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Citification of Religion: A New Approach to the Study of Urban Religion in Mediterranean Antiquity

Lecture by Dr. Emiliano Urciuoli (University of Erfurt).

Info about event

Time

Tuesday 30 April 2019,  at 16:00 - 17:00

Location

Centre for Urban Network Evolutions (UrbNet), Aarhus University, Moesgård Allé 20, 8270 Højbjerg, Denmark (Building 4230-232).

Abstract

 

‘The path to the study of urban religion has to be cleared,’ Robert Orsi has written in the introductory chapter of Gods of the City, the 1999-volume on contemporary American cities that sparked the study of ‘urban religion’ twenty years ago. This statement holds true also for ancient Mediterranean cities and religion/s. Blending together religious studies, social and political theory, this lecture will set out to propose a serviceable analytical distinction between ‘urbanization’ and ‘citification’ of religion as two sets of processes and states of affairs concerning the role of religion/s in cityspaces. The deep history of religion and urbanism reveals them as cross-cultural, deep-rooted, and inextricably related strategies of handling, enhancing, and buying into human sociality. Yet, after a century and a half of narratives on the rise of the earliest cities, religion still plays a rather standard and one-sided role in the scholarly plots of urbanization: a more or less critical force of political integration and social stratification. A different story needs to be told, starting, for instance, with a new description of the urban history of one of the most fortunate urban religions of the Mediterranean Antiquity: early Christ religion.

The lecture will be followed by a wine reception.