sacrificing themselves for Italy with the turban on their heads. It is important to remember that no Sikh soldier wore a helmet, but just fought with turbans. This is the golden age of Sikhs in Italy, when they fought to free Italy. The Sikhs have done their duty with passion […] The government should pay homage to its martyrs [the Sikhs].

Public Discourses about Sikhs in Terni Terni represents somehow an intermediate case study in the complex process of recognition of Sikh identity, in that being – unlike the prevailing tendency in Rome – a place of settlement and family reunion whilst at the same time still in the process of asserting a legitimate status as a religious community. The actual Sikh community in Terni comprises nearly one hundred families among an overall migrant population of approximately 17.000 people.61 According to the interviews conducted so far, Sikh men living today in Terni with their wives and children, often born in Italy, have previous job experiences in Southern Italy and Rome. Only few moved from the North towards the Centre, as job opportunities are considered better in the former area. Unlike the Rome Province and, to some extent, Novellara, Terni has a history as a former industrial city. It was born and has grown in the last two century as a urban agglomerate surrounding the steel

61 It is although difficult to have an exact picture for Sikhs’ high degree of dispersion in the rural area of the province and in nearby towns.



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industry (Terni Acciaierie) alongside minor, whilst today prevalent, asphalt and caulking factories that haves employed migrant as well as workingclass Italian families. Many Sikhs are employed in seasonal agriculture in the surrounding rural areas as well in the city tertiary sector (restaurants, bars, hotels). One aspect that attracted Ester’s attention at the beginning of the research is the increasing public role played by women in the organisation of community life, partly but not exclusively related with the temple. Among the five families interviewed so far, all women are working, four in the domestic sector as assistants of elderly people62 and one in an Indianrun shop.63 Out of these five, two were also working part-time for the local branch of the National Health Service (ASL) as translators and cultural mediators with migrant women. According to the available data, the level of education – particularly, but not exclusively, among women – seems higher than the one that characterized pioneer migrants. Women seem to be involved in the organisation of temple’ s activity as well as being active members in the organisational life of the Gurduuara Singli Sabha Sahib Association. This clearly contrasted with the situation in late 1990s Rome, confirming how the development of household ties and family life in the new context impact favourably into the institutionalisation of religious life and public expression of ethnic identity (Jacobsen and Kumar 2004). Family, we suggest, plays even in this case a key role in the construction of what we have previously termed as a “growing confidence in practising religion”. The reintegration of social ties within a family framework, alongside the progressive abandonment of certain public spaces such as squares, seem to have weakened – at least in Terni – the local perception of Sikh migration as embodying a dangerous masculinity. This is consciously reflected in the words of J. Singh, one of the members of the Association Gurduuara Singli Sabha Sahib. J. Singh, having lived in Rome between 1985 and 1988, was very much conscious of the differences that divided his experience a pioneer migrant from those who arrived in later years: The creation of a temple has removed Sikh men from the street…see, when a new one arrives now, he does not need to sleep in the street as many of us have done…most of them already know from India that in different parts of 62 In Italy this job is named with the term badante, and it is especially associated with the care of the increasingly elderly population. 63 Interestingly, domestic and health-related job was refused by many Sikhs in 1990s’ Rome. Nonetheless, the job as badante is more likely to be accepted compared to the domestic job (cleaning) and, at present, it is carried on exclusively by women. According to the available data, and differently from what happened in the Malayali community, only few Punjabi men, if none, seem to have worked within the domestic sector.

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ester gallo and silvia sai Italy there are gurdwaras…and if they do not know Terni they certainly know Novellara…and people from there will direct some here, or vice versa. Moreover now there are more and more families, and people who arrive find lodging in households that link them directly to other families or the association itself…64

This, according to our interlocutor, prevents a good number of Sikhs of avoiding wearing religious symbols soon after their arrival and also encourages them to adopt a better conduct in terms of drinking and food habits. If the redemptive role of the temple and of the association is acknowledged by Sikhs, local authorities tend to look at it as a place that can guarantee better security for the city through assuring a certain degree of spatial control. In that, dispersion and fragmentation – alongside common presence in public places traditionally used by Italians – is often contrasted with the project of ‘confining’ religious and ethnic gathering – alongside everyday forms of sociability – within a restricted and ethnically-connoted place, such as the temple. This is reflected in the city urban-development policy, that (in a rather instrumental way) has recently granted the permission to move the gurdwara from the usual dismissed shed (used throughout the 1990s) to a new brick building in the heart of the city central area surrounding the railway station. As one member of the Provincial Council noted: You see…in this country when migrants ask for places to worship it is always a big problem…to speak frankly, and independently from all these talking about multiculturalism…as a politician you have to please people here but at the same time recognise certain demands by migrants, who are the main resources of the labour market here…and also, if you grant them a place where to practice their religion you can control them better, because you know where to find them, what they are doing….The worst thing here is lack of control…that’s what people fear and what damages their security…[…] Sikh people also have proved to deserve a place where to gather as they have always been respectful of our rules…Having a temple makes them better people, because they can think about religion rather than criminality…and that’s better for us…that’s what I think…65

Hence, in the case of Sikhs, the gurdwara66 is spatially and symbolically located within a net of public meanings that confer it a role within the urban thread as a place of ‘moral salvation’ and ‘political security’.67 64 Terni, Interview with J. Singh on the 25th of July 2009. 65 Terni, Interview with P.G. on the 25th May 2009. 66 In Terni, the term gurdwara is rarely known and used by local authorities and common people, that address it with the term ‘temple’, or, more commonly, the ‘Indian church’. 67 Interestingly, this seem not to be valid for Muslim mosque and cultural centres, as being perceived more as a ‘places of conspiracy’.



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Everyday attendants of the temple lament however what they perceive as “the lack of respect” by local people, such as the smoking and drinking of youth (and not only) in the area surrounding the gurdwara and the uses of loud music in bars and private houses particularly during the week end. This, to the eye of some, would have made a peripheral area more suitable for the construction of the temple. As noted by R. Kaur, a woman who is an active member of the Association: People here do not know anything about our religion, often they do not show respect…they drink and smoke in front of the temple and try to enter with the cigarette in their hands to see what we are doing. Here in the temple everyone is accepted but people have to respect us…68

Sikhs seem to be acknowledged by local population more for their folkloric presence in the public space – during their participation at local secular and politically-based festivities (i.e. the Festa dell’Unità69) – and much less for their attempts of making people understanding the complexity of their religious belonging and collective history. Thus, for instance, the Sikh Association70 has been asked to participate at public events through the performances of dances, of ‘traditional dressing’ and the preparation of ethnic cooking. Differently, the Association’s demand to organise a public meeting with political and religious authorities to present their history and religion has so far encountered much more resistance. Relations with the local Catholic authorities and institutions seem to be considerably less developed if compared to Novellara. Through A. Singh’s words, the President of the Association, a tension permeates between the willingness to not hurt Italian sensibility with an overwhelming criticism towards the “local ignorance” and the recognition that much work has to be done to construct a mutually recognising and respectful relation: A.S: Italians do not know anything….people seem to welcome us as long as we show a certain face…Of course we are all happy to participate at your feasts, to share our food…but that’s not all of us!!! E: have you tried to approach local Catholic authorities?

68 Terni, Interview with R. Kaur on the 12th June 2009. 69 A feast periodically organised by the centre-left party PD (Partito Democratico) that gathers members or sympathisers of the party. In central Italy, particularly in the regions with a left-oriented political traditions (such as Tuscany, Emilia and Umbria), these feasts have increasingly involved members of migrant associations, whose members are sometimes involved within party activities as a way of social mobility and political recognition. 70 This it valid also for most of the migrant associations contacted and analysed by Ester.

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ester gallo and silvia sai A.S: We have tried once, to organise a meeting, but they have delayed and delayed their response, taking excuses…and in my country this means that they are not interested…71

Sikhs who are not members of the Association and hence do not have an institutional responsibility to keep the public image of the community free from aggressive attitudes towards the local society, are more keen to express their criticism. As noted by P. Kaur, a 27 year-old Sikh woman: Once people here know that since we are Indian we do not eat meat, dress with coloured saris and cook spicy food and are not terrorist…that’s it! That’s all what they want to know…72

Hence, what seems to emerge so far from a preliminary analysis of Ester’s ethnographic material –partly confirmed by Silvia’s longer relations with the Sikhs of Novellara – is that, at this stage, local society partly relates to a different ethnic presence in the city through processes of trivialization and cultural de-meaning of the political, historical, religious and social features of this community. This promotion of a simplistic over-ethnicization of migrant communities contrasts with Sikhs’ attempts to make both their religion understandable by the Catholic culture (i.e. finding points of similarity) and to keep simultaneously a distance from it advocating the recognition of Sikhism’s structural and symbolic complexity. Final Reflections The analysis presented here needs to be tested by ongoing and future developments that should deepen a comparative perspective across subnational variations and enhance the analysis of the political and public policy framework where the encounter between migrants and Italians take place. At a first glance, it seems to us that Sikh religion becomes ‘acceptable’ by local Italian society as long as it shows to be malleable to processes of ethnicization and folklorization, which make religion more similar to a peculiar and exotic ‘culture’ and less to an organised and politicised institution. This tendency has been in a way consciously ignored by many Sikh authorities for the “sake of well being and pacific coexistence”, but is meeting the anger and disapproval of many other Sikhs. Whilst in our researches we both met Italians – politicians, religious figures, neighbours, friends – who

71 Terni, Interview with A. Singh, 22nd of July 2009. 72 Terni, Interview with P. Kaur, 1st April 2009.



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have built open relations with Sikhs, often based in the real effort of knowing and understanding Sikh religion – and whilst we acknowledge that stereotyping one’s own and others’ religion is part of any multicultural encounter (Jacobsen and Kumar 2004) – we retain that Sikhs are still at present better anthropologists than what we (Italians) have proved to be. This, to the extent that Sikhs’ efforts to translate their own religion into understandable meanings and practices and through the knowing of Catholicism is still more notable than most Italians’ attempt to find a dialogue that puts into question the supposed dominant Catholic culture of Italian society. To what extent the over-ethnicization of migrant communities and their confinement within a folklorized space will encounter future criticism by Sikhs and will reorient their religious policy vis-à-vis the Italian society is open to investigations. References Anwar, M. 1998. Between Cultures. Continuity and Change in the Lives of Young Asians. London: Routledge. Ballard, R. 2000. ‘The Growth and Changing Character of the Sikh presence in Britain’, in Coward, H., J.R. Hinnells and R.B. Williams (eds), The South Asian Religious Diaspora in Britain, Canada, and the United States. New York: State University of New York Press, 127–144. Ballard, R. and C. Ballard. 1977. ‘The Sikhs: The Development of South Asian Settlements in Britain’, in Watson, J. L. (ed.), Between Two Cultures. Migrants and Minorities in Great Britain. Oxford: Blackwell, 21–56. Bates, C. (ed.). 2001. Community, Empire and Migration: South Asians in Diaspora. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Bertolani, B. 2005. ‘I Sikh in Emilia: tra specializzazione del mercato del lavoro e reti di relazioni’, in Denti, D., M. Ferrari and F. Perocco, (eds), I Sikh. Storia e immigrazione. Milan: Franco Angeli. Bhachu, P. 1985. Twice Migrants: East African Sikh Settlers in Britain, London: Tavistock Publications. Caritas/Migrantes. 2009. Immigrazione. Dossier Statistico, XIX Rapporto. Rome: Idos. Chohan, S.S. 2005. ‘Punjabi Religion Amongst the South Asian Diaspora in Britain: The role of the Baba’, in Jacobsen, K.A. and P. Kumar (eds), South Asians in the Diaspora. Histories and Religious Traditions. Leiden: Brill, 393–413. Clarke, C., C.Peach and S.Vertovec. 1990. ‘Introduction: Themes in the Study of the South Asian Diaspora’, in Clarke, C., C. Peach and S.Vertovec (eds), South Asians Overseas. Migration and Ethnicity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1–29. Cohen R. 1997. Global Diasporas: An Introduction. London: UCL Press. Denti, D., M. Ferrari and F. Perocco, (eds). 2005. I Sikh. Storia e immigrazione. Milan: Franco Angeli. Dusenbery, V.A. 1995. ‘A Sikh diaspora? Contested Identities and Constructed Realities’, in Van der Veer, P. (ed.), Nation and Migration: The Politics of Space in the South Asian Diaspora. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 17–42. Einaudi, L. 2007. Le politiche dell’immigrazione in Italia dall’Unità a oggi. Bari: Editori Laterza. Ferraris, F. 2009. ‘Going Rural and Urban at Once: Reflections from the Roman Sikh Context’, Journal of Contemporary Religion 24 (3): 305–18.

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Gallo , E. 2006. ‘Italy is not a Good Place for Men. Narratives of Place, Marriage and Masculinity Among Malayali Migrants in Rome’, Global Networks: 6 (4): 159–174. ——. 1998. ‘Reti migratorie e strategie di radicamento nell’immigrazione Indiana (Sikh and Malayali) a Roma’, BA Dissertation, University of Siena. Grewal, J.S. 1990. The Sikhs of the Punjab. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jacobsen K.A. and P. Kumar. 2004. ‘Introduction’, in Jacobsen, K.A. and P. Kumar (eds), South Asians in the Diaspora. Histories and Religious Traditions. Leiden: Brill, ix-xxiv. Leonard, K.I. 1992. Making Ethnic Choices: California’s Punjabi Mexican Americans. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. McLeod, W.H. 1999. Sikhs and Sikhism: Guru Nanak and the Sikh Religion. Dehli: OUP. Melotti, U. 1997. ‘International Migration in Europe: Social projects and Political Cultures’, in Modood, T. and P. Werbner (eds), The politics of Multiculturalism in the New Europe: Racism, Identity and Community. London: Zed Books, 72–91. Modood, T. 1997. ‘Introduction: The Politics of Multiculturalism in the New Europe’, in Modood T. and P. Werbner (eds), The Politics of Multiculturalism in the New Europe: Racism, Identity and Community. London: Zed Books, 1–25. Nesbitt, E. 2005. Sikhism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Peers, D.M. 1997. ‘“Those Nobel Exemplars of the True Military Tradition”: Construction of the Indian Army in the Mid-Victorian Press’, Modern Asian Studies 31, (1) 109–142. Restelli, M. 1989. I Sikh fra storia e attualità politica. Treviso: Pagus. Sai, S.M. 2008. ‘Riconfigurazioni familiari e identità di genere tra i migranti Sikh a Reggio Emilia’, in Colombo, A and G. Sciortino (eds), Stranieri in Italia: trent’anni dopo. Bologna: Il Mulino, 117–146. Singh, G. 2000. Ethnic Conflict in India: A Case-study of Punjab. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Singh, G. and D.S. Tatla. 2006. Sikhs in Britain: The Making of a Community. London & New York: Zed Books. Tatla, D.S. 1999. The Sikh Diaspora: The Search for Statehood. London: UCL Press. Vertovec, S. 1997. ‘Three Meanings of Diaspora, Exemplified Among South Asian Religions’, Diaspora, 6 (3): 277–299. Weller, P. 2004. ‘Hindus and Sikhs: Community Development and Religious Discrimination in England and Wales’, in Jacobsen, K.A. and P. Kumar (eds), South Asians in the Diaspora. Histories and Religious traditions. Leiden: Brill, 454–97.

NEGOTIATING RELIGIOUS DIFFERENCES IN THE CYCLADES: DISCOURSES OF INCLUSION AND EXCLUSION Katerina Seraïdari The fact that Greece is “the most religiously homogeneous society of Europe”, as Nicos Alivizatos (1999: 24) argues, is certainly related to the role that the Orthodox Church of Greece has played since the creation of the Greek State in 1830: as a monopoly-protected institution, it continues to command sacred authority over the whole Greek society. Michael Herzfeld (1995: 38) has also pointed out that Greece is the most homogeneous country in South-East Europe. In the introduction to a book presenting the “small religious” and “small linguistic” minorities in Greece, Richard Clogg (2002: x and xii) notes that his edited volume “should not be taken as an attempt to demonstrate that Greece constitutes a patchwork of ethnic minorities” since they “amount to scarcely 4 per cent of the population”. The statistically small size of a minority does not imply, however, that the issue of its visibility and its legal status are socially and politically irrelevant. The country includes a range of religious minorities, such as Jews, Roman Catholics and Muslims (who are seen as historic religious minorities harking back to the millets of the Ottoman Empire), but also Evangelical Protestants and Jehovah’s Witnesses,1 who encounter many more obstacles in freely practicing their religion. After the gradual pluralization of Greece’s labour force since 1990, the country’s religious composition has been further modified. Very little has been written about the Roman Catholic community in Greece; researchers have shown far more interest in Muslim or Jewish communities in Greece, as Adamantia Pollis (2005) noted. I wish to focus here

1 This group has attracted the interest of anthropologists working on Greece. For instance, in a short nine-page chapter entitled: “Witnesses or Millenarians? Tolerance and indifference”, Michael Herzfeld (1992: 86–94) focuses on this ‘traditionally persecuted’ group, whose humanity is perceived as incomplete by Greek bureaucrats and state officials. Herzfeld notes that “in a country where ideologically to be Greek means to be a member of the Orthodox Church”, the Witnesses illustrate “the embedding of categorical exclusion in self-justifying tautology”: they are “what they are because they are not what they are not — true Greeks” (ibid: 93).

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on this less polarized otherness. Pertaining to the Catholics in the Cyclades,2 apart from the work of French geographer Émile Kolodny (1974) and historian Charles Frazee, the only anthropological contribution has been the unpublished thesis of Maria Yannissopoulou in French (1992). During the last decade, historians have also started to study the educational structures of the Catholic community in Greece. Hence, this article tries to fill a lacuna. Two Cycladic islands will be in the centre of my argument: Syros (with a population of 20,000 inhabitants, 7,800 of whom are Catholics) and Tinos (about 7,500 inhabitants, 2,600 of whom are Catholics). I will also make reference to the islands of Santorini and Mykonos, whose Catholic population is much more limited. Contradictory ‘tales of origin’ give Catholic Greeks the identity of natives or of strangers, designating them either as converted Greeks or as Hellenized foreigners. Defended by the Catholic community itself, the first model of identification (‘converted Greeks’) claims autochthony and cultural continuity. The second one (‘Hellenised foreigners’) denies this population its local roots and, in accordance with a dominant model of nationalist rhetoric, it stresses the capacity of a superior Greek culture to integrate nonnative elements, despite national calamities and centuries of enslavement to foreign occupants. For instance, historian A. Vacalopoulos argues that such influence as the one the Latin rule “may have had on Greek society faded rapidly and the Latin element was completely ingested” (cited by Sansaridou-Hendrickx 2003: 119). It is common for Catholic intellectuals to borrow similar arguments and to invert their meaning in order to support their point of view. Proposing his own version aiming at constructing both togetherness and otherness, Roussos-Milidonis (2000: 290) notes: “Being at the crossroads of three continents and two seas, Greece attracted many foreigners, who were integrated into its national trunk”. The reference to the turbulent Greek past suggests that the Greek Catholics are not the only ones who ‘suffer’ from an ‘impure’ descent of admixture. Roussos-Milidonis also cites a philologist from Syros who enumerates the “barbarian” family names that the majority of Greeks have inherited: the Turkish, the Slavic and the Latin ones. This kind of ‘cultural bricolage’ allows him to pass from the specificity of the Catholic otherness to the generalization of the mixed character of Greek ancestry. Other scholars insist on the fact that the “converted Greek”

2 This group of Aegean islands has become one of the most important tourist destinations in Greece since the late 1980s, Mykonos being the best known island to foreigners.



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managed to Hellenize the foreign occupants – a virtue that the Catholic group definitively shares with its Orthodox compatriots. To give only one example, an Orthodox scholar, K. Danoussis (2003: 408) argues that the Catholics of Tinos “demonstrated a remarkable force of integration in front of foreigners, Venetians and other Occidental people, who every now and then were arriving there”. The Catholic community does not really constitute a minority on a local level concerning the islands of Syros and Tinos, where the respective percentage of Orthodox Greeks and Catholic Greeks is almost equal (50–50, or 40–60). The minority status of Catholic Greeks is, however, undeniable at a national level (only 0.5% of the Greek population). On the contrary, at the international level, the roles are inversed: the Catholic community is proud of belonging to a worldwide and multi-national Church, whereas the Orthodox majority is often accused of being too attached to a nationalist ideology and to an exclusivist identity. The Greek Catholics’ openness to Europe and to the world firmly contrasts with the nationalist Greek rhetoric, which boasts about the exceptional culture of the anadelpho Greek nation (anadelfo meaning without brothers and relatives among other nations). In this article, I will analyze how certain Catholic priests and intellectuals (who have contributed to a rich, untapped local production of historic and folkloric texts) define the adaptability, the European-centred character and the openness of their own communities, as well as their contribution to the Greek nation. Since these discursive resources can be seen as the authoritative voice (according to Bourdieu’s terminology) of this religious minority, I will juxtapose them to oral testimonies that I collected during my fieldwork (on Tinos, in July 2005 and July 2008; and on Santorini in July 2008).3 My aim is to reveal the multi-voicedness of these local societies, where certain ideas are shared by or negotiated between Catholic and Orthodox Greeks. I will also study how this religious minority uses history and folklore as arguments of classification and integration in the Greek nation: endowed with dynamic and flexible features, collective forms of 3 Four key informants are cited in this article: a Jesuit priest from Tinos, a Catholic priest from Tinos, a Catholic priest from Santorini and an Orthodox informant from Tinos. The fieldwork on Santorini was funded by the French School of Athens (École Française d’Athènes), in the framework of a research program on the Balkans directed by Pierre Sintès. I would also like to thank the Stanley J. Seeger Visiting Fellowship Program (Hellenic Studies, Princeton University), which allowed me in spring 2007 to profit from the rich bibliographical resources of the Princeton University library. All the translations from Greek or French in this article are made by the author.

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identification and the narration of the past are constantly restructured and reformulated. By paying special attention to the contrast between the local versions and the national canon, I wish to explore the complexity of the ‘we / they’ dichotomy in relation to the fluidity of the ‘modernization / tradition’ dichotomy. As we will see, Catholic discourses not only stigmatize the traditionalism of certain members of the Greek Orthodox Church and the discriminations that the Greek state continues to impose on its non-Orthodox citizens; they also range the Catholic immigrants, who have established themselves in the heavily touristic and economically prosperous Cyclades during the last decades, into clear-cut ‘civilizational’ categories (going from the ‘backward’ Albanians to the ‘arrogant’ Poles). Through the analysis of these manipulations of religious and political models of identification, my aim is to show how this Catholic group, by favouring representations and arguments of historic continuity, participate in the current debate about the necessity of encouraging and acknowledging pluralism inside a changing Greek society. Historical Interpretations and Cultural Distribution of Identities The Cycladic Catholic communities are associated with the taking of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade (1204) and with the installation of prominent Latin families in the Aegean. However, the majority of their present members claim a Greek origin and evoke a long and ill-defined process of conversion to Catholicism, justified by various historical and practical reasons. According to a recurrent argument to which both Orthodox and Catholic scholars resort, the islanders welcomed Latin rule, because the Byzantine authorities were indifferent to their problems, especially after the eleventh century. The tolerance of Latin feudal lords, who didn’t abolish the local customs and the existing economic structures while establishing a climate of security and prosperity in the region, is continuously stressed. This double argument puts on stage the ‘absent’ Byzantines and the ‘tolerant’ Latin aristocracy, who progressively gained the sympathy of the population. This discursive construction conflicts with official accounts of the Greek national history, in which the Latin occupiers are not only depicted as cruel, but they are also accused of religious oppression.4 4 M. Roussos-Milidonis (2000: 54) notes that the Venetians were not fanatic devotees, and that the defence of their Republic was more important to them than the expansion of



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If the Latin presence was not negative for the region, why then should the conversion of Greeks to Catholicism be so? The next logical step is to show the positive impact of Catholicism on Greek culture. M. Foskolos (2003: 7), a Catholic priest and historian, stresses the importance of the continuing presence of the Catholic Church in Greece, which “marked the historic evolution of the Greek nation, and continues to influence it until today and not exclusively in the places where we can still find an organized Catholic community”. In order to introduce a new geographical and cultural distribution of identities, emphasis is given to the cultural particularity of the Aegean insular communities; the idea that a local Greco-Venetian civilization, necessarily different from the continental one, gradually took form and knew a considerable development in the Aegean, is also advanced. Therefore, several Catholic intellectuals propose a new cultural division between a continental Oriental culture (Byzantine and Ottoman) and an Occidental culture of Greek islanders, in which Catholicism is presented as a positive element of progress, inscribing the area in the European culture and the Occidental sphere of influence. A Jesuit priest (born on Syros and living on Tinos) presented this argument to me in an explicit way: “The Greek is a Turk, the Greek carries on the defects of the Ottoman occupation”. According to this informant, the “Greek who is the Turk” is the continental one, while the Aegean islanders have progressively developed a distinct culture. Historic arguments are evoked to defend this thesis: both Catholic and Orthodox scholars insist on the fact that Tinos was the last of the Cycladic islands to fall into Turkish hands in 1715; hence, the Turkish occupation of Tinos lasted only one century, whereas the Latin authorities ruled the island during five centuries. These Cycladic Catholic communities reconcile distinct levels of identity: a local identity, which insists on autochthony; a national identity, which acknowledges the glory of Ancient Greece and the cult of icons as the common link between the Orthodox majority and themselves; and a religious identity, which recognizes the importance of the affiliation to a Catholic, multinational Church, while defending devotional local specificities like the devotional attachment of Catholics to icons. The legacy of Ancient Greece has been given primary significance, often leading to ideological contortion. For instance, Roussos-Milidonis (2000, 285–287) considers that the inhabitants of Syros not only preserved many Ancient Greek

Catholicism (many Greek Catholic intellectuals evoking the famous motto, prima Veneziani e poi Christiani).

