M Oosterbaan
Biographic Data
| ID | 14515 |
|---|---|
| NAME | M Oosterbaan |
| GIVEN NAMES | M |
| FAMILY NAME | Oosterbaan |
| SIGNATURE | OOSTERBAAN M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Utrecht University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0895-1842 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 151 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Creating the Complexo de Israel
This article centers on the relation between religion, criminal(ized) economies, and the production of urban space in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Our empirical focus lies on the Israel Complex, a cluster of favelas located in the city's northern periphery. The contested formation of the complex hinges on visual and discursive repertoires of city-making in which hybrid religious references derived from Catholicism, Pentecostal Christianity, and Judais…
Rules and laws in contexts of protracted conflict
Absence-of-the-law-talk and absence-of-the-state-display
From religious police to religious policing
Theopolitical police
This article centres on contemporary mergers between state security practices, popular media and religion in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It discusses the actions and the representations of BOPE - Batalhão de Operações Especiais da Polícia Militar do Rio de Janeiro - the special operations battalion of the military police of Rio de Janeiro, to show how this unit frequently employs Christian symbols and practices to legitimate violence at the border be…
Rights and Stones
This article discusses the growth of Pentecostal churches in favelas of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The author pleads for a systemic inclusion of religious ideas and practices in theoretical reflections on citizenship in the urban contexts of Brazil. Concretely, scholars need to include the explosive rise of Pentecostalism in their reflections on insurgent citizenship this religious movement fuels rights discourses and supports feelings of pride and …
Popular Art, Crime and Urban Order Beyond the State
This article engages with current discussions on the politics of aesthetics to theorize the role of popular art in reproducing or contesting urban orders. Specifically, we engage with scholars who have taken up the work of Jacques Rancière to understand how power structures are normalized through 'the distribution of the sensible'. Building on and critically engaging with debates on the 'post-political city', we suggest that all too often scholar…
Sounds of Children in Worship
Bringing together concepts from the fields of material religion and liturgical studies, this article explores how adults and children manage sound-related affordances during worship. The concept of affordances—the possibilities an environment offers a person—is made sensitive to socialization and is related to the concept of liturgical-ritual space. Liturgical-ritual space comes into being through people’s participation in an environment and is t…
Ethnography In-Sight
Credit: Performance of Labareda de Fogo. Photo by Martijn Oosterbaan, Rio de Janeiro, March 30, 2011. This photo captures four members of the Evangelical samba (pagode) collective Labareda de Fogo (Flame of Fire) midway their performance in a small Pentecostal Church in the neighborhood of Cidade Alta (Upper City) in Rio de Janeiro. The two men holding characteristic pagode instruments-a pandeiro and a tan-tan-are sweating as they push the samba …
Blessed Beats
This article examines Evangelical carnaval in Brazil to argue that anthropological writing on syncretization expresses a theoretical gap or shortcoming. In several large Brazilian cities, Evangelicals are currently organizing carnaval parades and performing samba music with percussion instruments. Many Evangelical adherents regard samba as spiritually hazardous because the music genre is perceived to hold Afro-Brazilian religious force. Such an a…
All is Normal
This article discusses the changes in Visionário, a favela located near the affluent neighborhoods in Rio de Janeiro, to assess the effects of the Sports Mega Events (SMEs) on the political and economic conditions in the favela. Following Harvey's (2005) description of "accumulation by dispossession," several authors have highlighted that the UPP policing program, implemented before the SMEs, was part of neoliberal efforts to colonize favela terr…
Samba Struggles
Olympic Legacies
Expectations of urban upgrading projects in light of the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro oscillated between hopeful prospects and pessimistic anticipation. The different opinions were clearly interwoven with stark socioeconomic inequalities and urban segregation. While authorities spread a celebratory narrative of improvements for the whole city, critics depicted a dystopian vision of spatial interventions that would violat…
Transposing Brazilian Carnival
This article discusses the rise of evangelical carnival parades in Rio de Janeiro in relation to spectacular carnival parades that feature Afro-Brazilian religious elements. The article exposes divergent intersections of religion and cultural heritage in Brazilian carnival. The first intersection aims to affirm the intrinsic connection betweensamba enredocarnival music and Afro-Brazilian religion by means of cultural heritage narratives, and the …
