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Desiring home: A long-term ethnography of a mosque in Lisbon
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The global or planetary reach of gentrification has become a mainstream in critical urban studies. And yet, the 'travels' of a concept originated in specific places and times have often brought about a loss of explanatory and strategic power. In this article, we argue that another concept, that of articulation developed by Laclau and Mouffe, is particularly adequate to help gentrification, touristification and financialisation to travel among places and levels of abstraction. In order to make this argument, we focus on Southern Europe, whose cities had long been considered scarcely gentrifiable and where, more recently, critical urban scholarship has made large use ogf gentrification, touristification and financialisation to 3 explain the impacts of crisis, austerity, and afterwards economic rebound driven by real estate and tourism. We explore in multi-scalar perspective the trajectory of Mouraria, a historical neighbourhood in Lisbon-and particularly the dimensions of housing and local politics. We show how Mouraria, during the last decade, shifted from being a 'deviant' case-capable of taking advantage of neoliberal regeneration policies in order to keep its social diversity and most of its long-term residents-toward one 'paradigmatic' of urbanisation-as-accumulation and contentious urban politics. We explain this shift by focusing on its multi-scalar determinants; concluding that present urban change in many Southern European cities should be understood as the articulation of various processes, which include gentrification, touristification and financialisation.
This article examines a recent controversy over the Catholic Church’s registration of Cordoba’s iconic Mosque-Cathedral as official Church property in 2006. In analyzing the controversy, we take up broader theoretical questions regarding the politicization and contestation of national cultural heritage, and the sociology of public controversy more generally. Drawing upon Alexander’s work on civil discourse and practice, we focus on the importance of performative aspects of civic debate. We argue that effective performances of “publicness” involving the conscientious suppression of visible signs of particularity, especially those related to Islam, have been critical to the successful politicization of the Mosque-Cathedral’s ownership and management. Politicization, however, has not produced any significant movement toward consensual resolution. In explaining this failure, we offer a more nuanced account of the conditions that limit the potential for consensus and “civil repair” as an outcome of public controversy in deeply divided societies. Our findings also have implications for understanding the growing role of international institutions and declarations in shaping the contours of localized controversies surrounding national cultural heritage.
In Western Europe, Muslims are increasingly demanding the right to amplify the Islamic call to prayer, the azan. Local resistance to the azan has prompted a search for technologized alternatives, of which architectural proposal to use light signals instead of loudspeakers is the only public alternative. By describing the light-azan proposal in the Netherlands, followed by an analysis of the extent to which it has been actually adopted, its association with spirituality is investigated from the perspective of mosque aesthetics negotiations. Aesthetic technologies of ordering physical spaces, in this case a transduction of sound into light, but also the use of glass in mosque architecture, can regulate the extent and quality of Muslims’ presence in European cities. Whether the medium of light can faithfully convey the human voice, however, is bound with questions of religious authority.
This article aims to conceptualize home and homemaking for people in protracted displacement.The article serves three purposes: To present an overview of the area of inquiry; to develop an analytical framework for understanding home and homemaking for forced migrants in protracted displacement; and to introduce the special issue.It explores how protracted displacement has been defined-from policy definitions to people's experiences of protractedness, including "waiting" and "the permanence of temporariness." The article identifies the ambivalence embedded in experiences and practices of homemaking in long-term displacement, demonstrating how static notions of home and displacement might be unsettled.It achieves this through examining relationships between mobility and stasis, the material and symbolic, between the past, present, and future, and multiple places and scales.The article proposes a conceptual framework-a triadic constellation of home-that enables an analysis of home in different contexts of protracted displacement.The framework helps to explore home both as an idea and a practice, distinguishing among three elements: "home" as the day-to-day practices of homemaking, "Home" as representing values, traditions, memories, and feelings of home, and the broader political and historical contexts in which "HOME" is understood in the current global order and embedded in institutions.In conclusion, the article argues that a feminist and dynamic understanding of home-Home-HOME provides a more holistic perspective of making home in protracted displacement that promotes a more extensive and more sophisticated academic work, policies, and practices.
