RELIGIOUS AND SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCES: CONFLICTS, PERSPECTIVES, AND HISTORICAL AND SOCIOCULTURAL CHALLENGES
Religious and spiritual experiences—despite the celebrated intensification of scientific and rational discourses and manifest technological advances—continue to hold a place of significant importance in people’s lives. Today it might seem trite to point out that no such disenchantment or re-enchantment of the world actually occurred, since, at the individual, community and/or social level, religion and spirituality continue to permeate ways of being-in-the-world.
Religious and spiritual manifestations are understood here not as epiphenomenal dimensions of everyday life, but, on the contrary, as experiences that hold centrality and influence across all spheres of human action. In this sense, social, natural, and transcendent worlds—which are not separate in all societies—converge and have bearing on the ways people inhabit these universes, thereby reconfiguring the interconnections and approaches between humans and non-humans. These ways of being-in-the-world sometimes translate into practices that may prove conflictive for one population group or another, insofar as they clash with the dispositions of the dominant society and with what may be considered its cultural proximity. These issues are exacerbated by internal-national but also diasporic and transnational migratory processes that, across the globe, influence the reappropriations and rearrangements that spiritualities may undergo in new host locations.
Thus, the symposium is committed to an inter- and transdisciplinary dialogue that considers, through different theoretical-methodological approaches, the ways in which the long-term, recent, or event-focused past intersects with religious systems and spiritual experiences, affecting the existing tensions and conflicts between these and the societies in which they unfold, while at the same time contributing to the formation of networks of resistance, support, and coping in the face of social differences and tensions such as environmental and territorial conflicts, racism, gender discrimination, and various forms of structural or de facto violence, among others.
In this sense, analytical and interpretive proposals are expected whose starting point is the experience of religious and spiritual dynamics, linking theory and practice, or theoretical analyses derived from concrete social cases capable of clarifying the place occupied by religious and spiritual systems, as well as the relevance and continued importance of social studies of these phenomena in the contemporary world.
