VERNACULAR RESPONSES TO RELIGIOUS CONFLICTS, CRISES, AND (RE)CONCILIATIONS

September 7-8, 2026 - Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon 

Conference organized by SIEF Ethnology of Religion Working Group and the Institute of Social Sciences

Local Convenors: Clara Saraiva and Gianmarco Marzola (ICS-ULisboa)

In a time marked by polycrisis ranging from ecological calamities and political polarization to armed conflict and deepening existential precarity, religion is increasingly entangled in, and mobilized through, struggles over meaning, belonging, and power. As a powerful social field, religion has long been an arena of conflict as well as a resource for mediating, managing, and transforming conflicts.

Conflict within religious traditions often unfolds in terms of struggles over authority, authenticity, and belonging. These struggles center on who has the power to define “proper” doctrine, ritual practice, moral behaviour, gender roles, and legitimate relationships with the state and the wider social world. Such disputes are often intensified by differing attitudes toward modernity. In these debates, competing actors present contituity and reform as matters of fidelity or moral order. Conflict can also be generated by aesthetic disputes over style and taste, new forms of piety and innovation.

Religious phenomena might cause conflicts in the public that arise when religious commitments and moral projects become articulated in shared public spaces and institutions, where they encounter competing norms of secular governance and pluralism. They frequently crystallize at the contested interface of dominant traditions and minoritized religious and ethnic formations, where difference is politicized through regimes of recognition.  

Resolving conflict through religious practices can be approached through local and individual strategies, embodied, relational, and material practices, through which people navigate, and recompose everyday life amid conflict and crisis. In this ritual economy of conflict and repair we find collective forms of memory work and religious artistic practices through which communities seek to come to terms with the past and to negotiate ethnic, religious, and political antagonisms in religious idioms.

More information here