Entangling Urban and Religious History: A New Methodology

Abstract

Religion and urbanity are successful and momentous inventions of humankind. Since the late Upper Palaeolithic, groups of people have been observed to seasonally or permanently settle down (Graeber and Wengrow 2021). From the early Neolithic, in many places around the world, they started forming settlements that gradually not only grew in size but also increasingly sought to distinguish themselves from their surrounding communities through spatial and social arrangements. Thanks to architectural features, their size, a specific political (self-)governance, their sociability and way of life as well as religious practices, these social formations were ascribed an urbanity by contemporaries that transformed them into what is generally called cities in the first place. Cities have fundamentally changed in many respects in the course of 6,000 years (Smith 2019); in the early 21st century, more than half of humanity lives in them.Evidence from as early as the Paleolithic already supports understanding religion as relevant communication with special beings. Like urbanity, it is equally subject to historical change. Our understanding of the historicity of religious practices, ideas and institutions includes a view of their space-producing effects, from lived to imagined spaces, and their interplay and repercussions. In such a perspective, one can ask how people come together in religious practices, what mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion they develop along the way, and how they form and shape places and spaces. The products and conditions of this coexistence also include the material and immaterial constellations, the architectures, practices and discourses that constitute urbanity.Both religion and urbanity are subjects of research in many different disciplinary fields. The disciplinary divides have been detrimental in conceptual terms as well as for historical understanding. This article brings together a range of scholars from a variety of disciplinesincluding history, archaeology, religious studies, sociology and anthropology -currently part of the Humanities Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities Religion and Urbanity: Reciprocal Formations. Of course, the disciplinary background of each author influences their take on the reciprocal formation of religion and urbanity. At the same time, and as this article shows, paying close attention to the reciprocally formative relationship of religion and urbanity is beneficial to all these fields of research.

Toward a Mutual Change of Religion and Urban Space: A Comparative Perspective

“…Rüpke, 2021b;Emiliano Rubens Urciuoli & Rüpke, 2018). The conceptual pair "religion and urbanity" then does not simply denote two independent phenomena but a method of the history of religion (Christ et al, 2023;Jörg Rüpke & Rau, 2020).…”