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features in their dialect, but they also perpetuated the agricultural and apicultural techniques of Ancient Greeks. The use of the Greek language here becomes a symbolic boundary towards the outside and a means of homogenization towards the inside. It constitutes a static doctrine of cultural continuity not only for Greek Catholics, but also for the majority of Orthodox Greeks, who present themselves as the direct descendants of Ancient Greeks (because of linguistic continuity and despite the cultural rupture in the religious field and the transition from polytheism to Christianity). Hearkening back to a pagan past relativizes even more the importance of religion (and of the Cycladic population’s confessional division), as it evokes the common ancestry of Greek Antiquity. If this radical rupture did not alter Ancient Greece’s legacy that Greeks claim as an evident component of their cultural specificity, why would the conversion from Orthodoxy to Catholicism have done so? In fact, many Greek folklorists deny the possibility of a radical cultural change after the conversion to Christianity, arguing that since “the Greek cannot get rid of his pagan roots”, many vernacular religious customs continue to bring the seal of pagan rituals. Some Catholic scholars, like RoussosMilidonis, defend this position and consider paganism to be the common past, still apparent in both Orthodox and Catholic present practices in the Cyclades. As a local scholar from Syros asserts: “From the Antiquity until today, Syros has always been inhabited; it has never been desert, not even during one generation. Those who inhabit the island have been pagans, Eastern Christians, Western Christians, but they have never ceased to be Greek” (cited by Roussos-Milidonis 2000: 50). This continuity argument asserts, on the one hand, a religious conservatism persisting through centuries; and on the other hand, it introduces a particular way of thinking the national Greek history, in which the importance of the Christian legacy is relativized (since Modern Greeks supposedly kept up pagan religious reflexes). Purity, Intermarriages and Cosmopolitan Influences It is useful to compare these narratives with the analysis of Rebecca Bryant (2004: 197), who considers that the Greek Cypriots describe their identity in terms of cleanliness and lack of mixing, and that their idiom of purity is exclusive and fundamentally consanguinal. She points out that “many Greek Cypriots expressed the belief to me that Turkish Cypriots are Greek ‘by blood’, but they had converted to Islam in the early years of Ottoman



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rule”; the idea of underlying blood ties is related here to the will to uncover their “Christian origins” from under the cloak of their “Muslim character” (ibid: 208). In the case of Cycladic Catholics, as we have seen, the argument of impurity is inclusive and, still, consanguinal (‘despite the mixing, we are brothers’). By stressing current impurity and heterogeneity, we can say that the Greek Cypriots’ argument is also inclusive and consanguinal. I think that R. Bryant does not take into account the contradictory possibilities of such intermediary ideological positions, where the argument of a wellhidden origin (Greek for Turkish Cypriots, pagan and subsequently Orthodox for Cycladic Catholics5) often evokes an idealized past, when ‘natural’ unity was total and purity unquestionable. This kind of discourse implicitly adopts the ideologically charged metaphor of the Fall from an ‘Edenic’ idealized condition to the ‘sinful’ reality of nationalist and religious divisions and conflicts. M. Foskolos (2000: 228) returns to this issue in order to criticize the Patriarch of Constantinople’s refusal in 1756 to recognize the validity of the Catholics’ baptism: “The lower classes (laika stromata) conserved [after the ecclesiastical Schism that took place in 1054] different stances from the ones that their respective hierarchies adopted. […] People had, and they still continue to have, some moments of absolute certainty that ‘we are all equally Christians’, thus authentically expressing the sensus Ecclesiae”. The lower classes are presented here as the spontaneous followers of the biblical truth, in opposition to the (lay and ecclesiastical) elites. An Orthodox informant from Tinos (working himself with a Catholic partner and having three daughters, one of whom is married to a Catholic) gave me a similar viewpoint, stressing that priests, both Catholic and Orthodox, are responsible for the fanaticism and the division of the locals. This discourse does not only erase the confessional distinctions between the two groups; it is also anti-clerical, since it associates the ambitious politics of the clergy 5 By comparing here the discourse of Cycladic Catholics with that of Turkish Cypriots, I have certainly not the intention to transform the Cycladic Catholics into a ‘strange element’ vis-à-vis the Orthodox majority; I am equally aware of the ‘emic’ paradox of this comparison, since this Catholic community is defined, as we have seen, in opposition to the continental Greek, presented as a Turk. I think, however, that the comparison is heuristically useful. For example, the fact that Turkish Cypriots, despite their minority status, present themselves as heirs to an Ottoman legacy clinging to “their self-concept of lordliness and mastery” and “to an idealized version of the Ottoman model of toleration” (Bryant 2004: 231) corresponds to patterns of behaviour that are common among Cycladic Catholics. Besides, if “in Greek Cypriot nationalist history, Cyprus is 3,000 years Greek, and Turks are mere transient, and illegitimate, invaders” (ibid: 236), Greek nationalist history treats the Latin presence in Greece, as we have seen, in a similar way.

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(perceived here as selfish power holders, and not as spiritual leaders at the service of their devotees) with the need to break the unity of the laity and the wish to instrumentalize their division. It is common to attribute the responsibility of the present confessional division and of the breaking of a long tradition of devotional syncretism and peaceful coexistence to (centralized or local, political or ecclesiastical) elites. But this ‘leader-victimization’ view does not deprive local people of their agency. In a paradoxical way, the local population becomes a vague and collective social actor who plays an important role as the ‘authentic’ keeper of the local heritage and of biblical truth, and as the guarantor for continuity from the past (which is often more remote than the Christian one).6 Special emphasis is given to the cohesive functions of religion and to the unchanging features of vernacular religiosity, which seems to have been ecumenical long before the official Churches opted for that approach. Indeed, a distinction is constantly made between a romanticized local unity and organic solidarity, which is beyond confessions, and the external obstacles to that ‘original’ harmony that reveal the antagonistic potential of religion. This is presented as “a dilemma between the suspect claims of the Church and the innocent counterclaims of ‘popular religiosity’” (Warner 1998: 201). We can thus distinguish two contradictory operations at work in this framework: on the one hand, the creation of confessional boundaries and ‘cultural myths’, reinforced by political decisions and clerical confrontations, mostly at a national and international level; and on the other hand, the negotiation of these boundaries – whose porosity is acknowledged – through intermarriages (which became frequent on these islands after World War Two) and the sharing of religious symbols and rituals. Even intermarriages are seen as having a contradictory effect: they can Hellenize (male) foreigners and, at the same time, they necessarily turn a part of the Orthodox native population into Catholics through procreation. Praised for their integrating effect when foreigners are concerned, intermarriages can also be considered as a way of perpetuating local division. My Orthodox informant from Tinos recalls that, when he was young, the Catholic priests were advising Catholic boys during catechism classes to marry Orthodox girls, in order to have children from an Orthodox mother baptized Catholic 6 From this point of view, religion is considered here neither as an expression of dominant ideology in a class-divided society, nor as consonant with the interests of the ruling classes (according to Marx’s analysis). On the contrary, these discourses present religious conservatism as a potential form of social protest and empowerment.



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(the husband being the one who transmits his confession to the children7). This ‘anti-mixed marriage’ account transforms the marital choice into a premeditated act of proselytism. What has always been considered by both Churches as a manifestation of spiritual love aiming at the creation of a pious family becomes here a very pragmatic affair of confessional rivalry. Similar gendered discourses present women as the assimilating element (but also an element that men can possess, by controlling their forces of procreation and the confessional affiliation of their offspring), while men are associated with aggressive and premeditated images of conquest and calculation. However, many informants consider that it would be better if mothers transmitted their confession to children, since they are the ones who educate them and have more influence on them. According to Charles Frazee (2002: 43), Greek statistics show that today four Catholics out of five choose an Orthodox person as spouse; even if the present decline and the future alleged disappearance of the Catholic community is often explained by the increase of intermarriages, I think that this is too easy a prediction to make, reproducing the idea of the minority’s inevitable absorption by the majority at one moment or another. On the one hand, the Catholic communities in the Cyclades are regularly revitalized by the arrival of Catholic newcomers – tourists who marry natives and economic immigrants as well, such as Albanians and Poles. On the other hand, religion today has become a much more personal choice in a gradually secularized Greek society. As the Jesuit priest from Tinos pointed out to me, “the Orthodox priests imitate the initiatives of the Catholic ones; but the Catholic devotees imitate the customs of the Orthodox devotees”. The distinction of two different categories of agents (clergy and laity) is constantly defined by a parallel distinction between men, who fix the confessional frontiers, and women, who are more involved in religious activities and contribute to the creation of forms of idiomatic devotion (Seraïdari 2010). For example, many Catholic women follow Orthodox processions on Tinos, despite the disapproval of Catholic priests. According to the Catholic priest from Tinos, “even if the Virgin Mary was Muslim, Catholic women would follow her procession”. At the same time, Catholic priests are generally seen as more progressive than 7 This is an ‘unwritten’ law, as my Catholic and Orthodox informants explained to me. However, the Jesuit priest from Tinos insisted on the fact that “there are some Polish women who baptize their children Catholic, even if they are married to Orthodox men”. It seems that the recent establishment of economic migrants in the Cyclades leads to the renegotiation and, even, the contestation of customary rules. Once a week, this priest visits the neighbouring cosmopolite island of Mykonos in order to serve the small Catholic parish there.

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the Orthodox ones, not only because of their high level of education, but also because of the multi-national character of their Church. New devotional practices and new sacred objects frequently arrive from Italy, France or elsewhere. For them, Orthodoxy is not only conservative and parochial, but also identified with reactionary nationalism and sometimes with fundamentalist tendencies (since a part of the Orthodoxy clergy still strongly refuses the ecumenical dialogue). In order to illustrate the positive impact of Catholicism on Greek culture, M. Foskolos (2003: 9) links ecumenicity to the legacy of Ancient Greece: “Ecumenicity, which characterizes the Greek spirit from the depths of Antiquity and which has been transformed into universal brotherhood with the adoption of the evangelical message of love, not only did not diminish because of the Catholic presence [in Greece], but mostly gained by it”. M. Foskolos (ibid: 8) characterizes the “integration of devotees from other countries” as “a hard experience, sometimes even an adversity. But, in

Figure 1. The decoration of a Catholic’s woman bedroom in a village of Tinos, 14 July 2009. Typical Catholic items are mixed with Orthodox items, such as the small icon of Saint Constantine and Saint Helen below the upper self. Photo by Katerina Seraïdari.



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an admirable way, our local communities, either on the islands or in the past and present big cities, managed to integrate all these brothers in faith, who were speaking other languages (because we have to erase the word ‘foreigner’ from our ecclesiastical vocabulary […]) and to profit from their religious experiences and traditions, without losing the Greek specificity of their local tradition”. According to an Orthodox scholar, Kostas Danoussis (2003: 425), the culture of the Catholics of Tinos is not only distinct but also, in a sense, superior: its “cosmopolitan” qualities can explain the important quantity of past and present intermarriages of Catholic locals with (mostly Occidental) foreigners, and the acceptance and welcome of co-religionists of different backgrounds. From the nationalist argument of the integrative capacity of a superior Greek culture, we pass thus to a specific Catholic attitude of openness to the world. In another text where emphasis is given to the authenticity of the Greek tradition, K. Danoussis (2000: 84) evokes not only the “naturalistic aesthetic perception which gave a human measure shape to the twelve gods of Antiquity”, but also “the spirituality of our occidental and oriental ecclesiastic tradition”. This inclusive association considers the pagan religion, on the one hand, and the Orthodox and the Catholic confessions, on the other hand, to be equal parts of the Greek religious heritage (without explicitly suggesting that “the Greek cannot get rid of his pagan roots”). In the same text, Tinos is defined as the island where “for centuries the West was meeting the East”. In the religiously heterogeneous setting of Tinos and Syros, these ideological positions create dualistic divisions (East / West, Turk / Venetian, Ottoman influence / European influence, progress / backwardness) and place the European heritage on the same side as that of Ancient Greece. Since the insular Greek has been continuously in contact with the West, his relationship with the Antiquity’s civilisation seems to be closer and more evident.8 Therefore, the division is not merely between Catholic and Orthodox Greeks at a local level, but between different types of ‘Greekness’ (Turk or Venetian) at a national level; and the notion of cultural continuity is used as a taxonomic device for defining internal categorizations of ‘Greekness’. The analysis of local intellectuals’ discourses reveals the ‘historical competition’ that marks the interaction between Orthodox and Catholics, each side trying to show who speaks the purest Greek dialect 8 A very interesting example is that of N. Perpignan, Catholic priest and poet who was born on Tinos in 1814 and who wrote poems in different Ancient Greek dialects (Homeric, Ionian, Dorian and Aeolian).

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(that means the one which is closest to Ancient Greek), or who played the most important role during the crucial events of national history (Seraïdari 2006). Involving a process of identifying oneself and one’s heritage, the invented models of identification and the localising strategies to which Cycladic Catholics resort, are necessarily competitive and ‘essentialized’ – even if they refute the ‘single-faith’ approach and the monolithic image of an exclusively Orthodox Greece. Through an operation of reification of a collective self, they exploit the relation between place and culture for their own ends, without questioning the essentializing effect of such tools. Affiliation to a Multi-national Church and Greek Patriotism What makes the specificity of the Catholic Church is the assertion of universal variety within a very centralized Church. When Pope John-Paul II came to Athens in 2001, he characterized the Catholic clergy of Greece as the “frontiers’ bishops” (2001: 55).9 He also told them that they represent “variety inside the unity in the interior of the Catholic church” (ibid: 59). While receiving the Pope, the Catholic Archbishop of Athens insisted on the fact that in front of him lays “the micrography of the One, Saint, Catholic and Apostolic Church, which is spread around the world” (ibid: 98). In this commemorative book, there is also reference to the “greatness of the ecumenical and pluralist Catholic Church of Greece” (ibid: 91), which is constituted by “people from every race, language and nationality” (ibid: 95). At the end of the Catholic mass that the Pope celebrated in Athens, everyone sang the National Anthem of Greece “with particular enthusiasm” and the devotees left the place “satisfied and proud of their religion and of their country” (ibid: 105). The question is why do Greek Catholics feel obliged to give concrete proofs of patriotism in order to be accepted as equal members of the national community. If an Orthodox mass in Greece ends with the National Anthem, this is certainly the proof of the exaggerated nationalist spirit of the gathering; on the contrary, the same ritual effectuated by the Catholic Greek minority becomes a positive sign of patriotism. When the Pope said in Greek “God save Greece”, according to 9 Mentioned in the book that the Greek Catholic hierarchy published in Greek to commemorate the visit of the Pope, entitled The pilgrimage of His Sanctity John-Paul II. On the steps of Apostle Paul. It contains the official texts pertaining to the visit, as well as a chronicle written by Antonis I. Foskolos. During this visit, the archbishop of Athens (who directs the Church of Greece) and Pope John-Paul II signed a joint declaration, condemning the tendency of European states to neglect their Christian heritage.



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Figure 2. The most important Catholic feast in Exombourgo (Tinos) that attracts pilgrims from all over Greece, 10 July 2005. Greek flags of small size are placed around the monument in honour of Greek Catholics who gave their life for Greece between 1912 and 1950. Photo by Katerina Seraïdari.

the commemorative book, these words remained “engraved on the souls of Greek Catholics, whose love for their country is often put into question without reason, through insults and insinuations” (ibid: 99). For the Greek Catholics, their patriotism and their belonging to the Catholic Church do not constitute competing group loyalties. According to Timothy Crippen (1988: 325), “the nation-state represents the most dominant, extensive and inclusive boundary of moral identity in modern societies. Thus, it is no surprise that so many scholars remark that nationalism is the dominant form of modern religious consciousness”. Greek Catholics’ nationalism constitutes an interesting study case, since it is conditioned by their affiliation to an international confessional family – thus challenging the exclusivist Orthodox model of patriotism and linking patterns of national sovereignty to Catholic rituals. Cycladic Catholics are often put low on the hierarchic scale supposedly measuring ‘Greekness’, because of ‘charges of deficit’ (as they are considered to be ‘less Greek’). Their discourses not only challenge such hierarchic

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and arbitrary classifications, but they also constitute an important contribution to the democratization of Greek society, since they demand parity of treatment and non-discrimination between the followers of different religions. According to Veit Bader (1999: 601), “‘private’ or ‘social’ associations such as churches and sects may contribute significantly to the development of the (necessarily non neutral) civic and political virtues and the skills of pluralist citizenship needed for the stability and flourishing of political democracy and for effective liberal-democratic constitutions”. Greek Catholics have certainly played this role, both on a local and national level. Criticizing discriminatory policies in Greece, Adamantia Pollis notes that “schoolteachers (except in the university) must be Orthodox, while employment in the upper echelons of some professions in the public sector, such as in the high courts and the military, is limited to the Orthodox” (Pollis 1993: 350). In 1987, a letter from the Catholic bishopric of Syros was published10 to protest against the refusal of the Minister of Education to appoint two Catholic teachers (a man for the primary school and a woman for the nursery school): “On the island of Syros, Orthodox and Catholics live together pacifically, with the respective proportions of 55 % and 45 %. The Ministry, with its unjust decisions, tries to transform Syros into a little Belfast”. Claims for equal rights for all Greek citizens have been continuously stressed, but I won’t proceed here to an inventory of similar requests. I refer to that specific case, because I find interesting the use of the Europeanist metaphor of Belfast evoking the mistreating of Irish Catholics by a Protestant majority: in this case, a Catholic cleric insists on the fact that the peaceful local context (that the scandalous intervention of the Greek state risks to disturb) cannot be taken for granted. Peaceful coexistence is not seen here as a static and diachronic reality, but as a dynamic (and, thus, fragile in its synchronicity) system. The status of a national minority is not only a social reality that affects people’s everyday lives and expectations;11 it also leads to retrospective historical interpretations and to cultural qualifications pertaining to material and immaterial heritage. I will briefly examine here the current degradation of Catholic religious monuments in the Cyclades. The Catholic community of Tinos turned some of its functional places of cult and religious

10 In the journal Aiyiopelayitika Themata 5, (April-June 1987): 45. 11 For instance, on Syros, even the most influential Catholic men cannot have access to the politically prestigious title of mayor of the island’s capital, Ermoupoli: since the town’s foundation in 1826, this post has always been occupied by an Orthodox male. This is a specific case of a ‘political taboo’.



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education into museums, where visitors are confronted with a different version of the local history, very much oriented towards the West (especially France and Italy). Negotiations between the Greek state, the local Municipality and the Catholic community have started in order to find concrete solutions and proceed to the preservation of the Catholic local patrimony, whose desolated buildings reflect the end of a prosperous era. As the Jesuit priest from Tinos explained to me, the state does not recognize the specificity of a Greco-Venetian civilization; for him, the problematic condition of some emblematic places of Greek Catholicism is necessarily related to the marginalization of this particular Greco-Venetian past. For example, the discussions with the Greek Ministry of Culture about the financing of the restoration, at Loutra on Tinos, of the Jesuit church which falls in ruins, did not bring any result. According to the Jesuit priest (who is also in charge of the Jesuit Folklore Museum, which functions in the same place), they finally decided to give the church to the Municipality in order to transform it into a Cultural Centre. The decision to donate it to the local authorities finally permits to bypass the refusal of the Greek state to recognize this patrimony as ‘national’. When I asked the priest why the Jesuit Order does not undertake the task of the restoration, he answered that a religious order is interested in places where the cult is still alive, not in the preservation of historical patrimony. His answer establishes a clear distinction between religious spirituality and sacred monuments’ materiality: all things considered, why should this patrimony, which materializes local memories and cultural forms (Greek and Catholic in that case), come within the responsibility of an international religious order? Catholic Immigrants in the Cyclades: New Religious Challenges The census of 2001 revealed that about 5% of the immigrants living in Greece are concentrated on the islands of the Aegean Sea. This percentage is considered to have risen considerably in the following years. According to a report by A. Kontis (December 2006, Hellenic Migration Policy Institute), this census also showed that the immigrants constitute 10.3% of the total population in the Cyclades, which is the highest regional percentage nationally after Athens (10.5%) and the South of Attica (10.8%). This is not surprising since, according to many articles in the Greek press, the Cyclades hold the second position, following Athens, in terms of average income per inhabitant (24,581 € in 2007). Many of these islands have a similar economic development based on tourism, which attracts an important

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labour force of (mostly Balkan) immigrants. Let me also remind you that the Dodecanese assumes the role of gatekeeper at Europe’s south-eastern border in the map of South-North migration movements. Immigration has had a substantial social impact. On Santorini for the years 2003 and 2004, 15% of the registered civil marriages in the town hall were mixed, mostly between Greek men and Albanian women. On July 23, 2005, the Greek journal Kathimerini started to report about Greek islands being full of immigrants, who, after working as employees for some years, began to open their own businesses, mostly restaurants and cafés. This press article was based on information from the island authorities: the mayor of Mykonos gave the number of 4,000 immigrants living there (one third of the local population), while the mayor of Santorini gave a number of 2,500 for a total population of 10,000 inhabitants. Santorini’s mayor declared that six micro-companies, which are the dominant company type in Greece12 and often family-run, had already been opened by immigrants, ranging from restaurants to a bookshop. At the same time, in different web forums, one comes across xenophobic comments against the excessive presence of Albanians on Santorini: they are said to be “over 5,000”, to be “dominating” the economic life of the port (Kamares) and to be opening their own businesses “even” in the main town of Fyra. This recent development of the image of immigrants is apparently linked to the disturbance provoked by their economic success, which transformed them from disadvantaged employees with a short-term wage-work into active employers. If Greek society was ‘flattered’ to be seen as a capitalist paradise able to attract foreigners, it starts now to incarnate the role of ‘the promised land’13 where an upward socio-economic mobility through professional independence and self-employment progressively becomes possible for a (still very small) number of immigrants. I will compare here Catholic discourses pertaining to Catholic migrants that I collected on Tinos and on Santorini. According to a Catholic priest from Santorini, its present Catholic native population is very small (only 100 Greeks), but the immigrant Catholic community has grown considerably during the past decades: 150 Poles and 60 Albanians – from a total of 2,500 Albanians living there, who are either Orthodox or non-believers. Very few Albanians living in Greece claim to be Muslims, since they are 12 Immigrant economic behaviour seems to follow that of Greece in general, which has one of the highest self-employment rates in southern European countries, almost three times the EU average. 13 This article was written before the economical crisis that actually strikes Greece.



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reluctant to confess such a (negatively connoted) religious identity.14 The Muslim identity of Albanians is difficult to ascertain, because of personal strategies of adaptation –name changes,15 baptism, and participation in local religious festivities. These subtle strategies of ‘Christianization’ facilitate integration into Greek society. My informant explained to me that Sisters from the Order of Saint Teresa came from Crete to preach to Catholic Albanians (tous katihisan), since they lost their religious legacy under communism: “The little they preserved was thanks to their grandmothers”. The priest noted that, when they arrived on Santorini, most of them knew only one prayer; those who decided to make a religious marriage were also obliged to be christened before. However, they neither have church-going habits nor bring their children to catechism classes. So, they are marginally involved with the church and with its teachings and practices. In this case, ‘unchurched’ and poorly educated Albanian immigrants are presented as objects of missionary efforts, aiming at re-enacting a forgotten, since repressed, religious background.16 The image the priest gave me of Polish devotees was completely different: in their country, where Catholicism was the religion of the majority, the churches were not destroyed as they were in Albania. The Poles were less religiously repressed under communism, even if those who christened their children or had a church wedding could lose their jobs. They kept their religion, which is “profoundly rooted”.17 They respect catechism and are more educated, since many of them hold college and university degrees. 14 Lazaridis (2000) stresses the importance of religion in Greece, which can explain why Muslim Albanians are constructed as “the enemy at the doorstep” and Filipinas as “the nice Catholic girls that one can place his / her trust with”. She also explains differential treatments by contrasting ideas of Euromania (the Greek admiration for modern Western cultures) and of Albanophobia (ranging from geopolitical conspiracy theories to racist discourses). 15 For an analysis of the personalized “staged identities” of Albanian migrants in Greece who are conscious of the fact that “the Greeks like the names and we like the money”, see Lelaj and Bardhoshi (2008). 16 In 1967, Albania officially proclaimed itself to be “the first atheistic state in the world”. Observers of Albania have suggested that the destruction of organized religion in Albania has been possible, because Albanians, who constitute the only ‘trans-religious’ people in the Balkans, have never taken religion seriously. In contrast with other Balkan nations, religion did not play a significant role in the shaping of Albanian national awareness in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 17 Poland and Ireland are often cited as the European nation-states where “Catholicism and national liberation are historically connected” (Chaves and Gorski 2001: 270); in these cases, religion and nationality reinforce one another. Interestingly enough, Poland’s religious vitality has been stable after the demise of communism (ibid: 271).

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In short, Polish immigrants are more ‘European’.18 The two groups do not mix socially, since Poles consider Albanians as inferiors. Let us go back to Tinos now. A Catholic priest from Tinos gave me a similar viewpoint: Polish immigrants feel superior, because they are proud of being Slavs and of using the Latin alphabet. As for Albanians, their approach to religion is often opportunistic. The priest gave me the example of an Albanian couple who went first to Italy and christened their new-born child Catholic; after deciding to quit Italy and to establish themselves on Tinos, they christened their second child Orthodox. He told me another similar story pertaining to an Albanian couple, who first made the choice to be christened Orthodox; after they came to Tinos and started to work for a Catholic employer, they decided to christen their children in the Catholic religion.19 To what extent does switching church membership affect family balance? How to define continuity within these frameworks of (geographical as well as religious) disruption? A new type of mixed Albanian families seems to emerge in the Cyclades; in their case, the crossing of national boundaries and the successive displacements and trajectories determine the crossing of confessional boundaries. Similar tendencies can be associated either with an inconsistent and pragmatic religious behaviour (producing doubts about the sincerity of the religious choice), or with the demonstration of free choice in religious matters (positively evoking the principle of voluntary and changing associations, since it overcomes ascriptive constraints on belonging20). For the native Orthodox and Catholics, 18 De Rapper (2009) examines the recent tendency to present Pelasgians (Albanians supposedly being their direct and authentic descendants) as the ancestors of all Europeans: in this case, “the re-arranging of ethnic and national boundaries between Greeks and Albanians through the myth of Pelasgic origin can be seen as an answer, on the imaginary level, to the difficult crossing of the actual international border through the narrow gate of legal migration and to the economic and cultural penetration of Greece in Albania” (ibid: 65). Interestingly enough, this process of reinvention of ancient history conducts to statements stressing that “in ancient times, ‘before Muslims and Christians started to fight’, the whole area practised a common pagan religion” (ibid: 53) – which reminds a type of discourses still popular among Cycladic Catholics, as we have seen. 19 This is an interesting example of the impact of a patron-client relationship on a family’s religious choices. The interdependence between “accepted ways of getting access to resources” and “systems of heavenly patronage” (Davis 1977: 149) certainly needs further analysis. 20 This is the thesis of Stephen Warner (1993), who considers that pluralism does not work to the disadvantage of religious vitality in the United States, that choice is fully compatible with commitment and religious switchers are morally serious. According to Warner, religious institutions can serve as vehicles of empowerment for minorities. Of course, the Greek context is quite different, because of the non-separation of church and state and the important state interference in religion. To paraphrase Warner, religion in Greece represents “something in which people are primordially rooted” (ibid: 1077).



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these cases of denominational switching constitute a new disturbing ‘paradigm’ (not to say an ‘impure anomaly’), since they indicate rational disaffiliation and selfish calculations. Conclusion Immigrants live transnational lives and sustain multiple loyalties. These social actors are mobile people who pursue their interests through their (often incoherent) positioning inside a (relatively) open Greek religious market. Often a sign of despair, migration always involves a cultural transition and a spirit of defiance; it evokes a decision made by people who are masters of their fate and who take risks. Robert Hayden (2002: 174) rightly argues that while economically the worker has no nation but labor, politically workers are mobilized as members of nations, not of labor. As we have seen, different cultural stereotypes are assigned to Polish and to Albanian migrants; new classifications emerge in this context, suggesting differential levels of civilisation and distinct behavioural patterns. In the Cyclades, the operation of ‘nationalization’ of the labor force is accompanied by the awareness that Catholicism is definitively becoming ethnically more diverse. For instance, during the last years, on Tinos, two foreign Jesuits, a Filipino and a Pole, have been on a mission. The accusations of disloyalty and treason, that Greek Orthodox pronounced in the past (and some of them still continue to pronounce) against Greek Catholics, are similar to those addressed the last few years by both groups to immigrants. Albanians, who choose to adhere either to Catholicism or to Orthodoxy, are often suspected to do so in order to dissimulate a previous Muslim affiliation or out of opportunism. Their religious commitment is often seen as a sign of unreliability. There is no space here to present the new models of self-designation that Albanians and Poles are creating in response. Therefore, I have limited my analysis to the study of the way Greek Catholics cognitively defend themselves in relation to the Orthodox majority and to the arrival of Catholic immigrants, who progressively take their place at the multicultural table of the Catholic Church in Greece. Greece is a country in which Orthodoxy has functioned as a primary identifier; in this framework, the exclusion of the ‘other’ has been a constitutive feature of the national public sphere. As we have seen, the absence of a ‘pluralistic culture’ on the national level has been challenged by local discourses stressing the peaceful coexistence between Catholics and

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Orthodox. Since social actors (belonging either to majorities or to minorities) have constantly the tendency to construct ‘essentialized’ models of self-presentation, the only way of deconstructing such idealized models is to insist on their internal contradictions. The focus of this case-study has been precisely on exploring the heuristic limits of pluralism, which inevitably contributes to the production of ‘essentialized’ forms of identification. Orthodox and Catholics in the Cyclades have lived side by side in neighbourhood relations for hundred of years. However, as Robert Hayden (2002: 173) points out, the fact that “people have been living intermingled does not mean that they have not been divided, overwhelmingly, into self-identified groups distinguished mainly by religion”. In a parallel way, even if the Catholics of the Cyclades, and the Albanian and Polish migrants who share the same faith can be presented as ‘brothers in Catholicism’, these groups do not really intermingle. Their common religious affiliation cannot erase social, linguistic, economic and cultural barriers which define a clear hierarchy of social classes and the existence of networks of power and clientelism.21 On the other hand, Catholicism now becomes the (differently defined and lived) property of each group. Inside this arena of competing claims for recognition and support in terms of culture and identity, new synergies create forms of religiosity which differ significantly from those that marked the experiences of Greek Catholics’ previous generations. Catholicism’s dynamic character is, in this case, related to the creation of new hierarchies, reaffirming Cycladic Catholics as autochthonous and potential patrons of the ‘allochthonous’ newcomers and offering them a new ‘civilizational’ mission. References Alivizatos, N. C. 1999. ‘A New Role for the Greek Church?’, Journal of Modern Greek Studies 17: 23–40. Bader, V. 1999. ‘Religious Pluralism. Secularism or Priority to Democracy?’, Political Theory 27: 597–633. 21 Interestingly enough, an Albanian informant on Santorini explained how Albanians living there are divided into groups, without giving any importance to religious affiliation: he distinguished between those who originate from the South of Albania and those who come from the North; those who have become employers and building contractors (employing sometimes even thirty co-nationals) and those who have not attained such a high economic status; finally, those who have studied in Greek high-schools and represent the new generation, and those who arrived in Greece at a more advanced age, and are consequently more conservative (still defined by the traditional ‘shame and honour complex’).



