Practical Piety: Intimate Devotions in Urban Space

Abstract City spaces not only reflect doctrinal religious ideas in orientation and monumental architecture, they also both reflect and enable pragmatic accommodations to human frailty. Long-term immersion in ethnographic research reveals the linkages and tensions between the structure of official religious morality and the reality of everyday social practice. Using field materials from Greece, Italy, and Thailand, I offer suggestive examples of such practical accommodations, both in the religious principles underlying bureaucratic approaches to urban spatiality and in the construction of local places of worship and commemoration. Displays of orthopraxy overlie locally pertinent (and sometimes divergent) conceptions of religiosity that are nevertheless historically and formally linked to doctrinal orthodoxy. Formal religions, like nation-states, often depend on the covert presence of cultural intimacy (here “religious intimacy”) – spaces for the recognition and quiet toleration of divergent attitudes and practices – for their long-term survival. Displays of loyalty and religiosity are thus primarily practices of identity rather than expressions of the complexity of innermost belief, and, as such, they form a protective façade of structural consistency that hides the internal tensions and accommodations generated between doctrine and practice by the human foibles and social ambiguities of everyday life.