Religious Symbols Made in Italy

Abstract

While Italian pundits and politicians purport a world of cultural-religious friction, systematic monitoring of the Italian mediascape and extensive ethnographic fieldwork illuminate a far more complex picture. Ambiguous everyday encounters coexist with structural inequality and exclusionary discourses. The periodic controversies dominating the popular media—over religious symbols, migration, and “Islam”—chart moral (and even theologically laden) political visions that function to inculcate new mechanisms of social control and boundary making in Italy.