CITY AND FAITH. An introduction to the study of the geography of religions in Santiago de Chile (1541 – 2018)

At the end of the last century, a kind of diaspora began from geography to other disciplinary areas and, at the same time, a diversification of the lines of research that traditionally addressed geography. This book is an example of the aforementioned efforts to expand the field of study of the discipline, despite the fact that religion was a subject of study at the beginning of nineteenth-century cultural geography, an issue that was interrupted with the advent of the last century. The twentieth century elevated a large number of Catholics to the status of saints, new religions were created and others were internationalized, evidence of the contemporary vitality of the religious fact. In this context, this book analyzes the evolution in the Chilean metropolitan regions from a uni-religious spatiality to a multi-religious one and addresses the geographical distribution of the eleven most relevant creeds in Chile. It is concluded that, despite the prevailing signs of secularization, the religious key continues to be a relevant factor in the socio-spatial practices and daily lives of a significant percentage of the population, and that, despite everything, temples continue to participate in the urban and rural landscape of Chile, and the times in which churches house supermarkets or discos, as happens in the European model of secularization, are perceived as distant. How and in what way are religious urban landscapes structured in a city like Santiago de Chile? Is the capital of Chile a secularized, secularizing and secularizing device? These questions, considering the city of Santiago de Chile as a case study, gave body to the work presented below.

ABRAHAM GONZALO PAULSE

541