From Tuesday 28 February to Thursday 2 March, the “Religious freedom within the framework of interculturality” conferences will be taking place at various city locations. Religious communities and organisations, along with people from the academic world and public administration are invited to take stock of the actions carried out in recent years to comply with this right, within the framework of intercultural Barcelona. The conferences include an inaugural conference, working committees, guided visits and various workshops. With the collaboration of the Ethnology and World Cultures Museum, Cementiris de Barcelona and religious communities and organisations in the city.
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WHY ARE THESE CONFERENCES BEING HELD?
The conference “Religious freedom in Barcelona: current situation”, in February 2020, just before the start of the Covid-19 health crisis, was held with the aim of compiling the city’s good practices and shortcomings in regard to the exercising of religious and worshipping freedom, and to evaluate the current situation in order to work on it during Barcelona City Council’s current term of office. That conference was the starting point for launching actions and evaluations and ensuring the right to religious freedom and awareness in the city (see the compilation here).
The affirmation that Barcelona is a religiously diverse city is no longer a surprise for anyone. But beyond that, it is necessary to see and understand how this diversity (among all the many possible diversities) shapes our society and has consequences in terms of public spaces and interpersonal relationships, both individually and collectively. In the city, there are currently 982 religious communities and organisations, corresponding to 28 different traditions (you can review this data in the Religious Affairs Office (OAR) reports-Catalan). All of this religiousness and spirituality is present in the day-to-day lives of Barcelona residents, in many areas of society: education, the workplace, the use of public spaces, etc. And furthermore, the pandemic caused new places for meeting, working and adapting, such as digital communities, in regard to religious communities and organisations in general and Barcelona in particular.
A notable change in the municipal policy for managing religious pluralism is the presentation and implementation of the new 2021-2030 Barcelona Interculturality Plan(Catalan). With this plan, Barcelona City Council has set itself an important goal: to progress towards a more intercultural city, based on the principles of effective equality, the recognition of diversity, positive interaction and intercultural dialogue, in order to build a fairer, more inclusive and dynamic Barcelona, to fight against discrimination and to favour social cohesion, equity and harmonious coexistence. The plan seeks to address the structural causes which perpetuate social and economic inequalities, identified through a prior analysis and linked to the ever-increasing diversity of people’s origins in the city.
Interculturality is an approach that focuses on providing responses to the challenges posed by harmonious coexistence within diversity. 27.8% of Barcelona’s current residents were born abroad. People from over 180 different countries coexist in the city, speaking around 300 different languages (data from the new Barcelona Interculturality Plan).
Religious pluralism has been integrated into the city’s interculturality policies due to the new Barcelona Interculturality Plan (2021-2030), which in addition to its commitment to progressing towards real, effective equality in terms of rights, also involves recognition and respect for cultural diversity and religious pluralism, as a structural aspect of society that must be taken into account and valued, and the aim of facilitating positive interaction, creating ties, participation and intercultural dialogue under conditions of equality.
The conferences are designed to focus on this new intercultural framework for the effective application of the right to religious freedom in the City of Barcelona. They will make it possible to take stock of the actions that have been carried out in recent years in regard to effectively complying with this right while also compiling requests and proposals from various city communities.
OPEN, PLURAL CONFERENCES FOR TAKING STOCK
The entire conference programme has been designed with activities in various formats that combine spaces for reflection with more participative experience activities (such as workshops and guided visits). The aim is to give space to various forms of expression beyond academic discourses, with a view to reaching a wider audience. On Tuesday 28 February, the Ethnology and World Cultures Museum will be the initial conference venue, with an inaugural conference introducing the goals and challenges involved in the public management of religious pluralism. There will then be four consecutive working committees, for the purpose of debate and dialogue, in order to give voice to religious pluralism and awareness in Barcelona, along with the evaluations and experiences arising from the four main themes under consideration: the application of the 1992 agreements, visibility and recognition of symbols in public spaces, religious freedom and the workplace and, lastly, digital communities. They will be led by activists and academics with wide experience in the field of sociology and anthropology, studying the management of religious diversity. Religious communities and organisations will be taking part, along with municipal officials from each area.
Also on 28 February, and all the other conference days, there will be two guided visits to the Ethnology and World Cultures Museum and Barcelona Cathedral, which will highlight the city’s cultural and religious legacy, linking it to the present day. And lastly, the workshops will aim to highlight real practices and facts in various areas, including education (Religious Affairs Office), places of worship (Orthodox Romanian Sant Jordi church) and the inter-denominational space (Cementiris de Barcelona).
In this way, the conferences aim to attract a wider, plural audience from various areas: the city’s religious and spiritual communities and organisations, the main protagonists of the conferences, municipal officials, who are also major figures in the scenarios presented during the conferences, academics, researchers or people interested in various aspects relating to one of the conference themes, and members of the general public who are interested in the effective application of religious freedom within this new intercultural framework.
COMBINING FORCES WITH THE ETHNOLOGY AND WORLD CULTURES MUSEUM AND OTHER ORGANISATIONS
The MUEC is a museum dedicated to ethnology or social anthropology. It has two venues, MUEC-Montjuïc and MUEC-Montcada, and it is the result of a merger between the Barcelona Ethnology Museum and the World Cultures Museum. The MUEC aims to be a participative space where society can reflect on itself, based on knowledge of cultural “others”. Religion is one of the aspects of social life that has been studied most by anthropology, always from a transcultural, comparative perspective, based on empirical data. Indeed, a lot of the objects in the MUEC-Montcada venue are related to religious or ritual aspects.
The MUEC and the OAR are once again (Spanish) combining forces to organise these conferences: the MUEC will be the venue for part of the conferences and will also offer a guided visit of its collection: “Sacred journeys. Humanity and religions”. The visit focuses on the fact that societies coexist with sacred elements which are concerned with their concept of the world, narratives and theories about their origin and function, the place of humans and the causes of misfortune. During the visit, you can discover some of the world’s major religions, including Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism, as well as others, such as the Yoruba religion from Africa, the Australian aborigine religion from Oceania and the Pre-Columbian Mayan religion from America.
Other organisations collaborating with these conferences include Cementiris de Barcelona, Barcelona Cathedral and the Romanian Orthodox Sant Jordi church(Spanish).