a new challenge for Portuguese religiosity

UID/ANT/04038/2013publishersversionpublishe

From Socialization to Individualization: A New Challenge for Portuguese Religiosity Author information From Socialization to Individualization From Socialization to Individualization: A New Challenge for Portuguese Religiosity From Socialization to Indivi

______________________________________ Abstract: Catholic Christianity, the official religion of Portugal, has always played a central role in the formation of Portuguese religious identity, offering a medium through which people could express their beliefs collectively. In the last decades, however, and especially during the recent socio-economic crisis, Portuguese religiosity is going through a process of individualization, where new forms of spirituality have become an active part of people's everyday religious practice. Based on ethnographic field research in Lisbon, this article investigates the new challenge Portuguese religiosity has to face, while it gradually becomes disengaged from religious tradition, namely Catholicism, as it is learned through core social institutions (family, school), and moves towards non-denominational trajectories. It furthermore shows how, through this process of individualization, traditional religious webs and ties are rendered obsolete, while a novel form of spiritual socialization is developed

Article review - Michael Bull, Jon P. Mitchell (eds.), 2015, Ritual, Performance and the Senses (Londres, Bloomsbury) [review]

UID/ANT/04038/2013 SFRH/BPD/72003/2010preprintpublishe

uma discussão antropológica da 'nova espiritualidade' contemporânea em Lisboa da crise

UID/ANT/04038/2013 SFRH/BPD/72003/2010Baseado em trabalho de terreno antropológico em Lisboa e na sua periferia, o meu artigo apresentará uma imagem sociocultural da variedade da “nova espiritualidade”, que vai desde as terapias alternativas, comunicação com os anjos e tarot, ao yoga, retiros de meditação e xamanismo. O meu objectivo é demonstrar como a religiosidade portuguesa contemporânea, afectada pelo multiculturalismo, globalização e crise socioeconómica, está a passar por um processo de transformação. Pretendo focar em como essas práticas da espiritualidade da Nova Era fazem o seu caminho para a vida quotidiana das pessoas, afectam as suas crenças e aspirações religiosas, desafiam a predominância do Cristianismo e reivindicam uma posição significativa na religiosidade portuguesa mais persistentemente. Based on anthropological fieldwork in Lisbon and its periphery, my work will present a socio-cultural image of the variety of "new spirituality", which ranges from alternative therapies, communication with angels and tarot, to yoga, meditation retreats and shamanism. My goal is to demonstrate how contemporary Portuguese religiosity, affected by multiculturalism, globalization and the socio-economic crisis, is undergoing a process of transformation. I want to focus on how these practices of New Age spirituality make their way into the everyday lives of people, affecting their religious beliefs and aspirations, challenging the dominance of Christianity and claiming a significant position within the Portuguese religiosity more persistently.publishersversionpublishe

Perception and science in the modern greek cosmos

PEst-OE/SADG/UI4038/2014Drawing on recent anthropological research in Crete and northern Greece, this article describes the various attitudes and conceptualisations of the supernatural in the context of an everyday Greek belief, namely the belief in the evil eye. The usual pre-determined representation that there are two antithetical segments of our cosmos-the perceivable, embodied, and natural on the one hand and the spiritual, immaterial, and supernatural on the other hand-is challenged. Ultimately, it is shown how the sense of belonging to the Greek cosmos calls for a re-location of the boundaries between naturalism and supernaturalism, rendering the bipolarity between scientific and supernaturalistic ideas obsolete via perceptual experience.authorsversionpublishe

A transformação de religiosidade em Portugal e na Grécia: uma comparação etnográfica da Nova Espiritualidade e pluralismo religioso no sul da Europa

