Religious Tastes in a Gentrified Neighbourhood

Abstract

This article examines how religious diversity is manifested and represented in contexts undergoing intense urban pressures. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in the Raval quarter of Barcelona, we analyse the open-air festivities of religious minorities and the emergence of new neighbourhood associations’ mobilizations. Specifically, we focus on the role of food in these events as a way to explore how diversification and urban transformation interrelate. Whilst food becomes the means through which religious and secular actors interact and articulate forms of place-making, it also becomes a resource to present religion in forms deemed ‘acceptable’ to the general public.