Urban religion beyond the city limits

2020

Intersecting religion and urbanity in late antiquity 1U rban Religion: readdressing historical change in latea ntiquity The period of Late Antiquityischaracterised by dramatic and even contradicting developments, especiallyf or the urban networks in the Mediterranean and beyond. On the one hand manyp rosperous cities downsized their earlier territory. The development in the Western part of the (former) Imperium Romanum could outrightlyb ec alled ap eriod of de-urbanisation, impacting on the density and strength of the urban networks as much as on the fabric of individual cities from the late third century CE onwards(Osborne and Wallace-Hadrill 2013, 56 f.). Due to the invasion of the Vandals, the western part of Northern Africa witnessed awidespread desertion of cities in the fifth and sixth centuries CE (Leone 2007,2 013;s ummarilyO sborne and Wallace-Hadrill 2013). On the other hand, and in particulari nt he Eastern part of the Mediterranean, several new cities emerged, and existingcities wereexpanded, even raised to the status of acapital city.The category of the urban, seen globallyasthe product of specific economic and social developments in the aftermath of the Neolithic revolution (Childe 1950) and regionallya st he resulto faspecific Greco-Roman circum-Mediterranean offspring and conscious production of ad ense network of interrelated and competing urban settlements (Cunliffea nd Osborne 2005;O sborne 2005; Zuiderhoek 2017), changed significantlya nd in correlation to local developments. Thishappened much in continuity in the East and far into the Islamic period and the second millennium CE, much contrary to the forms of political power and the loci of culturalp roduction in the West. Unsurprisingly,these developments had tremendous effects on the religious sphere. Religious actions, communications, and identities offer tools for carving out social spaces and making or at least modifying urban space. Neither is religion specificallyu rban nor the city specificallyr eligious. But historically, in manyp eriods and cultures,t he shape and development (includingg rowth as much as decline) of cities-and, even more, the different urban spaces created by individuals and different social groups within such built environments-and the shape and developmentofreligious practicesand ideas have significantlyin-OpenAccess.

in: Lätzer-Lasar, A. & Urciuoli, E. R. (eds.), Urban Religion in Late Antiquity, Religionsgeschichtliche Versuche und Vorarbeiten 76, Berlin, 1-14, 2020

Mythos, 2018

The claim formulated in this article is that city-space and interaction with city-space engineered the major changes that revolutionised ancient Mediterranean religions. Whereas previous research on ancient religion has stressed the role of religion for cities and urban topography, we are suggesting a new focus on the impact of cities on religion and on how the interaction with city-space changed religion. This side of the dialectic is what we call urban religion. This concept is paramount, since it encompasses the development of specific religious agencies and practices (e.g. neighbourhood shrines, theatrical processions; authors and entrepreneurs), specific forms of religious knowledge and imaginaries (imaginative places; imagined communities, heavenly cities) and societal phenomena such as civic rituals or religious communities in the appropriation (and hence modification and formation) of urban space in cities of different size and character. The major questions that we propose are: how and to what extent is religion shaped by density, urban aspirations, diversity and conflict, city governance, heterarchy and division of labour, and urban identity, that is urbanity? The basic assumption is that religious change needs to be investigated in terms of the ongoing interaction between space and a variety of different agents, including residents, immigrants, and people who live off religion.

Mythos

Archaeology and Economy in the Ancient World – Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Classical Archaeology, Cologne/Bonn 2018, 2022

City and religion as subjects of archaeological research in the Mediterranean are often limited to sacred buildings within the spatial and social fabric of the city. However, specific urban factors such as the concentration of economic potential, control of financial resources, but also heterogeneous populations, marginalization, and power imbalances impact religious practices and their reflections in material culture. The contributions in this volume discuss how economic characteristics of urbanity are reflected in institutional, medial, and performative expressions of religion(s) in cities of Italy and Asia Minor. These interactions are not only of interest for Greco-Roman antiquity, but are relevant in our modern world of globalized markets: With the concentration of economic power the potential for tensions and religious conflicts increases as rapidly as cities grow.

