María Eugenia Funes D. in Social Sciences (Universidad de Buenos Aires) and in Sociology (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales - École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales - ESS).ehess), Master in Social Anthropology (ides-idaes/Universidad de San Martín) and a degree in Sociology (Universidad del Salvador). She has taught in the Sociology of Religion seminar and is currently Professor of the Thesis Workshop, both in the Sociology program at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the Universidad del Salvador. She also directs the research project "Spirituality and new economies. Towards an understanding of the relationships between spiritual sociabilities and new economic organizations in Argentina", funded by the National Agency for the Promotion of Research, Technological Development and Innovation (2021-2022). She is currently researching the articulations between cosmovisions and spiritual practices with the emergence of business models that aim to solve social and environmental problems.

Realidades socioculturales

The Celebration of Beliefs. Cultural Policies and Religious Diversity in a Public Cultural Center in the City of Buenos Aires (Argentina)

  • María Eugenia Funes
  • Mercedes Máspero
  • Mercedes Nachón Ramírez

Keywords: Argentina, religious diversity, public space, New Age spirituality, cultural policies.

The purpose behind this article is to analyze the way in which the diversity of beliefs was defined and rebuilt in a cycle organized by a public cultural center in the city of Buenos Aires. For this, we will study the uses of the category of belief and the spiritual references created by participating state agents, artists and religious and spiritual specialists. We ask ourselves the definitions of all that is religious, spiritual and the diversity of beliefs that move outside institutions traditionally linked to religion. Likewise, we set out to show, using a specific case, the way in which the concern over diversity in the design of Latin American cultural public policies can coexist with the selection of specific cultural expressions which, in this case, represent only a part of the existing religious diversity. The data were built from a qualitative strategy that included participatory observations, in-depth interviews and the analysis of documents.