Large-scale street festivals, public processions, and open-air religious rituals enact religious, racial, and ethnic identities that anchor diverse religious communities in the secular landscape of California. The Global Religious Festivals in Secular Cityscapes Studio focuses attention on these public religious performances, “religion in the streets,” in a multi-site, multi-religious study that strives to understand public religion in California’s urban, suburban, and ex-urban contexts. We compare diverse public religious festivals: Buddhist, Chinese, Hindu, Sikh, “New Age” (American metaphysical religion), Latino Catholic, and Latino Pentecostal, among others, asking questions about the political significance of these performances vis a vis American democratic and civic culture.
What is a Global Festival?
Major Collaboration Humanities Studios
Holi, Manzanar, Noche, Milagros:
Research teams of five or more scholars, students, and artists engage in immersive, ethnographic research together over a period of several days.
Small Collaboration Humanities Studios
Teams of two to three researchers collaborate in field site visits over the course of the festival.
Theoretical Considerations of Festival as Object and Festival as Method
Historically, religious festivals have been means to celebrate special occasions, markers of sacred time and space, means to consolidate political power and reify community identity, ways to invoke the divine and/or nature in daily life, methods of marking …
Query 1: The Religious Festivals Humanities Lab Project reveals that we become enmeshed in the complicated and vibrant diversity of California and because these celebrations are capable of assuaging our multicultural anxieties and they open up the possibilities …
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