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Bryant, R. 2004. Imagining the Modern. The Cultures of Nationalism in Cyprus. London and New York: I.B.Tauris. Chaves, M. and P. Gorski. 2001. ‘Religious Pluralism and Religious Participation’, Annual Review of Sociology 27: 261–281. Clogg, R. 2002. ‘Introduction’, in Minorities in Greece. Aspects of a Plural Society. London: Hurst and Co., ix-xix. Crippen, T. 1988. ‘Old and New Gods in the Modern World: Toward a Theory of Religious Transformation’, Social Forces 67: 316–336. Danoussis, K. 2003. ‘The Catholic Intellectuals of Tinos in the Nineteenth Century’, Tiniaka Analekta 5: 405–430 (in Greek). ———. 2000. ‘HORE.L.P.O.T. 1988–1998: Ten Years of ‘Services’ to our Popular Culture’, Tiniaka Analekta 4: 83–88 (in Greek). Davis, J. 1977. People of the Mediterranean. An Essay in Comparative Social Anthropology. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. De Rapper, G. 2009. ‘Pelasgic Encounters in the Greek–Albanian Borderland. Border Dynamics and Reversion to Ancient Past in Southern Albania’, Anthropological Journal of European Cultures 18: 50–68. Foskolos, M. 2003. ‘Introduction-Presentation’, in Anno Domini. Periodical Publication for the Historic Presentation of the Catholic Church in Greece I (in Greek). ———. 2000. ‘Catholics and Orthodox on Tinos in the Eighteenth Century’, Tiniaka Analekta 4: 197–306 (in Greek). Frazee, C. 2002. ‘Catholics’, in Clogg, R. (ed.), Minorities in Greece. Aspects of a Plural Society. London: Hurst and Co., 24–47. Hayden, R.M. 2002. ‘Intolerant Sovereignties and ‘Multi-Multi’ Protectorates. Competition over Religious Sites and (in)tolerance in the Balkans’, in Hann, C. (ed.), Postsocialism. Ideals, Ideologies and Practices in Eurasia. London and New York: Routledge, 159–179. Herzfeld, M. 1995. ‘Les enjeux du sang: La Production Officielle des stéréotypes dans les Balkans. Le cas de la Grèce’, Anthropologie et Sociétés 19: 37–51. ———. 1992. The Social Production of Indifference. Exploring the Symbolic Roots of Western Bureaucracy. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Holy Synod of the Catholic Hierarchy of Greece. 2001. The Pilgrimage of His Sanctity JohnPaul II. On the Steps of Apostle Paul. Athens: Edition of the Holy Synod of the Catholic Hierarchy of Greece (in Greek). Kolodny, E. Y. 1974. La population des îles de la Grèce. Essai de géographie insulaire en Méditerranné Orientale, Tome I. Aix-en Provence: Édisud. Lazaridis, G. 2000. ‘Filipino and Albanian Women Migrant Workers in Greece: Multiple Layers of 1ppression’, in Anthias, F. and G. Lazaridis (eds), Gender and Migration in Southern Europe. Women on the Move. New York-Oxford: Berg, 49–79. Lelaj, O. and N. Bardhoshi. 2008. ‘Negotiating Existence in Emigration: An Outline of the Albanian Immigrants in Greece’, in Marushiakova, E. (ed.), Dynamics of National Identity and Transnational Identities in the Process of European Integration. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 394–406. Pollis, A. 2005. ‘Christians Against Christians’, Paper Presented at the 19th International Symposium of Modern Greek Studies Association, Chicago, USA, 3–5 November 2005. ———. 1993. ‘Eastern Orthodoxy and Human Rights’, Human Rights Quarterly 15: 339–356. Roussos-Milidonis, M. N. 2000. Syra Sacra. The Religious History of Syros. Athens: KI.K.E.D.E. (in Greek). Sansaridou-Hendrickx, T. 2003. ‘The Awakening of Greek National Consciousness’, Anno Domini. Periodical Publication for the Historic Presentation of the Catholic Church in Greece I: 81–124. Seraïdari, K. 2010. ‘Compétition Entre Orthodoxes et Catholiques. La Production du sacré dans une île grecque’, Ethnologie Française XL 1: 151–160. ———. 2006. ‘Grecs Orthodoxes et Grecs Catholiques, ou Comment définir son identité par la religion’, Mésogeios. Méditerranée, histoire, peuples, langues, cultures 28: 67–92.

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Yannissopoulou, M. 1992. Société et Religion en Grèce Insulaire. Un exemple, Potamia-Tinos. Ph.D. dissertation, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. Warner, S. R. 1998. ‘Approaching Religious Diversity: Barriers, Byways, and Beginnings’, Sociology of Religion 59: 193–215. ———. 1993. ‘Work in Progress toward a New Paradigm for the Sociological Study of Religion in the United States’, American Journal of Sociology 98: 1044–1093.

RELIGIOUS, NATIONAL, EUROPEAN OR INTER-CULTURAL AWARENESS: RELIGIOUS EDUCATION AS CULTURAL BATTLEFIELD IN GREECE Trine Stauning Willert Introduction Greece has only recently become a multi-cultural, multi-religious society after almost two hundred years of efforts towards homogenization.1 Since the 19th century the core of Modern Greek national identity has been the Orthodox Christian identity,2 but at the beginning of the 21st century this homogeneous religious identity no longer relates to the religious composition of the population. Apart from the influx of migrants with other religious belongings, the Orthodox Christian population has also undergone changes towards a continually more secularized relationship to religion (Petrou 2001: 30). Thus, today the religious orientation of  baptized m ­ embers of the Church of Greece varies from atheism and indifference to nationalistic and/or religious fundamentalism. Recently, there have also been initiatives like the Academy for Theological Studies at Volos, where new voices are heard proposing a rethinking of the attitude and institutional character of the Church of Greece (Willert 2009a; 2012; forthcoming). Hence, today it is impossible to characterize the religious landscape of Greece as homogeneous, neither among the population as such nor among the members of the prevailing Christian Orthodox Church.3 1 Linguistically, ethnically, and to some degree also religiously the early Modern Greek state was highly diverse. The problems related to such diversity were met with a centralised state and educational system and a nationalising programme in which the Orthodox Church as well as the classical past came to play central roles. The diversity that was not homogenized during the first hundred years was framed into specific geographic areas (Thrace, Dodecanese and other) or ‘cleaned’ through the Greek-Turkish population exchange (1923) and the Nazi extinction of Greek Jews (1941–1944). 2 In the international exposure of Modern Greek identity the ancient Greek legacy has received more attention as the nation’s core identity; internally and in the local Balkan context, however, the religious identity of Greek Orthodoxy has played a central role (see also Herzfeld 2002: 201). 3 Effie Fokas (2007: 301) has pointed to the problem of generalizations regarding the role of religion in society and the importance of recognizing the polyphony within Greek Orthodoxy (as within any religious system).

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Religious education (RE) is an interesting case study into ways of dealing with religious and cultural diversity in a society with a historical record of factual as well as imagined homogeneity. Greek national identity is an example of the identification of a Christian religious tradition with a specific people and territory. However, the relation between place and culture is not a given but something that needs to be constantly questioned, defied and discussed through ethnographic research (Gupta and Ferguson 1997). The debate over the nature of RE in Greece is closely related to perceptions of the importance of Christianity for Greek culture and for Greece’s relationship with and integration into the so-called European tradition and the European present. The analyses, in this chapter, of proposals for a new RE in a multi-religious society is primarily based on discussions regarding Europe’s Christian heritage and Greece’s European heritage.4 Questions of citizenship come to the fore in the debate as a discussion concerning the compulsory nature of RE. One question is whether all citizens are entitled to RE or whether only those citizens addressed in the Greek constitution as ‘Greeks’ with the ‘prevailing religion’ are entitled to such education. Should RE continue to cultivate the pupils’ religious, i.e. Christian Orthodox, awareness or should it help promote inter-religious and inter-cultural understanding among the citizens of the Greek state? The debate over RE in Greece is a discussion where religious diversity and ‘cultural identity’ are highly at stake. This chapter approaches the debate from the point of view of Christian Orthodox theologians and secondary school religion teachers.5 The aim of the chapter is to disclose the strategies of the ‘original’ religious community in coping with the contested question of cultural (national) identity and the place of religion in times of increasing pluralization and globalization. Education, Religion and Religious Diversity in Greece In the Ottoman Empire the Orthodox Church under the leadership of the ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople (today Istanbul) had a certain 4 For another recent article dealing with contemporary developments concerning RE in Greece see Molokotos-Liederman (2004). 5 The inquiry is based on articles published in newspapers and theological journals, published papers from seminars and workshops organized by theologians and on interviews and participant observation with teachers, pedagogical councillors, journal editors and other central actors in the field of RE. Participant observation and interviews have taken place between February 2008 and November 2009. All translations of Greek texts and interviews are mine. For a comprehensive account of the fieldwork undertaken see Willert (forthcoming).

   religious, national, european or inter-cultural awareness333 administrative authority over its members, i.e. the Christians of the Empire. When nationalist independence movements began to succeed in their aspirations to found territorially and linguistically or ethnically defined nation-states, parts of the Church hierarchy followed suit and national Churches were founded in opposition to the multi-ethnic and multi-lingual composition of the Orthodox Church in the Ottoman Empire. Since people in the Ottoman Empire primarily defined themselves vis-à-vis the authorities in religious terms it became necessary for the linguistic and cultural nationalization project to include religion as one essential identity marker. In so far as the national project proved successful, it also became necessary for the Church hierarchs to adjust their religious, multi-ethnic agenda and add a national agenda in order to stay close to their flock and to a certain extent retain their administrative power over it. These circumstances help us to understand the pervasive success of the collective, but unverified myth regarding the clandestine schools of the Christian churches during Ottoman rule where clerics, supposedly illegally, taught Christian subjects to read and write Greek, hence keeping the language and the inheritance from antiquity alive. To what extent such schools may have existed and to what extent they were encouraged or threatened by Ottoman authorities we do not know,6 but regardless of the actual nature of the relationship between churches and education it is important that the positive relationship between them was given so much weight during the nation building process. The citizens of the new collective entity, the nation, should not feel obliged to make a choice between the new national identity marker and the old religious one. Being educated to become a national citizen was not in conflict with one’s self-understanding as a member of the Christian Orthodox Church. From the foundation of the Greek state in 1832, religion has been taught in accordance with the Greek Orthodox majority7 in a catechist manner.8 Another initiative sealing the close ties between religion and education was the inauguration in 1842 of three of the most influential Church fathers as patron saints for education in the Greek state (Gazi 2004). The day of their ecclesial celebration on January 29 is a school holiday celebrated with speeches on the educative importance of the Church Fathers. 6 The debate in the Greek public and academic spheres has been heated on this topic during the 1990s - and even more so after the first scientific contributions suggested that the clandestine school is a myth without any evidence in historical sources (Aggelou 1997). 7 Until the 1990’s the overwhelming majority (97%) of the Greek population were members of the Greek Orthodox Church. 8 Yangazoglou (2005) gives a useful historical overview of the changes in the content and pedagogical models of RE.

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Furthermore, the close relationship between education and religion is reproduced every day through the daily Morning Prayer in all schools and through a blessing ceremony of schools by the local priest at the beginning of every school year.9 According to article 16 of the Greek Constitution, a central aim of public education is “to develop the religious consciousness of the pupils”. However, the article does not identify one specific religion or religious dogma as being the proper guide for the pupils in developing such a consciousness. Article three of the constitution states that the prevailing religion in Greece is the Eastern Orthodox Church of Christ. Therefore, the constitution is often interpreted as obliging the state to provide RE within the Eastern Orthodox dogma. The constitution was written in 1975 when Greece did not pay special attention to its historical religious minorities10 and immigration of religious others to Greece was limited. Today, however, approximately 10 % of the population is immigrant, many belonging to religious communities outside Eastern Orthodox Christianity.11 Thus, article 16 of the constitution can be interpreted as expressing the state’s obligation to provide pupils with an education that develops their religious awareness of any religion. The Church of Greece has the right to be heard in state education matters related to religion and the Church has often proven successful in influencing the Ministry of Education and Religious Affairs.12 Therefore, the next section will be devoted to a short analysis of the Church’s position vis-à-vis the multi-cultural composition of Greek society and RE.   9 A teacher and former school leader from the 132nd primary school in Athens replaced the school’s Christian Orthodox Morning Prayer with a non-religious morning prayer written by the Greek (Marxist) poet Yannis Ritsos (1909–1990). She was taken to court, but not convicted, for this and for having arranged classes in mother tongue language for immigrant children at her school which comprised 70% pupils of other ethnic, linguistic and religious origin than Greek. 10 The religious rights of the Muslim minority of Western Thrace was (and is) regulated by the Lausanne Treaty of 1923, where Muslims of Western Thrace were exempted from the population exchange of 400.000 Muslims from Greek to Turkish territory and 1.200.000 Christians from Turkish to Greek territory. In this part of Greece the Muslim community is responsible for RE of Muslim pupils, hence allowing a purely confessional class (Baltsiotis and Tsitselikis 2001).   11 No reliable statistics exists regarding the religious beliefs and belonging of immigrants in Greece (Mediterranean Migration Observatory 2004). 12 In 2007 pressure from the Church, among others, pushed the Ministry to withdraw a history text book which did not attribute an unequivocal positive patriotic role to the Church in the history of the Greek nation. A Ministry adviser on RE estimates that RE in Greece can only change with the consent of the Church (Interview with Stavros Yangazoglou, May 2008).

   religious, national, european or inter-cultural awareness335 During summer 2009 the Church ran a publicity spot in the screens of the Athens metro showing the Archbishop and other clerics distributing food to immigrants. The spot stressed that the Church was not doing this for proselytizing, but only as a way of providing humanitarian aid to people regardless of their ethnic and religious background. The new Archbishop seems bent on bringing about a change in the image of the Church, which in the reign of his predecessor Christodoulos was strongly ethnocentric and xenophobic (Molokotos-Liederman 2007). There are indications that he will recognize the fact of an increasingly multi-cultural and multi-religious composition of Greek society and that he will distinguish between the Orthodox Christian flock of the Church of Greece and the citizens of the Greek state (Hieronymus-written interview 2008).13 In autumn 2008 the councillor for RE at the Pedagogical Institute expressed confidence in the willingness of the Church leadership to support a changed RE which should be compulsory for all pupils and therefore non-confessional.14 However, in February 2009 the Archbishop publicly expressed concern for RE to remain confessional and, by implication, compulsory for Christian Orthodox pupils (Hieronymus 2009), thereby excluding pupils of other or none religion(s). The Archbishop has also expressed anxiety over the Greek public school distancing itself from the Church and its truths (Makedonia 2009). Furthermore, his statements regarding education tend to suggest that an education of true learning (paideia) is an education close to ‘the Church and its truths’ while all other education is ‘dry instruction’ (ibid.). Hence, in relation to the public RE the Archbishop has shown himself less willing to face the multi-cultural, multi-religious composition of the pupils. Thus, despite the hopes of some progressive theologians, that the recently elected Archbishop will bring about a less conservative and ethnocentric attitude in the Church, the Archbishop has openly supported the most conservative attitude of the Pan-Hellenic Union of Theologians (Hieronymus 2009, Eleftherotypia 2009a), while he has left uncommented various recent progressive propositions of changing the confessional character of RE. The Church’s influence upon the content and practice of the public RE and the interaction and power relations between the various bodies (Ministry, Pedagogical Institute, Church, unions, NGO’s etc.) need specific attention,

13 It may still be too early to judge the impact of the new Church leader, but early estimations based on comparative discourse analysis of the rhetoric means of the two leaders suggest that Hieronymus continues the ideological line of his predecessor wrapped in a less fundamentalist attitude (Papastathis 2009). 14 Interview with Stavros Yangazoglou, May 2008.

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but the limited space of a book chapter does not allow us to elaborate the topic at this point. The Debate Over Religious Education The participants in the public debate over RE are academics from theological schools and secondary school teachers (theologians) as well as other academics from Greek intelligentsia (e.g. philologists, sociologists and historians), members of the Church hierarchy and politicians. In this chapter the analysis of the debate is confined to contributions from theologians and other religion-friendly intellectuals. The contributions of these debaters are mainly presented at seminars and conferences organized within the framework of the educational system and very often in cooperation with the local Church authorities.15 As an example of this, I quote the educational director of Central Macedonia: “I confirm to you once again that the regional educational directorate of Central Macedonia will support any initiative contributing to the strengthening of RE and to the consolidation of good cooperative relations between school and Church”.16 This relationship between Church and State authorities is typical for the ‘Greek model’ where Church and State are not separated. But it is also highly problematic because the interests of the Church cannot be identical with the educative interests of public education. The debate, however, is not a new one. The modern debate over RE began in the late 1970s and 1980s when Greece had to recover from years of authoritarian regime and internal conflicts. In 1974 the communist party was legalized for the first time and the State and the Church had to find a new contract after the ultra-right wing alliance during the Junta period. In these years the influence upon RE came from the revived monastic movement (Agios Oros 1983) rather than from the institution of the Church. The revival of monasticism and the so-called neo-orthodox movement (Makrides 1998) created a new perception of the relationship between Orthodoxy and Modern Greek identity based on an outspoken antiwesternism and ethnocentrism (Kalaitzidis 2008).17 During this decade 15 I have not been able to find one example of an academic seminar on RE arranged by theologians that has been held independently from the Church. The seminars are often economically sponsored by the local bishop or held in buildings belonging to the Church. 16 Regional Directorate for Primary and Secondary Education in Central Macedonia official website: http://kmaked.pde.sch.gr/post_12022009.php. 17 Greece was the only European country with a large Orthodox Church which did not fall under the communist eastern bloc during the cold war. This ‘isolation’ from other

   religious, national, european or inter-cultural awareness337 there were attempts at relieving RE from its pietistic and non-liberal spirit and, instead, to introduce a class based on the orthodox experience (vioma), but always at the same time in concordance with Modern Greek national identity as opposed to a (Western) European identity. While theologians, Church hierarchs and religious intellectuals have forwarded their views regarding the survival of Modern Greek national identity through RE legal experts and leftist intellectuals have pointed to the problem of religious freedom. Apart from a few exceptions the two antagonistic sides of the debate have both, basically, been isolated in their own discourse (Kalaitzidis 2005). The debate in the mid-1990s was in part prompted by a decision from the State council (Symvoulio tis Epikrateias) decreeing the right to be exempted from RE (ΣτΕ 3356/1995). This decision was made in order to meet European standards based on the Human Rights charter regarding the right to religious freedom. In 2008, the debate was reactivated because the Ministry of Education and Religious Affairs, attempting to answer critique from the EU and the Greek Ombudsman, sent out three circular letters to the Greek public schools that anyone wishing to be exempted from RE could do so without stating any reason. Up until 2008 a pupil wishing to be exempted had to state, with her parents’ signature, that she did not belong to the Orthodox creed. This, however, forced citizens to reveal part of their religious beliefs, even if in a negative manner. Hence, this practice was not in compliance with the declared right to be a religious believer at your own discretion. Public responses to the first two circulars pointed out the danger of loosing the young generations who “don’t care about the Orthodox heritage”, thus urging the Minister to issue the third circular which stated that even if the first circular renders RE attendance voluntary all Christian Orthodox pupils are obliged to follow the class (sic!).18 The RE circulars of July 2008 resulted in several new internet blogs by theologians and many seminars arranged by Church and educational authorities regarding the future of RE. Among the bloggers is the ultra-conservative nationalistic thriskeftika.blogspot. com, where the government is accused of devaluating and undermining RE orthodox countries, the active role of western powers, especially the U.S.A., in keeping the communist party from power in Greece and the historical traumatic relationship with Western Europe (e.g. Kitromilides 1998) all contributed to create a need for self-definition in the Greek population. However, as Kalaitzidis (2008) remarks, this self-definition became a self-definition based on negation and exclusiveness creating ethnocentrism and further isolation incompatible with late modern pluralistic and globalised living conditions. 18 The legal aspect of the ‘circular affair’ has not been clarified, but in 2012 a new curricula was introduced in pilot schools aiming at a non-confessional RE.

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and thereby the Greek nation. In the discourse of this blog we find conspiracy theories about the “Jewish-led New Order” whose aim is the “end of nations and religions (the so-called multi-cultural society)”. The blog-owner criticizes other theologians for supporting this ‘New Order’ and he proclaims that “we will not let it happen. We will fight with all our strength for the truth of Christ to be taught in Greek schools as it has been passed to us from the Holy Fathers”. Finally, the blogger regrets that other theologians and The Academy at Volos19 contributes to the de-orthodoxization of RE. This blog is a strong representative of the one side of the public voices on RE. This side is represented in the first model of the following analysis. Another side is represented by the same progressive theologians he attacks. It is their contributions to the debate that the larger part of this chapter will be concerned with. Four Religious Education Models In this section I will present four models of RE that have been prevailing in the current debate. These models are results of my categorization of the voices in the debate and they are not articulated by the actors themselves as specific models. There are two models containing traditional conceptions of RE aiming at developing a Modern Greek national awareness and/ or an Orthodox Christian religious awareness. The two more recent models propose RE based on a perception of Greece’s sharing in the European cultural and Christian heritage or on inter-religious, inter-cultural dialogue and reflexivity, i.e. the European awareness and the inter-cultural awareness models. The last two models resemble to a certain degree two models named by actors in the debate as the “Biblical class model” (Zoumboulakis 2006) and the “cultural class model” (Kalaitzidis 2005). RE as National Awareness RE is typically seen as a guardian of Greek culture. ‘Loss’ is a perpetual theme in Greek self-understanding: Ancient Greece is lost, Byzantium and the Holy Cathedral of Aghia Sofia are lost, and thus, Greek culture is constructed through its national master narrative as a threatened culture 19 The Academy of Theological Studies at Volos is a recent semi-private initiative of forwarding critical and dialogic theological thought in Greece (for a fuller description and analysis of the Academy’s role see Willert (2009a; 2009b; 2012 and forthcoming).

   religious, national, european or inter-cultural awareness339 (Frangoudaki and Dragona 1997). Diversity is constructed as a threat to Greek culture because the Greek nation-building process comprised homogenization of a much diversified population. Latent in much discourse on culture in Greece is the threat of Turkification, Europeanization etc.20 Therefore a prevailing discourse regarding RE is the cultural memory discourse.21 A theologically trained secondary school teacher explains the persistence of the traditional confessional RE as the parents’ wish for their children to learn about Orthodoxy because of the history of the country and the Greek people. According to this theologian the adult generation still wishes to pay tribute to the Orthodox Church as a way of showing gratitude towards the Church for its role as guardian of the Greek language and identity under Ottoman rule and in the liberation war (Anonymous interview 1, 2008). This theologian also gives another reason for the parents’ insistence upon the confessional RE, namely that the adult generation leads a life style which does not allow parents to have enough time with their children and therefore they want the school to provide their children with some ‘steady values’ by teaching them the religious tradition of older generations (ibid.). In this way, the persistence of the traditional RE expresses nostalgia for the good old days when adults supposedly had more time and families did not split up. Another argument for keeping RE in the Greek-centered model is that it is a way to Hellenize the non-Greek and non-Orthodox pupils, that is, an assimilation strategy. According to this model the immigrants will turn into philhellenes as foreigners have done in all time since Isocrates (436–338 bc) who said that a Greek is a person sharing the Greek education (Natsios 2009). Natsios, a primary school teacher and frequent blogger, who forwarded this universalist understanding of Greek culture, also applies the cultural threat discourse when he reminds that the Greek children should be reminded that they belong to a “lonely and brotherless” nation.

20 During the late 1980s and 1990s there was a widespread belief that Greece is in danger of decay (e.g. Yannaras 1987), Greek culture being ‘threatened’ from its integration into the EEC (1981), from the increasing influx of western tourists and from military conflict with neighbouring Turkey. 21 Hervieu-Léger (1993) attributes much importance to the aspect of collective memory in religious traditions. She has used the term ‘chain of memory’ to explain how religions can play a role in modern, secular societies. In Greece religion comes to serve the national myth which reproduces a national collective identity. Molokotos-Liederman underlines the crucial role played by national education in the service of reproducing the ethno-religious synthesis in generation after generation (2004: 493).

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He reminds that the Slavs, Arabs and Franks22 number millions and his argumentation develops into a narrative of Greece as an elected people in the faith of God: Lonely and few in numbers, without brothers or relatives in other peoples, we cannot count on the honest help of anybody, we will not find support from any others but the Church fathers who for centuries with their sacrifices pass on from one generation to the next the faith that salves us in the Church. (…) If we loose this faith we loose everything since our national reason of existence disappears (Natsios 2009).

The Greek nation’s reason of existence is thus grounded in its relationship with the Church and the Orthodox faith that has been guarded by the Greek Church fathers. Other cultural and historical influences upon the foundation of the Modern Greek nation are ignored and only one exclusive model of the past is thought to represent and reproduce the national community. The above example is extreme in a sense, but it is widely reproduced in non-academic circles. A more established version of the same argument is found in an open letter to the Minister of Education and Religious Affairs, Aris Spiliotopoulos, signed by a group of University professors (University Professors Initiative Group 2009). The professors are from faculties of law, pedagogy, philology, polytechnics and dentistry, but most of them sign as Emeritus Professors. In the letter it is argued that RE must remain compulsory because knowing one’s own culture is a key to getting genuinely acquainted with other cultures. Again the culturally and religiously diverse composition of the pupils is ignored: … only by knowing your own country’s specific character you may be able to understand the foreign religious and cultural traditions and compare them to our own. Not only is knowledge of the Orthodox Christian heritage not in opposition to the demands of pluralism, of polyphony and of multiculturalism, but these are exactly its foundation. Therefore, its compulsory nature does not revoke, but rather seals the respect shown towards any possible different beliefs. And this, all the more so because the Greek space has always been open to foreign stimuli and it has experienced in its historical course long coexistence with other races and other religions. (…) The crucial words of Odysseus Elytis refer to this ecumenical wealth and to the orthodox heritage: “It is the only way in which we can again become Greek Europeans. By contributing and not by borrowing… With respect towards the achievements 22 In Greece Western European people are often referred to as ‘Franks’, a remnant of the crusades lead by Franks and of the conquest of parts of the present Greek territory by Franks in the 13th century.

   religious, national, european or inter-cultural awareness341 of others, but also with awareness of the wealth incessantly streaming from a hidden source within us.”

