This reissue, initially published in 1989, considers the upsurge of locally-based movements attempting to improve living conditions in Third-World cities throughout the 1980s. The book presents qualitative, comparative research on the dynamics and constraints of these urban social movements, in a cross-cultural framework, using case studies from a variety of Latin American, African and Asian countries. As more democratic-type regimes establish themselves in the Third World, the possibilities for collective organisations and actions increase. Urban social movements therefore are playing an increasingly important role in the habitat of the poor.

Exploring how people from Andean communities seek progress and social mobility by moving to the cities, Cecilie Ødegaard demonstrates the changing significance of kinship, reciprocity and ritual in an urban context. Through a focus on people´s involvement in land occupations and local associations, labour and trade, Ødegaard examines the dialectics between popular practices and neoliberal state policies in processes of urbanization. The making and un-making of notions of the Indigenous, communal work, and gender is central in this analysis, and is discussed against the historical backdrop of the land occupations in Peruvian cities since the 1930s. Through its close ethnographic description of everyday life in a new urban neighbourhood, this book reveals how social and spatial categories and boundaries are continually negotiated in people´s quest for mobility and progress. Cecilie Ødegaard argues that conventional meanings of prosperity and progress are significantly altered in interaction with Andean understandings of reciprocity. By combining a unique ethnographic account with original theoretical arguments, the book provides new insight into the cultural, cosmological and political dimensions of mobility, progress and market participation.

This book brings the emerging fields of practical theology and theology of the arts into a dialogue beyond the bias of modern systematic and constructive theology. The authors draw upon postmodern, post-secular, feminist, liberation, and dialogical/dialectical philosophy and theology, and their critiques of the narrow modern emphases on reason and the scientific method, as the model for all knowledge. Such a practical theology of the arts focuses the work of theology on the actual practices that engage the arts in their various forms as the means of interpreting and understanding the nature of the communities and their members, as well as the mechanisms through which these communities engage in transformative work, to make persons and neighborhoods whole. This book presents its theological claims through the careful analysis of several stories of communities around the world that have engaged in transformational practices through a specific art form, investigating communities from Europe, the Middle East, South America, and the U.S. The case studies explored include Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Druze, indigenous, and sometimes agnostic subjects, involved in visual art, music, dance, theatre, documentary film, and literature. Theology and the Arts demonstrates that the challenges of a postmodern and post-secular context require a fundamental rethinking of theology that focuses on discrete practices of faithful communities, rather than one-dimensional theories about religion.