Entrepreneurial Religion in the Age of Neoliberal Urbanism
The introduction to this symposium on entrepreneurial religion and neoliberal urbanism discusses leading scholarly approaches to religion and urban theory, arguing that, despite their merits, these approaches are in need of refinement. Theories on religion and urban theory too often describe religion as a reactionary phenomenon. Religious movements and spaces are generally defined as pockets of resistance and shelter against retreating or failing…
Mediating Culture
Batman Returns
This article explores the aesthetic elements of sovereignty. Building on the anthropological literature on sovereignty and on contemporary work on the politics of aesthetics, the article analyzes contemporary appearances of Batman symbols and figures in Rio de Janeiro. Despite political debate and academic discussion about the Batmen appearing in mafia-like militias and popular street protests in Rio, the question of what these appearances tell u…
Public religion and urban space in Europe
Conflicts related to demographic and cultural change in Europe regularly find their expression in struggles over the presence and visibility of religious buildings and groups. As this editorial argues, these conflicts can best be understood from a postsecular perspective that takes into account overlapping and diverging histories of state-formation and secularization. The papers collected for this special issue on public religion and urban space …
Religious experiences of stasis and mobility in contemporary Europe
Discussions related to contemporary religious diversity in urban contexts often presume that people who form part of the public life of cities are citizens or have the right to move and dwell in the city. This article reminds us that when asking how certain religious movements become public in European cities, we also need to ask how possibilities of becoming public are tied to exclusionary citizenship regimes. By way of research among undocument…
Virtually global
Taking as a point of departure the Pentecostal use of digital world maps, this article argues that Pentecostal movements should be understood as part and parcel of contemporary convergence culture. A reading of the remediations of the Brazilian Pentecostal church – the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (IURD) – demonstrates that the simulacrum of global evangelical presence as put forward by the IURD is supported by the interplay between the…
Virtual Migration. Brazilian Diasporic Media and the Reconfigurations of Place and Space
This paper discusses the implications of the current developments in communication media on the form, content and place of Brazilian migrant communities in Europe. It is argued that Internet supports both deterritorialization and reterritorialization of diasporic Brazilians in Amsterdam and Barcelona. Brazilian migrants employ virtual communities on social network sites to sustain grassroots networks that facilitate migration and settlement in th…
Sonic Supremacy
This article discusses the soundscape of a favela in Rio de Janeiro. It argues that sounds, and music in particular, play an important part in the creation and maintenance of boundaries between groups in the dense urban space of the favela. The politics of presence excercised by different groups constitutes the sonic charisma of the favela. Especially in relation to Pentecostal faith, it becomes obvious how the charisma of the city and in the cit…
Spiritual Attunement
This article explores the ways in which Pentecostal media, especially electro-acoustic media, are integrated in the everyday life of a favela in Rio de Janeiro. It argues that the popularity of Pentecostal radio has to be understood in relation to the sociocultural meaning of sound, the architecture of the favela, and the ways in which sound is employed to mark off space and express identity and alterity. Pentecostal broadcasts acquire their mean…
Mass mediating the spiritual battle
In this paper I discuss several visual representations of a Brazilian neo-Pentecostal Church that has become involved in national politics. I argue that the Church employs representations of urban violence to enforce a Pentecostal imagination of the spiritual battle between God and the devil. The Church has been able to put forward this compelling Pentecostal interpretation of Brazilian society because its message is framed against the background…
Sonic Supremacy
This article discusses the soundscape of a favela in Rio de Janeiro. It argues that sounds, and music in particular, play an important part in the creation and maintenance of boundaries between groups in the dense urban space of the favela. The politics of presence excercised by different groups constitutes the sonic charisma of the favela. Especially in relation to Pentecostal faith, it becomes obvious how the charisma of the city and in the cit…
Entrepreneurial Religion in the Age of Neoliberal Urbanism
The introduction to this symposium on entrepreneurial religion and neoliberal urbanism discusses leading scholarly approaches to religion and urban theory, arguing that, despite their merits, these approaches are in need of refinement. Theories on religion and urban theory too often describe religion as a reactionary phenomenon. Religious movements and spaces are generally defined as pockets of resistance and shelter against retreating or failing…
