This paper examines how social mixing and celebration of diversity can be enabled through sports festivals marked by their carnivalesque atmosphere. Our analysis draws on a longitudinal ethnographic study of the Mondiali Antirazzisti (Antiracist World Cup), a non-competitive football tournament and intercultural festival featuring the yearly participation of hardcore football fans (ultras), migrant groups, third-sector associations and other informal groups. We consider how the multifocal ritual form of the event helps to create a liminal space in which discrimination and stereotypes can be temporarily challenged. The sources of collective effervescence are multiplied by placing sport games within a wider range of other leisure and cultural activities, thus promoting internal diversity and the inclusion of outsiders. Additionally, social boundaries are also blurred by not emphasising the competitive dimension of the sporting activities, making sporting categorizations more fluid, and breaking down the separation between protagonists and spectators. Nonetheless, considering the transient character of liminality, we also investigate problems and limitations implied by the pursuit of these objectives. It is concluded that, despite a certain degree of selfreferentiality, the festival fosters the spreading of anti-discriminatory cultures by enhancing the participants' reflexivity and feeding their commitment in generating spin-off activities in different local contexts.
The concept of 'diaspora' seems to be a relevant framework for reading and understanding the parallel strategies of the settled state and mobility in contemporary flows of migration. This article presents a critical overview of the evolution of the concept, and then goes on to hypothesize the long-term emergence of an Islamic diaspora in Europe, by analysing how Muslims today are reshaping their relations to time and space. The reappropriation of time is articulated on two distinct but complementary levels. The first is expressed through developments in interpretation of the religious sources ("ijtihad"), demonstrated by a dynamic of conflict in the reterritorialization of the Revelation: the adaptation of Koranic categories to new sets of social issues, individual reappropriation of the Text, the questioning of consistency between belief and normative behaviour by women and young people. The second, more complex level reflects the creation of a form of subjectivity through the development of collective memory and identity. In this, the structuring of a Muslim 'community' stumbles against difficulty in accepting the legitimacy of internal pluralism, which is reflected in the struggles between movements and religious leaderships for control of codes of meaning and symbolic boundaries. In contrast, the appropriation of space appears to be broadly under way: this is demonstrated by the successful integration of the majority of Muslims into the local urban space in Europe. This parallel process of settlement and transnational mobility is made possible by the current vitality of the field of religion - a spiritual extraterritoriality that enables fluid, pragmatic management of integration into the European space. Thus, the diaspora is becoming a true social laboratory, in which a flexible category of belonging is developing. Copyright Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2002.
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
Conflict over the building of mosques in European cities depends very much on the degree of legitimacy acquired by Muslims in the public sphere. What is at stake is the degree of cultural and religious pluralism acceptable in a certain context. In Italy mosque-building has a strong symbolic dimension and involves both local and national actors, and religious and political issues. The media have a key role because on the one hand they present local facts to a wider national arena; on the other they help to build fear among the Italian population by enlarging the international discourse on Islam. Thus, the conflicts that frequently arise around mosque-building reflect tensions and ambiguities already existing in Italian society, like the relationship between local and national politics, or the Catholic Church monopoly of cultural values versus secularism. What is the role of Muslim actors in all this? Building a mosque means, first of all, visibility. We address these questions through the example of the planning of a mosque in the town of Lodi, in the North Italian region of Lombardy.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
customersupport@researchsolutions.com
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.