Religion, the City, and the Body

This article contributes to debates on the relation between religion and the city by focusing on bodily experiences of religious rituals and the urban. Approaching religion as corporeal, and acknowledging the importance of bodies in experiencing and creating cities, I focus on embodied religious practices and the role of ritual bodies in the creation of urban memory. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork on the Hindu fire-walking festival in Singapore between 2019 and 2022, I reveal the gendered body and the translocal dimensions of the festival as key in experiencing the religious and the urban, in creating urban memory through religious rituals, and in the ways the religious and the urban co-constitute one another.