Saints and Mobility. Crisis and Presence of Catholicism and its Faithful in Contemporary Cologne (working title).

Cologne is a place of cultural and historical entanglement, where the presence of Catholicism is fading and changing; local priests are disappearing and churches are agglomerating under the leadership of just one of them, while thousands of faithful are fleeing also due to recent scandals. However, the history and memory of this “holy city” are embodied by its sacred places and saint’s figures, a dozed of religious heritage that constitute the cultural landscape for its inhabitants, old and new, and that can be appropriated, re-activated, and re-shaped according to their needs. By following Southern-Italian migrants and their practices of place-making in these sacred spaces, the project delves into the intertwinement of their history of migration and their religious practices through generations. In all of this, saints’ figures and devotions have played a fundamental role; Italians have brought their own saints with them, mobilizing the sacredness embodied in these mythological figures “from home” while possibly re-invoking that inscribed in Cologne. Saints are mobile and allow people to move back and forth from a cultural and social space to another, to connect, claim and appropriate them. A claimed space and the claim itself allow people to be recognized by the surrounding “others” and thus to be present in front of each other. In other words, these sacred figures work as a compass; they connect the faithful to time through memories and to space through movements. Strangerhood and religion reconfigure themselves together, from local practices to transnational networks; this double movement unfolds a multilayered complexity that become crucial also to understand the crisis and presence of Catholicism today in its center.

Biography

During his studies in sociology at the University of Salerno, Emanuele De Simone joined the Annabella Rossi Anthropology Lab and collaborated with anthropologist Stefano De Matteis. This led to his Bachelor’s thesis in Cultural Anthropology on the memory of the Shoah across generations, part of a larger project in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut Naples. He completed his Master's degree with a thesis in Theories of Contemporary Society, exploring critical perspectives on myth-making processes. Collegiate of the a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School for the Humanities of Cologne, PhD and research assistant at the chair of Professor Martin Zillinger in the Department of Anthropology, Emanuele is working within the intertwining of anthropology of religion and sainthood and anthropology of migration and mobility to investigate the role of saints in the migration process of Italian Catholic migrants of Cologne. He is also working on the Decentring Epistemologies for Global Well-Being project within the EUniWell-Network and is member of the Mediterranean Liminalities Research Lab.

Contact

edesimonsmail.uni-koeln.de