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This article analyzes the development and framing of Catalonia's "Law on Centers of Worship", an innovative law dedicated exclusively to the regulation of religious temples that was passed by the regional parliament in 2009. The law was a legal novelty in Spain, as well as in Europe, where regulations pertaining to places of worship are typically folded into regional or municipal laws and ordinances dealing with zoning and construction. This analysis highlights how the law aimed not only to address the challenges generated by the proliferation of places of worship serving religious minorities, but also to legally reinforce and symbolically affirm Catalonia's political autonomy and cultural distinctiveness vis-à-vis Spain. I place particular emphasis on how the temporal confluence of heightened nationalist mobilization, on the one hand, and tensions surrounding ethno-religious diversification, on the other, contributed to the development of a legal innovation that integrated the governance of religious diversity within the broader nation-building project. The findings illustrate the role of historical timing and conjunctural causality in shaping the dynamic nexus between religion, law, and politics.

AbstractHow do cities determine who has the right to station themselves in iconic public spaces? This article explores this question by analyzing the evolution of Barcelona's approach to regulating street performance, with a particular focus on regulations pertaining to 'living statues'. Although most buskers have been expelled from the Ramblas, one of the city's most emblematic walkways, living statues remain permitted on the promenade. This, I argue, is due to the general embrace of statues as part of local tradition and their integration within city‐branding campaigns, as well as their own organizing and boundary work. As the image Barcelona seeks to cultivate has changed, however, the right of statues to station themselves in public space has become ever more tenuous. My findings speak to broader questions regarding how cities determine the boundaries of 'urban desirability', as well as why and how such boundaries change over time. They also elucidate the strategies that groups located at the margins employ in attempting to position themselves favorably in relation to such boundaries. More generally, they highlight how current approaches to analyzing urban inclusion and exclusion may benefit from a more sustained engagement with the burgeoning social scientific literature on symbolic boundaries.

This article examines the structural conditions and cultural narratives underlying the high frequency and intensity of anti-mosque campaigns in the Spanish region of Catalonia. Drawing on Blumer's theory of prejudice as a sense of group position, as it has been elaborated and extended to multi-ethnic settings by subsequent scholarship, I contend that local reactions to mosques in Catalonia have been shaped by context-specific configurations of identity and urban space. I show how longstanding socio-economic and cultural divisions within Catalonia's native population, as well as the inscription of these divisions within the spatial ordering of the region, have heightened feelings of threat elicited by the large-scale arrival of Muslim immigrants to working-class neighborhoods in recent years. In advancing this argument, I build on the insights of geographers and urban sociologists to develop a spatially sensitive understanding of social position and perceived group threat that considers the importance of place identities and the interaction between distinct registers of territorial belonging.

Jessaca Leinaweaver's Adoptive Migration is a rich and insightful studyof the complex dynamics surrounding Peruvian adoption and migration inSpain that builds upon and extends the insights from her previous book, TheCirculation of Children: Kinship, Adoption, and Morality in Andean Peru. Thenovelty of Leinaweaver's approach lies in the comparison she draws between theseemingly incongruous phenomena of international adoption and transnationalmigration. Through juxtaposing adoption and migration, Leinaweaver providesa fresh perspective on each process and brings disparate scholarly literaturesinto productive dialogue.

Scholars have written extensively on the emergence of mass sports in modern industrial societies, and the factors that have facilitated the development of 'hegemonic sports cultures'. Less has been written on how the structure and content of 'national sport spaces' change over time, and the reasons that certain sports cultures have failed to sustain their popular appeal amid processes of political, social and cultural transformation. This article analyses the sharp decline in the popularity of Spanish boxing during the 1970s and 1980s. In explaining this decline, we draw attention to a series of developments that disrupted rituals of spectatorship that were key to sustaining the sport's fan base. Our findings highlight the importance of ritual to the reproduction of hegemonic sports cultures and identify 'ritual disruption' as a mechanism through which broad societal changes may alter the configuration of national sport spaces.

The Mediterranean has long been a space of encounter between different nations, religions, and cultures. The fusion of national and religious identity in the region has added complexity to current debates regarding the recognition and accommodation of religious minorities. In this introduction, we outline recent scholarship on religious nationalism and the governance of religious diversity in the Mediterranean. We draw upon the articles included in this special issue to highlight the distinctive modalities of the religion-national identity link that exist in the region, and the manner in which these modalities have influenced policies of religious accommodation and strategies of political mobilization among religious minorities. In concluding, we draw attention to the need for more studies that help to connect recent analyses of ethno-religious and political transformations in the Mediterranean with the work of historians and social scientists on the historical constitution and evolution of the region as an interconnected space in which core socio-political and cultural dynamics are shaped by cross-border flows, engagements, and exchanges.