Diego Maria Malara (University of Glasgow) ‘On the Urbanity of Sacred Substance: Purity, Sin, and the Flow of Blessing in Addis Ababa’
| Dates: | 15 December 2025 |
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| Times: | 15:00 - 17:00 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Social Sciences |
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| Who is it for: | University staff, External researchers, Current University students |
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| Speaker: | Angela Giattino |
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In Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity, the Eucharist is regarded as an exceptionally pure substance, and governed by such stringent ritual proscriptions that only a very small number of Christians partake of it regularly. In this presentation, I examine this phenomenon while also tracing the circulation and uses of another sacred substance—holy water—which is intimately associated with the body of Christ and, by extension, with the Eucharist. While the logics of containment and contagion that govern access to, and consumption of, both holy water and the Eucharist draw upon a shared ritual grammar, I show that to grasp the efficacy and ubiquity of holy water, we must attend analytically to its material affordances, its capacity to travel across urban landscape, and the distinctive forms of spiritual experience and care for others that it enables. The salience of these experiences and properties becomes apparent, in turn, when situated within the heterogenous sacred geography of Addis Ababa—a city that is at once a potent zone of active blessing and one of the most worldly spaces in Ethiopian Orthodox moral cartography. Foregrounding relations of care within troubled households and densely populated neighbourhoods, the presentation concludes by refocusing discussions of ethics away from dominant tropes of individual self-cultivation and the pursuit of high moral goals, and toward the predictably fraught yet spiritually productive workings of socio-religious networks and collectives.
Diego Maria Malara is a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Glasgow. His research to date has focused on issues of religion and politics in Ethiopia and Italian colonialism. Most recently, he has published articles on Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity examining the ethics of magic and transgression, spirit possession and modernity, and inter-religious relations in the context of changing secular policies. He is the co-author of Conversation with Tim Ingold: Anthropology, Education and Life (SUP, 2024), and is currently editing a special issue on the anthropology of care and time (HAU) and another on the anthropology of generation and crisis (History and Anthropology).
Speaker
Angela Giattino
Organisation: University of Oxford
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Boardroom (2.016-17)
Arthur Lewis Building
Manchester
