The workshop considers the visibility – and invisibility – of religious movements as an important if underexposed aspect in research on the reciprocal formation of religion and urbanity. It explores how new religious groups in towns and cities make themselves in/visible or are made in/visible. By doing so, the workshop also considers the impact this had on the urban space and its multifarious conceptions. The workshop brings together approaches from sociology, historical and cultural studies: The modes of appropriating and creating space will be discussed; visibility will be considered as premise of social interaction and the perception of difference; and medial strategies employed to display or hide religious beliefs are investigated.
The workshop brings together approaches from sociology, historical and cultural studies: The modes of appropriating and creating space will be discussed; visibility will be considered as premise of social interaction and the perception of difference; and medial strategies employed to display or hide religious mindset are investigated.
The workshop focuses on moments when the in/visibility of religious movements becomes an issue or is perceived as problematic. These instances will be observed from three different, yet overlapping, angles: One, urban topography and architecture as carriers of meaning and the question in how far it changes its character with the arrival of new religious ideas. Two, the city as a stage on which hierarchies, rules and the self-image of the civic community are negotiated and how the actions performed by new religious groups temporarily or permanently transform urban space. Finally, moments of ‘self-fashioning’ and ‘city branding’ and when and how the arrival of a new faith was fixed and historicised be it by images, historiography, or other kinds of artifacts. Thus, practices, discourses, images, texts and other artifacts launched by representatives of new beliefs become repositories of the change urbanity undergoes.
The workshop focuses on phenomena within the wide-ranging and cross-epochal framework of the “Religion and Urbanity” research group in Erfurt. The timeframe is large and reaches from the first century up to the present. The examples mainly from Europe and South (East) Asia allow to compare differing strategies that make faith visible or invisible in the urban space and to discuss the individual mechanisms to control them.
One focus lies on situations of major religious change in Europe particularly to be seen in the 16th century with the Reformation but also with Islam moving from East to West: the visibility of prosecuted Huguenots in Paris, the ways in which the Reformation changed the urban space in Catholic Vienna, and the topographical changes to Hungarian cathedral cities after the Ottoman conquest. Furthermore, the workshop zooms in on constellations in the Mediterranean area with early Christian concepts of visibility, and Jewish spaces in colonial Tunis. The papers concerning Asia will focus on the afterwar period and discuss Ambedkarite Buddhism, Pentecostal Megachurches in contemporary Singapore, as well as processes of group formation when European traders settled in early modern Vietnam.
In general, we will discuss:
- Strategies of visualisation or invisibilisation: Which ways and means are employed to claim space? Are they specific to a particular culture?
- Perspectives of observation: Is “new faith” an emic or etic attribution? Who decides whether a religious group can become visible? Or conversely, how were decisions for invisibility argued?
- Temporal dimensions: Do the methods of making faith visible or invisible change within the course of time? What happens when the novelty of a faith or a group is questioned?