Spaces of Modernity: Religion and the Urban in Asia and Africa

Abstract

This article introduces a symposium on religion and the formation of modern urban space in Asia and Africa. Both the spread of new religious movements and the articulations between religion, globalization and neoliberalism have prompted new analyses of the shifting geographic and social boundaries between 'religious' and 'secular' institutions, practices and discourses, and about the meaning of 'religion' itself. We reinscribe work on urban religion within a discussion of 'modernity' by dealing with the socio-spatial mediation of religion and its role in redefining public spaces, practices, norms and discourses in contemporary cities. Individual articles map the spaces engendered by religious imaginaries and the forms of mobility and networks that religion relies on and constitutes, and they identify and analyze the roles played by mass media in religious practice and institution building, as well as the embodied nature of urban religious experience. They demonstrate how urban studies can be 'pluralized' and 'vernacularized' through analyses of how the urban realm is constituted in part through religious practice and meaning. Our attention to the articulation of religion with cities in Asia and Africa will also help to foster a new theoretical vocabulary within religious studies that is attentive to the historical, cultural and spatial contingencies of religion as a category of analysis. Copyright (c) 2008 The Authors. Journal Compilation (c) 2008 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

The im-materiality of urban religion: towards an ethnography of urban religious aspirations

“…Finally, social science scholarship on urban religion has been driven by concerns over visibility, raising questions about the ways in which religious communities are able to become visible to others in urban societies and via routine urban encounters (Garbin 2013;Hancock and Srinivas 2008). Taking the visibility of religious groups in public space as an expression of power relations and existing cultural supremacies, they have explored the conditions that constrain the visibility of some groups while accentuating that of others, usually majorities (Saint-Blancat and Cancellieri 2014).…”

Public religion and urban space in Europe

“…In many of the world's cities one encounters mosques, Hindu temples or mega-churches Garbin 2006, 2007;Hassner 2003;Kong 1993;Kuppinger 2011), and in many cities, one comes across religious media, such as Christian billboards or amplified Islamic recitations (AsamoahGyadu 2005;De Witte 2008;Hirschkind 2006;Larkin 2008). As several scholars have shown, the contemporary presence of religious movements in cities should be understood in terms of global processes and connections that facilitate the de-and re-territorialization of religion (Becker, Klingan, Lanz, and, Wildner 2013;Hancock and Srinivas 2008; This special issue builds on the work of the authors mentioned to analyze the contemporary obstacles that religious people and movements in Europe face to exercise their ways of worship publicly. The Swiss ban on minarets in 2009 has made clear that political conflicts related to demographic, religious, and cultural change in Europe regularly find their expression in struggles over the presence and visibility of religious buildings and groups specifically.…”

Haunted Infrastructure: Religious Ruins and Urban Obstruction in Vietnam

“…Anthropologists have been instrumental in challenging meta‐narratives of urbanization as a rational progression toward modern secularism by showing how religious and spiritual expressions remain intrinsic to urban life (e.g., Hancock and Srinivas ; van der Veer ). Indeed, authoritarian regimes are themselves often engaged in occult practices to build nations and consolidate state power, from Nazi Germany to the Burmese military, which, according to popular rumor, relied heavily on astrological predictions to construct the new capital city.…”