Healing atmospheres and community care among Pentecostal Gitano communities in vulnerable neighbourhoods

Research on European Pentecostalism has paid limited attention to how embodied and affective dynamics of worship sustain everyday forms of mutual support. This paper addresses that gap by proposing the concept of healing atmospheres to analyse how collective affects in Gitano Pentecostal worship generate a double form of healing: a bodily healing, often dramatised in moments of miraculous cure during worship, and a social healing configured in the everyday through dense networks of community care in vulnerable urban peripheries. Drawing on ten months of affect-centred ethnography in the La Paz church, located between the Besòs-Maresme and La Mina neighbourhoods of Barcelona, we explore how material, sensory and performative configurations of worship produce intense affective atmospheres that reshape bodies, emotions, and experiences of illness. We argue that these healing atmospheres operate across two interconnected spatialities: the ritual space–time of worship, where believers experience cleansing, renewal and moments of miraculous or therapeutic transformation; and the extended space–time of neighbourhood life, where dispositions cultivated in worship underpin community care through ongoing practices of intercession, conflict mediation and collective action. Rather than opposing biomedicine, these practices complement it, contesting its monopoly on health while recognising its diagnostic authority.