In both examples of RE as national awareness there is a discourse of fear of treason from within the nation. The foreign is not invoked as a threat as much as is those Greek compatriots who are feared to betray the distinct foundation of the nation, namely its Orthodox Christian heritage. These voices in the debate, which are supported by people as influential as the former vice chancellor of the University of Athens, George Babiniotis (2007: 105–111) and the former dean of the Faculty of Theology in Athens, Father George Metallinos (2009), do not address the actual cultural and religious diversity among the pupil population of Greece. The attempts to retain and re-invoke a past order reveal a consciousness of such diversity that threaten the order, but also a conviction that diversity can be ignored or overcome by insisting upon a uniform and exclusive version of cultural and religious identity in Greece. Furthermore, the proponents of a onesided Orthodox Christian religious class refer to the maintenance of religion’s cultural heritage rather than the development of the pupils’ religious consciousness, which is the stated aim of the Greek constitution. RE as Religious Awareness The model of RE as religious awareness differs from the model of national awareness in that, in its progressive version, it avoids presenting RE as a model for national education. It is argued that national education can be undertaken by several other classes such as history and language and should not be the purpose of RE (Athanasopoulou-Kypriou 2006: 996). The religious awareness model can easily be confused with a confessionalcatechist version, which has been the dominant model for RE in Greece throughout modern history (Yangazoglou 2005, Athanasopoulou-Kypriou 2006). The advocates for a confessional-catechist RE are numerous, but most often they lean towards the national awareness model, because they perceive Orthodox religious consciousness as an inbuilt component of Greek national identity. In contrast, the religious awareness model referred to in this section is a confessional-theological version, which is described as a “systematic presentation of the teachings of a belief system and a systematic dialogue and comparison with whatever has not or does not seem to have a relation to that specific belief system” (Athanasopoulou-Kypriou 2006: 994, note 4). Athanasopoulou-Kypriou (2006) opts for separate theological-confessional classes for each religious community based on recognition of the rules of constitutional democracy and the declaration of

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human rights. Athanasopoulou-Kypriou (2006: 998) argues that a nonconfessional RE will violate the rights of believers, who have the same right as atheists or agnostics to have their worldview presented by state authorities through public education. She notes that the Orthodox Christians would not accept to be taught their Orthodox faith as one religion among many. She presumes that believers of other religions would also not be satisfied with a religious studies (thriskeiologia) model, since this would deprive them of a religious education focused on their own tradition. Therefore, according to Athanasopoulou-Kypriou (ibid.), the development of reflexive processes in religious pupils should be the responsibility of theology, while for atheist this responsibility should lie with philosophy. Athanasopoulou-Kypriou (ibid.) seems to opt for the religious awareness model as necessitated by the declared rights of religious freedom, which according to her should not result in ignorance of religion, as in the laicitémodel in France (Mannitz 2004: 89–93), but in recognition of religious diversity. There is a tendency towards a generalization of the religiosity of Greek citizens in the model proposed by Athanasopoulou-Kypriou. She seems to take for granted that every Greek citizen is able to unambigu­ ously define her religious affiliation, while the situation in Greece in late modernity is comparable to other Western societies where the majority of people place themselves in a religious in-between space,23 which in Greece is reflected by the relatively low numbers of regular Church attendance.24 In-betweenness or indifference is also widespread among immigrants in Greece and especially among the largest immigrant community of Albanians since religion was suppressed in Albania for decades and social integration has been more important than religious demarcation for those Albanians who migrated to Greece.25 In her attempt to avoid violating any 23 Such in-between positions have been described as ‘believing without belonging’ or ‘belonging without believing’ (Davie 1994; Halman and Draulan 2006). Statistical date for Greece regarding religiosity are not very reliable due to a tendency in Greek respondents of giving extreme answers and a general reluctance to position oneself in opposition to authorities such as the Church. This reluctance is inherited from the many periods of authoritarian regime in modern Greek history and a general suspicion towards power­ful institutions perhaps dating back to Ottoman rule over Orthodox Greek-speaking populations. 24 According to the European Social Survey of 2004–2005, 19 percent attend Church once a week, while 30 percent attend once a month and 33 percent only on special holidays (Stathopoulou 2010). 25 During fieldwork I have been told several times that many Albanians convert to Orthodoxy or have their children christened. According to the teachers of religion that I have spoken to, the pupils of Albanian Muslim background do not make use of their right to be exempted from RE.

   religious, national, european or inter-cultural awareness343 citizen’s right to freely live with or without religion AthanasopoulouKypriou invokes the public school as an arena for separating, in an absolute manner, religion from non-religion by ignoring the blurred boundaries of religious identities especially among young citizens. The model proposed by Athanasopoulou-Kypriou (2006) resembles the model applied in many German states, where state controlled confessional religious education is undertaken in public schools by the religious communities or churches, while an agnostic cross-confessional subject is offered to pupils not belonging to any specific religion (Mannitz 2004: 94–102). It is not a model that has been widely discussed, probably because it departs from the models of state controlled compulsory unified religious education, which does not fit in a centralized educational system like the Greek.26 RE as European Awareness For many debaters the modernization of the Greek educational system is the core issue. The confessional and/or ethnocentric RE should be modernized in order to be a “lawful and upgraded” RE in the “Greek school of the united Europe” (Grizopoulou 2002). Grizopoulou (ibid.), a theologian and author of RE school books, further mentions that the aim of the dialogue over RE “is to enrich the subject matter of our own [religion] class and to converge creatively with Europe, without removing our particularity”. The debate thus inscribes itself into a century long debate in Greece over its degree of belonging to and being integrated into a (Western) European cultural framework imagined as modern, secular and progressive. As Zoumboulakis (2006) sardonically remarks regarding RE: the abolition of the class is the first thing said by most people, e.g. journalists, various intellectuals, professors, parents or pupils, all full of joy that, in this synoptic way, they are given a chance to prove their progressive mind-set, their modern and innovative spirit, the freshness of their mind (Zoumboulakis 2006: 234)

According to Zoumboulakis (2006), who is author of several essaycollections and editor of a classic literary journal, the issue of RE relates to the doubts regarding its general educative value. A European school without the teaching of Christianity is unthinkable for those who believe that 26 School books in Greece are still published centrally by the Ministry of Education with one book for each year in each subject, thus adjustments to local needs (e.g. in schools with many non-orthodox pupils) are hardly possible.

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education is more than a school of skills, but also a space for positive enculturation (Zoumboulakis ibid.). He proposes a RE based on the Old and New Testaments which are recognized as Holy texts by the three monotheistic religions and which have been crucial in the forming of European cultural heritage. The class would in this way become broadened from a specific focus upon the Eastern and Greek Orthodox tradition to a general Christian and European tradition. Zoumboulakis argues that the value of fundamental cultural texts such as the Bible and the works of Classical Greece are much needed today so as to counterbalance the emphasis upon the market value of technical skills at the expense of spiritual and cultural values of Europe. Thus Zoumboulakis’ proposal seems to be driven by a wish to Europeanize Greek education. The theologian and Academy director Pantelis Kalaitzidis (2001)27 echoes one of the leading voices in Greece’s literary modernist movement, Georgios Theotokas (1905–1966) when he talks of the need to distance RE from the “nationalistic withdrawal” or the “well-known spiritual and cultural provincialism” (ibid.: 45).28 Petrou (2001: 31), a University professor, has forwarded a similar argumentation regarding the centrality of the Bible in RE. Likewise Delikonstantis (2005: 50), also a University professor, believes that in the framework of the European dimension of education “RE will obtain a particular importance and mission as the foremost class of European identity and culture.” Finally, my participant observation of discussions among progressive theologians has registered a dominant discourse regarding the European perspective of RE. Especially the pedagogical councilor Stavros Yangazoglou stresses the European dimension and framework when he presents his visions for a renewed RE (Yangazoglou 2009). The theologian and Academy director Pantelis Kalaitzidis is concerned to separate the roles of the Church and the school according to the theological principle of separating the “the kingdom of Caesar from the kingdom of God” (2005: 158–60), but also as a consequence of ongoing modernization and globalization and of Greece’s involvement in a European context.

27 Pantelis Kalaitzidis is director of a private theological academy under the Holy Metropolis of Demetrias. The academy is projected as a progressive forum for theological thought and since its foundation in 2000 it has organised debates and conferences on controversial issues within Greek theology. Seminars for theologians teaching in secondary schools on new teaching methods in RE take place on a regular basis in the realm of the academy. 28 In his powerful manifest ‘Free Spirit’ Theotokas (1929) criticized Greek academic and cultural life for its provincialism and its lack of original contribution in a European context.

   religious, national, european or inter-cultural awareness345 He claims that “Greece is no longer an Orthodox country; it is metaOrthodox, meta-Christian” (Kalaitzidis 2005: 161) and therefore the public school is not a suitable space for undertaking the catechist work of the Church (Kalaitzidis 2004a). He considers the present RE confessionalcatechist and his argument for changing it is that it is “a remnant of another epoch”, that is, by keeping it Greece appears un-modern and foreign in the European context: The presence of RE in primary and secondary education, with its character of an exclusively orthodox catechist confessional class, constitutes a remnant of another epoch and transfer of a paradigm which is foreign to the preconditions of orthodox culture and ecclesial catechism. Simultaneously, such a type of class seems to constitute a foreign body and a howling discord in the program of the contemporary democratic European school (Kalaitzidis 2001: 39).

In the above quotation Kalaitzidis also displays a theological argument for changing the character of RE, namely that at present it is not in accord with ‘the preconditions of Orthodox culture’. By combining a concern for the modern, European outlook of Greece (Greek education) and a concern for an indigenous (not foreign) orthodox culture, he attempts to overcome a discourse that views the Orthodox Christian RE as a safeguard against a threatening Europeanization or Westernization of Orthodox culture and Greek national identity (Cholevas 2007). The modernization and Europeanization of RE will, according to Kalaitzidis, be in harmony with a true orthodox culture, where the roles of the Church and the state are separate. The Church should undertake the catechist work, the state fulfill its educative obligations. The RE proposed by Kalaitzidis (2001) refers to the multi-culturalism and the coming post-modernity, where any kind of ‘historical privileges’ of Orthodoxy will not be able to claim supremacy (Kalaitzidis 2001: 45).

Despite the reference to ‘multiculturalism’, Kalaitzidis, as Zoumboulakis, focuses on the European context as the main challenge for RE in contemporary Greece, rather than the multi-cultural. In his proposal of a compulsory RE as a culture class he suggests a class that has as its “unifying and legitimate basis”: Given that theology and Orthodoxy to a large extent co-created the Greek and the European cultural identity, they must contribute greatly to our culture’s educative wealth which we teach in school (Kalaitzidis 2005: 158).

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Kalaitzidis insists upon the centrality of Christian Orthodox religious values and messages in his proposal of culturally guided RE: The argument (…) is that the pupils become acquainted with the Orthodox tradition, but also the knowledge of the world of other religions. In this difficult work the incorporation of inter-cultural elements and the reminding of the ecumenical spirit of Orthodoxy may work very positively (Kalaitzidis 2005: 49)

In the above quotation Kalaitzidis refers to the incorporation of intercultural elements. This suggests that his proposal also fits in the model for RE as inter-cultural awareness, but his point of departure in the spirit of a specific religion and his priority for the European context makes his proposal less directed towards the inter-cultural awareness model. RE as Inter-Cultural Awareness The multicultural, inter-cultural or inter-religious model covers such a variety of proposals that the term ‘model’ may seem a misnomer. Two features seem to be shared by the said proposals. They directly address the theme of ‘otherness’ as a feature of contemporary society and as a life-condition and they problematize the relationship between religion and national identity. Three theologians in particular have presented proposals for dealing with cultural diversity and religious pluralism through a ‘theology of otherness’ (Papathanasiou 2002; Thermos 2005; Yangazoglou 2006). One theologian has proposed a cultural heritage approach (Kalaitzidis 2001) and some young theologians and educational researchers (Koukounaras-Liagis 2009; Kapetanakis 2011) propose a RE based on principles of inter-cultural and inter-religious understanding and cultural and religious reflection. The ‘theology of otherness’29 has affinity to the above mentioned model of RE as religious awareness. However, the proposed class is not meant to be confessional, even if the arguments in favor of the class are based on Christian Orthodox theology. The idea of a theology of otherness or cultural plurality based on the Bible and the Church Fathers is intended to include “mutual respect, recognition and peaceful coexistence with the religious or any kind of otherness” (Yangazoglou 2005: 135). Yangazoglou argues that RE must change its character in order not to be completely marginalized by the new inter-thematic teaching methods and especially the (secular) inter-cultural education (ibid.: 136). Yangazoglou (2009) pleads for

29 Sometimes also called ‘theology of multiculturalism’ (Yangazoglou 2005: 135).

   religious, national, european or inter-cultural awareness347 a non-confessional, thus compulsory and unified RE, yet in an Orthodox theological framework taught by Orthodox theologians. His vision is that the theology of multiculturalism should not only vaguely inspire RE but permeate it so that the class becomes a pioneer within inter-cultural education thus bringing another testimony of the truth and quality of human life and of the world (Yangazoglou 2005: 136).

He further claims that the class should display the ecumenical elements of Orthodoxy and not its various ethno-phyletisms (ibid.: 137).30 Orthodox theology is proposed as particularly suited for a Christian contribution to the development of a version of globality (global culture) with respect of difference and diversity (Yangazoglou 2005: 135).31 Stavros Yangazoglou speaks from a specific position as permanent councilor for RE in secondary education at the Pedagogical Institute.32 Hence, his political and professional interests are obvious because, as representative of the theologians vis-à-vis the Minister, he must defend his own and his colleagues legitimate right to their position in the education system. Presumably due to his official position, Yangazoglou has not presented a specific proposal comparable to the other three central proposals presented in this chapter,33 but simply points out a number of arguments for retaining the theological foundation of RE. One such argument is the theology of otherness (Yangazoglou 2006) or theology of multiculturalism (Yangazoglou 2005: 135) which implies that Orthodox theology is essentially an inclusive theology which embraces any other, be it atheist, agnostic, indifferent or belonging to other religious traditions. This argument is problematic because it approaches religious diversity from within a specific (Orthodox Christian) theological framework. 30 Orthodox Christianity has, in modern times, been characterized by the national paradigm, thus having autocephalous national churches as its main channel of expression. Ethno-phyletism is the term used to distinguish such nationally based Orthodox Christianity from its ecumenical version represented by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Istanbul. 31 The archbishop of Tirana and all Albania, Anastasios (2000), is a proponent of the creative opportunities that lie in Orthodoxy’s dialogic approach to other religions and to the processes of globalization. It is characteristic that such a voice comes from a church hierarch under the Patriarch’s administration; in Greece the overwhelming majority of bishops express themselves in negative terms regarding the phenomenon of globalization. 32 The Pedagogical Institute is a state institution inaugurated in 1964 which undertakes the development of curricula and the preparation of school books. It is a powerful institution which often exerts considerable influence on the Ministry of Education and Religious Affairs. 33 That is, the theological-confessional proposal (Athanasopoulou-Kypriou 2006), the cultural class proposal (Kalaitzidis 2005) and the biblical class proposal (Zoumboulakis 2006).

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Koukounaras-Liagis (2009) has been concerned to develop an approach to RE that raises the pupils’ awareness of cultural and religious diversity without invoking a specific moral or religious code as providing the best ways of coping with such diversity. His hypothesis is that RE in Greece can contribute to intercultural communication by focusing on interreligious encounters through the inter-active learning processes of theatrepedagogy. It is remarkable that Koukounaras-Liagis, who is a theologically trained secondary school teacher and whose book is based on his recent Ph.D.-dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Theology of University of Thessaloniki, does not mention any Orthodox theological aspect of his proposal. This makes his proposal appear as the most radical among the proposals made by theologians, since he appears willing to give up the privileged status attributed to Orthodoxy. On the one hand his proposal can be characterized as religious awareness because it aims at sensitizing young citizens to religious phenomena. Yet, because the awareness is to be directed towards the pupils’ cultural, social and political context it is better characterized as inter-cultural awareness since the aim is not to develop the pupils personal or collective religious awareness, but their competent dealing with diversity and otherness. Another interpretation of RE that seems to have moved beyond the usual religious/theological, national or European-centered perspectives is Karamouzis’ (2007) proposal of inter-religious education which seems more religiously neutral than all the hitherto presented models:34 the inter-religious dialogue in the contemporary school (…) develops (…) the [pupils’] confidence in difference and their communication with it, based on the pluralist character of knowledge and without being confined exclusively to religious perspectives (Karamouzis 2007: 62–63).

The prevailing values in some proposals of a RE within the inter-cultural awareness model are similar to those of cosmopolitanism (Nussbaum 2002). The inter-religious education has made huge steps forward (reference to Wilkerson ed. 1997), by having as its basic choice the development of understandings and criteria of religiosity, so that the pupils, apart from gaining knowledge of information and facts, will experience themselves and live as citizens of the earth (Grizopoulou 2002: 71).

34 Koukounaras-Liagis Theatre-in-Education programme is also religiously neutral, but his proposal is not presented as a whole programme for RE.

   religious, national, european or inter-cultural awareness349 This aspect of the relationship between RE and cosmopolitan and humanistic values need further investigation which the limited space of the present chapter does not allow for. Recent Developments During the autumn of 2009 a group of approximately 100 theologians and secondary school teachers have taken the initiative to form an association35 whose declared aim is to work towards a pluralistic but theologically grounded RE. Representatives of this group have vividly discussed how pronounced the positive contribution of Orthodox theology should be (participant observation November 2009). Among these theologians there is a manifest intention of modernizing RE by removing its confessionalcatechist image and by adding a religious studies dimension making it attendable by all pupils. The positions of Yangazoglou (2009) and the progressive theologians are not easily categorized because they draw on all models apart from the national awareness model. Their insistence upon a theologically grounded RE places them in the religious awareness model, whereas insistence upon a non-confessional RE moves them towards an inter-cultural awareness class. A strong modernizing agenda contains discourse elements relating to European awareness. Religious Projects in Late Modernity The arguments forwarded by progressive theologians in the debate are influenced by the social constructivist paradigm and an understanding of national identities as socially constructed or imagined communities. This understanding distances itself from the metaphysical and destiny-oriented elements of national mythology and opens the way towards a global or ecumenical religious metaphysics reaching beyond ethnic and national borders. What seems to have changed in the current debate compared to earlier debates between universalists and particularists is that the universalists are joining a global movement of religious universalism, either in Christian ecumenism or in religious diversity. The main point is that the dominant voices in this debate are not simply rational voices, but voices combining a rational, pluralistic understanding of society with a religious worldview. 35 “KAIROS – Panhellenic Association for the renewal of RE”. Kairos, meaning time (‘proper timing’), also has biblical connotations.

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It is however characteristic of the debate that it largely has taken place within established circles of the theological educational and ecclesiastic community. During my fieldwork and research in 2008 and 2009 I have not come across seminars, arranged debates or other public events that have involved other religious groups or atheists. Thus, as argued by Sakellariou (2009), there are mechanisms in Greek society and public debate that render the religious ‘Other’ invisible. Some debaters do mention that religious pluralism also comprises religious indifference and atheism. Yet, no one has proposed that religious indifference or atheism should be taught as legitimate subjects in a new RE. The focus upon cultural diversity as a primary challenge to RE may be a way to somehow hide the growing atheism and religious indifference in Greek society. In the same vein, no proposal explicitly considers the possibility of psychology or sociology of religion be introduced as a means for understanding the way social and economic structures play a selective role in shaping society including its peculiar religious institutions.36 The largely elitist and intellectual debate lacks considerations of the societal dimension of RE issue. There are no research results describing the actual reception of the present or alternative models of RE.37 The lack of research on immigrants’ attitude to RE and my difficulty in finding immigrant or other religious minority voices in the debate further point at internal Greek definitions of religious and educational values. As such the debate is more related to a century old debate over the identity of Modern Greece and of the country’s relationship to Western European modernization than to current debates over religious diversity and multiculturalism. The arguments are framed in an all-European discussion about the challenges of religious diversity and multi-culturalism, but the religious diversity being debated is first and foremost the indigenous Greeks’ right to diversity. The presence of the religious ‘other’ seems only to be a pretext for re-examining the religious and cultural foundations of Modern Greek identity. This explains why the situation of the religious ‘Other’ is seldom present in the debate more than as a superficial reference. The values at stake are those of a cosmopolitan/ecumenist Christian Western Greekness with universal values as compared with an ethnocentric Orthodox Eastern Greekness with particular values. In the language of Greek Christian 36 On the view that only the religious dimension of life is addressed see Perselis (2004: 128). 37 The results of Koukounaras-Liagis (2009) and Kapetanakis (2011) are, however, based on secondary school pupils’ participation in action research programmes.

   religious, national, european or inter-cultural awareness351 Orthodoxy these values are expressed in terms of the ecumenical message of Christianity versus the particular Greek language heritage of Eastern, Byzantine and Modern Greek Orthodox Christianity. To the first value system may also be added a European orientation, while the second value system refers exclusively to other Orthodox cultures and countries and to Greek self-sufficiency. When analyzing the debate one may ask how immigrants and religious minorities may benefit from the suggested improvements to RE. Any attempts at inclusive education can have a positive effect upon minorities,38 but the main profit is likely to be achieved by indigenous Greek, because for many immigrants and religious minorities the problems related to RE are of minor importance compared to their social and economic marginalization in Greek society. The indigenous Greek pupils may, however, benefit from a changed RE in terms of receiving an education that provides them with tools to navigate in a pluralist changing world. The present model of RE is too focused on the past to provide the future Greek citizens with a useful understanding of their present: […], attempt to save the collective memory through a homogenized religious instruction, whose gaze is continuously turned to the past, in fact cancels all attempts to arrive at an understanding of the present in its real dimensions, exactly because its hermeneutical frame is inflexible providing only one version of reality as absolute and prevailing (Karamouzis 2007: 90).

Many younger theologians apply popular late modern academic concepts such as ‘fluid and multiple identities’ and ‘construction of otherness’ and they attempt to demonstrate how these ‘modern’ concepts are fully compatible with the Christian faith and the message of its holy texts. This approach frames universal as well as historic human conditions within an exclusive religious tradition. So do the theological arguments in favour of a multi-culturally oriented religion despite good and honest intentions: Furthermore, the knowledge of the biblical tradition is a necessary precondition for the understanding (…) and preservation of our culture. And not only in relation to our art and literature, but also with the awareness of social responsibility towards the weak and less privileged, an awareness that is very much strengthened in the biblical tradition (Triantafyllou 2009).

38 A recent example is the 132nd primary school in Athens, where inclusive strategies created increased integration of immigrant children and their parents. The initiative to implement the new strategies, however, were stopped by the Ministry of Education and Religious Affairs because, according to the Ministry, they where not in agreement with Greek school law.

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The problem with such arguments is that the awareness which is passed on to the pupils is the didagmata of a religious text with the symbolic value of such texts. The same awareness and message could be passed through on to the pupils without the biblical reference. Athanasopoulou-Kypriou (2006) argues that the public school of a constitutional liberal democracy ought to provide theologically based RE in order to meet the needs of citizens with a religiously grounded world view. She invites the Greek public to engage in a debate based on ‘public reason’ (Rawls 2005, cited in Athanasopoulou-Kypriou 2006: 995) in a spirit of recognition of cultural particularity (Taylor 1997, cited in AthanasopoulouKypriou 2006: 997) thus pleading for a public sphere that includes religious worldviews instead of relegating them to the private sphere. This proposal seems to overlook the problem of power structures in Greek society, which do not allow all citizens equal access to articulate their claims and opinions in the public sphere. Hitherto the debate has been dominated by advocates for national survival on the one hand and progressive theologians on the other hand. The theologians have a special interest in maintaining the theological character of public RE. For the past four decades the theological faculties of Athens and Thessaloniki have produced large numbers of theologians whose main occupational destination is teaching religion in secondary education.39 Hence, we cannot overlook the professional interests lying behind claims to RE based on the theological approach. The progressive theologians’ aim is to distance RE from the national identity paradigm. With this aim they form an alliance with social scientists who have also criticized the national identity paradigm for its exclusiveness and its remnants of a 19th century romantic perception of national identity (Frangoudaki and Dragonas 1997). The aim of theologians and secular social scientists may be similar, but their reasons are mutually opposed. The secular social scientists advocate a public education without an aggressive and romantic nationalism based on 19th century ideals of national purity and exclusiveness. They also advocate for a secular public education based on European and human rights models of inclusive education without any exclusive adherence to one specific religious dogma. The origin of their proposal is their vision of a cosmopolitan Greek state based on the principles of equality and non-discrimination. Some theologians 39 In Greece higher education has been considered the prime means to social upgrading (Tsoukalas 1975) and theology studies have been considered an easy way to obtain a university degree and subsequently a much desired permanent appointment in the public education system.

   religious, national, european or inter-cultural awareness353 similarly advocate a public education without national prejudice, but from the perspective of a Christian principle of equality in God. Their point of view is theological and their proposals for a renewal of RE in Greece are, albeit progressive, still proposals for RE from a religious and not a secular point of view. Such an approach presupposes the universality of the Christian paradigm since the theological arguments for equality and acceptance of the other are rooted in this one particular theological and exclusive religious tradition. Conclusions It is obvious that the intensified debate over the nature of RE in the Greek public school has, to a large extent, been provoked by the challenges of the increasing presence of religious expressions other than the national ‘prevailing religion’ stated in the country’s constitution, as well as the build-up of joint European policies towards religious diversity.40 Behind this debate lie fundamental values and beliefs regarding the nature, meaning and cultural composition of Greece as a nation and as a state. I will tend to conclude that, in the context of the analyzed debate, the consequences of religious diversity have had more to do with the participants’ presumptions about the ideological content and framework of Greece as an ‘imagined community’ and as a nation-state than with the concrete condition of religious diversity in Greek society. This is an interesting conclusion, since it suggests that, in this case, the experience of religious diversity becomes a pretext for national self-reflection. The debate, so far, has not included representatives of other religious communities and only to a small degree other groups of teachers and of proclaimed secular or atheist groups of Greek society. Many of the proposals emphasize that RE by broadening its intellectual horizon should include Christianity in all its dogmatic variety in order to incorporate Greece and its specific Orthodox Christian tradition into an ecumenical Christian and European tradition. This ecumenical outlook relates to a general tendency among younger theological circles indicating a rupture with previous generations of anti-western Greek theology (e.g. Kalaitzidis 2008; see also Kalaitzidis 2007). Hence, it can be said that some reactions to the challenges of cultural and religious diversity in Greece have 40 Especially, as represented by the Council of Europe, but to some degree also by the EU organs.