These days, the imagined destinations of ever more people, particularly in the ‘global South’, are not where they were born but elsewhere. Using a case study of educated (lower) middle-class youth in Dhaka, this paper attempts to demonstrate that for many ‘aspiring migrants’, the yearning for leaving is a metaphor for disappointment and disengagement rather than the first step towards transnational migration. Economic growth, rapid urbanisation and the increasing investment in education infest the emerging urban (lower) middle-class youth with new ‘modern’ lifestyle desires that cannot be fulfilled in their home country and generate a sense of disengagement with Bangladesh. The paper focuses in particular on how the – culturally embedded – imaginations of foreign places link up to personal (re-)evaluations of local lives. Nearly all informants explained how local socio-economic, political and existential insecurities made them yearn for ‘safe’ places where their dreams could be fulfilled.
This is a paper about the importance of the notion of subjectivity for a critical anthropology. 2 Although there is no necessary link between questions of subjectivity and questions of power and subordination, and indeed there is a great deal of work both inside and outside of anthropology that explores subjectivity as a relatively neutral arena of inquiry, my particular interest will be in extending those lines of work that do see a close linkage between subjectivity and power. Hence the significance of investigating subjectivity as part of "anthropology as cultural critique" (Marcus and Fisher 1986). By subjectivity I will mean the ensemble of modes of perception, affect, thought, desire, fear, and so forth that animate acting subjects. But I always mean as well the cultural and social formations that shape, organize, and provoke those modes of affect, thought, etc. Indeed this paper will move back and forth between the examination of such cultural formations and the inner states of acting subjects. Given that the idea of the subject is itself a bone of contention, however, I begin with: for excellent critical comments on earlier drafts of this paper. I also received valuable comments when I presented the paper at the following places: the Glasscock Center for the Humanities at Texas A&M; the Society for Psychological Anthropology 2003 annual meetings; the Department of Anthropology at UCLA; the Department of Anthropology and also Jeffrey Alexander's Cultural Sociology seminar at Yale; the conference on "Blurred Boundaries: Rethinking 'Culture' in the Context of Interdisciplinary Practices" at the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, Taiwan (with formal comments by Ding-tzann Lii); and finally at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. I also want to thank James Rosenheim at Texas A&M, Allen Chun in Taiwan, and Tassadit Yacine in Paris for hospitality above and beyond the call of duty.
Reassembling the Social is a fundamental challenge from one of the world’s leading social theorists to how we understand society and the ‘social ‘. Bruno Latour’s contention is that the word ‘social’, as used by Social Scientists, has become laden with assumptions to the point where it has become misnomer. When the adjective is applied to a phenomenon, it is used to indicate a stablilized state of affairs, a bundle of ties that in due course may be used to account for another phenomenon. But Latour also finds the word used as if it described a type of material, in a comparable way to an adjective such as ‘wooden’ or ‘steely ‘. Rather than simply indicating what is already assembled together, it is now used in a way that makes assumptions about the nature of what is assembled. It has become a word that designates two distinct things: a process of assembling; and a type of material, distinct from others. Latour shows why ‘the social’ cannot be thought of as a kind of material or domain, and disputes attempts to provide a ‘social explanations’ of other states of affairs. While these attempts have been productive (and probably necessary) in the past, the very success of the social sciences mean that they are largely no longer so. At the present stage it is no longer possible to inspect the precise constituents entering the social domain. Latour returns to the original meaning of ‘the social’ to redefine the notion, and allow it to trace connections again. It will then be possible to resume the traditional goal of the social sciences, but using more refined tools. Drawing on his extensive work examining the ‘assemblages’ of nature, Latour finds it necessary to scrutinize thoroughly the exact content of what is assembled under the umbrella of Society. This approach, a ‘sociology of associations’, has become known as Actor-Network-Theory, and this book is an essential introduction both for those seeking to understand Actor-Network Theory, or the ideas of one of its most influential proponents.
In plural and secular societies today, religious communities understand access to public space as a right to the city. Thisright legitimises their status as social actors and, through various notions linked to modernity and transparency, entitlesthem to have a public life and be recognised by others. By examining the case of Bangladeshi Muslims in Lavapiés, oneof Madrid’s multicultural district undergoing intense gentrification and touristification processes, this article analyses theconditions through which this community accesses public space and achieves legitimisation and recognition through different practices and discourses displayed in a variety of events and festivities.
