| Theologie > CIRRuS > Forschungsdisziplinen > Systematische Theologie, Religionssoziologie > Religion und soziale Ungleichheit -- Pfingstbewegung > |
The city quarter of "el Ajusco" is located at the south-east of the delegation of Coyoacán to which it belongs. It is a low-middle and low class sector of popular culture with aprox. 30,000 inhabitants. It originates in the 1940ies through land occupation with different migration waves mainly from the states of Oaxaca, Michoacán and Querétaro. In the successive struggles with the government for building of infrastructure, delivering of urban services and regularization of land ownership the liberationist pastoral of the Jesuit parish played a significant role from the beginning, contributing to the development of an urban identity and establishing an exceptional case regarding the presence of CEBs (church base communities), which amount approximately to 40 in the quarter. Traditional Pentecostals were present since the 1970ies, the period of most growth and diversification of migrant groups. Among these groups however, many people stayed attached to popular Catholicism which was adapted in order to translate a rural village identity to the city. Around the 1980ies the religious landscape became strongly pluralized since most of the evangelical churches established themselves in the quarter during that period. This coincides with the start of the neoliberal politics and the transition to a service-economy, by which working class and marginal sectors of the city were the most affected.
Further, the start of a pluralization process combined with the legal frame of religious freedom triggered the emergence of new forms of urban popular religiosity, such as the cult of "la Santa Muerte", also with a strong presence in the quarter. "El Ajusco" offers thus almost "laboratory conditions" for the study of religious plurality in popular urban sectors. This project aims to analyze religious diversity of catholic and evangelical (mainly pentecostal) actors in "el Ajusco", focusing on the relation between religious identity, social space and urban spatiality. It is being realized in cooperation with Prof. Dr. Hugo José Suarez from the Institute of Social Research (Instituto de Investigaciónes Social, IIS) Universidad Autónoma Nacional de México (UNAM).
The method of habitus analysis with the models of the praxeological square and the space of religious styles provides the central methodological apparatus of the project, thus feeding back empirically the theoretical and methodological research agenda on an Bourdieuan sociology of religion at CIRRuS. Complemented with ethnographic observation of the studied religious groups and theoretical elements from urban sociology and analysis of urban space, the project elaborates on three main research-axes: religious diversity under conditions of relative social homogeneity, transversality of religious styles (forms of believing across forms of belonging) and the relation between religious identity and urban spaciality.
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