Public religion and urban space in Europe
Conflicts related to demographic and cultural change in Europe regularly find their expression in struggles over the presence and visibility of religious buildings and groups. As this editorial argues, these conflicts can best be understood from a postsecular perspective that takes into account overlapping and diverging histories of state-formation and secularization. The papers collected for this special issue on public religion and urban space …
Spiritual Attunement
This article explores the ways in which Pentecostal media, especially electro-acoustic media, are integrated in the everyday life of a favela in Rio de Janeiro. It argues that the popularity of Pentecostal radio has to be understood in relation to the sociocultural meaning of sound, the architecture of the favela, and the ways in which sound is employed to mark off space and express identity and alterity. Pentecostal broadcasts acquire their mean…
Virtual Migration. Brazilian Diasporic Media and the Reconfigurations of Place and Space
This paper discusses the implications of the current developments in communication media on the form, content and place of Brazilian migrant communities in Europe. It is argued that Internet supports both deterritorialization and reterritorialization of diasporic Brazilians in Amsterdam and Barcelona. Brazilian migrants employ virtual communities on social network sites to sustain grassroots networks that facilitate migration and settlement in th…
Transposing Brazilian Carnival
This article discusses the rise of evangelical carnival parades in Rio de Janeiro in relation to spectacular carnival parades that feature Afro-Brazilian religious elements. The article exposes divergent intersections of religion and cultural heritage in Brazilian carnival. The first intersection aims to affirm the intrinsic connection betweensamba enredocarnival music and Afro-Brazilian religion by means of cultural heritage narratives, and the …
Mass mediating the spiritual battle
In this paper I discuss several visual representations of a Brazilian neo-Pentecostal Church that has become involved in national politics. I argue that the Church employs representations of urban violence to enforce a Pentecostal imagination of the spiritual battle between God and the devil. The Church has been able to put forward this compelling Pentecostal interpretation of Brazilian society because its message is framed against the background…
Religious experiences of stasis and mobility in contemporary Europe
Discussions related to contemporary religious diversity in urban contexts often presume that people who form part of the public life of cities are citizens or have the right to move and dwell in the city. This article reminds us that when asking how certain religious movements become public in European cities, we also need to ask how possibilities of becoming public are tied to exclusionary citizenship regimes. By way of research among undocument…
Blessed Beats
This article examines Evangelical carnaval in Brazil to argue that anthropological writing on syncretization expresses a theoretical gap or shortcoming. In several large Brazilian cities, Evangelicals are currently organizing carnaval parades and performing samba music with percussion instruments. Many Evangelical adherents regard samba as spiritually hazardous because the music genre is perceived to hold Afro-Brazilian religious force. Such an a…
Olympic Legacies
Expectations of urban upgrading projects in light of the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro oscillated between hopeful prospects and pessimistic anticipation. The different opinions were clearly interwoven with stark socioeconomic inequalities and urban segregation. While authorities spread a celebratory narrative of improvements for the whole city, critics depicted a dystopian vision of spatial interventions that would violat…
Rights and Stones
This article discusses the growth of Pentecostal churches in favelas of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The author pleads for a systemic inclusion of religious ideas and practices in theoretical reflections on citizenship in the urban contexts of Brazil. Concretely, scholars need to include the explosive rise of Pentecostalism in their reflections on insurgent citizenship this religious movement fuels rights discourses and supports feelings of pride and …
Popular Art, Crime and Urban Order Beyond the State
This article engages with current discussions on the politics of aesthetics to theorize the role of popular art in reproducing or contesting urban orders. Specifically, we engage with scholars who have taken up the work of Jacques Rancière to understand how power structures are normalized through 'the distribution of the sensible'. Building on and critically engaging with debates on the 'post-political city', we suggest that all too often scholar…
All is Normal
This article discusses the changes in Visionário, a favela located near the affluent neighborhoods in Rio de Janeiro, to assess the effects of the Sports Mega Events (SMEs) on the political and economic conditions in the favela. Following Harvey's (2005) description of "accumulation by dispossession," several authors have highlighted that the UPP policing program, implemented before the SMEs, was part of neoliberal efforts to colonize favela terr…
