Religious Super-diversity and Peacebuilding
An Anthropological Perspective
Alessandro Saggioro [+–]
Sapienza University, Rome
delle Religioni and of the related book series Quaderni di SMSR. Books recently edited: with C. Russo: Roma città plurale. Le religioni, il territorio, le ricerche, Chi siamo – Storia delle religioni 48, Bulzoni, Rome, 2018; Definire il pluralismo religioso, Morcelliana, Brescia, 2020. His interests and publications include teaching, methodology and Historiography of the History of Religions, religious conflict and coexistence, religions of Ancient Mediterranean, religions, law and politics, identity, mythology and peace studies.
Carmelo Russo [+–]
Sapienza University, Rome
Steven Vertovec introduced the category of super-diversity in 2007. According to this notion, the nature of immigration brings with it “a transformative ‘diversification of diversity’ not just in terms of bringing more ethnicities and countries of origin, but also with respect to a multiplication of significant variables [that include] differential immigration statuses and their concomitant entitlements and restrictions of rights, divergent labour market experiences, discrete gender and age profiles, patterns of spatial distribution, and mixed local area responses by service providers and residents.”
Religion has recently gained more prominence in debates around migration-driven super-diversity due to issues of secularization and the re-enchantment of the world and the increasing presence of migrant religions and new religious movements. While anthropologists have traditionally focused on conflicts, some scholars have recently explored the role of religion in peacebuilding process, taking into account the fact that religious spaces are produced through the labor of ritualization and interpretations.
Vertovec claims that, if on the one hand super-diversity could entail patterns of inequality and prejudice, emergent forms of racism and segregation, on the other it could challenge these negative features in increasingly complex, composite, and stratified societies. Despite certain ambiguities, the religious super-diversity could lead to greater interaction, to the development of convivial and cosmopolitan identities, and contribute to the building of a peaceful coexistence (Vertovec 2019).
This book explores the relation between religious super-diversity and peacebuilding from an anthropological perspective using both theory and specific case studies.
Series: Religions and Peace Studies
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
University. She received a doctoral degree in anthropology from SOAS, University of
London. From 2020 to 2022, she worked as a post-doctoral fellow at Sun Yat-Sen
University. Her research interests include anthropology of Christianity, Vietnamese
Catholicism and gender.
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8