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resulted in tendencies towards religious (Christian) universalism rather than religious particularism while other reactions intensify the particularistic projection of Orthodoxy as specifically Greek and unique. Thus, my analysis of the debate over RE suggests that the presence of religious diversity in Greek society has at once led to diversification among theologians and members of the Greek Orthodox Church and to a unification process in so far as the ecumenical aspects of the same Church are concerned. By way of conclusion, I will refer to three possible scenarios for RE in Greece. The first scenario implies that the Church of Greece as well as the state authorities recognize the initiative called “KAIROS – Panhellenic Association for the renewal of RE” as a serious and influential actor. This may open the way for Ministry initiatives towards a modernization of RE by incorporating a European and cultural approach. It is likely that, at the moment, the Ministry will support a solution where theologians continue to teach religion because of the large number of theologians employed in public education. If theologians should not to teach public RE the state will face a problem with 4500 unemployed theologians who will ask for the Church’s support and the Ministry will experience severe pressure. In all probability the newly elected Minister will try to avoid such a scenario and turn to more urgent educational reforms.41 Hence a scenario where RE is abolished or turned into religious studies taught by sociologists or others is unlikely given the current political situation. Thus, the first scenario implies a reformed RE framed in a multi-cultural, multi-religious setting with a non-confessional yet theological approach. This scenario offers a compromise for the Ministry, where religious freedom demands are met without theologians loosing their occupation. However, it is doubtful whether other religious groups will be satisfied with a RE taught by Christian Orthodox theologians. The second scenario is a solution where pupils who are exempted from RE are offered an alternative class in ethics or philosophy. This solution is expensive for the state, because it will need to employ new teachers for such classes. The theologians and the Church will work hard against this scenario because an alternative class will constitute competition to RE. The third scenario is that the situation remains unchanged, that is RE will remain confessional and ethnocentric and anyone who wishes

41 The priorities of the current Minister of Education, Lifelong Learning and Religious Affairs lay elsewhere, as she showed with her comment to the European court decision regarding removal of religious symbols in Italian schools: “I don’t think the Greek educational system is suffering first and foremost from questions like this” (Press interview with the political leadership of the Ministry of Education, 12–11–2009).

   religious, national, european or inter-cultural awareness355 can be exempted. The third scenario is plausible only if the number of pupils asking exemption remains low, otherwise schools will meet severe problems with exempted pupils outside the classroom. The political situation regarding RE in Greece and the response to religious diversity seems to be at a deadlock at the moment due to the economic and political crisis of the country since 2010. However, as this article has shown, it is a field which has the attention of many actors and, recently, has produced rich debate and many proposals for a RE in compliance with late modern living conditions. It is only a question of time (KAIROS!), when this debate will be opened to a broader public and decisions will need to be taken by the authorities. The author wishes to thank the participants in the thematic session Reli­gious Education in the State Schools from Balkan Region: Religious Pluralism or Religious Exclusiveness in Education? at the 30th ISSR Conference 27–30 July 2009 as well as Krzysztof Stala, Lina Molokotos-Liederman, Søren Willert and the editors for valuable comments on earlier versions of this chapter. References Agios Oros. 1983. The Holy Mountain and the Education of Our Nation. Athos: Ieri Moni Iviron (in Greek). Aggelou, A. 1997. The Clandestine School: Chronicle of a Myth. Athens: Hestia (in Greek). Anastasios. 2000. Globality and Orthodoxy. Athens: Akritas (in Greek). Athanasopoulou-Kypriou, S. 2006. ‘Religious Education on the Fringes of Public Reason’, Nea Hestia 159 (1789): 993–1002 (in Greek). Baltsiotis, L. and K. Tsitselikis. 2001. Minority Education in Thrace. Collection of LegislationComments. Athens: Sakkulas (in Greek). Babiniotis, G. 2007. Christian and Greek Spirituality. Athens: Akritas (in Greek). Cholevas, K. 2007. Greek-orthodox Education in the Twenty-first Century. Trikala: Protypes Thessaly Publications (in Greek). Davie, G. 1994. Religion in Britain since 1945: Believing without Belonging. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Delikonstantis, K. 2005. ‘The European Dimension of Religious Education in School’, in Religious Education as Identity and Culture Class. Athens: Parliament of the Hellenes (in Greek), 48–55. Fokas, E. 2007. ‘Religion and Politics: Examining the Case of Greece through the European Prism’, in Zorba, K. (ed.), Politics and Religions. Athens: Papazizis Publications (in Greek). Frangoudaki, A. and Th. Dragonas (eds). 1997. What is our Homeland? Ethnocentrism in Education. Athens: Alexandreia Publications (in Greek). Gazi, E. 2004. The Second Life of the Three Hierarchs. A Genealogy of the Helleno-Christian Civilization. Athens: Nefeli (in Greek). Grizopoulou, O. 2002. ‘On the Dialogue about Religious Education’, Synaxi 17: 61–73 (in Greek). Gupta, A. and J. Ferguson (eds). 1997. Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology. Durham: Duke University Press. Halman, L. and V. Draulans 2006. ‘How Secular is Europe?’, The British Journal of Sociology 57 (2): 263–288.

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Herzfeld, M. 2002. ‘Cultural Fundamentalism and Regimentation of Identity: The Embodiment of Orthodox Values in a Modernist Setting’, in Hedetoft, U. and M. Hjort (eds), The Postnational Self. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hervieu-Léger, D. 1993. La religion pour mémoire. Paris: Cerf. Kalaitzidis, P. 2008. Greekness and Anti-Westernism in the ‘Theology of the 60’s’, Ph.D. Dissertation, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, (in Greek). ——. 2007. ‘Christian Identity, National Identity and the Claims of Territorial Exclusiveness. An essay on Christian Delocalization’, Paper Presented at the International Conference on “Forgiveness, Reconciliation and Peace”, Volos, Greece, May 19, 2007. ——. 2005. ‘Alternative Proposals for the Nature and Didactics of Religion. Religious Education as a Culture Class: The Example of the Book of Genesis and the Story of Creation’, in Religious Education as Identity and Culture Class. Athens: Parliament of the Hellenes (in Greek), 156–190. ——. 2004a. ‘Multicultural, Multi-Religious Society and the Catechist Work of the Church’, Paper Presented at the Seminar for ποιμαντικού έργου των Ι. Μητροπόλεων, Thessaloniki, November 19–20 (in Greek). ——. 2004b. ‘Providing interfaith and Intercultural Education’, Paper Presented at the Exploratory Workshop Christian-Muslim Relations in 21st Century Europe, Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy (ELIAMEP), Athens, 26–27 November. ——. 2001. ‘Religious Education in the Multi-cultural Age’, Kath’odon 17: 39–50 (in Greek). Kapetanakis, G. 2011. ‘Proposal for Reform of the Curricula for RE in Upper Secondary School Based on Action Research Data’, Ph.D. Dissertation Submitted at University of Athens (in Greek). Karamouzis, P. 2007. Culture and Inter-religious Education. The Comparative Teaching of Religions and Religiosity in Contemporary School. Athens: Ellinika Grammata (in Greek). Kitromilides, P. 1998. ‘On the Intellectual Content of Greek nationalism: Paparrigopoulos, Byzantium and the Great Idea’, in Ricks, D. and P. Magdalino (eds), Byzantium and the Modern Greek Identity. Aldershot: Ashgate, 25–33. Koukounaras-Liagis, M. 2009a. ‘I believe in Another God …’, Synaxi 109: 48–58 (in Greek). ——. 2009b. My God, your God. Culture, Education, Diversity. Athens: Grigoris (in Greek). Makrides, V. 1998. ‘Byzantium in Contemporary Greece: the Neo-Orthodox Current of Ideas’, in Ricks, D. and P. Magdalino (eds), Byzantium and the Modern Greek Identity. Aldershot: Ashgate, 141–153. Mannitz, S. 2004. ‘The Place of Religion in Four Civil Cultures’, in W. Schiffauer, G. Baumann, R. Karoryano and S. Vertovec (eds), Civil Enculturation. Nation-State, Schools and Ethnic Difference in four European Countries. Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books. Mediterranean Migration Observatory. 2004. Statistical Data on Immigrants in Greece: An Analytic Study of Available Data and Recommendations for Conformity with European Union Standards. Athens: Panteion University. Metallinos, G. 2009. ‘Religious Education: The Essence and its National Significance’, Speech at the Fifth Training Seminar for Theologians of Epirus, Kerkira and Lefkada, Lefkada February 7 (in Greek). Molokotos-Liederman, L. 2007. ‘The Greek ID Cards Controversy: A Case Study on Religion and National Identity in a Changing European Union’, Journal of Contemporary Religion 22 (2): 187–203. ——. 2004. ‘Mutations et débats sur la question religieuse dans l’espace scolaire grec’, Social Compass 51 (4): 487–497. Natsios, D. 2009. ‘Hellenocentrism or Multi’culturalism’, available at www.zoiforos.gr (accessed on June 30, 2009; in Greek). Nussbaum, M. 2002. ‘Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism’, in Cohen, J. (ed.), For Love of Country? Boston: Beacon Press.

   religious, national, european or inter-cultural awareness357 Papastathis, K. 2009. ‘From Christodoulos to Hieronymus: The Discourse of Secularisation and the Church of Greece’, Sychrona Themata 104: 21–30 (in Greek). Papathanasiou, Th. 2002. My God the Foreigner. Athens: Akritas (in Greek). Perselis, E. 2004. Cultural Diversity and Religious Instruction in Schools in Europe and Greece. Alexandreia: Faros 75 (in Greek). Petrou, I.S. 2001. ‘Religious Education in the Greek Education System’, Kath’odon 17: 29–37 (in Greek). Sakellariou, A. 2009 ‘The “Invisible” Islamic Community of Athens and The Question of the “Invisible” Islamic Mosque: Reactions and Conflicts in a Greek-Orthodox society’, Paper Presented at the 30th Conference of I.S.S.R., Santiago de Compostela, Spain, July 27–31. Stathopoulou, Th. 2010. ‘Faith and Trust: Tracking Patterns of Religious and Civic Commitment in Greece and Europe. An Empirical Approach’, in Roudometof, V. and V. Makrides (eds) Orthodox Christianity in 21st Century Greece. The Role of Religion in Culture, Ethnicity and Politics. Farnham: Ashgate. Theotokas, G. 1988.‘Free Spirit’. Athens: Hermes (in Greek). Thermos, V. 2005. My Own Foreigners, Athens: En Plo (in Greek). Triantafyllou, D. 2009. ‘The Cultural Dimension of the Didactic Content of the School Books for RE in Lower Secondary School’, Paper Presented at the 2nd Theological Conference of Postgraduate Students of the Department of Social Theology at Nafpaktos June 27 (in Greek). Tsoukalas, K. 1975. ‘Higher Education in Greece as Mechanism of Social Reproduction’, Defkalion 13 (in Greek). University Professors Initiative Group. 2009. ‘Religious Education (The Problem and its Solution)’, Public Letter sent to Minister of Education and Religious Affairs, Aris Spiliotopoulos, June 3 (in Greek). Willert, T.S. (forthcoming) New Voices in Greek Orthodox Thought: Untying the Bond between Nation and Religion. Farnham: Ashgate. ——. 2012. ‘A New Role for Religion in Greece? Theologians Challenging the Ethno-Religious Understanding of Orthodoxy and Greekness’, in Willert, T. S. and L. Molokotos-Liederman (eds), Innovation in the Orthodox Christian Tradition? The Question of Change in Greek Orthodox Thought and Practice. Farnham: Ashgate, 183–205. ——. 2009a. ‘Will Greece “Modernize” through Orthodoxy?’, Paper Presented at the 10th Mediterranean Research Meeting, European University Institute, Montecatini, March 25–28. ——. 2009b. Introduction to lecture by Pantelis Kalaitzidis at the Scientific Symposium Orthodoxy and Innovation, University of Copenhagen, June 5–6. Yangazoglou, S. 2009. ‘Religious Education between Tradition and Modernization’, speech given at Seminar on RE, Inter-orthodox Centre of the Church of Greece, November 16 (in Greek). ——. 2007. ‘Religious Education in Public Education. Features, Aims, Content, New books, Inter-thematic Approach, European Perspective, Theology of Otherness’, in Scientific Seminar: Religious Education in Contemporary School – Facing the Current Challenges. Thessaloniki: Mygdonia (in Greek). ——. 2006. ‘Person and Otherness – Essay on a Theology of Otherness’, Indiktos 15 (in Greek). ——. 2005. ‘Features and Character of Religious Education. Religious Education in Contemporary Multi-Cultural Societies’, in Religious Education as Identity and Culture Class, Proceedings from a Seminar held by the Inter-parliamentary Assembly on Orthodoxy. Athens: Hellenic Parliament (in Greek). Yannaras, C. 1987. Finis Graeciae. Athens: Domos (in Greek). Zoumboulakis, S. 2006. ‘Religious Education as Biblical Class’, in Religious Education and Contemporary Society. Positions and Oppositions. Athens: En Plo (in Greek).

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http://thriskeftika.blogspot.com Hieronymus 2009 at http://kmaked.pde.sch.gr/post_12022009.php www.zoiforos.gr

Newspapers Eleftherotypia (2009a) March 31 Eleftherotypia (2009b) May 4 Ependytis tou Kosmou (2008) December 13 Kyriakatiki Eleftherotypia 2008 November 23 Makedonia (2009) February13 To Vima (2009) February 8

Personal Interviews Anonymous theologian interview 1 (2008) May Archbishop Hieronymus-written interview (2008) October Stavros Yangazoglou-interview (2008) May and October

ETHNOGRAPHY OF RELIGION, ETHNICITY AND REFLEXIVITY. EVANGELICAL GITANOS IN SOUTHERN SPAIN Manuela Cantón Delgado Introduction This article aims to make a methodological contribution to the analysis of several problems related to the anthropological examination of religions. It reflects on the role of the social scientist in this kind of ethnography, recognising the need to produce critical knowledge regarding the practical conditions that demarcate, limit and thereby produce ethnographical research problems, including difficulties related to places of study and those who participate in fieldwork. It explores the role that reflexive anthropology can play in examining the position attained by non-hegemonic religious organisations within different contexts, in this case that of Spain. The inten­sity of recent migratory flows into Spain is having a transformative effect on cultural diversity. At the same time, religious pluralism is opening up in a country where the majority of the population is nominally Catholic. I will focus here on a single case: the advent, establishment and impact of Gitano Evangelical communities in southern Spain. Gitano churches began in Andalusia in the 1960s, when French gypsy preachers arrived in a Seville slum. Congregation numbers have mushroomed since then throughout Andalusia. They have increased to the extent that the factor of religion is essential in order to understand key current issues. These include processes  of mobility, lineage and ethno-religious belonging; ethnic and gender policies; dialogue between the ethnic minority and public administration; ethnogenesis and cultural reinvention; and the political role played by Gitano associations, whether these are non-confessional or (increasingly) confessional. I will focus on what Gitano Pentecostal Protestantism has come to represent since the start of the 1960s in Andalusia, on problems of theoretical and ethnographic reflexivity, and the experiences of anthropologists in dealing with religious agencies. Such experiences range from sets of stratagems, negotiations and intersubjective games that shape interactive processes and influence (not always consciously) the underpinning of any suggestion to give a theoretical explanation of the processes in question.

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I will examine Gitano evangelism within the wider framework of growing confessional plurality and try to explore the relations established in the field with religious agents and church members. These range from regimes of knowledge and discourses that traverse narratives of belonging and identity to the game of scales of action that challenges the often-reifying use of ethnonyms (Díaz de Rada 2008). It includes processes of ethnic selfdescription, circularity of meaning in fieldwork relations between investigators and ‘experts’, and even the contesting variety of ‘expert discourses’ concerning culture, tradition and ethnic identity. It is about elements of reflection that come from (and this is what they have in common) new epistemological and empirical conditions in which ethnographic work is carried out and that, as some other authors postulate, recommend a redefinition of the conventions of the classic Malinowskian model, which has been an inspiration to us since the mid-nineteenth century and so account ethnographically for the later modern intercrossing of the ‘traditional’, the ‘urban’ and the ‘massive’ (García Canclini 1989: 232–235; Cruces 2003). In short, I propose a critical approach in relation to the conditions in which we produce our theoretical objects and even the ‘ethnographic encounter’ itself, the ways in which we orient experiences (in the field) and (textual) representations, the theoretical sensitivity with which we generate scientific knowledge about observed and enacted socio-religious realities. I am thinking of a framework of general reflection starting from an ethnographic exploration of Gitano Evangelical contexts in southern Spain, spaces influenced by the historical presence of anti-Gitano and antiProtestant stereotypes and stigmas that are firmly entrenched in the dominant culture and history, representations of Gitano otherness that are charged with hostility and discrimination, and clichés that fuel the imaginary about what it means to be Gitano and what converting to a Protestant and sectarian religion represents. At the same time we encounter a way of dealing with the ethnic Gitano minority that is conditioned by primordialist ideas or dichotomies of ethnic identity, ideas to which investigators are analytically attached in a more or less refined manner. We should become increasingly aware of the problems that a hard definition of identities introduces to an understanding of the transactions of social life. The organisational experience of Andalusian Gitano churches and the confessional associativism connected to them shows that social life cannot be fixed by entrenching it in the existence of homogenous and stable cultural and ethnic groups with an internal logic – a logic that is often overestimated to the detriment of the flows of interaction between minorities and national



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societies, or between the former and the transnational economic and symbolic market. Overall, I suggest a form of reversed reading, a ‘reflexive’ turning back in order to examine the epistemological, theoretical and practical conditions in which we produce our ethnographic experiences and representations, the fetish-categories used by researchers of culture, ethnicity and religion as well as the generally controversial character of the relations that scientists maintain with religious agencies. The Catholic Legacy, Religious Pluralism and the Secular State The so-called ‘return of the religious’ in public debates throughout Europe has appeared in Spain in the form of three convergent phenomena. First, the determination of J. L. Rodríguez Zapatero’s socialist government to consolidate a secular state; second, the reaction of the Catholic hierarchy, which has shown unequivocal signs of its inclination to rearm with the essentialist demands of traditional Spanish Catholicism and its opposition to certain government measures (the legalisation of homosexual unions, the broadening of the abortion law and the introduction of Educación para la Ciudadanía1 as a school subject, for example) (Dietz 2007: 104 and following); and third, the gradual emergence of a confessional pluralism. The latter is thanks mostly to intense migratory flows from Islamic countries (Morocco, Algeria, and Pakistan to a lesser degree, although there are a significant number of Spanish converts to Islam as well as Christian immigrants from other Islamic countries such as Egypt and Lebanon), Eastern Europe (mostly Orthodox Christians from Romania, Bulgaria and the Ukraine) and Latin-American countries (including Brazil) where Evangel­ ical Protestantism has become the main challenger to hegemonic Cathol­ icism in the last few decades. Similarly, many sub-Saharan immigrants are Evangelical Christians on arrival. Any defence of ‘Catholic essentialism’ in the Spanish state tends to be exclusive by definition, and thereby politically designed to force emerging minorities to remain invisible. This is becoming increasingly untenable. In the last twenty years, minorities have greatly diversified the range of expressions, belongings, filiations, loyalties, cartographies and religious practices,

1 This occurred in 2007. The more influential sections of the Catholic hierarchy have been calling it a step towards “estadolatría” or “state-idolatry”, in that it increases government interference in people’s private lives (El País, December 20th, 2008).

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and these can no longer be undermined for the sake of maintaining the privileges demanded and received by the Catholic Church. This occurs within a formally secular framework, in which there is no state religion and the constitution in force since 1978 guarantees religious freedom. The privileges of the Catholic Church in Spain2 probably have no counterpart in the rest of Europe and a number of contradictions have emerged following recent government measures to render the state’s commitment to nonconfessionalism more visible and effective. One example is the contrast between the wishes of the current socialist government, which are in line with respect for religious diversity as recognised in the Constitution, and the continuance of an agreement that favours the Catholic Church in fiscal and educational matters,3 as well as the contradictory, belligerent and openly confrontational position of the Catholic hierarchy in opposition to the secularism of the current government. The presence of Protestants of several denominations, ranging from those long-established to Evangelicals, along with Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Scientologists, Mormons, Orthodox Christians, Buddhists, Baha’i and Hare Krishna communities, to mention a few (most of them recognized as notorio arraigo in the Religious Entities Register at the Spanish Ministry of Justice),4 shows,

2 These privileges derive from four accords signed with the Holy See in 1979 and include an advantageous agreement in economic, military and judicial matters, as well as religious education. Representatives of the Protestant, Jewish and Islamic faiths signed bilateral agree­ments with the government, the first of which in 1992. Protestant entities signed the accord as the Federation of Evangelical Entities of Spain (FEREDE), Jewish entities signed as the Federation of Israelite Communities of Spain (FCIE), and Islamic entities signed as the Islamic Commission of Spain (CIE). Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons (Church of Jesus Christ of the Saints of the Last Days) and Buddhists have been recognised in the last few years as religions with notorio arraigo (well-known deeply-rooted beliefs), and have negotiated bilateral accords with the government. Muslim and Protestant leaders have demanded that the government provide more support for state religious education in their respective faiths. In cases in which the Ministry fails to consider the religious organization to be a religion (as in the very recent case of Scientology), it may be included on a Register of Associations maintained by the Ministry of Interior, which gives them the legal right to be treated as a cultural association. 3 Including the large number of state-funded religious centres, consequently provided with by public funding, as well as religious classes given by teachers appointed by the Catholic Church (though paid by the government), and the financing of the Catholic Church through a detraction of state income in IRPF (Personal Income Tax) instead of a recharge (tax assignment). Together with other privileges, these are all issues that cause discontent among faiths that already enjoy official recognition by government authorities. 4 El Registro de Entidades Religiosas (Religious Entities Register) is the responsibility of the Dirección General de Relaciones con las Confesiones (General Direction of Relations with Religious Confessions) which is under the Justice Ministry. All religious entities wishing to obtain civil legal status must register according to article 6 in the Organic Law of Religious Freedom. The first paragraph of Article 7 in the said law says: “The state, taking into account



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among other things, that the internal dynamics and constant diversification within Christianity itself make it impossible to continue producing homogenous and schematic representations of religious traditions and differences in present-day Spain. Ethnographic research is a good tool with which to discuss the automatic correspondence between place and culture, and to assign to this old relationship a situated character which is in constant construction and change as a result of the shifts, intersections and intermeshing of meaning triggered by globalization processes. Recent concepts such as transnationalism, deterritorialisation and dislocalisation have appeared in response to the radical transformation that modernity has produced in social relations and the “centrality” and “arraigo” (rootedness) of a culture to a territory. The “place” will then no longer be the morphological substratum on which cultures rest, but the crossover or transversality of different lines of strength in the context of a determined situation (Ortiz 1996: 17).5 This book seeks to highlight how all of these processes are unfolding in southern Europe; in places where, as the editors of this volume have pointed out, it is urgent to show the setting of a transformation to which new forms of religious belonging and the present diversity and intertwining of unexpected religious filiations, loyalties and itineraries are also making a contribution. We must go beyond outdated historical associations formulated in the old Mediterranean anthropology which argued that there was a Mediterranean cultural complex, and that the Catholic hierarchy was one of its principal pillars of support. Gitano Evangelism in Southern Spain How can we approach, analytically, identity when your data ask you to renounce that category? (Díaz de Rada 2008: 193)

In this increasingly plural setting, we have seen the emergence and consolidation of an organizational, religious and ethnic movement, which until a religious beliefs in Spanish society, will establish, where applicable, accords or agreements of cooperation with churches, confessions and religious communities included in the Register which for their situation and number of believers have achieved the status of notorio arraigo (‘well-known deeply-rooted’ belief) in Spain.” 5 Ortiz mentions situation, thereby returning to the phenomenologists’ notion – although he refuses to share the concept in Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology that social relations derive solely from interaction between people without considering the objective definition that from the situation social forces are made bearers of unequal legitimacies that are constitutive of the framework in which people act (Ortiz 1996: 17).

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few years ago was scarcely more visible than Spanish Gitanos themselves.6 We have depended on systematic studies carried out in Catalonia (Méndez 2005; San Román 1997; Ramírez Hita 2007) and Andalusia only (Gamella 1996; Cantón et al. 2004), as well as an interesting approach in the case of Portuguese gypsies (Llera Blanes 2008). In contrast, Gypsy evangelism outside the Iberian Peninsula has received the attention of several European scientists (Williams 1991, 1993; Glize 1989),7 who have thoroughly examined the scope of a transnational movement that cannot be considered ‘new’, but that nonetheless still shows itself to be a little known, paradoxical and polysemous phenomenon, as well as a surprising example of contemporary processes of religious innovation and creativity (Nelson 1987; Beckford 1986). Despite this, an analysis of the different facts that intervene in the processes of the expansion of Pentecostal evangelism, the creation of transnational communities of believers, and its cultural impact on European gypsies, is still to a great extent absent from the large academic forums of debate on the growth of religious pluralism in Europe. The new religion was formally established in Spain in the 1960s as the Iglesia Filadelfia (Philadelphia Church), an umbrella name for different religious groups8 with Protestant affiliations that were led by gypsy preachers and doctrinally connected with groups that had emerged with the devel­ opment of reformed Christianity during the 20th century in the United States. One of the most successful outcomes of this historical development was Pentecostal Evangelism, a clear example of cultural and religious globalization (Martin 1990; Cantón 2003). However, what is now transnational

6 The population of Spanish Gitanos is over 5000,000. Nearly all live in Andalusia, dispersed among provinces – much as described in accounts from the 18th century – with most living in Seville and followed by Granada and Cadiz (Gamella 1996; Cantón et al. 2004). 7 In November 2009 Södertörn University (Stockholm, Sweden) held a workshop on Romani Pentecostalism in Europe. Historians, sociologists and anthropologists took part and the discussion will lead to the first collective book on Christian revivalism among gypsies throughout the world and in Europe in particular. Some of the guest investigators were specialists with extensive experience in this field, such as Patrick Williams, Thomas Acton, Elena Marushia-Kova and Veselin Popov, Tomas Hrustic, Ian Hancock, Jorge Bernal, M. Slavkova, Tatiana Podolinska, Gaëlla Loiseau, and David Thurfjell, as well as the author of this chapter. They presented the state of Gypsy Pentecostalism in Sweden, Romania, Turkey, Russia, the United States, Argentina, Bulgaria, Spain, Slovakia, France, Finland and Hungary. 8 The first congregations were formed in Balaguer (Lerida). They then spread to Catalonia and Castille and reached Andalusia at the end of the 1960s (Cantón et al. 2004: 71 and following). They proposed the name Movimiento Evangélico Gitano Español (Spanish Gypsy Evangelical Movement) and later Misión Gitana (Gitano Mission – the name of the movement in France), but these names were rejected by the Spanish authorities because “in Spain, Gitanos are considered Spanish” (Jiménez 1981: 91).



