Abstract
I have chosen as a basis for the discussion in this paper two sociological theories relevant to the relations between religion and urbanization. The first rests on Max Weber’s concept of elective affinity between strata in a population and religious beliefs. I think the concept of elective affinity is broad enough to encompass Marxist theories of the ideological and utopian functions of religious beliefs. The second theory rests on Durkheim’s analysis of the social consequences of the division of labour, and similar formulations of this central theme in sociological thought.
Revision of a paper given to the Third Conference of Scholars, Frank L. Weil Institute, on The Effects of Urbanization on Religion, October 1963. I am indebted to Professor Monica Wilson, University of Capetown, for her comments on an earlier version of the paper, and to the Weil Institute for Studies in Religion and the Humanities for permission to publish this paper.
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Referenzen
Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion (The Religion of Non-Privileged Classes), Boston: Beacon-Press 1963
H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, From Max Weber (Oxford University Press 1958) p. 280.
Edwin Smith, African Ideas of God (London: Edinburgh House Press 1950).
Roger Le Tourneau, Fez in the Age of the Marinides (University of Oklahoma Press 1961).
John Taylor, Christians of the Copperbelt (London: SCM Press 1961).
Philip Mayer, Townsmen or Tribesmen (Oxford University Press 1961).
Mayer, op. cit., p. 3o.
I have relied very largely on the analysis of the Ethiopian and Zionist Churches by Bengt G. M. Sundkler (Bantu Prophets in South Africa, Oxford University Press 1961). B. A. Pauw (in his study of Religion in a Tswana Chiefdom, Oxford University Press 196o, pp. 142–145) did not find as much concern with the interracial situation in the churches he studied in Taung. In many respects, his results are different from those of Sundkler, who was concerned largely with the independent Zulu churches.
The Concept of Christianity in the African Independent Churches, Institute for Social Research, University of Natal 1958.
Sundkler, Bantu Prophets . ., op cit, pp. 85–93.
E fraim Andersson, Messianic Popular Movements in the Lower Congo, Studia Ethnographica Upsaliensia, 1958.
Some crude confirmation of a selective religious factor in African urbanization may be derived, for South Africa, from the census for 1951, which showed the percentage of rural Africans returned as heathen to be over twice as high as that of urban Africans. In East London, the second generation of town-born Xhosa were mostly children of “School” Xhosa (B. A. Pauw, The Second Generation, Oxford University Press, 1963). Monica Wilson thought that the opportunity for higher wages was a factor in the different pattern of migration to Cape Town as compared with East London, largely “School” in the former, “Red” in the latter.
Cf. Arnold L. Epstein, Politics in an African Urban Community (Manchester University Press 1958).
Michael Banton, West African City (Oxford University Press 1960).
See Sundkler, Bantu Prophets . ., op. cit., pp. 307–310.
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Kuper, L. (1965). Religion and Urbanization in Africa. In: Matthes, J. (eds) Religiöser Pluralismus und Gesellschaftsstruktur / Religious Pluralism and Social Structure. Internationales Jahrbuch für Religionssoziologie / International Yearbook for the Sociology of Religion, vol 1. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-663-02893-2_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-663-02893-2_8
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