Abstract
Ever since our first ancestors walked out of East Africa some 100 thousand years ago, human beings have been globalizing. We might not have always recognized it as such, but from the moment our ancestors went on the move, the process of globalization was underway. A sufficient number of our ancestors continued on the move until they and their descendants succeeded in expanding into six continents and populating every portion of land (or frozen sea) that they could reach, and on which they could sustain themselves. Furthermore, the impulses that led them to move in the first place did not come to an end once they had reached the ends of the inhabitable earth furthest removed from East Africa. Human beings, or at least a significant number of them, have continued to migrate throughout their long history (recorded or otherwise) for reasons of necessity, survival, commerce, conquest, inquiry, or spiritual visioning.
Cities are always made by mobility—or, as in current parlance, by flows—of people, money, goods and signs. They combine, for this reason, paradoxical extremes of wealth and poverty, familiarity and strangeness, home and abroad. Cities are where new things are created and from which they spread across the world. A city is both a territory and an attitude, and perhaps this attitude is culture.
—United Nations Human Settlements Programme, The State of the World’s Cities 2004/20051
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Notes
United Nations Human Settlements Programme, The State of the World’s Cities 2004/2005: Globalization and Urban Culture (London and Sterling, VA: Earthscan / UN-Habitat, 2004), 10.
Anthony Leeds, Cities, Classes, and the Social Order, ed. Roger Sanjek (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994), 77. He argues, “the distinction between ‘town’ and ‘city’ is not sociologically meaningful.” I will follow him in the pages that proceed in arguing for a more fundamental conceptualization of urbanization and social life being summarized by “the city.”
Vere Gordon Childe, Man Makes Himself (London: Watts Publishing, 1936), 114.
Edwin James and Judith Granich Goode, Anthropology of the City: An Introduction to Urban Anthropology (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1977), 74.
Childe, Man Makes Himself, 63. On territoriality and urbanization, see Richard L. Rohrbaugh, “The Pre-Industrial City in Luke-Acts: Urban Social Relations,” in The Social World of Luke-Acts: Models for Interpretation, ed. Jerome H. Neyrey (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1991), 129–133.
Immanuel Wallerstein, The End of the World As We Know It: Social Science for the Twenty-First Century (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 104. For him, “The concept of society is, I suppose, millennial, in the sense that it has probably been true for at least ten thousand years, if not longer, that human beings have been aware of two things about the world in which they live. They interact on a regular basis with others, usually persons located in propinquity. And this ‘group’ has rules of which they all take account, and which in fact fashion in many ways their consciousness of the world. The membership of such groups, however, is always less that the totality of human beings on the earth, and hence the members always distinguish between ‘we’ and ‘the others.’”
David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything (New York: Faber and Faber, 2011), 325. Here he argues that the diversity of human languages actually arose out of the interaction among different tribes and clans as peoples sought to distinguish their “us” from “others.”
“The subordination of some functions to others proceeds with reference to social controls that mediate vital relationships of a population to its environment, namely, the provision of sustenance and security,” Notes Eric E. Lampard, “Historical Aspects of Urbanization,” The Study of Urbanization, ed. Philip M. Houser and Leo F. Schnore (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1965), 530.
Georg Simmel, “The Stranger,” The Sociology of Georg Simmel, trans. Kurt Wolff (New York: Free Press, 1950), 402–408.
Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 3–4. He writes: “The point of departure for the present study is that the combination of spatial dispersal and global integration has created a new strategic role for major cities. Beyond their long history as centers for international trade and banking, these cities now function in four ways: first, as highly concentrated command points in the organization of the world economy; second, as key locations for finance and for specialized service firms, which have replaced manufacturing as the leading economic sectors; third, as sites of production, including the production of innovations, in these leading industries; and fourth, as markets for the products and innovations produced. These changes in the functioning of cities have had a massive impact upon both international economic activity and urban form: Cities concentrate control over vast resources, while finance and specialized service industries have restructured the urban social and economic order. Thus a new type of city has appeared. It is the global city. Leading examples are New York, London, and Tokyo.”