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Pentecostalism actually began over a century ago and sprang from Meth­ odism, a pietistic movement that broke away from Anglicanism and was established in the 18th century by John Wesley in the United States. The most relevant characteristic of Methodism, apart from the attractive ritual and cohesive strength of the various contemporary forms of Pentecostalism, is the connection between the model of ascetic Protestant life and the sentimentalism of some Methodist groups, which Max Weber himself identified (Weber 1998: 186 and following). Methodist sentimentalism becomes evident in the abundance of ecstatic manifestations experienced by those who open themselves up to Pentecos­ tal practices and ritual by means of dance, trancelike states, faith healing, laying on of hands, prophecy, speaking in tongues, possession, liberation and in a wider sense, the charismatic experience through the so-called ‘gifts of the Spirit’. These are religious practices in which the body plays a leading role in the activity and in mystic communication. In the case of Gypsy Pentecostal Evangelism, we easily recognize the importance of this charismatic tradition and its relevance in religious spaces and understand it to be the result of practical, ritualistic and political appropriations that must in turn be understood through relations situated between religion and ‘ethnicity’. ‘Ethnicity’ is considered here to be an epiphenomenon of the intercultural contact, capable of structuring the interaction of this contact by the selection of certain emblems of contrast and in this way defining ‘identity politics’. Understood as ‘politics of recognition’, identity politics mediate the relations between what is intra-cultural and what is intercultural (Dietz 2003: 105). The conversion of gypsies throughout Europe to Pentecostal Christianity has produced one of the most extraordinary contemporary organizational experiences of this ethinic minority. Moreover, their places of worship constitute unique loci in which to test the most schematic views of ethnic identity itself, because they reveal that there are completely different ways of being a Gitano, of conveying multi-belonging and creating intertwining ways of interacting. The rapid formation of formal groups that have grown increasingly powerful and gained greater organizational capacities as they become more institutionalised, together with the global reach of Gypsy Evangelism, has made Pentecostalism the catalyst of the most original ethnic and religious moment in all Gypsy history. To a great extent, the speed with which it has developed among Spanish Gitanos is due to the fact that it mobilises ethnicity and promotes selfmanagement of the processes of change. The movement consists mostly of Gitanos and has been almost exclusively run and organised by them from

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the start. However, another factor has been the decline in a relevant sector of the Gitano associative movement, which emerged in the 1960s with increasing numbers of Gitanos becoming sedentary and urbanised in tandem with the appearance of the evangelical churches. Both associativism and Pentecostalism represented new forms of ‘empowerment’, opening unexpected pathways for political mobilisation and answering a demand made by the gypsies themselves: that of setting up “new intertwined structures different from kinship groups (…) capable of mobilising public resources and awareness” (San Román 1999: 38–39). Pentecostalism has grown independently among Gitanos with a leadership springing from within the Gitano group itself, most of who keep themselves aloof from the non-Gitano world, non-Gitano Pentecostalism and the administrative apparatus. On the other hand, Gitano non-confessional associativism has tried to use ethnicity as a resource and political tool that depends heavily on the public administration. This has created dangerous internal divisions and revealed the contradictions inherent to Gitano participation in nonGitano (democratic) structures (Fresno 1991; San Román 1997). Most Gitano religious congregations clearly intermingle with the social fabric of marginalised neighbourhoods and become visible in towns and cities where Gitanos are concentrated. They flourish in urban areas of social exclusion where conditions often deteriorate into situations of extreme poverty, unemployment and absence of social expectations. These slum areas are the products of ‘development’ and urban planning in the 1960s, which were responsible for forcing Gitano families to move into new housing and to settle in certain areas with the result that their lineages became mixed while their organisational frameworks were dismantled (San Román 1999). Along with the concentration of Gitanos in urban areas, their segregation and sense of uprootedness, the gradual emergence of new spaces for self-recognition was encouraged by religious congregations, agencies and places of worship. Important work began to provide assistance in cases of social exclusion and to define new, different and interlinked methods of solidarity, going beyond the limits of kinship to create unexpected strategies for ethnic mobilisation. These privileged new emerging structures of authority, leadership and power groups as well as the symbolic reconstruction of ‘us’ and the resignification of ‘Gitano traditions’ themselves. Renewed self-perception among Gitano religious believers has produced ‘narratives of coherence’ in which Evangelism is defined as a ‘new way of being a Gitano’, renewing the sense of belonging to an ethnic group that acknowledges and self-proclaims its difference. Many members have



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discovered in religion a novel means of regaining their cohesion after the dismantling of traditional structures, promoting their cultural specificity in renewed ‘politics of recognition’ and legitimating new ways to fight for equal opportunities (San Román 1999; Cantón et al. 2004). Spaces pertaining to the religious have once again emerged as social, political, symbolic and even therapeutic, as well as places for economic exchange. They show all their relational richness in opposition to the trend that explains conversions reductively by arguing that they are benefitting from the erosion of traditional structures and effectively fighting the damage caused by drug use and trafficking.9 We should no longer resort to saying that Evangelism prevents Gitanos from achieving new forms of consensus, or that it triggers divisions which will preclude a united political response to segregation and xenophobia. Neither can it be said, however, that the religious has withdrawn into private, personal sphere as a result of secularisation. It is immediately apparent that there are complex connections between religious representations and practices with other spheres of social and economic life, as well as between representations of the body, dialogue with administrations and ethnic or supposedly associative policies. As previous research into these groups has shown, an understanding can be achieved that counterbalances the reductionist trend. For instance, the first central authority to be recognised and respected by a large number of Gitanos is the Iglesia Filadelfia National Council. This is based in Madrid and consists of a president, elected every year by direct vote, a secretary and several members responsible for zones throughout the whole of Spain. Belonging to the Iglesia Filadelfia ideally extends the duty of helping all Gitano Evangelists, irrespective of their lineage, while prior to the introduction of Evangelism obligations of solidarity remained confined to members of the patrilineal group, holding back the promotion of joint initiatives or a consensus on demands to public administrative bodies (Glize 1989). An extensive description of the historical and anthropological context of Pentecostalism among Gitanos from southern Andalusia, and an examination of the social, political, economic, therapeutic and symbolic uses of the ways Andalusian Gitanos adhere locally to a religious system that is nowadays globalized, has already been presented elsewhere (Cantón et al. 2004). One of the most interesting aspects of this examination involved the manner in which tradition is redefined (the diaspora of gypsies like that of the

9 This follows a familiar route from the arrival of intravenous drugs in Gitano neighbourhoods in the 1980s to the current situation of poly-substance abuse.

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Jews, the Bible as the Promised Land in contrast with the lack of a State) and the consensus that is reached on giving up social and economic practices that Gitanos see as linked with their culture but which new religious ethics have persuaded them to consider unacceptable. These include the controversial cases of their refusing to use any form of physical violence to solve family offences, an inclination (still undeniably faint) to reconsider the issue of the subordination of Gitano women, and the rejection of thievery or trickery as acceptable strategies for survival in a society that is considered xenophobic and non-inclusive.10 Gitano Pentecostal Evangelism is today an organised and complex social movement undergoing rapid processes of transformation.11 It continues to contribute towards the construction of a pan-Gypsy identity project with Christian affiliations, an ethnic foundation and a transnational scale. Although it is no longer a new phenomenon it retains strong potential for creativity and identity renewal. This is despite having been rejected or ignored in the past by Gitanos and non-Gitanos who believed that conversion to the new religion, and the appearance of alternative leaderships and their associated organisations, would separate Gitanos from their ‘culture’ and ‘traditions’. These considerations have been invariably based on the idea that culture and tradition possess some ‘essential’ and stable element, which has perhaps enabled them to be used as a legitimising stratagem for 10 In any case, the more closed the representations, coherence reports and diagnostics we offer from the social sciences, the more open to discussion they appear. Distance is needed for production and, as usual, the further we are when we look at a field of social relations, “the less local and more closed is its panopsis” and the sharper its (ethnic, religious) borders appear defined. These same borders become blurred as we get closer to concrete practices: “In their biographical and subsequently lived connection with certain expert systems, in particular educational and political institutions, and their training within the spheres of intimate belonging, such as family or friendship, agents can construct their special coherence reports and in accordance with these reports, they possible appeal to their identity rights.” Our task as anthropologists is “to understand analytically how these coherence reports are produced on the different scales connected with the action and what different forms of being they illuminate” (Díaz de Rada 2008: 230). 11 For instance, the emergence in 2001 of the Federación de Asociaciones Cristianas de Andalucía (FACCA) [Federation of Christian Associations of Andalusia], the social arm of the Iglesia Filadelfia. It proposes a gradual formal constitution of Evangelical churches in Christian associations in order to gain recognition and access public resources, with the vast support of the almost 10,000 Gitano members of the Iglesia Filadelfia in Andalusia. The historical moment in which FACCA emerged is decisive for several reasons. One is the possibility of counteracting the effects of mass immigration on public opinion with regard to problems that affect the Gitanos. Immigration, with an increase that coincided with one of the lowest points in the trajectory of Gitano associative movements, has heightened the risk of social attention moving definitively to other ethnic minorities (Cantón et al. 2004: 253–255).



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the unilateral construction of nosotros (a sense of “us”). This has not prevented suspicions from arising even now in some Catholic quarters which probably still have a paternalistic attitude towards Gitanos, as well as the more politically active Gitano organisations, which we usually find taking part in the management of administrative bodies and non-confessional associations. However, the problem of schematisation and reification is also present in the analytical work of academics. It is still difficult to produce representations that do not view Gitano ethnicity as a boundary, instead of understanding it as a product of intersections and flows. Ever since the late 1960s, when Barth distinguished between ‘culture’ and ‘ethnic group’ and introduced his definition of ‘ethnic boundary’, the primordialist concept of culture has suffered. Barth held that group identity can persist despite undergoing profound inner transformations, because at the basis of the continuation of a group in terms of ethnic identity is not the cultural content as a given but rather the continual reinvention of intergroup delimitations. It therefore became decisive to have a definition of ‘ethnic boundary’ with an operational character and a definition of ‘ethnic group’ with organisational rather than primordialist criteria, as well as necessary to understand the identity of a group as a contrastive phenomenon that emerges from contacts and develops through interactions (Barth 1976). As recently as the 1980s, the trend in anthropological constructions was to treat cultures as stable objects enclosed within themselves. The idea of an insular identity is to a large extent responsible for the structuralfunctional orientation and a consideration of ethnic constructions that does not recognise the heuristic relevance of the concrete everyday practices of social actors (Harold Garfinkel’s ‘practical activities’). The result was the reification of communities, peoples and cultures. Clear-cut restrictions were invented to demarcate a primordial, intrinsic identity, in contrast to Barth’s arguments that cultures were open entities and were constructed only through interactions. This problem persists. As Ángel Díaz showed after reviewing most of the scientific literature on the subject, we still operate ‘in the field’ with a sense directed at “understanding ethnicity as a relation between dichotomous and reified social subjects” (Díaz de Rada 2008: 193 et al). It is very possible that all of this orthodox sociology, which has tried to fix the category of ethnicity in the intersection between culture and identity, has taken a wrong turn. This is indicated by emerging and unexpected forms of contemporary ethnicity as well as by what Comaroff and Comaroff have called the “global business of ethnicity”: a ‘taken-for-granted’ category which has always been ambiguous as a sociological concept, given

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that it emerges in such different phenomena and expressions that it becomes empirically impossible to speak of one Theory of Ethnicity. The authors state that we can no longer accept oscillating accounts of ethnicity as a monolithic and reified ‘thing’, nor simply as an analytical construction – after all, people kill in its name. Nor can we accept a half-hearted com­ promise between primordialism and instrumentalism, which will only postpone discussion (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009).12 This extensive epistemological and theoretical discussion is present and must be taken into account when we undertake an analytical approach to Gitano communities, which are chiefly seen as forming part of an ‘ethnic minority’ with a certain degree of homogeneity and whose members have more in common with one another than they will ever have with those outside the group. As Ángel Díaz explains, even if Barth placed more emphasis on the formation of borders than on their intercrossing, his “dynamic and transactional reformulation in the original text struggles with a deeply-rooted belief in anthropological tradition: the belief in the existence of different cultures in structurally different groups. Barth showed that the ethnic border could not be simplified to the extreme point of being a territorial border, but allowed us to continue to believe in the virtual existence of borders that are actuated and represented in the contact between ethnic groups” (Díaz de Rada 2008: 195). Religion, Ethnography, Reflexivity Contrary to those who believe that sociology involves some prophetic task, Bourdieu suggests it has a far more clinical and even therapeutic function. Sociology is an instrument for self-analysis that allows everyone to better understand their own social conditions of production and the position they occupy in the social and academic world. It also allows a critical x-ray

12 In their latest book, John and Jean Comaroff put forward a transcultural exploration of the changing relationship between culture and markets, as well as the future of ethnicity and its global business (from casinos run by Native North Americans to ethno-businesses run by traditional chiefs in South Africa). Ethnic populations are re-thinking themselves as corporations while corporations are appropriating ethnic practices in order to open up new markets and inaugurate new types of consumption. The authors posit that the ethnicity cat­ egory, always a porous and equivocal sociological concept, is morphing into exactly the oppo­ site of what orthodox social sciences once pointed to. Ethno-politics, ethno-consciousness, and ethno-practice are changing, as well as our way of apprehending them (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009). I am indebted to Ruy Llera and José Mapril for recommending this book to me.



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to be taken of certain unchallenged ideals (positive objectivity itself, hyperempiricism and the language of neutral observation) as well as the set of scientific practices directed (not always consciously) at achieving those ideals (Bourdieu 1988a: 101). Without leaving the field, we will now move from theoretical sensibility directed at looking for reified social subjects which, on relating with each other, create ‘ethnicity’, to the (false) problem of the ‘subjectivity’ of the anthropologist when producing relations and data during field­ work.  Some authors have suggested that the impact of the idiosyncratic factor on the ideal of objectivity could be avoided by using techniques of confession and self-control. Aside from the dubious efficiency of such measures, this means acknowledging objectivity as the ultimate aim of anthropology. Basing ourselves on Pierre Bourdieu’s reflexive proposal, the recognition of subjectivity must be seen as part of the pursuit of the old ideal of scientific asepsis. The endeavour consists of ‘cleaning up’ the means of ethnographic knowledge, highlighting the objective and seeking the surrender of subjectivist excesses through the naïve method of unmasking them. It seems obvious that we cannot avoid being influenced by our personalities, but it is also questionable that we should, as S.F. Nadel13 has suggested, scrutinise the biases produced by our subjectivity so as to be able to bypass, overcome, negotiate and eradicate them. If Bourdieu’s proposed reflexivity goes beyond this, it is precisely because it surpasses the idea of ‘subjectivity’ and is not directed at creating some grand fiction about ‘coherence’ (which, understood this way, would be put at risk by our condition of ‘authors’ with ‘subjectivity’): an idea of coherence once again governed by a structural and dualist perspective, and directed at the quest for opposites, essentials and compartments which do not usually correspond with the everyday practices, experiences and perceptions of the people we study. The coherence inscribed in the objectifying discourses of our interlocutors in the field usually appears when identity is the theme (that is to say, when agents act from a determined scale of practices to speak to us or speak about who they are).

13 “If subjectivity is inevitable, at least it must reveal itself openly, which means that the underlying reasoning behind observation and description should be clearly formulated, its premises displayed explicitly and its operations revealed step by step (…) I have it suggested that all future anthropologists should undergo psychoanalysis (…) This way the anthropologist will be more easily warned of his unconscious tendency and will be enabled to defend himself from the influence of force that he has learnt to evaluate (Nadel: 1974 [1951]: 61–62).

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Moreover, these fictive coherences are constructed from the experience of ethnography (an intense, absorbing scientific practice that is not free of ambiguity), with all the contradictions and tensions generated by this particular knowledge process. One such contradiction is the con­ version of an experience that we have always defined as re-socialisationimmersion, which occurs either through dialogue or not at all, marked by interactions, mutual expectations, negotiations and complex intersubjective games (fieldwork) into an eminently monologic and objectifying product (the scientific text). It must be remembered that postmodern anthropology has already made these tensions apparent (Marcus and Fischer 2000). However, Bourdieu has been concerned with moving beyond the naïve recognition of the role played by subjectivity and what S. F. Nadel called ‘personal equation’. ‘Epistemological vigilance’ plays with the idea that the ‘fact’ will triumph over the illusion of ‘immediate knowledge’ and the ‘prenotions’ that ‘spontaneous’ sociology leads to. It is interesting to see that Bourdieu unmasks Garfinkel’s ethnomethodological project despite recognising that the constructivist and microsociological perspective plays an indispensable part in the construction of his sociology of practice (Bourdieu 2003: 156–157). This ‘vigilance’ is crucial in the case of sociology and anthropology because we know (and have known at least since Weber) that the border that separates ‘common opinion’ and ‘scientific discourse’ in the social sciences is more porous than in other fields of knowledge. But if Bourdieu’s proposal is that the production of scientific knowledge must go ‘against commonsense’, it seems clear that we are facing a petitio principii that could set up a meta-theoretical referent capable of invigilating those who invigilate. We would then have to ask who in turn legitimises the validity of theories that have been empirically contrasted, if we decide to entrust them with above-mentioned task, or, if we entrust the task of validation to anthropologists themselves, to discuss what role is reflexively played by social factors that mediate the cognitive action (Bourdieu et al. 1991; Sánchez Pérez 2001). If subjectivity is only a (false) part of the problem, this is also because it is not so much ‘subjectivities’ but ‘traditions’ that come into contact during fieldwork. In other words, it is not about getting facts into dialogue with a subjectivist personal history, but rather with the cultural and historical roots of the society that investigators belong to (Ulin 1990: 41–42). There is no other way to understand the role played by prejudiced ideas about the ‘gypsy’, ‘protestant gypsy’, ‘protestant’ and ‘sectarian’ when the loaded question operates on the investigator as a socialised subject in the prejudice



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against the Gitano way of life, in Catholic hegemony and the prevention of other religious options; or else understand them to be ‘the investigated’ which observe and question the investigator from a legitimately defensive, historically constructed position. At least the practice of ‘reflexivity’ enables us to move beyond a naïve trust in the mere recognition of the role of the investigator’s subjectivity in the production of knowledge. Of course, it also helps to bypass the inductivist route, which out of either positivist or naturalist methodology ends up promoting a model of a hyper-empirical social investigator whose relationship with the object is not at all ‘problematized’ (Hammersley and Atkinson 1994). Bourdieu’s reflexivity, called ‘reformist’ or ‘practical’, is presented as a quest for and recognition of the social conditions of the production of social science and the knowledge that it may produce in turn. This is done by analysing the ‘hidden’ assumptions in the usual operations of scientific practice. Consequently, it extends into a real critique of the unknown practical activity, one that finally replaces the investigator in carrying out such vital scientific operations as the actual ‘construction of the object’. This reformist reflexivity does not entail revealing the individual/ subjective history of the investigator. It is, instead, a collective task in that it can only be fully carried out if it is taken up by the team of agents involved in the academic field. In the face of this, the reflexivity that Bourdieu terms ‘narcissistic’ would not be anything other than that which we usually identify with the recognition of subjectivity, and which he identifies with a modality of confession limited to the complacent return of the investigator to his or her own experiences. It thus becomes its own end (Bourdieu 2003: 155–157). Conversely, we never think that those who speak to us during fieldwork are individual agents driven by their own idiosyncratic and singular viewpoints. Rather, on one hand they are interlocutors that are produced by the same expert in their investigatory practice, and on the other, actors who embody social positions that are historically constituted and socially inserted in a complex network of relationships and processes, so that the ethnographer’s task is mainly an analytical one situated in the social conditions of discursive production. Reflexivity also implies this. In fact, as Bourdieu once asked: What is an informant and what exactly is he doing when he elaborates for the anthropologist a representation of his own world, a representation about which he can never clearly know whether its informing and forming schemas are borrowed from the system of characteristic cognitive structures of his own tradition, from the system of the ethnologist, or from an unconsciously

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Who is an informant in the case of an ethnology of religion in which suspicion is bi-directional and easily settles into the cracks of interaction between investigators and those who are investigated, and between investigators and their colleagues who fill with uncertainty the relations between religion and those who think about it? There is a striking absence of reflection on both the determining factors that ethnographic investigation into religious practices identifies in social sciences and the presence and impact of the commonsensical representations (as well as those due to the scientific ideal itself), according to which emerging and established religions embody the return of the irrational and pose a threat to the idea of secularism and to the bases of democratic freedom. The problem logically appears before such processes take place. In fact, the construction of religion as a scientific domain has been a highly ambiguous process. Symbolic systems, festive processes, the sphere of representations or the field of ideology have dominated the configuration of ‘religion’ throughout history. It thus becomes an awkward label on a box filled with leftovers: beliefs, rituals, symbols, totemism, fetishism, animism and a great many others whose unity is claimed almost as an act of faith. It is also an awkward label for investigators of religion themselves, those who are supposed to have no hidden ties with religion and who must prove that they are not concealing any personal interest in relation to the field of religion or loyalty to any system of religious belief.15 As a believer in any religion, it is highly likely that the investigator’s work will be seen as a mystifying and not as a disinterested exercise. At the same time, this label has often proved awkward and uncomfortable for the groups under study themselves: those organisations that refuse to be considered ‘sectarian’ but also refuse to be known as ‘religions’.16 In the case of Gitano agencies, they do not accept 14 Bourdieu continues: “Couldn’t it be that the inquiring relationship in itself, by creating a situation of theoretical interrogation in which the interrogated interrogates himself about what has been until then unproblematic and self-evident, creates a vital alteration capable of introducing a significant bias in all other collected observations, a great deal more crucial than all distortions of ethnocentrism?” (Bourdieu 1992: 152–153). 15 Both interest and the “loss” of interest are of equal importance because the institution organises belief that conceals belief in the institution and all the interests linked with the reproduction of the institution, which has been complicated by the dissolution of the religious – in other words, by the increasing blurring of the former borders of the religious field. In addition, “reversals in the religious field can survive the loss of faith and even a more or less declared rupture with the Church” (Bourdieu 1988b: 93–94). 16 Of course, in a setting marked by religious plurality and competition we find scientologists asserting that Scientology is a religion, Evangelical Christians that they are not a



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being defined as ‘religious’ or as Gitano (churches). They demand to be recognised merely as Christians, and try to detach themselves from the spiritual stagnation that Pentecostals associate with religions, among which they primarily include historical Protestantisms and the Catholic Church. They also openly reject the quick and easy identification of the ethnic character of churches (those they refer to as the culto, “worship”) as well as the simple ‘assistentialism’ that results from the poverty and marginalisation of those who congregate there. The investigators’ obvious lack of interest in personal conversion makes them suspect in the field and in the eyes of religious agents themselves. At least in the case of movements such as Pentecostalism, in which millennialism, proselytism and conversions are of such importance, it is difficult to understand people in places of worship who show no interest whatsoever in converting and devote themselves instead to a task as indecipherable to the ordinary person as anthropology. What is more, most leaders and believers in Pentecostalism have fully internalised the “bad press” that Pentecostalism receives. They are thus ‘informed informants’ who never lower their guard due to a constant expectation of attack for being either Gitanos or Pentecostals. They hope for (and possibly demand) ‘devolution’ because often it is about empowered actors (at least in the case of some pastors, association leaders and regional representatives), for whom the sometime ventriloquist’s task of classic ethnography becomes rather problematic. The role of media-produced representations, images and discourse that anathematise emerging religions must be examined so that we may deepen our knowledge of the contemporary contexts in which ethnography of religions is carried out. This is vital because of the information that is conveyed through the mass media – the Manichean and schematic representation that it transmits of what for believers is a universe logically full of feeling, its valuation and representations of what remains outside this universe. This makes them suspicious of what people who approach churches without necessarily looking for repentance or conversion really want. One of the results of this is that the ‘native point of

religion, and Jehovah’s Witnesses seeking to be recognized as Christians instead of marginalized as a sect within Christianity. However, these all become, without exception, sects in the common sense discourse. This reminds us of the heuristic possibilities of exploring the internal uses of the term ‘sect’ in processes that mark the limits of the religious field, and with it, in the struggle for a definition of religious competition and of the same legitimate production of salvific belongings, of ultimate meanings. In turn this means getting proposals put forward by Bourdieu (2006) and Goffman (1989) into dialogue. I have endeavoured to express and find applications for this dialogue in previous work (Cantón 1999).

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view’ can no longer be collected without contradictions – if indeed it ever could have been. Our descriptions therefore become heteroglossic. Numerous marks of ‘reflexive’ effort are left on them to negotiate the blurriness of the borders between multiple clashing languages, the confrontation between categories of different levels of abstraction, explicative circularity itself, the entry into the text of discourses informed by objectifying categories, the competition with other mediators, cultural and political agents and ‘expert systems’ such as the mass media itself – that equally seek to produce whole images of the situation (Cruces 2003: 174). Suspicion moves and grows strong in the cracks and fissures in anthropological work with religions. With ‘other’ religions, mainly ‘sectarian’ minorities closer to us, our sensitivity to difference operates under pressure and ethnographic ‘alienation’ undergoes tensions that deserve attention (Cantón 2008). Proof of this lies in the many biased opinions in the literature about these groups, which are observed for the following reasons: because of their rarity, extravagance and their standing out suspiciously in a time of desacrilization, secularisation, and the undeniable supremacy of science; because of their nostalgia for structure and certainties in a world of axiological and moral relativity; because they are organised groups that manipulate, divide, deconstruct and threaten ‘identities’ and trample on ‘traditions’. Alternatively they are viewed as conflictive sectors of societies, already seen by the majority as problematic, pre-constructed as ‘social acts’ that are demarcated, understood and qualified by ‘spontaneous sociology’. These are circumstances that oblige us as anthropologists to keep a close watch on our own possible complicity with marking and controlling practices. Gitano Pentecostalism is a truly interpretative challenge because in the social imaginary of most people it is associated with religious fanaticism, poverty, illiteracy, drugs and deprivation, in fact the social fabric of extreme marginalisation. There may be a greater likelihood that my categories of interpretation as a socialised individual will govern my analytical disposition where it becomes more evident that porosity exists in the cultural borders that bring me closer to the studied groups, or the closer they are to my everyday experiences.17 It then becomes more likely that I will stop seeing 17 In a suggestive passage in his article “Understanding a primitive society”, first published in 1964, Winch reflects on the way in which we should understand beliefs and magic practices like that of the Azande. These form essential foundations of the social like of the Azande, in contrast to beliefs that can be sustained or magic rites that can be practiced by



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Pentecostal Gitanos as they really are: as cultural and socially heterogeneous groups with conventions, negotiations and conflicts, organised groups who move about along the intersections, who interact constantly with the non-Gitano world and cross borders which we often imagine to be fixed, and who most probably are neither Gitanos nor Pentecostals all of the time. In the long run, it could turn out to be less costly to see this all, and to give a far off example, as among the Mayan-Quiché Indians who worship the mysterious stone carving of Pascual Abaj on a remote hill in the mountainous north of Guatemala. References Barth, F. 1976. Los grupos étnicos y sus fronteras. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Beckford, J.A. 1986. New Religious Movements and Rapid Social Change. California: Sage. Bourdieu, P. 2006. ‘Génesis y estructura del campo religioso’, Relaciones 108 (XXVII). ——. 2003. El oficio de científico. Ciencia de la ciencia y reflexividad. Madrid: Anagrama. ——. 1992. ‘Postfacio’, in Rabinow, P., Reflexiones sobre un trabajo de campo en Marruecos. Madrid: Júcar, 151–154. ——. 1988a. ‘Objetivar el sujeto objetivante’, in Cosas dichas por Pierre Bourdieu. Barcelona: Gedisa, 98–101. ——. 988b. ‘Sociólogos de la creencia y la creencia de los sociólogos’, in Cosas dichas por Pierre Bourdieu. Barcelona: Gedisa, 93–97. Bourdieu, P., J.C. Chamboredon and J.C. Passeron. 1991. El oficio de sociólogo. Mexico: Siglo XXI. Cantón Delgado, M. 2009. La razón hechizada. Teorías antropológicas de la religión. Barcelona: Ariel (2nd ed.). ——. 2008. ‘Los confines de la impostura. Reflexiones sobre el trabajo de campo etnográfico entre minorías religiosas’, Revista de Dialectología y Tradiciones Populares LXIII (1): 147–172. Cantón Delgado, M. 2003. ‘Religiones Globales, Estrategias Locales. Usos políticos de las conversiones en Guatemala’, in Pérez, B. and G. Dietz (eds), Globalización, resistencia y negociación en América Latina. Madrid: Los Libros de la Catarata. ——. 1999. ‘El culto gitano y los procesos de deslegitimación: Definiciones y comptetencias’, in Rodrígeuz Becerra, S. (ed.), Religión y Cultura, Vol. 1. Sevilla: Consejería de Cultura y Fundación Machado, 165–180. Cantón Delgado, M. et al. 2004. Gitanos pentecostales. Una mirada antropológica a la Iglesia Filadelfia en Andalucía. Sevilla: Signatura Eds. members of our own culture: “… The difference is not merely one of degree of familiarity, although this may be more important that in seems at first. Concepts of witchcraft and magic in our culture, at least since the advent of Christianity, have been parasitic on, and a perversion of other orthodox concepts, both religious and, increasingly, scientific. To take an obvious example, you could not understand what was involved in conducting a Black Mass unless you were familiar with the concept of a proper Mass and, therefore, with the whole complex of religious ideas from which the Mass draws its sense. Neither would you understand the relations between these without taking into account of the fact that Black practices are rejected as irrational (in the sense proper to religion) in the system of beliefs on which these practices are thus parasitic” (Winch 1994: 40–41).

