South Asian Women’s Innovations of Commercial Sites as Religious Spaces in Barcelona

Abstract

This paper considers how working-class South Asian women across generations and religious communities innovate commercial spaces as religious spaces in Spain. The paper describes how women shopkeepers (aged 20-50) in Barcelona’s Raval neighborhood facilitate the everyday mixing of marketplace transactions and religious devotion through mutual acts of care. For example, Muslim-run shops are regularly “covered” by neighboring Hindu or Sikh shopkeepers during namaz prayer. Likewise, Hindu women shopkeepers – most of whom lack “formal” temple communities in Barcelona – frequently use their shops to host religious events, including ritualized worship of deities. During such events, it is common for non-Hindu neighbors to “cover” the shops’ commercial transactions. Older, non-working women family members also join younger counterparts in commercial spaces to facilitate religious observances and to help care for young children who join their mothers at work. Though the intermingling of devotional acts in commercial spaces is common in South Asian communities in and beyond the subcontinent, scholarly research on such interminglings has often treated the “marketplace” and “religion” as mutually exclusive zones. Building on long-term ethnographic research, this paper suggests that commercial spaces may be critical to the cultivation of personal devotional expression and intergenerational faith-based gathering—particularly among working-class women in “minority” diaspora communities.