Dancing With Death; The Excremental, the Sacred & Ecstatic Community in Free Party Culture (original) (raw)
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How do cities include newcomers and established inhabitants? Do urban rituals bring people together? Because of their relative anonymity and accessibility, public rituals-as temporary processes of inclusion or emphasizers of differences-are likely to include people with respect to their differences and any intersections of these. We examine three cases in Geneva, a high mobility city-the Escalade, the Fêtes de Genève and the Saga des Géants-and their potential to foster scepticism (i.e. exclusion) or belonging (i.e. inclusion). Our policy-relevant findings indicate that in post-migration societies, rituals are crucial in fostering belonging, especially when they are based on an open narrative, organized by or with civil-society organizations and based on elements that permit the emotional involvement of the participants. We confront this emic perspective with an etic one, using variables derived from our investigation of public policies and rituals to analyse our observations and public representations of the events.
Familiar Places, Everyday Lives: places as gatherings
Place has often been overlooked or taken for granted in social research (Massey, 1994: 119; Casey, 1996: 33) but it is, nevertheless, always there: people are always somewhere. It is taken as a priori, given and therefore static, whereas society is changing, dynamic (Urry, 2000: 133). Local places are seen as irrelevant, because now we live in an homogenous global world where ‘local’ infers a sentimental attachment to history (Appadurai, 1995: 214; Massey, 1994: 5). Here I shall argue that that places are not a priori, but are created interactively. Beginning from Heidegger’s (1971) Building, Dwelling, Thinking I will explore how places ‘gather’ leading to an examination of the entanglement of local places and local life stories. Having established place as a thoroughly social entity the contrasting ideas of the ‘global’ and the ‘local’ will be scrutinised showing how the particularity of place is connected to its people and their practices. Using case studies from my research in Wigan as illustration I will show how building gathers both landscape and peoplescape; building brings together neighbourhoods; building leads from place to place. Places are not merely an effect of human agency but are created performatively as material intra-activity (Barad, 2003), not merely a backdrop to the performance of human or social life.
Religious Processions: Urban Politics and Poetics
Temenos - Nordic Journal of Comparative Religion, 2005
In this paper, I will explore the ways in which processions, by their very visibility, foreground the relationships between the secular and the sacred, while contributing to a construction of identity and community, and simultaneously surfacing fractures therein. Using the example of multireligious yet secular Singapore, I will examine (a) the state's management of religious processions, including the regulation of time and space for such events, as well as regulations over noise production; (b) the tactics of adaptation, negotiation and resistance the participants engage in at an everyday level in response to the state's ideologies, policies, laws and strategies; (c) the participants' experience of these processions in terms of the sense of communitas that Turner describes but which Eade and Sallnow dispute, through emphasis on faultlines within "community" based on age, class and nationality; (d) the investment of sacred meanings in these processions by parti...
BODIES AT THE WORLD CITIES PUBLIC SPACES AND INTERRELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS*1
BODIES AT THE WORLD CITIES PUBLIC SPACES AND INTERRELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS, 2019
My modest English prompts necessitates this lecture to be delivered in Italian. I apologise to those present for the inconvenience, especially for those who will have the most difficulty in following it: in any case, I will make it up to you by providing a version in English translation. The topic on which I will briefly entertain you with falls among those variously articulate, for which I will proceed per broad lines, exacerbating concepts and oversimplifications at times, of which I apologise in advance. After having heard the erudite reports of the first working session, the concern of not fully meeting the task assigned to me is more than a simple concern. With these limits and the mentioned warnings, I will start today by saying that, in my opinion, we face a non-homogenous geo-political system, variously articulate within, nevertheless not formed by closed civilised societies, impenetrable, whether we can afford the term, devoid of income and expenditures, resulting in not being completely 1 * The concepts expressed in this lecture are the result of a thorough consultation with my Master professor Piero Bellini, Emeritus professor of the History of the Canon Law at Sapienza Roma and High School Academic. In particular, some exhibition propositions reflect what is already expressed in the work "Le radici culturali e religiose della identità europea" appeared in a collection I curated by the title "Riflessioni in materia di libertà e giustizia. Percorsi storico-giuridici", Giappichelli, Turin, 2005, pp. 1-30.
