Abstract
This introduction focuses on the shifting paradigms in understanding the interrelationships of religion and urbanization and discusses the debate in naming and describing emergence of a new phase of urbanism beyond the modern and even postmodern especially in the rapidly changing cities of Asia. The rising dominance of Asia as a site for rapid urban growth belies the once-dominant version of the Weberian thesis that assumed a particular configuration of religion that uniquely facilitated the rise of the Western urbanization and capitalism. Now a reconsideration of religiosity as a major component of today’s rapid urbanization in Asia is due but in a different mode tied to the spirit of Asia and “Asian-ness.” Religious life can no longer be seen as enhancing or impeding general economic prosperity, or providing stability and order, or defining the contours of the urban life as in the old ceremonial cities. The ubiquitous presence of look-alike global styles, cyberspaces, and worldwide organizations, which some theorists bemoan as non-places, are often religiously inflected as no-place. Compelling questions arise: how to think about and how to describe the melding, participating, and precipitating elements—questioning the very nature of religiosity—as they appear and disappear within the new urban caldron as likely to emit the ethereal as the mundane, the imaginary as the substantial, and no-places as much as new places.
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Notes
- 1.
http://americanlivewire.com/top-10-largest-cities-in-the-world-2013/#uL1sLBs1tFPy4MOs.99/accessed September 13, 2013. Lists can vary according to methodology but this list includes Tokyo, Chóngqìng (Chunking), Jakarta, Seoul , and Delhi; another lists the top five as Tokyo–Yokohama, Jakarta, Seoul–Incheon, Delhi, and Shanghai , but all are in Asia. But when the riches in terms of GPA are considered, then the picture changes—with more European cities appearing but with Singaporean and Chinese cities remaining on the list.
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At the time her essay was not unique: a professor of economics at City University of New York could declare that the Hindu has “made the preoccupation with absolute reality more important than concern with amelioration of the actual conditions of human existence” (Kapp 1963, 19). The idea was taken so seriously in India that the National Institute of Community Development organized a symposium, “Socio-Economic Change and the Religious Factor in India: An Indian Symposium of Views on Max Weber ,” in 1966 later published (Loomis and Loomis 1969).
- 5.
Tomoko Masuzawa sees this same process in terms of denying, not a sense of place, but a sense of time and history to the non-Western people, the others via the constant trope of the dreamworld in the mid-twentieth century: “For now at this juncture, it is historical consciousness itself—or its alleged presence or absence—that has become the most powerful mark of difference between peoples, between the historically conscious subject (‘Western man’) and the historically unconscious or preconscious object (archaic, primitive, premodern), as we ascribe to one and withhold from the other, a privileged relationship to temporality” (1993, 178).
- 6.
In the 1980s, as part of a general reevaluation/deconstruction of Weber , major edited volumes, books, and articles appeared on his discussion of Asia, particularly India and Hinduism, which fostered a brief, but intense, reevaluation of the “spirit of capitalism” in Indian religious context. Andreas Buss argued that Weber ’s own revised essays on the sociology of religion in a comparative context, which he published in a massive three-volume work the “Collected Essays in the Sociology of Religion,” were never translated into English as a whole, “Instead, separated translations, which leave the reader unaware of the interrelations, have been published out of the various parts.” Buss points to the “new and misleading titles” that jacketed the cannibalized work that appeared as The Religion of India and The Religion of China as well as “poor and misleading translations” by Hans Gerth and Don Martindale (1985, 1–3). Although much of this debate does not quite succeed in de-Orientalize Weber , the argument that Weber never intended to glorify either Protestantism or modern European civilization remains important and now more widely accepted. See Buss (1985), Kantowky (1986), and Turner (1981).
- 7.
Interestingly, while in this account the “Eastern” consciousness tends toward placelessness, in others from the same period, the “East” (usually China and India in particular) was considered entrenched in place, unable to move forward. With the discussion of development thoroughly rooted in the trope of modernity and tradition , “Tradition”—often simply equated with “Religion”—kept discussions of religiosity central throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Even now in textbooks, “the Traditions” serve as a euphemism for the now complicated term Religions.
- 8.
http://www.shrinkingcities.eu/ (accessed September 9, 2013). This series of conferences titled “Cities Regrowing Smaller (CIRES)—Fostering Knowledge on Regeneration Strategies in Shrinking Cities across Europe” was sponsored by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology).
- 9.
Without a clearer context, this statement is I think purposely elusive but assumes the incarnation of God in the person of Jesus as both Man and God. The radical incarnation of God into the world has long been part of the once controversial “Death of God” theologians and their successor who often stress an understanding of God as uncertain even “weak” (see Caputo 2006).
- 10.
