Lucumí (Yoruba) Culture in Cuba: A Reevaluation (1830S -1940s)

The status, roles, and interactions of three dominant African ethnic groups and their descendants in Cuba significantly influenced the island’s cubanidad (national identity): the Lucumís (Yoruba), the Congos (Bantú speakers from Central West Africa), and the Carabalís (from the region of Calabar). These three groups, enslaved on the island, coexisted, each group confronting obstacles that threatened their way of life and cultural identities. Through covert resistance, cultural appropriation, and accommodation, all three, but especially the Lucumís, laid deep roots in the nineteenth century that came to fruition in the twentieth. During the early 1900s, Cuba confronted numerous pressures, internal and external. Under the pretense of a quest for national identity and modernity, Afro-Cubans and African cultures and religion came under political, social, and intellectual attack. Race was an undeniable element in these conflicts. While all three groups were oppressed equally, only the Lucumís fought back, contesting accusations of backwardness, human sacrifice, cannibalism, and brujería (witchcraft), exaggerated by the sensationalistic media, often with the police’s and legal system’s complicity. Unlike the covert character of earlier epochs’ responses to oppression, in the twentieth century Lucumí resistance was overt and outspoken, publically refuting the accusations levied against African religions. Although these struggles had unintended consequences for the Lucumís, they gave birth to cubanidad’s African component. With the help of Fernando Ortiz, the Lucumí were situated at the pinnacle of a hierarchical pyramid, stratifying African religious complexes based on civilizational advancement, but at a costly price. Social ascent denigrated Lucumí religion to the status of folklore, depriving it of its status as a bona fide religious complex. To the present, Lucumí religious descendants, in Cuba and, after 1959, in many other areas of the world, are still contesting this contradiction in terms: an elevated downgrade.

La santidad compartida: la encrucijada del Islam y la ortodoxia cristiana en los Balcanes, reflejos en Bulgaria

In this doctoral thesis with the title: “The Shared Holiness: The crossroad of Islam and the Christian Orthodoxy in the Balkans, reflections in Bulgaria”, presented by VLADISLAVA SPASOVA ILIEVA, under the direction of Dr. MONTSERRAT ABUMALHAM MAS, and Dr. PEDRO BÁDENAS DE LA PEÑA, we reflect upon the crossroads between the populations in the Balkans, whose conversion into States was significantly influenced by their belonging to the Byzantine and the Ottoman Empires. Known as the crossroads of several cultures, the area was the destination of a massive influx of pagan Slaves, as well as the meeting point of Islam and Christianity. Considering the bidirectionality of the processes, we shall focus on the mutual enrichment brought about in the encounter between the religiosities of the Balkans, and we will discuss these points from different perspectives. In the common Balkan-Anatolian space, we turn our attention to the ancient hermits, with the aim of showing the complicity in the relations of coexistence, whether Islamic-Christian, Turkish-Byzantine, Turkish-Bulgarian, or Ottoman-Balkan, and a possible scheme, that could be valid for both social and spiritual growth of the person, as well as for the development of an ethnic or religious community, when sharing the same space with other populations, communities or ethnicities...

“ The Creation of an Urban Landscape” in Adaptive reuse,the modern movement toward the future, 14th international conference proceedings, Do_co.mo.mo international, Lisboa ( indexed by SCOPUS)

The headquarters and park of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon represent the first modern Portuguese environment with an outstanding relation between exterior and interior as a spatial continuum . As such, the project refused the more common conceptual attitude of interior plus exterior. This unitary view revealed a clear understanding of the proposed site for the project and what could have been Calouste Sarkis Gulbenkian (1869-1955) expectations, while concretizing Modern Movement ideals regarding landscape architecture and architecture. Through its design the park mediates the relation between the buildings’ super-structures, the urban context, and the human scale, while generating a unifying system established by the complicity between natural and synthetic materials. From the first moment of the project’s design process, this complicity resulted in a set of strategies that met programmatic