ReligioCity in Acre: Religious Processions, Parades, and Festivities in a Multi-Religious City
Cities, 2022
This paper proposes the notion of ReligioCity as an analytical category to account for religious urbanism and urban influences on religion(s). This theoretical notion allows us to explore the ways religion and urban space are transformed together by current socio-political processes, but also to examine the ways the city's landscape encompasses new expressions of religious materiality in the urban environment. Taking Acre, a small multireligious and multi-ethnic city in the north of Israel the paper explores religious processions, parades, and festivities as public rituals which encompass ways of being in the city and of taking temporary control of specific city spaces while engaging with urban infrastructures. In what ways these spatial religious manifestations are dictated by urban infrastructures and at the same time influence the city and how they serve as forms of being in the city for participants? The argument is that these religious manifestations and spatializations are ways of placing religion as an identity marker, with the possibility of sustaining, projecting or even reinventing a sense of self and community in the changing landscape of cities.
CITIES OF ‘OTHERS’: PUBLIC SPACE AND EVERYDAY PRACTICES
2009
The paper is an attempt to think through ‘public space’, working with the ambiguities of the concept, which includes on the one hand material space/s - the streets, squares, parks, public buildings of the city - and on the other the functions and institutions of the ‘public sphere’ as a site of public deliberation, through which one or more rational publics are constituted as such and come to contact with each other. These ambiguities in the content or the domain of reference of ‘public space’ allow us to approach questions of access, interaction, participation, cultural and symbolic rights of passage. Public space is approached here as constituted through the practices of everyday life: it is produced and constantly contested, reflecting – among other things –relations of power. Differences in gender, ethnicity or sexuality often lead us to think in binaries such as inside/outside, inclusion/exclusion, local/stranger, etc. The way that such categories intertwine in everyday life, though, unsettle easy categorisations and force us to question strict lines of division. It is in this context that we propose to discuss the city of ‘others’, drawing from research examples which cross over such lines.
Sites of public (homo) sex and the carnivalesque spaces of reclaim the streets
The Emancipatory City: Paradoxes and Possibilities, 2004
This chapter explores two sets of (often fleeting) contemporary urban spaces that demonstrate some of the emancipatory potential of the city – sites of public (homo)sex and the carnivalesque spaces created by the direct actions of the anti-capitalist disorganisation Reclaim The Streets(RTS). Just as the actions of RTS consciously attempt to undermine (however briefly) the privatisation of public space and the alienated conpartmentalism of our lives, the liminal spaces of public (homo)sex transcend the private/public binary through which contemporary sexual citizenship is defined. Although the spaces created by RTS actions and for public (homo)sex challenge certain societal norms and demonstrate the potential for new forms of commuality, I question the extent to which these spaces and the acts that constitute them are capable of promoting real and sustainable emancipatory change. Based on participatory ethnographic research in both sets of spaces, this chapter explores the tensions and contradictions contained within these sites.
Mainly employed as domestic workers and care providers since the 1980s, Filipino migrants have been, and still are, largely invisible in Italian public space. Since 1991, once a year, on the last Sunday of May, they transform the streets of Padua, city of Saint Anthony, into their own temporary 'sacred space' celebrating the finding of the Holy Cross (Santa Cruz). Based on ethnographic research and in-depth interviews, the paper analyses the preparation of the ritual and the embodied performance as a means to interpret the Filipino local and transnational territorialisation in the Italian context. The discussion underlines how the Italian setting affects the relationship between the sacred and the secular and between majority and minority religions in the urban texture. Urban space being the symbolic arena where identity and the process of boundary making are inscribed, we consider public space as a social process constituted by three levels: accessibility, temporary appropriation and visibility. Drawing on this immigrant religious ritual, we apply this perspective to look at the interactions between local society and newcomers and the blurring boundaries between religious and non-religious in the ambiguous Italian public space.
The city has always been, and remains, the ideal place of collective rituality. It is the city that has hosted, since Antiquity, collective celebrations of victory, important religious ceremonies, but also ritual consecrations of the elite. Based on these essential notions, the aim of this book is to reflect on a specific issue: the interaction between ritual and city space. Our wish is to understand, in a multidisciplinary and cross-epochal approach, how a collective liturgy, civic or religious, can unfold within the public space and transform it. In addition to sacred buildings and seizures of power, the square and the streets become in this sense important identity-shaping loci. Bringing places of power to the street or the square – which are by definition liminal spaces – means entering into a dialogue constructed between those who organise the ritual, those who perform it and those who witness it. It seems that it is in compromise between the different components of society that collective rituals can happen within the public space. Therefore, it is no surprise that the crucial question for this book is the way in which this same space is adapted to the requirements of the ritual, or, on the contrary, how the ritual adapts to the space.