Title: The Future of Public Religious Ritual in an Urban Context
Abstract: Over the years the streets of the city of Birmingham have witnessed many different forms of public religious ritual. From the church, guild and market based rituals of the small medieval town around St Martin’s church through to the walks of witness, May processions and Corpus Christi walks of the ever expanding nineteenth century city. Riots took place in Highgate just south of the new city center in the late nineteenth century because Anglo-Catholic clergy chose to take to the streets with banners, bands, vestments and statues to proclaim their faith within the slums of the city.1 Sunday schools held walks and many different churches took their faith out into the city streets in the early years of the twentieth century. As the city appeared to die, however, with the closing factories and slump years of the 1970s and 80s so the public religious rituals also appeared to die. At much the same time, however, new communities came into the city from the Indian sub-continent and the Caribbean and new rituals began to be seen on the streets, often amidst considerable protest from the older inhabitants of the city. Towards the end of the twentieth century citysponsored rituals for the celebration of St Patrick’s day, the Chinese New Year, Vaisakhi, Eid, Carnival and we might even want to include Gay Pride, came to represent the public face of the city as a culturally diverse and inclusive city. Into the twenty-first century many more nationalities, religions, ethnicities and language groups came to the city and competed for space and recognition. It is this latest, superdiverse, context for the performance of public ritual that I wish to explore and analyze within this paper. By public religious ritual, or ‘public ritual’ in this context, what I am referring to are those rituals that a specific religious, or other, community chooses to perform in public, that is beyond the confines of their own building or compound, and more specifically to perform with the specific intention of attracting an audience beyond their own particular community. These are rituals that are designed to be performed in public and to the public. The most common form of such rituals are processions or walks of one form or another, but public rituals do take many different forms from static and silent acts of witness or remembrance, through to public performances or other activities that come to resemble large, communal parties such as carnivals or markets. There is a significant literature on such public rituals, although much of it focuses on one or
Publication Year: 2015
Publication Date: 2015-12-11
Language: en
Type: article
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