ReligioCity in Acre: Religious Processions, Parades, and Festivities in a Multi-Religious City

Who belongs where? Geographies of (inter)religion and urban segregation in Surabaya, Indonesia

“…The postmodern turn in urban theories and the lived religion turn in religious studies in the 1990s reinvigorated geographies of religion through the adoption of new cultural understandings ofamong other thingsthe phenomenology of religious and spiritual experience, the intersectionality of identities, unofficial sacred space, religious politics, and post-secularism (Beaumont & Baker, 2011;Cloke & Beaumont, 2013;Holloway & Valins, 2002;Kong, 1990Kong, , 2010Molendijk, Beaumont, & Jedan, 2010;Tremlett, 2022). As part of the global rise of the visibility of religious practices and the decline of the secularisation thesis, geographers have highlighted the complex, multi-layered, and post-secular character of cities using concepts such as the Infrasecular (Della Dora, 2018), religious urbanism (Woods, 2019), and ReligioCity (Luz, 2022). Contemporary geographies of religion have been characterised by the growing understanding that space and experience, subjectivity and materiality, and the religious and the secular are intertwined, mutually constitutive, ever-shifting, and continuously reworked (Gökarıksel, 2009;Tremlett, 2022;Woods, 2019).…”

“…Some examples include Bible study groups in McDonald's restaurants in China (Yang, 2005), house churches in Sri Lankan evangelical movements (Woods, 2013), and commercial theatres in Singapore rented by megachurches only on Sundays (Woods, 2019). Luz (2022) studies the religious processions and parades in the Israeli city of Acre to show how believers of various religions temporarily claim central parts of the city to demonstrate their identity to fellow city dwellers. Inhabiting these contingent, unofficial sacred spaces, individuals rework and reinvent their religious subjectivity into more flexible, momentary, less formal, and self-mediated forms of religiosity and spirituality (Gilliat-Ray, 2005), as opposed to the more formal and communal versions of religiosity found in officially designated places of worship.…”

“…Inhabiting these contingent, unofficial sacred spaces, individuals rework and reinvent their religious subjectivity into more flexible, momentary, less formal, and self-mediated forms of religiosity and spirituality (Gilliat-Ray, 2005), as opposed to the more formal and communal versions of religiosity found in officially designated places of worship. At the same time, some individuals make political claims of inclusion and practise conscious or unconscious resistance to top-down or official designations of urban space (e.g., Luz, 2022;Phadke, Ranade, & Khan, 2009). Simultaneously, state actors refashion urban policies, agendas, and politics in order to accommodate, control, or take advantage of these changing religious practices, subjectivities, and spatial (re)productions.…”