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Comaroff, J. and J. Comaroff. 2009. Ethnicity, Inc. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cruces, F. 2003. ‘Etnografías sin final feliz. Sobre las condiciones de posibilidad del trabajo de campo urbano en contextos globalizados’ Revista de Dialectología y Tradiciones Populares LVIII (2): 161–178. Díaz de Rada, A. 2008. ‘¿Dónde está la frontera? Prejuicios de campo y problemas de escala en la estructuración étnica en Sápmi’ Revista de Dialectología y Tradiciones Populares LXIII (1): 187–235. Dietz, G. 2007. ‘Invisibilizing or Ethnicizing Religious Diversity? The Transition of Religious Education Towards Pluralism in Contemporary Spain’, in Jackson, R., S. Miedesma, W. Weisse and J.P. Willaime (eds), Religion and Education in Europe. Developments, Contexts and Debates. Germany: Waxmann, 103–132. ——. 2003. Multiculturalismo, interculturalidad y educación: Una aproximación antropológica. Granada: CIESAS and Universidad de Granada. Fresno García, J.M. 1991. ‘Dictamen sobre articulación de la participación social y movimiento asociativo’, in Estudio Sociológico sobre la Comunidad Gitana en España. Marco Teórico. Madrid: Asesoría de Programas de Servicios Sociales (P.A.S.S.) (Mimeo). Gamella, J.F. 1996. La población gitana en Andalucía. Seville: Consejería de Trabajo y Asuntos Sociales de la Junta de Andalucía. García Canclini, N. 1989. Culturas híbridas. Estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad. Mexico: Grijalbo. Glize, R. 1989. ‘L’Église Évangélique Tsigane comme voie posible d’un engagement culturel nouveau’, in VV.AA., Actes du Cólloque pour le Trentiénne anniversaire des Etudes Tsiganes. Paris: Syros, 433–443. Goffman, E. 1989. Estigma. La identidad deteriorada. Buenos Aires: Amorrortu. Hammersley, M. and P. Atkinson. 1994. Etnografía. Métodos de investigación. Barcelona: Paidós. Jiménez Ramírez, A. 1981. Llamamiento de Dios al pueblo gitano. Jerez de la Frontera: Talleres Gráficos de Anfra. Llera Blanes, R. 2008. Os Aleluias. Ciganos evangélicos e música. Lisbon: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais. Marcus, G. and M. Fischer. 2000. La antropología como crítica cultural. Un momento experimental en las ciencias humanas. Buenos Aires: Amorrortu. Martin, D. 1990. Tongues of Fire. The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America. Oxford: Blackwell. Méndez, C. 2005. Por el camino de la participación. Una aproximación contrastada a los procesos de integración social y política de los gitanos y las gitanas. Ph.D. Dissertation, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Nadel, S.F. 1974 (1951). Fundamentos de Antropología Social. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Nelson, G. 1987. Cults, New Religions and Religious Creativity. London: Routledge & Kegan. Ortiz, R. 1996. ‘Otro territorio’, Antropología. Revista de pensamiento antropológico y estudios etnográficos 12: 5–22. Ramírez Hita, S. 2007. Entre calles estrechas. Gitanos: Prácticas y saberes médicos. Barcelona: Bellaterra. Sánchez Pérez, F. 2001. ‘Antropología Social, ¿hacia una disciplina sin sujeto de conocimiento?’, in Cátedra, M. (ed.), La mirada cruzada en la Península Ibérica. Madrid: La Catarata, 107–120. San Román, T. 1999. ‘El desarrollo de la conciencia política de los gitanos’, Gitanos, pensamiento y cultura 0: 36–41. ——. 1997. La diferencia inquietante. Viejas y nuevas estrategias culturales de los gitanos. Madrid: Siglo XXI. Ulin, R. 1990. Antropología y Teoría Social. Mexico: Siglo XXI. Weber, M. 1989. La ética protestante y el espíritu del capitalismo. Madrid: Alianza.



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Williams, P. 1993. ‘Questions pour l’étude du movement religieux pentecôtiste chez les Tsiganes’, in Belmont, N. and F. Lautman (eds), Ethnologie des faits religieux en Europa Paris: Editions du CTHS, 433–445. ——. 1991. ‘Le miracle et la nécessité: à propos du développement du Pentecôtisme chez les Tsiganes’ Extraits Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religions 73: 81–78. Winch, P. 1994. Comprender una sociedad primitiva. Barcelona: Paidós.

PART THREE

AN EPILOGUE

MAP AND IMAGINATION: TOWARDS A PHENOMENOLOGY OF REMOTE PLACES Ramon Sarró In a classic volume dedicated to “anthropology at home”, British anthropologist Edwin Ardener wrote an insightful article entitled “On remote areas” (Ardener 1987). It was a provocation, surely. Why should anybody working ‘at home’ care about remoteness? In this epilogue to a volume dedicated to religious sites and politics in Southern Europe, I would like to take up Ardener’s insights and to suggest that we could indeed explore Europe as a remote place. It is indeed remote, not only for those who live away from it, but even to those who claim to have inhabited it for many centuries. Some readers may intuitively think that by ‘remote’ I mean a ‘distant place’. Not exactly: as Edwin Ardener taught us in his text, distance and remoteness are two different things. A remote place, the Oxford professor wrote, is not a place that is far away, but one that has no continuity with the experienced place, with the Lebenswelt we find ourselves in. As its etymology indicates, a remote place is a removed place: a place taken away from our most direct sensorial experience. One of the mistakes of anthropology has been the assumption that the human form of living through space is clearly translatable from one culture to another, which has given rise to acritically accepting assertions such as that the Nuer live in Nuerland or that the pastoralist Fulbe peoples of West and Central Africa come from Egypt. It would have been better, I would like to suggest, to dedicate our ethnographic efforts at elucidating what Nuerland means for the Nuer or what images are evoked by the word ‘Egypt’ in the historical and cultural imagination of some herders who today live thousands of miles away from the modern state called Egypt. I do not intend to be a relativist and claim that each culture is entitled to its own way of thinking space or of being in it. In fact, the opposite obtains. All humans independently of our cultural diversity have the same common schemata that allow us to classify the sensorial world in terms of right and left, front and back, up and down (we could also add the living and the dead to obtain Heidegger’s ontological ‘quaternity’, but the universality of a clear-cut division between the living and the dead remains more uncertain than the purely spatial one). The issue has been discussed by innumerable

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geographers and specialists of religious symbolism (see, for example, Tuan 1974 and Knott 2005). But between this and asserting that all people think of ‘territory’ in similar terms there is a big gap. After many years of conducting research among the Baga of Guinea, I still do not know exactly what they have in their minds when they speak of Dabaka, a concept usually translated into French as le pays baga (more or less ‘Baga land’ in English). A handy translation, but Dabaka is neither a ‘country’ nor does it strike me as a clear-cut territory or land in the modern politico-territorial sense of these terms. Nor do I know, of course, what they have in mind when they are speaking of Databo, a concept they translate as ‘Europe’ – certainly not the same as me. ‘Map is not territory’ claims an old philosophical dictum used by Jonathan Z. Smith as the title of a well-known book (Smith 1978). The knowl­ edge of the map has made us un-know the territory. The rise of geometry has led us to forget, as Husserl taught us, that the earth, as place lived through (and not as a concept thought by the intellect), is flat and does not move around (Husserl 1989 [1934]). The map is not a primary or direct representation of the land, but a tool to represent space in a very different way as we perceive it in reality, a tool whose complexity we are not usually aware of. I realized this when I offered an Atlas to some kids of the Baga community where I lived who were always asking me where I came from. A bit naively, I thought that by giving them an Atlas and showing them a map of Africa and a map of the Iberian Peninsula they would understand my origins in regards to where we were at that moment. However, they were not impressed. What they wanted to know was where I came from, and not in what page they could find an orange drawing of a thing called Catalogne. “Okay, this picture is your country, but you, de miyefe?, where do you come from?”, they insisted. When I started doing oral history with the Bagas, I often came across the statement given to me by the elders that the Baga came from “Itchopi”. However, when I asked where Itchopi was, they did not know. Itchopi was Itchopi: the place they came from. In fact, they did not even understand my question. What does ‘where’ mean? The Dabaka is the world we live in: Itchopi the world we come from. Some of the young people who attended school and who therefore were more documented told me the Itchopi was actually Ethiopia or Egypt. In other words, they wanted to localize Itchopi’s remote location in the map of Africa: it is this green spot with the word ‘Ethiopia’ stamped on it. But Ethiopia is precisely one of the most problematic and polysemic topographic concepts ever known to humanity: its referent is not the same in the Homeric texts, in the Old Testament, in a



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seventeenth-century Portuguese text (where sometimes what is today Guinea appears as Aethiopia Minor), in the writings of Marcus Garvey or Bob Marley’s music. For thousands of years, ‘Ethiopia’ has been a signifiant flottant to cling to Levi-Strauss’s buoy. So, to say that according to oral history the Baga are of Ethiopian origin (in the cartographic sense of the word) would be a very serious historiographical error. The oral history does not tell us that the Baga were ever in Ethiopia. What it does tell is that the Baga locate their origin in a remote area that in one way or another has come to be known as Itchopi. Europe as a Remote Place The example of the Baga Itchopi as a remote area shows us that behind cartographic places there is a cultural history anthropologists should be aware of (or so I would like to suggest). Behind the very idea of ‘Africa’ lays not only a continent but also a complex history of representations. Similarly, Wyatt MacGaffey, in an article that all anthropologists interested in place and representation should know, explored the web of meanings attributed to locations such as ‘Europe’ or ‘the West’ by the inhabitants of the Kongo basin, showing how important it is to understand peoples cosmology in order to map out their cosmographies (MacGaffey 1972). Obviously, we cannot be as naïve as to think that African folks of today believe that Europe is the place of the dead people (as many Bakongo of past centuries probably did). Still, when we hear about ‘Europe’ in non-Western contexts we must bear in mind that Europe may have been a remote place, and for many it continues to be so. ‘Europe’ is also a signifiant flottant with no precise meaning or location. A friend from Guinea-Bissau told me recently that when he lived in his Mandingo village in Guinea-Bissau in the 1970s and 1980s, people heard the stories of adventurers who had gone to Europe as if they had travelled to another world. Many believed that the coldness reported by migrants to Europe was indeed the pleasant freshness that, according to the Mandingo Muslim imaginary, characterized the state of glory that should follow the torrid life on earth. Consequently, many ‘adventurers’ (as Mandingo migrants are usually referred to) prepared their journeys to Europe convinced that they were travelling to the world of glory… A trend of the cultural history of mankind is the conversion of remote places in specific geographic locations, those that are above or below, left or right, in front or in the back of us. Concepts such as ‘Brazil’, ‘Guinea’, and ‘Ethiopia’ once alluded to remote areas and have now a concrete

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geographical location. Perhaps a feature of the Mandingo adventurers is, precisely, their ability to establish the concrete reality of many remote places. In this sense, adventurers (and not only for the Mandingo) are like tricksters: mediators who connect worlds so far non-communicated. Some of them, upon returning and explaining their travels, demystify the remote locations and help inscribe them in the cartography. This would be the case of adventurers of the Ibn Battuta type. Others, however, present the remote as fantastic and help keep them ‘at bay’, establishing that remote locations may be accessible, but only after many difficulties, hardships and risks. Such would be the case of adventurers of the Marco Polo type. No doubt, to this type belonged the travellers whom my friend (himself an adventurer) listened to in his village of West Africa when he was small. With their adventures, they fed the imagination of young listeners and of future adventurers. They will look for Europe in Europe, and will probably end up being unable to locate their imagined Europe in Europe. Europe, to fuse Foucault with Ardener, is a remote heterotopy. Not only so for migrants who do not find the Europe they had dreamed of in the experienced Europe that is now excluding them; the idea of a single, united Europe with one tradition and one religious heritage is a remote heterotopy for everybody, whether foreigners or natives to the continent. Europe is also a ‘remote area’ and the difference between the way it is imagined and the way it is lived through is just getting bigger and bigger. When we study religions, the distinction between ‘concrete’ and ‘remote’ places I am here advocating for can become particularly relevant, as religion is simultaneously a way to remove our existential earthly life and place it in a spiritual context and a way to root the spiritual domain into concrete sites. As Jonathan Z. Smith wrote: “Religion is the quest, within the bounds of the human, historical condition, for the power to manipulate and negotiate one’s situation so as to have ‘space’ in which to meaningfully dwell (…) Religion is a distinctive mode of human creativity, a creativity which both discovers and creates limits for humane existence. What we study when we study religion is the variety of attempts to map, construct and inhabit such positions of power through the use of myths, rituals and experiences of transformation” (Smith 1978: 291). Smith was one of the first scholars to insist that the way places are imagined by competing religious cultures has to be as important to researchers as the way the soil is inhabited by its believers. In our case, this imagination have given rise to what Griera in this volume calls ‘new religious geographies’, construed either through discussion (Mapril), confrontation (Fedele, Leghari), negotiation (Seraidari), creativity (Roussou), strategy (Saraiva),



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reflexivity and self-perception (Bertolani and Perocco, Blanes). New senses of place and belonging emerge, often linked to transnational imageries (Sanchez). The ethnographic richness of this volume shows that, indeed, diverse religious communities constuct different places in which to meaningfully dwell and that, together with a sustained debate and theorization on the secularization of European institutions, we ought not to foget to keep a close ethnographic glaze at the way concrete sites and politics emerge in the new religious cartographies of a continent that, only remotely, we can consider as being secular. References Ardener. E. 1987. ‘Remote Areas: Some Theoretical Considerations’, in Jackson, A. Anthro­ pology at Home (ASA Monograph 25). London: Tavistock. Husserl, E. 1989 (1934). ‘L’arche-originaire terre ne se meut pas: recherches fondamentales sur l’origine phénoménologique de la spatialité de la nature’, in La Terre ne se Meut Pas. Translated by the German by D. Frank. Paris: Minuit. Knott, K. 2005. The Location of Religion: a Spatial Analysis. London: Equinox Publishing. MacGaffey, W. 1972. ‘The West in Congolese Experience’, in Curtin, Ph. D (ed.). Africa and the West: Intellectual Responses to European Culture. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Smith, J.Z. 1978. Map is not Territory: Essays on the History of Religions. Leiden: Brill. Tuan, Y.-F. 1975. Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes and Values. Englewood Cliffs. N.J.: Prentice-Hall Inc.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Barbara Bertolani is Ph.D. in Sociology and lecturer at the University of Molise (Italy), where she teaches Sociology and Economic Sociology. From 2008 to 2012 she participated to the national research project “Religious Pluralism in Italy,” funded by the Italian government. Bertolani researches focus on Sikhs in Italy, on transnational Sikh families and on cultural and religious identity of second generation Sikhs. She has recently published “Transnational Sikh marriages in Italy”, in K. Jacobsen and K. Myrvold (eds.), Sikhs Across Borders: Transnational Practices of European Sikhs, London, Bloomsbury, 2012, pp. 68–83 and (with F. Ferraris and F. Perocco) “Mirror Games: A Fresco of Sikh Settlements among Italian Local Societies”, in K. Jacobsen and K. Myrvold (eds.), Sikhs in Europe: Migration, Identities and Representations, Farnham, Surrey, Ashgate, 2011, pp. 133–161. Ruy Blanes is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Bergen, Norway, and associate researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences, Lisbon. His research interests include religion, Christianity, prophetism, messianism, temporality, mobility and belonging, Africa, Angola, Atlantic. He is coeditor of the journal Religion & Society: Advances in Research and author of A Prophetic Trajectory: Ideologies of Time, Space and Belonging in an Angolan Prophetic Movement (Berghahn); he is also coeditor of Encounters of Body and Soul in Contemporary Religious Practices: Anthropological Reflections. Manuela Cantón earned her Ph.D. degree in Social Anthropology. She is currently a Professor in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Seville (Spain). She has published numerous articles about the diverse aspects involved in the analysis of the different protestant organizations: Ethnicity, politics, identity and stigma, gender politics or therapeutical and symbolic practices, and also about theoretical and methodological problems in the socio-anthropological approach to religions. She has done ethnographic fieldwork on religious minorities and ethnic and political movements in Guatemala, south-east México (Chiapas) and south of Spain (Andalusia), among Gypsy communities. Her main project at the moment is the study of the ethnopolitical construction of Gypsy Pentecostalism in transnational perspective (National Project I+D, 2011– 2014). Her most recent publications: “Gypsy Pentecostalism, Ethnopolitical

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Uses and Construction of Belonging in the South of Spain”, Social Compass (2010), “Guatemala. Protestantismos, violencias y heteroglosias en perspectiva”, Pluralización religiosa de América Latina (Colef, México; 2011); “Echando fuera demonios. Neopentecostalismo, exclusión étnica y violencia política en Guatemala”, Las figuras del Enemigo (El Salvador, 2012). Anna Fedele is an anthropologist whose research focuses on issues of gender, religion and corporeality. She is currently a research fellow of the Center for Research in Anthropology of the Lisbon University Institute and a chercheure associée of the Groupe de Sociologie Politique et Morale of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Anna is the author of Looking for Mary Magdalene: Alternative Pilgrimage and Ritual Creativity at Catholic Shrines in France (Oxford University Press 2013) and has co-edited Encounters of Body and Soul in Contemporary Religious Practices (Berghahn 2011) and Gender and Power in Contemporary Spirituality (Routledge 2013). Ester Gallo is currently Assistant Professor in Social Anthropology in the Department of International Relations at the University of Gediz, Turkey, and Honorary Fellow at the Centre for South Asian Studies, University of Edinburgh, UK. She holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Siena (Italy) and has been Marie Curie Fellow in Migration Studies at the University of Sussex (UK). Her research interests cut across migration, religion (Catholicism and Hinduism), kinship, memory and elites, with specific reference to South Asia and Mediterranean Europe. She has published in international journals on the interrelated topics of marriage and migration, global Catholicism and transnationalism. She is at present preparing a monograph titled The Fall of Gods. Kinship Memories and Middle-Class Modernity in South India, and co-authoring a book with Francesca Scrinzi on Migrant Masculinities in the International Division of Care. Mar Griera works as a lecturer at the department of Sociology, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She was awarded a Ph.D. on Sociology from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (2009) for her work on public policies and religious minorities. She is research associate at the ISOR (UAB) and at the Centre de Sociologie des Religions et d’Éthique Sociale de la Université Marc Bloch (Strasbourg, France). She has been visitor fellow at the Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs (Boston University) and at the Institute for Migration and Ethnic Studies (Amsterdam University) among



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others. From 2000 onwards she has been researching on sociology of religion and has published several books and articles in this area. Inam Leghari has completed his Ph.D. studies in Social Anthropology from University of Aegean, Greece. Currently he is working as Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Qauid-i-Azam University, Islamabad. His research interests include Transnationalism and diaspora studies, transnational Islam, political Islam and Anthropology and Development. José Mapril holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon, with a research about transnationalism and Islam among Bangladeshis in Lisbon. Currently he is an invited lecturer in Anthropology at the New University of Lisbon and a research fellow at CRIA– UNL (Centre for Anthropological Research, New University of Lisbon). In 2009, José Mapril was a visiting postdoctoral fellow at the Univerisity of Sussex and between 2008 and 2012 was a member of CRIA executive committe. His current research project is about remigration and transnational political imaginaries among Luso-Bangladeshis in Europe. He has published in both national and international journals. Fabio Perocco is researcher in sociology at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. Main recent publications: Trasformazioni globali e nuove disuguaglianze. Il caso italiano, FrancoAngeli, 2012; Racial inequality in Italy, “Temperanter”, 2011, vol. II: 17–28; with Bertolani B., Ferraris F., Mirror Games: A Fresco of Sikhs Settlements among Italian Local Societies, in Jacobsen K.A., Myrvold K. (eds), Sikhs in Europe. Migration, identities and representations, Ashgate, 2011: 133–162; Immigrant women workers in the underground economy between old and new inequities, “International Sociology Review”, vol. 20, 2, 2010: 385–390. Nora Repo is Ph.D. in Comparative Religion for Åbo Akademi University, Faculty of Human Sciences, with a thesis entitled “An Islamic Mosaic – Women’s Identities in Transition. Albanian Muslim women in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia”. Her research interests are on religion and gender, religion and politics in Eastern Europe. Her main research so far has been on mapping religiosity of Muslim women in former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia as a part of and a way to express identity. She has also been been very active in diverse inter-religious and ecumenical contexts, projects and events, working as a translator for the Embassy of Iran in Helsinki.

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Eugenia Roussou is a postdoctoral research fellow at CRIA/FCSH, New University of Lisbon. She has published on issues of religion and spirituality in Greece, where she has conducted extensive fieldwork. She is currently working on contemporary spirituality, religious pluralism, complementary healing and spiritual creativity in present-day Portugal. Silvia Sai completed her Ph.D. in Social Anthropology in 2010 at the University of Siena, focusing on religious diversity and migration in Italy, which she explores through the case study of the relationship between the Sikh religious community, local Italian political and Catholic authorities in Northern Italy (Reggio Emilia). She attended a postgraduate course in Medical Anthropology at the University of Milano-Bicocca (2005–2006). From 2004 to 2005 (12 months) she conducted ethnographic fieldwork among Sikh migrants in Reggio Emilia province and in 2005 she graduated at the University of Bologna, Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, with a dissertation in Cultural Anthropology on “Kinship Networks and Transnational Families among Indian sikh migrants in Reggio Emilia” (110/110 cum laude). Her research resulted in various chapters, among them the chapter (Riconfigurazioni familiari e identità di genere tra i migranti Sikh a Reggio Emilia)1 for the peer-reviewed volume Stranieri in Italia, (Eds. A. Colombo, G. Sciortino, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2008). Cristina Sánchez-Carretero is a staff researcher at the Institute of Heritage Sciences (Incipit), Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). She holds a Ph.D. by the University of Pennsylvania (2002) and was a post-doctoral visiting researcher at Harvard University (2004). Her areas of interest are: memorials, processes of traditionalization and heritage formation; the intersection of migration and cultural heritage (in particular, the role of the revitalization of religious practices after migrating); and the role of rituals and expressive culture in contemporary societies. She has published extensively on these topics, including the book Grassroots Memorials. The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death (Berghahn, 2011), co-edited with Peter Jan Margry; also her works on heritagization have been published in Sage, Palgrave and in journals such as Ethnologia Europaea and the Journal of American Folklore. She coordinated the projects: “An Ethnographic Archive in the Aftermath of March 11th Attacks in Madrid” (2005–2009); the CSIC

1 Aspects of family and gender identity redefinition among sikh migrants in Reggio Emilia.



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team that participated in the 7FP project CRIC “Cultural Heritage and the Reconstruction of Identities after Conflict” (2008–2012); and her latest research project deals with the processes of heritagization linked to the pilgrimage from Santiago to Finisterre and the effects that is having in the local populations (2009–2012). Sandra Santos is Associate Professor in the Department of Social Anthropology at Pablo de Olavide University (Seville) and Ph.D. candidate in Social Anthropology at University of Barcelona. She obtained a FPU Scholarship (Scholarship for Lecturer Formation) from the Ministry of Sciences and Innovation of Spain (2006–2010). She obtained with Dis­ tinction the Diploma in Advanced Studies (DEA) (2007) and the MPhil in Social Anthropology with Extraordinary Degree Award at the University of Barcelona (2005). Her main research interests are Sikhs, migration, the body and gender. Her doctoral research focuses on the Sikh community of Barcelona. The aim of her thesis is to study the changes produced in the Sikh community after the migratory process, especially regarding the body, embodiment and bodily practices. In this research she works from a perspective of multi-sited ethnography, having conducted more than 18 months of anthropological fieldwork in Barcelona, London, Delhi and Punjab. This approach allows her to make comparisons among the Sikhs communities in London, India and Barcelona. She is member of the Consolidated Group of Research “Multiculturalism and Gender” and of the Working Group “The Body” of the Institut Català d’Antropoligia (ICA). Clara Saraiva is a senior researcher at the Lisbon Institute for Scientific Tropical Research (Instituto de Investigação Científica Tropical- IICT) in Lisbon, a researcher of the Center for Research in Anthropology (CRIA) and a Professor at the Department of Anthropology, Faculty of Social and Human Sciences, Universidade Nova de Lisboa. She was a Visiting Professor at Brown University and a Research Fellow at the Watson Institute for Inter­ national Studies at Brown (USA 2001–2002 and 2008) and at the Université d’Aix-en-Provence (France-2005). Her main fields of research deal with religion and ritual (conceptions of death in Africa and Portugal), transnational religion and transnational therapeutic practices among migrants from Guinea-Bissau and Brazil in Lisbon. She is one of the co-founder of the network on Migration and Health, established in Lisbon in January 2006. In the last six years she has been researching the expansion of the AfroBrazilian cults in Portugal.

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She is a member of the board/direction of the Society for International Ethnology and Folklore (SIEF), of the Association of Portuguese Anthro­ pology (APA), of the Center for Research in Anthropology (CRIA), and of the Ethics task Force of the World Council of Anthropological associations (WCAA). Ramon Sarró is a University Lecturer in the Social Anthropology of Africa. Before joining ISCA he has been a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon (2002–2012). He studied philosophy in Barcelona and social anthropology in the UK, completing his Ph.D. on iconoclasm, politics and religion among Baga (Republic of Guinea) at University College London (1999), under the supervision of Philip Burnham and Barrie Sharpe. Between 2000 and 2002, he held the Ioma Evans-Pritchard Junior Research Fellowship at Saint Anne’s College (Oxford). In 2009 he published the monograph The Politics of Religious Change on the Upper Guinea Coast: Iconoclasm Done and Undone (EUP for the IAI), which was co-winner of the ‘Aumory Talbot Award’ of the Royal Anthropological Institute of the UK and Ireland. In 2010/2011 he was an internal fellow, Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale. Since 1992 Sarró has con­ducted fieldwork on prophetic movements in West Africa (Guinea and Guinea-Bissau), Central Africa (Congo and Angola) and Europe (Portugal), focusing on the diaspora of the Congolese Kimbanguist church. In 2007–2010 he directed the NORFACE project “Recognizing Christianity: How African Christians Redefine the European Religious Heritage”, and is currently directing two research projects on religion in Africa: one on Guinea-Bissau and the other one on Angola, both funded by the FCT (the Portuguese Research Council). He is currently co-editing, with Simon Coleman and Ruy Blanes, the annual journal Religion and Society: Advances in Research (Berghahn books). At present he is researching into the interface between prophecy, art and the ‘invention of writing’ in Central and West Africa. Katerina Seraïdari, Ph.D. in social anthropology earned at EHESS-Toulouse in 2000, is an associated member of LISST-Centre d’Anthropologie Sociale in Toulouse and an EURIAS junior fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Vlaams Academisch Centrum of Brussels (2012–2013). She has written three books to date, Le culte des icônes en Grèce (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2005), in French; “May her grace be with us!” Devotional practices and ideological conflicts in the Cyclades (Athens: ErinniPhilippotis, 2007), published in Greek; and La ville, la nation et l’immigré.