Axis mundi, often literally a pole that connected the heaven and the earth. Eliade shows the ubiquitous presence of “sacred pillars” from ancient Rome to India, “the point at which it enters the sky is the ‘door to the world above’” (Eliade 1959, 35). While skyscrapers may reach for the sky, for example, their high is a matter of prestige more than literally reaching for God—although some of that logic may linger (King 2004, 12).
- 11.
This is apparent in the collection of syllabi on the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion. See http://www.wabashcenter.wabash.edu/resources/result-browse. One example is the case of Stephen Prothero in his trenchant God is Not One, who rails against overly broad generalizations but chooses a comparison between Christianity and Buddhism that surprisingly mirrors decades-old textbooks comparing East and Western religions.
- 12.
The very early churches in the Roman Empire had no model but borrowed the form of public forums as with the massive Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. So interestingly, the ancient church did have a secular model. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/building-wonders.html#hagia-sophia (retrieved March 10, 2015).
- 13.
I saw this in the small city of Pudukkottai, the former capital of the princely state, where the practices of both Jaggi Vasudev and Sri Sri Ravishankar flourished along with older forms of yoga.
- 14.
I heard the common date of 2002 for the demise of postmodernism at “The Inter-Asia Roundtable 2013: Religion and Development in China: Innovations and Implications” (Oct 17–18, 2013) at the Asia Research Institute, National University Of Singapore, and in personal conversations with scholars. Recently Peter van der Veer presented his work at the 2013 Lewis Henry Morgan Workshop at the University of Rochester, “The Value of Comparison,” Nov 13–14, 2013. His public lecture argued for a return to a carefully considered comparison and the following workshop centered on the manuscript of his new book project “The Value of Comparison.”
- 15.
On October 21, 2013. I quote with the kind permission of Dr. Wee who is a fellow PhD from the The Divinity School, University of Chicago, thus my academic piasan.
- 16.
The credits list her work with Zdravko Trivić and her fellow editors Viray and Boontharm.
- 17.
Using Singapore as his case, Wang-Ling Wee argues forcefully that both waves are a reaction to colonialism and contends: “Asian modern’s relationship to the advanced West and the links between them …are simultaneously affirmed, denied, sublimated and (mis-) recognized” (Wee 2007, e- loc 212).
- 18.
Her thresholds display the implications of spatial theory especially in the mode of Benjamin whom she openly acknowledges and by inference to his posterity in Lefebvre and Soja —when new places are reconstituted, all of the bodies within this place, the icons and images, the physical structures, the human devotees, and patrons are likewise reformed.
- 19.
In a long conversation with a member of the Singapore urban redevelopment authority, she mentioned that the overall reasons for design and development were often pragmatic rather than based on an overriding philosophy. In an earlier email exchange with another member, she also defaulted to pragmatics as reasons for design plans. However I suspect that more may be at stake but pragmatics remains the word here.
- 20.
Here I think of the conversation with Dr. Wee, as academics we seek to uncover contradictions that are the way-things-are to residents.
- 21.
The Housing Development Board has constructed high-rise developments throughout the city-state, which most citizens buy and are free to sell—however these are all leased usually for thirty years. In my experience, these flats are modern and very comfortable and well designed.
- 22.
Many of his attitudes are now compiled in M. K. Gandhi, Village Swaraj. Compiled by H. M. Vyas. Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishers, 1966. This is the press that Gandhi founded.
- 23.
Milton Singer in his monumental study of Madras (now Chennai) outlined this tendency as he began to shift to a then rare engagement with the city (Singer 1972).
- 24.
Especially since the 1960s, fueled by the popular American love affair with the spiritual East, American religious studies scholars began detailed studies of the rich textual and ritual traditions of India as anthropologists produced increasingly complex descriptions of the formation of communities—now allowing a diachronic picture of urbanism and religiosity not available for other regions. During this period mainland China remained close to foreign scholars.
- 25.
His entire magnum opus on Madras (now Chennai) argues for the mutual interpenetration of the Little Tradition , usually associated with village culture, and the Great Tradition of textual and intellectual elite more often associated with urban centers. He chose Madras as a creation of the East India Company and therefore “heterogenetic” from its start (1972, 60). Unlike Pune or Gwalior , Madras—like Bombay—was never a precolonial center of learning or royal patronage, although the city did incorporate areas like Mylapore with an ancient past.
- 26.
D. Gold reports that the Ashram while not part of the Ramakrishna Mission is affiliated with the Ramakrishna Math, which is a related but separate organization.
- 27.
This research derives from her first encounters with Jahazpur ; her completed research will appear as a book.
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Waghorne, J.P. (2016). Introduction: Negotiating Place, Non-place, and No-Place. In: Waghorne, J. (eds) Place/No-Place in Urban Asian Religiosity. ARI - Springer Asia Series, vol 5. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-0385-1_1
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