Theopolitical police
This article centres on contemporary mergers between state security practices, popular media and religion in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It discusses the actions and the representations of BOPE - Batalhão de Operações Especiais da Polícia Militar do Rio de Janeiro - the special operations battalion of the military police of Rio de Janeiro, to show how this unit frequently employs Christian symbols and practices to legitimate violence at the border be…
Sounds of Children in Worship
Bringing together concepts from the fields of material religion and liturgical studies, this article explores how adults and children manage sound-related affordances during worship. The concept of affordances—the possibilities an environment offers a person—is made sensitive to socialization and is related to the concept of liturgical-ritual space. Liturgical-ritual space comes into being through people’s participation in an environment and is t…
Mass mediating the spiritual battle
In this paper I discuss several visual representations of a Brazilian neo-Pentecostal Church that has become involved in national politics. I argue that the Church employs representations of urban violence to enforce a Pentecostal imagination of the spiritual battle between God and the devil. The Church has been able to put forward this compelling Pentecostal interpretation of Brazilian society because its message is framed against the background…
Spiritual Attunement
This article explores the ways in which Pentecostal media, especially electro-acoustic media, are integrated in the everyday life of a favela in Rio de Janeiro. It argues that the popularity of Pentecostal radio has to be understood in relation to the sociocultural meaning of sound, the architecture of the favela, and the ways in which sound is employed to mark off space and express identity and alterity. Pentecostal broadcasts acquire their mean…
Sonic Supremacy
This article discusses the soundscape of a favela in Rio de Janeiro. It argues that sounds, and music in particular, play an important part in the creation and maintenance of boundaries between groups in the dense urban space of the favela. The politics of presence excercised by different groups constitutes the sonic charisma of the favela. Especially in relation to Pentecostal faith, it becomes obvious how the charisma of the city and in the cit…
Virtual Migration. Brazilian Diasporic Media and the Reconfigurations of Place and Space
This paper discusses the implications of the current developments in communication media on the form, content and place of Brazilian migrant communities in Europe. It is argued that Internet supports both deterritorialization and reterritorialization of diasporic Brazilians in Amsterdam and Barcelona. Brazilian migrants employ virtual communities on social network sites to sustain grassroots networks that facilitate migration and settlement in th…
Virtually global
Taking as a point of departure the Pentecostal use of digital world maps, this article argues that Pentecostal movements should be understood as part and parcel of contemporary convergence culture. A reading of the remediations of the Brazilian Pentecostal church – the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (IURD) – demonstrates that the simulacrum of global evangelical presence as put forward by the IURD is supported by the interplay between the…
Public religion and urban space in Europe
Conflicts related to demographic and cultural change in Europe regularly find their expression in struggles over the presence and visibility of religious buildings and groups. As this editorial argues, these conflicts can best be understood from a postsecular perspective that takes into account overlapping and diverging histories of state-formation and secularization. The papers collected for this special issue on public religion and urban space …
Religious experiences of stasis and mobility in contemporary Europe
Discussions related to contemporary religious diversity in urban contexts often presume that people who form part of the public life of cities are citizens or have the right to move and dwell in the city. This article reminds us that when asking how certain religious movements become public in European cities, we also need to ask how possibilities of becoming public are tied to exclusionary citizenship regimes. By way of research among undocument…
Mediating Culture
Batman Returns
This article explores the aesthetic elements of sovereignty. Building on the anthropological literature on sovereignty and on contemporary work on the politics of aesthetics, the article analyzes contemporary appearances of Batman symbols and figures in Rio de Janeiro. Despite political debate and academic discussion about the Batmen appearing in mafia-like militias and popular street protests in Rio, the question of what these appearances tell u…
Entrepreneurial Religion in the Age of Neoliberal Urbanism
The introduction to this symposium on entrepreneurial religion and neoliberal urbanism discusses leading scholarly approaches to religion and urban theory, arguing that, despite their merits, these approaches are in need of refinement. Theories on religion and urban theory too often describe religion as a reactionary phenomenon. Religious movements and spaces are generally defined as pockets of resistance and shelter against retreating or failing…