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Rapports entre Grecs et Turcs à Bruxelles (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2012), in French. Virtudes Téllez is Tutor Professor of Anthropology at The National University of Distance Education in Spain. Her Ph.D. dissertation focused on citizenship and religiosity of Young Muslims in Madrid. She is currently doing research in the project “Culture, Gender and Islamophobia: Islam in Diaspora”. Her current research interests range from violence, emotions and political uses of the body to knowledge and ethnographic production, ethic in fieldwork and uses of Heritage. These topical and theoretical concerns will be grounded in ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Spain, Portugal, Morocco, Algeria, Angola and Mozambique. Trine Stauning Willert is assistant professor in Modern Greek Studies at the University of Copenhagen. Her research interests include national identity, religion, education and literature in contemporary Greece. She is currently associated with the research project Many Roads in Modernity: The Transformation of Southeast Europe and the Ottoman Heritage from 1870 to the Twenty-first Century where she examines representations of the Ottoman past in Greek literature. She is the editor of Innovation in the Orthodox Christian Tradition? The Question of Change in Greek Orthodox Thought and Practice (Ashgate 2012) and Rethinking the Space for Religion: New Actors in Central and Southeast Europe on Religion, Authenticity and Belonging (Nordic Academic Press 2012). Her monograph New Voices in Greek Orthodox Thought: Untying the Bond between Nation and Religion is forthcoming with Ashgate (2013).

INDEX Africa 3, 4, 5, 9, 19, 20, 22, 23, 25, 26, 42, 39, 93, 124, 134, 135, 144–146, 148, 150, 151, 158, 170, 207, 384, 385 Africa-ness 21, 31, 32, 239, 241 Afro-Brazilian cults 10, 131, 136, 138–141, 144–146, 148, 393 Agency 5, 6, 25, 214, 219, 241, 316 Albania 325, 326, 328, 342, 347 Albanians 93, 98, 178, 180–184, 187, 189, 190, 197, 201, 202, 312, 317, 324–328, 342 Allievi, Stefano 115 Alterity 5 alterity and magic 42 Amselle, Jean-Loup 21, 32 Angola 21, 22, 24, 26–29, 129, 136, 145 Anticlericalism 315 Ardener, Edwin 383, 386 Apartheid 96 Appadurai, Arjun 121, 162, 260, 261, 275 Asad, Talal 12, 116 Assimilation 93, 96, 97, 100, 101, 210, 339 assimilationism 93, 97 Associativism 360, 366 Atlantic 25, 27, 142, 146 Atlantic space 25 Autoctony 8 autochthony versus allochthony 8 Baga 384, 385, 394 Bangladesh 118, 159, 164 Bangladeshis 3, 117–120, 122 Barcelona 11, 55, 225–230, 232–237, 239–243, 246, 247, 251–258, 260–269, 271, 273–275 Barth, Fredrick 254, 271, 369, 370, Baumann, Gerd 2, 25, 32, 253, 254, 255, 274, 275 Belonging 1, 2, 4, 8, 9, 18, 20–22, 31, 32, 54, 57, 60, 61, 88, 91, 93, 96, 98, 99, 101–104, 107, 108, 112, 134, 166, 168, 179, 183, 184, 187, 190, 191, 201, 210, 219, 226, 238, 244, 251, 253, 254, 260, 263, 264, 268, 270, 282, 287, 293, 305, 311, 321, 326, 328, 334, 336, 342, 343, 347, 359, 360, 363, 365–368, 387 multiple ascriptions 22, 254, 326 religious 9, 101–103, 107, 108, 112, 251, 282, 305, 359, 363

Bender, Courtney 52 Berger, Helen A. 52, 53, 54, 69 Berger, Peter 1, 2, 25, 52, 77, 89, 90, 175, 225, 246, 247 Besserer, Francisco 46 Bible 344, 346, 368 Biblical truth 315, 316 Biography 368 Life-crisis situations 132 Black Madonna 60, 63, 64, 65, 68 Boddy, Janice 48 Body 38, 46, 47, 53, 55, 56, 71, 72, 75, 81, 85, 90, 94, 102, 105, 112, 147, 203, 220, 252, 254, 264, 271, 345, 365, 367 bodily possession 9, 28, 36, 40–42, 45, 47–8, 74, 130 denigration of 63 sacralization of 53, 56 Boundaries 7, 73, 74, 76, 79, 82, 115, 164, 238, 239, 241, 243–245, 266, 316, 326, 343 confessional 316, 326 political 7 Bourdieu, Pierre 38, 82, 214, 370–375 Bowen, John 115, 125 Byzantium 338 Canclini, Néstor García 252, 273, 360 Cartography 38, 261, 386 Casanova, José 25, 89, 175 Caste 102, 110, 257, 260, 261, 267–270, 284, 285, 287, 302 Catalonia 11, 51, 61, 212, 226, 227, 235, 236, 251, 273, 364 Chartres 61, 62, 63, 64 Christian 2, 3, 5, 12, 19, 20–25, 29, 30, 51–53, 55–62, 64–69, 73–76, 80, 81, 86, 87, 89, 90–92, 159, 160, 166, 168, 171, 175, 182, 183, 185, 187, 225, 226, 228, 237, 241, 245, 246, 248, 273, 295, 314–316, 320, 331–335, 337, 338, 340, 344–347, 349, 350, 351, 353, 354, 361, 364, 368 Background 225 Figures 51, 53, 55, 58, 59–60, 64, 66–69 Heritage 341 Symbols 90 Christianity 1–5, 7, 9, 11, 12, 19, 21, 23–25, 29, 30, 32, 53, 55–58, 60–62, 64, 66, 67, 68, 71,

398

index

82, 89, 90, 157, 171, 175, 225, 226, 228, 229, 241, 246, 280, 314, 332, 334, 243, 347, 351, 353, 363, 364, 365, 375, 377, 389, 394 and globalization 240–242 African 19, 20, 21, 24, 25, 30–32, 129, 229, 242, 246 Catholicism 3, 7, 9, 11, 23, 33, 40, 53, 55, 66, 67, 95, 131, 133, 134, 139, 207, 208, 221, 231, 241, 280, 281, 307, 312–314, 318, 323, 325–328, 361, 390 Christian pluralism 25 critique of 57–66 Orthodox Christianity 9, 73–75, 77, 82, 84, 85, 87–91, 171, 175, 334, 347, 351, 357 and Greek identity 75, 76, 171, 336 and globalization 75, 78, 347 Helleno-Orthodoxy 75 Greek Orthodox Church 74, 80, 161, 171, 163, 312, 333, 344 Russian Orthodox Church 77 Pentecostalism 11, 21, 226, 232–235, 238–245, 364–367, 375, 376, 389 African Pentecostalism 237 Angolan Pentecostalism 19 Pre-Christian 53, 57–61, 64–5, 67–8 Protestantism 3, 23, 228, 229, 230, 231, 332, 233, 234, 359, 361, 375, 390 reinterpretation of 51, 58 Church 3, 5, 9, 19, 20, 22–33, 54, 59–61, 63, 65, 66, 68, 74–78, 80, 84, 85, 87, 88, 90–92, 95, 105, 108, 129, 131, 132, 152, 171–174, 208, 225, 226, 228, 229, 231, 232, 235, 236, 239, 241–247, 249, 268, 280, 283, 299, 304, 309, 311–313, 316, 318, 320, 321, 323, 325–329, 331–337, 339, 340, 342, 344–347, 354, 356, 357, 360, 362 Citizenship 4, 5, 12, 15, 96, 147, 157, 159, 160, 215, 221, 280, 322, 332 Civilization 19, 56, 58, 59, 61, 63, 67, 96, 143, 146, 175, 210, 312, 313, 323, 328 Cohabitation 5, 7 Cohen, Robin 159, 287, 288 Community 11, 24, 28, 37, 95, 99, 102–104, 106, 108, 110–112, 118, 119, 130, 134, 135, 136, 139, 141, 142, 159, 164–167, 179–184, 186–189, 200, 201, 202, 211, 219, 226, 228, 230, 231, 232, 233, 235–238, 241–247, 251–257, 259–275, 283–287, 290–292, 295–300, 302, 303, 306–311, 313, 315, 317, 320, 322–324, 340–342, 350, 353, 357, 384, 394 Competition 5, 8, 77, 112, 162, 319, 354, 374, 375, 376

Controversy 4, 159, 160, 161, 170, 171, 174, 273 Counterpublics 12, 117 Davie, Grace 1, 2, 6, 25, 33, 54, 91, 342 Diaspora 22, 28, 29, 31, 32, 37, 133–135, 139, 163, 167–169, 184, 242, 245, 251, 252, 254, 259, 260, 261, 263, 264, 267, 268, 270, 281, 287, 288, 290, 297, 298, 300, 307, 367, 391, 394, 395 Diasporic communities 197, 251, 260, 275, Diasporic consciousness 285, 287 Disbelief 37, 38, 48 Traditions of 37, 38, 48 Diversity 3–11, 12, 23, 25, 77, 99, 118, 120, 139, 141, 151, 154, 175, 177–179, 183, 203, 221, 225, 227, 230, 257, 258, 271, 279–281, 301, 331, 332, 339, 341, 342, 346–350, 353–355, 359, 363, 383 Dix, Steffen 3, 23, 25 Dominican Republic 38, 39, 40, 42, 43, 49, 50 Dominican Religious Centers 38, 42, 44 Dusenbery, Verne 285, 286 Ecumenical dialogue 31 Eickelman, Dale 115, 123 Elective Affinity 11, 226, 235, 240, 247 Eliade, Mircea 268 Elites 131, 180, 315, 316 Empowerment 132, 135, 144, 316, 326, 366 Energy 56, 57, 58, 59, 61, 63–66, 68, 74, 79, 81–83, 85–87, 146 Ethnicity 22, 49, 100, 101, 138, 194, 235, 254, 359, 361, 365, 366, 369, 370, 371 contextual ethnicity 254 ethnic communities 240, 243, 244 ethnicisation of religious identity 104 ethnicisation of religious behaviours 112, 133 ethos/ethnos 29, 31, 100, 103, 138, 145 primordialist ethnicity 360, 369 reactive ethnicity 100, 109, 112 Ethnography 9, 252, 283, 359, 370, 372, 375, 393 ethnographic translation 7, 383 reflexivity 359 Europe as remote place 383, 385 as heterotopy 386 as prophecy 19–36 European exceptionalism 6 Eurosecularism 25

index399 Southern Europe 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 12, 51, 52, 67, 115, 117, 124, 150, 363, 383 Evil eye 67, 73–75, 78–88, 90 Exclusion 95, 111, 242, 244, 272, 309, 327, 366, 390 Family 43, 46, 75, 83, 93, 110–113, 133, 138, 162, 179, 185, 190, 199, 201, 202, 218, 220, 246, 256, 258, 259, 263, 264, 267, 269, 280, 283–285, 287, 290–292, 294, 295, 297, 299, 301–303, 310, 317, 321, 324, 326, 368, 392 Fardon, Richard 7 Feng shui 74, 78, 79, 82, 83, 84, 85, 90 Ferguson, James 5, 219, 332 Filadelfia Church 232, 235–6, 238–44, 247, 364, 367–8. “Five Ks” 262 Freedom 4, 23, 77, 91, 98, 129, 130, 132, 133, 139, 148, 150, 171, 183, 201, 202, 207, 208, 210, 231, 259, 280, 337, 342, 354, 362, 364 Frigerio, Alejandro 133, 134, 135, 136 Frontiers 7, 37, 77, 317, 320 confessional 317 Geography 159, 160, 190, 246 mystic/rational geography 44–48 Globalization 75, 77, 78, 157, 240, 241, 242, 261, 275, 332, 344, 347, 363, 364 Particular/universal 29–31 Goffman, Erving 220–1, 375 Goddess 51, 52, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 63, 66, 67, 69, 146, 147 Greece 73–93, 309–359 Ancient Greece 313, 314, 318, 319, 338 Greco-Venetian Past 313 Guinea-Bissau 385393, 394 Guinea-Conakry 384–5 Gupta, Akil 5, 219, 332 Gurdwaras 111, 175, 252, 253, 260, 266, 267, 269, 270, 274, 280, 286, 287, 288, 290, 304 Guru Granth Sahib 104, 106, 255, 260, 267, 268, 274, 285, 285, 297 Gurus 107, 108, 109, 255, 285, 286, 287 Gypsies 232, 234, 235, 236, 238, 239, 241, 364, 365, 366, 367 Gypsy churches 236, 237, 246 Habermas, Jurgen 4, 12 Habitus 214, 215 Healing 38, 64, 74, 78, 81, 85, 86, 87, 90, 146, 169, 183, 365, 392 Heritage 1, 2, 4, 7, 9, 21, 23, 25, 51–53, 57, 58, 67, 68, 87, 100, 143, 151, 184, 185, 187, 190, 201, 202, 209, 218, 274, 316, 319, 320,

322, 332, 337, 338, 340, 341, 344, 346, 351, 386 Cultural 1, 7, 51, 53, 67, 184, 185, 187, 201, 202, 341, 344, 346, 392, 393 Christian 52, 57, 68, 320, 332, 338, 340, 341 immaterial 322 Hervieu-Léger, Danièle 1, 6, 160, 339 Hirschkind, Charles 12, 116 Host society 135, 166, 255, 262, 266, 270, 272, 273, 275 Hufford, David 38, 47 Hybridization 9, 252, 272, 273 Identity changing identity 254 identification 6, 20, 218, 254, 265–6, 281, 310–2, 320, 328, 332, 375 national identity 39, 94, 174, 182, 187, 231, 313, 329, 331, 332, 333, 337, 341, 345, 346, 352, 356, 395 processes 207 Imagination 9, 42, 142, 162, 383, 386 Immigration 11, 23, 35, 93, 94, 97, 99, 100, 129, 158, 210, 211, 225, 237, 239, 246, 257, 275, 279, 281, 289, 290, 297, 324, 334 neo-assimilationism 93, 97 Individualism 2, 89 Integration 3, 11, 20, 94, 95, 96, 97, 99, 100, 107, 113, 133, 140, 158, 175, 210, 211, 221, 280, 303, 311, 318, 315, 332, 339, 342, 351 Interstice 251, 252, 255, 272, 273, 275 interstitial 272, 273 Islam 3, 10, 11, 94, 98, 115, 116, 119, 121–125, 157, 159, 160, 163–166, 168, 169, 171, 173–175, 178, 181–188, 190–194, 196, 197, 198, 200–203, 208, 210, 212, 213, 215–217, 220, 221, 225, 228–230, 280, 314, 361 associativism 207, 212–21 barelvis 123, 168, 168 discursive formation 12, 116 in Albania 190 in Portugal 118 in Spain 210 Islamic invasion 94 islamophobia 5, 167 Public Islam 115 religious life 157, 167, 169, 178, 182, 303 Tablighi Jama’at 119–125, 168, 169 tablighis 119, 122, 123 transnational public space 116, 125 women 177, 178, 188, 191, 193, 196, 197, 263, 264

400

index

Italy Italianity 96 Itchopi 384, 385 Kalaitzidis, Pantelis 336, 337, 338, 344, 345, 346, 347, 353 Khalistan 283, 287, 287 Kolonos 160, 161, 163, 164, 165 Law Albanian 187 British 254 European 148 Greek 77, 164–173, 179 Islamic 184 Italian 96–8 Portuguese 137 Religious rights 77, 96–8, 164–173, 254, 361–2 Spanish 1, 207–217, 245, 361–2 Leeds 255–6 Lisbon 3, 19, 21, 23–32, 115–125, 130, 140, 148 Localizing strategies 6–8 Logic Positivist 44–47 Luso-tropicalism 145, 151 Macedonia, Republic of 117–206 Madrid 37–50 Islamic Cultural Centre of 213 Terrorist attacks in Mahmood, Saba 12, 116, 219 Mandaville, Peter 115 Maps 226–228, 231, 233–6, 324, 383–389 map versus territory 384 mapping 8, 225–227, 391 Marriage 1, 84, 182, 209, 324 intermarriages 314–19 religious 325 strategies 102, 110, 257–73, 302 Mary Magdalene 51, 55, 59–65, 68 Mass media 94, 98, 218, 261, 375–6 Matriarchy 57–68 Matriarchal roots 57, 68 McGuire, Meredith 52 Mediterranean 131, 151, 363 Mediterranean complex 6–7, 129, 363 Melotti, Umberto 279–280 Methods statistic 52, 226, 251, 309 Migration 2–3, 6, 9, 11, 20, 23–24, 32, 37–8, 43–4, 93, 95, 97, 100, 129, 143, 158, 161–2, 164–7, 169, 175, 210, 227, 239, 246,

256–264, 275. 279–287, 297–8, 303, 324, 327, 342, 359, 361, 368 economic 157–8, 161–2, 164–7, 236, 256, 288–291 immigrant faith 48, 225, 243, 252, 287 migration networks 232, 257, 261, 264, 294 retornados 145 second generation 9, 99, 101, 103, 258 Mimesis 113, 281–2, 291–7 Minority ethnic minorities 10, 166–7, 203, 225–247, 251–5, 272, 275, 286, 315, 317, 359, 365, 368, 370 minority communities 20, 95, 100, 326 national minorities 95, 179–82, 322, 360 religious minorities 2, 10–11, 99, 111, 175, 183, 203, 208–211, 221, 275, 290, 309–11, 334, 350–1, 361, 376 Missionization 2, 9, 19–22, 25, 29, 119–25, 168–9, 226, 231–2, 236–8, 298, 325–8 reverse mission 19, 241 Mobility and belonging 1–9, 19–36, 99, 134, 166–8 centripetal/centrifugal 32, 181 extraversion 9, 312 Modernity 1, 19, 47, 76, 89, 167, 260–2, 342, 349, 363 post-modernity 260–261, 275, 345 religious 25, 31 Modood, Tariq 5, 25, 219 Monuments religious 321–323 Mosque 1, 8–10, 115–128, 157–177 controversy 94 157–177 formal/informal 161–3, 165, 168 storefront 163–4 Multiculturalism 5, 30, 96–7, 121, 129, 138, 175, 279, 281, 299, 301, 304, 307, 327, 340, 345–7 multicultural eclipse 93–101 multicultural riddle 2 Muslims autochthonous 157, 159 in Athens 157–177 in Lisbon 115–128 in Madrid 207–224 Islamic Community of Bangladesh 118 Islamic Community of Lisbon 118 mosques (see Mosque) mosque controversies (see Mosque) Muslim women 177–206 young Muslims 207, 212–6, 219, 221–2 Mysteries 37–48, 62

index401 Nationalism 76, 131, 142, 318, 321, 352 Negotiation 4–5, 7, 98, 113, 143, 170, 182, 186, 251–275, 316, 359, 372, 377 Neopaganism 51–69 metamorphoses of 51, 57 movements 5, 32, 54, 58–60, 67, 69 rituals 51 worldview 52, 56, 62, 66 Nesbitt, Eleanor 287–6, 289 New Age 2, 3, 9, 52, 58–60, 67, 73–92, 150, 157, 175 Orixá 132, 135–8, 145, 147, 149–5 Oro, Ari Pedro 131–3 Pathology 21, 45–9 Palos 39, 42–3 Patriarchy 53, 57, 60–1, 67–8, 182, 190, 201–2 Patriotism 320–1, 334 Performance 79–83, 88, 99, 120–1, 132, 271, 274, 299, 305 Place and culture 5–6, 320, 332, 363 places of prophecy 26–29 power places 59, 64, 68 remote places 383–8 sacred places 264, 268, 287 Pluralism 7, 9, 95, 97, 111, 210–1, 312, 328, 340 religious 3–4, 11, 23, 25, 77–8, 83, 207–221, 279–80, 301, 326, 346, 350, 359, 361, 364 Poles 102, 312, 317, 324, 325–7 Politics Policy-making 8, 116, 158, 174, 256, 275, 289, 322, 353 political arenas 1, 8, 11, 106, 151, 160, 166, 254, 280, 301, 328, 343 political change 23 political cultures 99, 279 identity policies 97, 359, 367 security policies 96, 168, 256 Portugal 19–37, 115–128, 129–156 Portuguese Carnation Revolution 23, 129, 145 Proselytism 21–2, 28, 31, 77, 168, 171, 317, 335, 375 outreach 20–21, 31 Public sphere 1–12, 24–5, 95, 174, 196, 202–3, 226, 230, 246, 327, 352 Punjab 161–2, 251–4, 269, 263, 265, 270, 284–8, 290–2, 296 Punjabi 3, 101–12, 161, 253, 257, 260, 262–5, 269, 287, 289–2, 296–300, 202

Race 252, 268, 288, 320 institutional racism 96–7 racial uniformity (myth of) 94 racialization 5–6, 138, 297 racism 139, 151, 166, 167, 243, 281, 293 Ravidassia 260, 270 Recognition 1, 8, 11, 20, 23, 25, 29–32, 97–8, 120, 139, 174, 207–10, 222, 232, 244, 247, 257, 279–80, 288, 292, 302, 328, 341, 346, 362, 365–7, 373 Reflexivity 338, 353–377 Reggio Emilia 97–8, 101, 112, 280, 295–7 Reiki 74, 79–82, 85, 87, 90 Reinterpretation of Christianity 51, 58, 65 Religion and diversity 1, 5–12, 23, 151, 175, 177, 179, 225, 279–81, 301, 332, 341–2, 347–50, 353, 362 and freedom 4, 23, 77, 91, 98, 129–31, 139, 148, 150, 183, 207–8, 210, 231, 280, 337, 342, 354, 362 and law 1, 77, 96–8, 137, 148, 164, 168, 170, 179, 184, 187, 192, 207–10, 254, 289, 297, 317, 340, 343, 351, 361–2 and material objects 86 and mobility 2, 4, 32, 282, 287, 291–2, 305, 359 and nation 2–4, 8–11, 25, 110, 211, 216, 290, 320, 325 and pluralism 3, 4, 11, 21, 25, 77, 95, 99, 208, 210, 212, 221, 279–80, 301–2, 326, 328, 340, 346, 350, 359, 361, 364 and rights 95, 137, 139, 142, 146, 148, 157, 160, 170, 190, 192, 194–5, 208, 216–7, 334, 352, 368 emotional 132 of affliction 74, 92, 132 popular/vernacular 7, 314, 316 religious baggage 25, 255 religious conversion 19, 25–6, 132, 134, 167, 208, 218, 312–4, 365, 375, 385 religious education 123, 189, 193, 197, 331–2, 336, 338, 342–3, 348, 362 religious expression 177–206 religious imaginary 218, 385 religious membership 101, 103–4, 109, 112 religious minorities 183, 208, 226–31, 247–8, 275, 309, 311, 350–1 religious outreach (see Proselytism, outreach) religiouscapes 8 religious sects 8, 254, 260, 375 religious sextant 255, 274

402

index

religious status 22, 72, 90, 256 transnational religious movements 115– 128, 169 Remoteness 135, 316, 383–7 Rethymno 9, 73, 78, 80–85, 166, 169, Ritual 41, 43, 58, 65–6, 74, 81, 86, 102, 118, 134–5, 144, 266–7, 274, 320, 365 proximity 86–8 Saints 37–41, 44, 47, 49, 81, 131–2, 150, 168–9, 285, 333 Salvatore, Armando 115 Secularism Enchantment/re-enchantment 20 post-secularism 1, 12, 25, 301, 362, secularization 78, 89, 157, 175, 227, 246, 387 Security 88, 96, 160, 165–6, 199, 218, 292–6, 304, 312 Segregation 95, 111, 138, 366–7 Self 4, 20, 22, 29, 30, 40 74, 93, 96–7, 106, 115, 133, 150, 161, 167, 169, 200, 215, 218, 236, 243, 145, 153, 174, 281–2, 285, 289, 293–4, 299, 300, 309, 315. 318, 320, 324, 327–8, 333, 337–8, 351, 353, 360, 365–6, 370–1, 374 otherness of 218 Sexuality 68 stigmatization of 53 sacralization of 56 Sikhs 251–278, 279–308 second generation 9, 99, 101, 103, 258 Mona Sikhs 261 Sikh communities 280–1, 283, 285, 287, 289–93, 295, 300 Sikh exception 98, 271 Sikhs in Barcelona 257–261 Sikh temples (see gurdwaras) Western Sikhs 253 Smith, Jonathan Z. 384, 386 Soares, Benjamin 116 Social Action 254 Socialization 100, 258 Southall 253–4, 274 Sovereignty 286, 321 Space claiming/reclaiming space 8, 10, 12, 75 public space 4, 9–13, 94, 115–6, 125, 174, 197, 290, 298–9, 305, Spain 1, 3, 6–7, 28, 37–50, 51–72, 207–224, 225–250, 359–382 Spirituality 48, 73–4, 77, 85, 88, 90–1, 135, 323 and creativity 86 as revolution 90–1

eastern 74, 78, 82, 88–9, 97, 99 European spirituality 21, 319 feminist 54 marketing 47 New Age (see New Age) spiritual colonization 20 spiritual reconfiguration 21, 23 women’s spirituality 51–2 Stereotypes 42, 97, 108, 111, 149, 188, 192, 215, 217–8, 299, 327 Anti-gitano stereotypes 360 Stigma 39, 220, 360 selective stigmatization 98 stigmatization 40, 98–9, 103, 166, 216, 219, 220–2, 231, 312 Temples 28, 43, 63, 101, 133, 140, 148, 255, 259–60, 263–5, 267–70, 283–4, 287, 295, 297–300, 303–4 Territory 20, 23, 27, 31, 61, 77, 112, 184, 225, 281, 285, 289–91, 295, 332, 334, 340, 363, 384 re-territorialization 9 territorialization 288, 298 Terrorism 174, 200 in Madrid 216–8 Theology 134–5, 240, 331–2, 335–54 Thessaloniki 9, 73, 78, 80–2, 86, 159, 172, 348, 352 Third way 20 Toko, Simão Gonçalves 28, 31 Tokoist Church 9, 22–3, 25–32, 130 Tourism 58, 69, 99, 256, 323 Tradition 7, 22–3, 38, 41, 54–5,57–9, 62, 76–7, 89, 102, 104, 106, 135, 148, 168–9, 185, 187–9, 192, 194, 199, 201–2, 208, 220, 255, 261, 264–6, 274, 279, 281, 301–2, 312, 316, 319, 332, 339, 342, 346, 351, 353, 360, 365, 367–8, 370, 373, 386 Antiquity 314, 318, 319, 333 Trance 45, 47, 79, 130, 132, 365 Transcendence 90, 243 Transnationalism 37, 142–3, 150, 251–2 Turkey 2, 170, 173–4, 334, 364 Turkification 339 Turks/Turkic 157, 183, 310, 313–5, 331 Umbanda 39, 130–137, 140–5, 148–52 United Kindgdom 28, 52, 124, 256, 288 Urban 160, 175, 178, 182, 297, 304, 360 urban contexts 117, 131, 143, 148, 159, 187, 226, 252, 272, 291, 294–5, 302, 366 Vertovec, Steven 251, 285 Voodoo 9, 37, 39–42

index403 Whitening, process of 131, 143 Women 37, 43–6, 51–69, 82, 93, 105, 117, 177, 178–203, 215, 157–8, 262–8, 274, 283, 285, 288, 294, 303, 317, 324, 368

Yangazoglou, Stavros 333–5, 344, 346–9 Yoga 74, 78–82, 87, 90 Kundalini yoga 271, 273–4 Yogui Bhajan 274

Xenophobia 100, 139, 324, 335, 367–8

Zane, Wallace 48