About

Research Context

Kenya | Mozambique | Portugal

Research Interests

African studies | Anthropology of Religion | Anthropology for children

Institutional Subunit

ISCTE

Biographical Note

Giulia Cavallo hold a MA in Philosophy at the University of Turin, Italy. During the last years of degree she dedicated her research to African studies, particularly to African religious studies. Her first experience of fieldwork was in Kenya, in 2003. In 2005 she volunteered in Mozambique, where she worked in two NGOs for two years, always in urban context (Maputo and Maputo’s outskirts). After this experience in International Cooperation she resumed her studies and moved to Lisbon in 2007, where she completed a PhD in 2013 at ICS, University of Lisbon, with a dissertation on the healing practices of Zion churches in Maputo. During the last four years she have devoted herself professionally to drawing and illustration, practising both activities in dialog with ethnographic and anthropologic principles. She has had the opportunity to exhibit her artistic work in Portugal, Spain and Italy. She also drawn on her personal ethnographic data collected in Maputo (Mozambique), following the current of ethnography-based art. In October 2017, she opened her personal art studio in Lisbon, OnduLar Ateliê https://www.facebook.com/OnduLarAtelie, a new space to collaborate with, and exhibit other illustrators and artists. She also started a new project of Anthropology for Children: https://www.facebook.com/oficinadeantropologiaparacriancas/ In 2018 she collaborated with Professor Anna Fedele (CRIA-ISCTE-IUL), collecting ethnographic data in Lisbon for the FCT research project: “Fatima, one century after the apparitions: Pilgrimage, gender and lived religion" and conducting qualitative interviews with devotees of Fatima from African Portuguese-speaking countries. Since May 2019, she has been working at CRIA–ISCTE-IUL as a post doctorate researcher for the HERA project HERILIGION, ‘The Heritagization of Religion and the Sacralization of Heritage in Contemporary Europe’, again under the supervision of Anna Fedele (CRIA-ISCTE-IUL), on the case study of the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Fatima (Portugal) with indepth interviews with African pilgrims and members of the Hindu and Muslim communities of Lisbon, to expand the scope of scholarship on the devotion of Fatima.