The 21st century has seen increasing attacks directed at Muslim places of worship, a social problem that has resulted in a whole array of investigations. This article suggests that the majority of this research on mosque conflicts fails to address the entrenched class dynamics and shifting geography of capitalist accumulation. Consequently, it complements this research by analysing the first mediatised conflict of its kind in Spain, the protest against the construction of a purpose-built mosque in Catalonia, Premià de Mar. The case demonstrates that the opposition was in fact a racist attack against Muslims answering to the economic interests of the local bourgeoisie. The ones acting it out, a section of the local working class, was convinced that this symbol of migrant presence would be a degrading feature that would jeopardise their recent social upward mobility. Hence it is fundamentally an expression of how racist logic is embedded in the spatial logic of capitalism in the 21st century.
In a particularly difficult context for the interreligious interaction in Barcelona, a context marked by the attack of 17A and by the controversy raised by the will of the Islamic Community of Nou Barris to open an oratory in the Prosperitat neighborhood, the local administration has launched an ambitious project to raise awareness and fight against Islamophobia. This article aims to examine the achievements and limitations of this program with special emphasis on the influence of "secular imaginaries" (Göle) in the design and implementation of such policies. © 2018 Taller de Estudios Internacionales Mediterraneos. All rights reserved.
This article explores from a Foucauldian perspective how, in the neoliberal age, religious diversity has become a new form of governmentality that is based on practices of classifying and categorizing people according to religious criteria. Contributing to studies on religion and marketization, the article explores how religious diversity is promoted as a category of social order and coexistence and develops two ideas: first, religious diversity is a legal-political form of governmentality geared towards rendering complex populations legible for administrative purposes. Second, religious diversity reflects an economic form of governmentality, in that its legal doctrinal cognates (subjective definitions of religion, sincerity of belief, etc.) call forth liberal notions of consumer choice. While both are premised on the idea that people have identities, there are potential tensions between both forms, as the first tends to favor collectives and the second favors individuals. The article is based on research in Spain and Canada.
The sociological literature has devoted less attention to cities than to nation-states as contexts for the regulation of religion and religious diversity in Europe. Drawing on ideas from the literature on migration, urban studies, geography and the sociology of religion, as well as empirical material from fieldwork conducted in three medium-size cities in France, the author conceptualises the governance of religious diversity in cities as complex assemblages where (1) the political interests and claims of various unequally socially positioned actors over (2) a number of domains and objects of the public expression of religiosity are (3) subjected to a variety of municipal interventions, which are (4) shaped by the interplay of supranational legal frameworks, national legislation, policies, institutional arrangements and local contextual factors. The result of these regulation processes are particular (and often contested) normative definitions of ‘accepted’ or ‘legitimate’ public expressions of religiosity, subsequently enacted by a variety of local actors through both formal procedures and informal practices.
This article contributes to sociological theorizations of religion as heritage through analyzing the politics of religious heritage in Spain since its transition to democracy during the late 1970s. Our analysis is organized around three historical sequences of critical importance for understanding the political and legal significance of discourses that frame religion as cultural heritage in Spain: (1) negotiations that took place during Spain's democratic transition between 1977 and 1980; (2) discussions that surfaced in the context of the state's decision to recognize Islam, Protestantism, and Judaism in 1992; and (3) more recent debates regarding the incorporation of religious minorities in the context of increasing religious diversity, especially concerning places of worship. We show how framing “religion” using the language of cultural heritage has provided religious actors with a means of defending the connection between religion and national identity—and of protecting the privileges of majoritarian religious institutions without violating core tenets of secularism or pluralism. This scenario has created space for certain religious minorities to claim a place within Spain's evolving socioreligious landscape by invoking alternative heritages from Spain's multicultural past.
This book explores the impact of transnational migration on the views, feelings, and practices of home among migrants. Home is usually perceived as what placidly lies in the background of everyday life, yet migrants’ experience tells a different story: what happens to the notion of home, once migrants move far away from their “natural” bases and search for new ones, often under marginalized living conditions? The author analyzes in how far migrants’ sense of home relies on a dwelling place, intimate relationships, memories of the past, and aspirations for the future–and what difference these factors make in practice. Analyzing their claims, conflicts, and dilemmas, this book showcases how in the migrants’ case, the sense of home turns from an apparently intimate and domestic concern into a major public question.
Paolo Boccagni is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Trento, Italy. His main research areas are transnational migration, social welfare, care, diversity and home, and his publication record includes articles in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Global Networks, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, and Housing, Theory and Society. He is also Principal Investigator of the European Research Council project HOMInG – The home-migration nexus: Home as a window on migrant belonging, integration and circulation (ERC STG 678456, 2016-2021).