Urban Religion in Late Antiquity, 2020

The aim of this paper is to provide the historical research on both religion and the city with a serviceable analytical distinction between 'urbanisation' and 'citification' as two sets of socio-spatial phenomena related to the role of religion in city-spaces. Inspired by modern social and political theory, the notion of 'citification' has been crafted with the purpose to be tested on early Christ religion in order to better foreground its character of an 'urban religion'. The paper ends by suggesting how the concept of 'citification' can be profitably applied to the historical study of other ancient constellations of religiously infused spatial practices in interaction with the urban space. Focus, applied concepts and methods Testing 'Urban Religion' on past cities and ancient religions*1 The path to the study of urban religion has to be cleared. The urban world, […], is alive with the competing and divergent dreams projected onto it and found within it by outsiders. It is crisscrossed by discrepant narratives and fissured by incommensurable visions of what is possible and good in cities. Before we look at cases of religious engagement with the urban world, then, we have to step back and examine what converges on that world ; to see what Moishe Sacks, Mama Lola, and the other religious improvisors who appear in this collection of essays made of the city for themselves, we have to consider first the broad outlines of what was being made of the city for and against them, in the plans and programs of others (Orsi 1999a: 12; emphasis mine). These lines are taken from Robert Orsi's introductory chapter of Gods of the City (Orsi 1999a), the collective volume on lived religion in contemporary American cities that, more twenty years ago, sparked the study of 'urban religion' (Garbin and Strhan 2017b: 4; see Rüpke 2020: 4-8). The epistemological barriers created by the academic division of labour probably explain why it took almost fifteen years to fully realise that Orsi's agenda, as instantiated by the quotation above, might apply also to past cities and ancient religions: namely, to 'cases of religious engagement with urban world(s)' that are not 'alive' and out there, like in social science ethnographies (e.g., Orsi 1985; Hall 1997; McGuire 2008), but dead and nowhere but in archaeological findings and written records. Indeed, the ERC-funded project on 'Lived Ancient Religion' (LAR) has shown that there always existed 'religious improvisers,' small religious entrepreneurs, and self-styled religious experts among the urban commoners (e.g., Gasparini et al. 2020; Albrecht et al. 2018; for the initial agenda, see Rüpke 2011). An extensive body of cross-temporal and-disciplinary research spanning from Karanis to Palmyra, from Pergamum and Carthage to Pompeii and Rome, the LAR approach has demonstrated that embarking on the search of the ancient Mediterranean 'colleagues' of the creative protagonists of Gods of the City does make sense. Rather, the unaccomplished task is to foreground the 'spatiality' of these ancient local religious practices (Soja 1985) by zooming in on the city, that is, to speak with Orsi, by considering 'what was being made of the city' that enabled and constrained the appearance of these religious agents, facilitated and hindered their 'job.' The study of ancient lived religions needs an 'urban turn' that builds on the key achievements attained by the 'spatial turn' in research on religion (see Knott 2010). Borrowing from and bringing together categories, approaches, and insights from religious studies, sociology of religion, archaeology, and spatial theory, the aim of this article is to present a particular view about how to bring specific bits of the sociological conversation on urban religion to bear on a historical enquiry of the millennia-spanning, reciprocal formation of religion and urbanity. The article builds on the assumption that both religious communication and urban life are cross-cultural, deep-rooted, and significantly related strategies of handling, enhancing, and buying into human 'sociability' (Simmel 1911). It moves from the observation that, however increasingly refined archaeological and historical accounts on the genesis and structuration of urban forms have become (see Yoffee 2015), religion still plays a rather standard role in the study of its intersections with urbanisation in early societies: namely, that of a driving force and stabilising factor of political integration and social stratification. The article contends that the connection between the cross-disciplinary emphasis on the 'urbanising' function of religion in the multiple beginnings of large-scale settled life (Rüpke 2020, 53-58), on the one hand, and the dominant focus on the integrative quality of the 'polis/civic religion' in historical research on Ancient Mediterranean religions, on the other, has contributed to crystallise the role of religion in the construction of stratified political communities through sanctifying the core values of the polity. The heuristic and explanatory deficits of this main narrative do not live up to its cross-disciplinary interpretive dominance. Another story needs to be told. This article calls for a different and more articulate view of the co-evolution of religion and urban life by proposing an analytical distinction between 'urbanisation' and 'citification' of religion as two sets of processes and states of affairs concerning the role of religion in city-spaces. In order to justify this differentiation, I will first (1) embark on a brief 'world tour' in the deep history of the relation of religion and the urban by sifting through different narratives on the earliest cities and the role of religion in urbanisation processes. Then (2), once I have discussed a specific use of the verb 'to citify' in contemporary sociology of religion, I will sketch out the short and highly idiosyncratic history of the term Brought to you by | Universitäts-und Forschungsbibliothek Erfurt/Gotha

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