Transposing Brazilian Carnival
This article discusses the rise of evangelical carnival parades in Rio de Janeiro in relation to spectacular carnival parades that feature Afro-Brazilian religious elements. The article exposes divergent intersections of religion and cultural heritage in Brazilian carnival. The first intersection aims to affirm the intrinsic connection betweensamba enredocarnival music and Afro-Brazilian religion by means of cultural heritage narratives, and the …
Samba Struggles
Olympic Legacies
Expectations of urban upgrading projects in light of the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro oscillated between hopeful prospects and pessimistic anticipation. The different opinions were clearly interwoven with stark socioeconomic inequalities and urban segregation. While authorities spread a celebratory narrative of improvements for the whole city, critics depicted a dystopian vision of spatial interventions that would violat…
Sounds of Children in Worship
Bringing together concepts from the fields of material religion and liturgical studies, this article explores how adults and children manage sound-related affordances during worship. The concept of affordances—the possibilities an environment offers a person—is made sensitive to socialization and is related to the concept of liturgical-ritual space. Liturgical-ritual space comes into being through people’s participation in an environment and is t…
Ethnography In-Sight
Credit: Performance of Labareda de Fogo. Photo by Martijn Oosterbaan, Rio de Janeiro, March 30, 2011. This photo captures four members of the Evangelical samba (pagode) collective Labareda de Fogo (Flame of Fire) midway their performance in a small Pentecostal Church in the neighborhood of Cidade Alta (Upper City) in Rio de Janeiro. The two men holding characteristic pagode instruments-a pandeiro and a tan-tan-are sweating as they push the samba …
Blessed Beats
This article examines Evangelical carnaval in Brazil to argue that anthropological writing on syncretization expresses a theoretical gap or shortcoming. In several large Brazilian cities, Evangelicals are currently organizing carnaval parades and performing samba music with percussion instruments. Many Evangelical adherents regard samba as spiritually hazardous because the music genre is perceived to hold Afro-Brazilian religious force. Such an a…
All is Normal
This article discusses the changes in Visionário, a favela located near the affluent neighborhoods in Rio de Janeiro, to assess the effects of the Sports Mega Events (SMEs) on the political and economic conditions in the favela. Following Harvey's (2005) description of "accumulation by dispossession," several authors have highlighted that the UPP policing program, implemented before the SMEs, was part of neoliberal efforts to colonize favela terr…
Rights and Stones
This article discusses the growth of Pentecostal churches in favelas of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The author pleads for a systemic inclusion of religious ideas and practices in theoretical reflections on citizenship in the urban contexts of Brazil. Concretely, scholars need to include the explosive rise of Pentecostalism in their reflections on insurgent citizenship this religious movement fuels rights discourses and supports feelings of pride and …
Popular Art, Crime and Urban Order Beyond the State
This article engages with current discussions on the politics of aesthetics to theorize the role of popular art in reproducing or contesting urban orders. Specifically, we engage with scholars who have taken up the work of Jacques Rancière to understand how power structures are normalized through 'the distribution of the sensible'. Building on and critically engaging with debates on the 'post-political city', we suggest that all too often scholar…
Absence-of-the-law-talk and absence-of-the-state-display
From religious police to religious policing
Theopolitical police
This article centres on contemporary mergers between state security practices, popular media and religion in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It discusses the actions and the representations of BOPE - Batalhão de Operações Especiais da Polícia Militar do Rio de Janeiro - the special operations battalion of the military police of Rio de Janeiro, to show how this unit frequently employs Christian symbols and practices to legitimate violence at the border be…
Rules and laws in contexts of protracted conflict
Creating the Complexo de Israel
This article centers on the relation between religion, criminal(ized) economies, and the production of urban space in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Our empirical focus lies on the Israel Complex, a cluster of favelas located in the city's northern periphery. The contested formation of the complex hinges on visual and discursive repertoires of city-making in which hybrid religious references derived from Catholicism, Pentecostal Christianity, and Judais…
Sociology (15 works) · Law (13 works) · Political science (13 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (10 works) · Art (10 works) · Aesthetics (8 works) · Media studies (8 works) · Politics (8 works) · Law (7 works)