In the past 20 years, Bangladeshi migration to Southern European countries has gained an increasing importance. Portugal is no exception, and today more than 4,500 Bangladeshis live in the country. One of the more interesting facets of this population, though, is their educational and economic profile. They come from what has been roughly summed up as the ‘new’ Bangladeshi ‘middle classes’. Their families are both rural and urban, have properties, and own businesses. Other members of their domestic units work in NGOs, and private and state owned companies. Simultaneously, they have considerable educational backgrounds, with college and university degrees, and most are fluent in English. But what was their motivation to come to Europe in the first place? And what does this tell us about the young Bangladeshi middle class? For these young Bangladeshi adults, it is through geographic mobility that one can earn enough economic capital to access the ‘modern’ and to progress in the life-course. By remaining in Bangladesh, their access to middle class status and adulthood is not guaranteed and thus migrating to Europe is seen as a possible avenue for achieving such dreams and expectations. The main argument in this paper is that migration—as a resource and a discoursive formation—is itself constitutive of this ‘middle class’.
This article is an introduction to a special issue on ethnography, diversity and urban space. It places the ‘diversity turn’ within studies of migration and multiculture historically and discusses the implications of concepts such as ‘diversity’ and more recently ‘super-diversity’ for scholarship, policy and identity politics. It argues that diversity is a helpful concept for studies of migration and multiculture because it avoids the essentialism and bias towards ethnic affiliation often characterising studies within the multiculturalism framework, while being more grounded locally than studies within the transnationalism framework. It examines the methodological implications of increasing diversity and complexity on ethnographic studies and the definition of the ‘field’. It makes the point that increasing urban diversity poses a challenge to ethnographic ideals of ‘immersion’ and wholeness. Finally, it introduces the individual articles in the special issue.
This article reflects critically on the study of Muslims in European countries of immigration. ‘Muslim’ is both a category of analysis and an increasingly salient – and contested – category of social, political and religious practice. The traffic between categories of analysis and categories of practice makes it important for scholars to adopt a critical and self-reflexive stance towards the categories we use. The article sketches some ways in which the use of ‘Muslim’ as a category of practice – a category of self- and other-identification – has changed in recent decades, and it concludes with some cautionary remarks about the use of ‘Muslim’ as a category of analysis.
Previous research has shown that mosques in the Netherlands and in Western Europe, in general, are frequently located in marginal spaces and face resistance when transformed into a visible, constructed, house of worship. In this essay, fieldwork analysis centered on the controversial Essalam Mosque in Rotterdam deepens the understanding of marginality, by explaining how mosque construction, spatial establishment, labor, and Islamic morality can be distinguished and intersect on the ground level. It is shown that mosques are not merely situated in marginal spaces, but rather resist marginality, appropriate the “right to the city”, and transform the meanings of marginal spaces for Dutch Muslims.
This article examines the relationship between migration and identity by complicating our notion of what ‘home’ means, both for the narrative of ‘being at home’ and for the narrative of ‘leaving home’. It offers, not a migrant ontology, but a consideration of the historical determination of patterns of estrangement in which the living and yet mediated relation between being, home and world is partially reconfigured from the perspective of those who have left home. This reconfiguration does not take place through the heroic act of an individual (the migrant), but through the forming of communities that create multiple identifications through collective acts of remembering in the absence of a shared knowledge or a familiar terrain. The article interweaves a variety of different texts: short stories by Asian women in Britain, autobiographical reflection, theoretical constructions of migrancy and literature from two very different nomadic or migrant communities, the Global Nomads International and the Asian Women’s Writing Collective. The article provides a critique of recent theories of migrancy - and nomadism - as inherently transgressive, or as an ontological condition (where what we have in common is the loss of a home). The author argues that it is through an uncommon estrangement that the possibility of migrant communities comes to be lived. That is, it is the uncommon estrangement of migration that allows migrant subjects to remake what it is they might yet have in common.
This brief paper introduces the special issue on mosque conflicts in Europe, which draws on research results of the Network of Comparative Research on Islam and Muslims in Europe. The paper first provides basic data on the numbers and distribution of Muslim immigrants in Europe. Reflecting a dialectical approach in which Muslims both affect, and are impacted by, European culture, the paper introduces the issue of the islamicisation of European public space, with special reference to mosque construction, which represents the evolution of Islam from the private to the public sphere. Sources and causes of resistance to mosque-building are identified, and various national contrasts—based on the papers that follow—are drawn.