Based on anthropological fieldwork in Lisbon, Portugal and Athens, Greece, this article presents a comparative account of New Age spirituality in southern Europe, a geographical and socio-cultural area where studies of the New Age phenomenon are scarce to find. It will be shown how this recent turn to "new spirituality” leads to a transformation of everyday religiosity and to a new form of religious pluralism, where people have the choice to follow alternative spiritual paths. The focus is on how these practices of New Age spirituality, which range from alternative therapies, communication with angels and tarot, to yoga, meditation retreats and shamanism, make their way into the everyday lives of people, affecting their religious beliefs and aspirations, challenging the dominance of Christianity and claiming a significant position within the Portuguese and Greek religiosity more persistently. Baseado em trabalho de terreno antropológico em Lisboa, Portugal e Atenas, Grécia, este artigo apresentará um relato comparativo da espiritualidade da Nova Era no Sul da Europa, uma área geográfica e sociocultural em que os estudos do fenômeno da Nova Era são escassos para encontrar. Vai demostrar como esta recente viragem para nova espiritualidade leva a uma transformação da religiosidade quotidiana e a um pluralismo religioso no qual as pessoas têm a escolha de seguir caminhos espirituais alternativas. O objetivo é focar em como essas práticas da espiritualidade da Nova Era, que variam de terapias alternativas, yoga e retiros de meditação para Xamanismo e Espiritismo, fazem o seu caminho para a vida quotidiana das pessoas, afetando as suas crenças e aspirações religiosas, desafiando a predominância do Cristianismo e reivindicando uma posição significativa na religiosidade portuguesa e grega mais persistentemente

Spiritual Elasticity and Crisis: From Non-Religiosity to Transreligiosity—An Introduction

This paper is an analysis of the principal themes on which our Special Issue and its articles are based. We explain in more depth the significant relationship between spiritual elasticity and crisis, taking into consideration the diversity of contemporary religiosity and its flexible contextualization that ranges from non-religiosity to transreligiosity. In-between, there lies a wide spectrum of practices, attitudes, beliefs, performances and identities, which is creative, frequently transformative, in some cases rigid, in other contexts distinctly elastic. It is this field of religion and spirituality that we aim to explore; consequently, we offer paradigms of different types of elasticity and clarify the above-mentioned spectrum better

Spiritual Elasticity and Crisis: From Non-religiosity to Transreligiosity

From the socio-economic and political crisis in southern Europe during the last decades, to the more recent global healthcare crisis created by the COVID-19 pandemic, contemporary societies have faced and are still under the impact of considerable sociocultural change. The domain of religiosity has certainly not remained unaffected at the level of institutional, vernacular religion (Bowman and Valk 2012) and lived religion (McGuire 2008; Ammerman 2021) and of religious “belief without belonging” (Davie 1994) or “believing in belonging” (Day 2011). One of the most prominent consequences with reference to the shifting boundaries of contemporary religiosity, for example, is the rising popularity of non-denominational forms of “holistic” (Sointu and Woodhead 2008) and/or “New Age” (Heelas 1996; Sutcliffe and Gilhus 2013) spirituality. With such a framework of sociological and anthropological, mostly, contextualization of religion and spirituality as a starting point, the aim of the Special Issue is to expand upon the above-mentioned themes and examine the spiritual elasticity with which contemporary religiosity is practiced today, in direct relation to crisis. We perceive the boundaries of crisis open: it can refer to socio-economic, political and global health/pandemic crisis in society at large, and/or to personal critical instants at a more individualized level. We also consider the contexts within which spiritual elasticity can occur open: non-religion, conversion, secularization, transreligiosity can all serve as vehicles of investigating the elasticity—or lack of—in and of contemporary religiosity. How do the boundaries of distinct or similar religious and spiritual traditions, between religion and spirituality and/or between spiritual belief and belonging adapt during and after a crisis? Do they stretch, break, become more elastic, become less flexible? What kind of transgressions can we witness in the process? We introduce and employ the term “transreligiosity” as a conceptual condensation of these transgressions of borders (between religion and spirituality, religiosity and non-religiosity or secularism, religiosity and wellbeing and/or healing, among others)