While over the past several decades in North America and Western Europe, a secondary migration of immigrants or their descendants from city to suburb might seem at first glance to reverse this pattern, upon deeper inspection it does not. Over the past century or so especially in North America the suburban has become something of a bedroom extension to the urban, first called “exurbia” in the United States by Auguste C. Spectorsky, The Exurbanites (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1955). In time, exurban areas have developed into full-fledged urban centers on their own. Meanwhile, the development of interstate highways in the United States has led to a stretching out of urban experience so that the city becomes a larger entity defined by the beltway.
See Steven Johnson, Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software (New York: Scribners, 2001).
See Nezar Al-Sayyad, Cities and Caliphs: On the Genesis of Arab Muslim Urbanism (Boulder, CO: Praeger, 1991), 45.
Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1994).
Richard Sennett, “The Civitas of Seeing,” quoted by Bo Grönlund, “The Civitas of Seeing and the Design of Cities: On the Urbanism of Richard Sennett,” Urban Winds, accessed March 2004, http://hjem.get2net.dk/gronlund/Sennett_ny_tekst_97kort.html.
Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, trans. Robert Bononno (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2003; originally published in French, 1970).
On the gendering of everyday rituals in the city see Laurie Langbauer, “The City, the Everyday, and Boredom: The Case of Sherlock Holmes,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 5, no. 3 (1993): 80–102.
Karl A. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957);
see also Karl A. Wittfogel, Agriculture: A Key to Understanding Chinese Society, Past and Present (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1970).
Robert L. Carneiro, “A Theory of the Origin of the State,” Science 169 (August 1970): 733–738.
Examples of such theories abound, but one of the more important for biblical studies is found in the work of Norman K Gottwald, The Tribes of Yahweh: A Sociology of the Religion of Liberated Israel, 1250–1050 B.C.E (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1979). Gottwald argues that eighteenth century BCE Hyksos invaders into Egypt used Canaan as base for production of their chariots, developing a string of military cities. Native inhabitants from the surrounding countryside were forced to produce raw materials and foodstuffs that supported these urban military production centers. Extraction of tribute was the defining relationship of city to countryside in Canaan. Eventually Egyptians and then Philistines conquered Canaan, continuing the relationship of urban to rural economy. Gottwald argues that an alternative emerged in the period of Israel’s Judges, however, taking the form of what he calls the “retribalized city.” This new city did not extract tribute from the countryside, even though it was still a military center of protection for the surrounding region. The retribalized city had no king, but ruling elders and charismatic judges. The central historical agents for him were still soldiers and military rulers. They were not kings who commanded their following and exercised their control only through violence, however, but elders and judges whose rule was based on social consensus and spiritual charisma.
See Andrew Curry, “Seeking the Roots of Ritual,” Science 319 (January 18, 2008): 278–280;
and Charles C. Mann, “The Birth of Religion—The World’s First Temple,” National Geographic 219, no. 6 (June 2011): 34–59.
Paul Wheatley, The Pivot of the Four Quarters: A Preliminary Enquiry into the Origins and Character of the Ancient Chinese City (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co., 1971), 302.
Davíd Carrasco, City of Sacrifice: The Aztec Empire and the Role of Violence in Civilization (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999), 31.
On the relationship between religion and violence, see Carrasco City of Sacrifice; RenéGirard, The Scapegoat, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989);
RenéGirard Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990);
R. Scott Appleby, The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence and Reconciliation (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999);
and Dale T. Irvin, “The Terror of History and the Memory of Redemption: Engaging the Ambiguities of the Christian Past,” in Surviving Terror: Hope and Justice in a World of Violence, Victoria L. Erickson and Michelle Lim Jones, eds. (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2002).
On the manner in which the violence of the market for selling enslaved persons was enshrouded with the appearances of enjoyment, see Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 36–40.
Saint Augustine, City of God in The Nicene and Post Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, vol. 2, ed. Philip Schaff (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1956), 413.
Johannes C. Hoekendijk, “The Church in the Missionary Thinking,” International Review of Missions 61, no. 2 (1952): 334. On the church as a people of pilgrims and sojourners,
see also J. E. Lesslie Newbigin, The Household Of God: Lectures on the Nature of Church (London: SCM Press, 1953), 145.
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© 2013 Elaine Padilla and Peter C. Phan
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Irvin, D.T. (2013). Migration and Cities: Theological Reflections. In: Padilla, E., Phan, P.C. (eds) Contemporary Issues of Migration and Theology. Palgrave Macmillan’s Christianities of the World. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137031495_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137031495_5
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