Recent studies of transnational religious phenomena have emphasised the importance of distinguishing between transnational processes of migration and movement, on the one hand, and diasporic forms of consciousness , identity, and cultural creation, on the other. While this distinction is useful, it risks directing the study of transnational social phenomena in certain, limited directions. Migration and diaspora insufficiently take into account the possibility of quite distinct self-understandings about boundaries and legitimacy on the part of both 'host' countries and 'immigrant' populations. Taking 'Islam in France' as an illuminating case in point because each of its two constitutive terms challenges the possibility of self -defining through migration and diaspora, I argue that transnational Islam creates and implies the existence and legitimacy of a global public space of normative reference and debate, and that this public space cannot be reduced to a dimension of migration or of transnational religious movements. I offer two brief ethnographic examples of this transnational public space, and maintain that even as it develops references to Europe it implies neither a 'Euro-Islam' nor a 'post-national' sense of European membership and citizenship. Rather, current directions of debate and discussion in France are strongly shaped by, first, French efforts to define Islam within national political and cultural boundaries, and, second, efforts by Muslim intellectuals to maintain the transnational legitimacy of Islamic knowledge.
This article comprises preliminary remarks about spatiality and power, with a particular focus on field data from Greece and Thailand (with secondary materials from Italy). I suggest that the creation of large open spaces in city contexts, generating a marked contrast with local tolerance of crowding, represents the intrusive presence of regimentation and aesthetic domi- nation. Within a larger pattern of conceding to hegemonic ideas about classical ornamentation as well as rational town-planning, such idioms of 'spatial cleansing' create a context entirely compatible with the current structures of economic inequality. They also occlude the understandings of past experience that characterize local groups wishing to remain in historic centers; it is noteworthy that in Thailand, where the middle class has not yet succumbed to the global fashion for antique domestic spaces as has its counterpart in Italy (and to a lesser extent in Greece), it is the poor who seem more interested in calibrating their lives to official master narratives in the hope of being rewarded with continued rights to inhabit their existing lived environment.
This paper offers a critical analysis of ‘groupism’ and suggests alternative ways of conceptualizing ethnicity without invoking the imagery of bounded groups. Alternative conceptual strategies focus on practical categories, cultural idioms, cognitive schemas, discursive frames, organizational routines, institutional forms, political projects, and contingent events. The conceptual critique has implications for the ways in which researchers, journalists, policymakers and NGOs address ‘ethnic conflict’ and ‘ethnic violence’. The paper concludes with an analysis of an empirical case from Eastern Europe.
In recent years there has been a proliferation of writing on the meaning of home within the disciplines of sociology, anthropology, psychology, human geography, history, architecture and philosophy. Although many researchers now understand home as a multidimensional concept and acknowledge the presence of and need for multidisciplinary research in the field, there has been little sustained reflection and critique of the multidisciplinary field of home research and the diverse, even contradictory meanings of this term. This paper brings together and examines the dominant and recurring ideas about home represented in the relevant theoretical and empirical literature. It raises the question whether or not home is (a) place(s), (a) space(s), feeling(s), practices, and/or an active state of state of being in the world? Home is variously described in the literature as conflated with or related to house, family, haven, self, gender, and journeying. Many authors also consider notions of being-at-home, creating or making home and the ideal home. In an effort to facilitate interdisciplinary conversations about the meaning and experience of home each of these themes are briefly considered in this critical literature review.
"Bangladeshis are one of a wide variety of recently established immigrant groups in Italy, analysed here as an example of the interaction of geopolitics, employment and survival strategies, and the micropolitics of the community's organization in Italy. The geopolitics involves events in Bangladesh (change of government), Italy (the Martelli Law and other legislation), Europe (EU and other European policies, and the opening of eastern Europe as a routeway) and the Gulf. The micropolitics concerns mechanisms of immigration, migration sponsorship, connections to Italian political groups and clientelistic relationships within the community. Micropolitics also governs to a large extent the types of mostly informal work done by Bangladeshis in Rome."
- Hobsbawm Eric
Lisbon: Instituto Camões
- José Luís De Matos
- Rapport Nigel
- Bourdieu Pierre
Lisbon: Edições Colibri
- Jorge Malheiros
Coventry: Centre For Research in Ethnic Relations
- Francis Robinson
O Portugal islâmico, o Portugal multicultural, e os muçulmanos portugueses
- Abdoolkarim Vakil
Dhaka: RMMRU Working Papers
- Benjamin Zeitlyn