More than half of the population of metropolitan cities like Mumbai lives in spaces categorized as “slums”. Social marginalization can be seen as being overdetermined by territorial stigmatization. The fact that most of the urban subalterns, who represent the relatively largest share of the population, have largely to fend for themselves, and the general “informality” of the economy, find their parallel in the structures of local governance and in the social and religious fields. To a large extent (larger than among residents of middle-class suburbs) slum residents operate their religious lives and religious institutions on their own, make their own choices and maintain their own translocal networks. Taking the case of Dharavi, long labelled the largest slum of Asia, with a population of 1 million people on a little more than 2 square kilometres at the heart of Mumbai, the paper discusses the specific take of members of this widely neglected section of the populace, especially of Dalits, on questions of religion as well as urbanity. It offers an entry-point into the spectrum of options, preferences as well as modes of appropriation within the dense and diversified religious field of Dharavi (Mumbai) from the perspectives of both individuals as well as communities, or caste groups. It finally points to the little acknowledged difficulties scholarship has of understanding the perspectives and the position, and the implied relationship to the urban, of people whose life is shared between city and village, a very common practice among people connected to places like Dharavi.
Felipe Torres Navarro is going to present a working paper on ‚Technologies of Time‘
“Technologies are artificial, but… artificiality is natural to human beings. Technology, properly interiorized, does not degrade human life but on the contrary enhances it.” (Ong 2002:81) Following the same spirit that encourages all our research, we will address in this section the question, ‘How is time produced?’ in order to explore the new experiences and concepts of time generated by the interaction with digital technology. A virtual dimension that encompasses several spaces at the same time has overtaken space; the users are localized and reterritorialized by the technology in a temporal frame of simultaneity. Meanwhile, the expansion of the network transforms temporality, as a condensed flow, into an ever-expanding network and a unity of connected yet geographically dispersed movements in the present. Electronic communication has made it possible for simultaneous experiences. This has awakened not only economic interest in products and the sale of mass technologies, but also awareness of its potential political power.
Enno Friedrich gives a working paper on ‚Ven. Fort. carm. 9, 15 – an interpretative commentary. Michael Riffaterre’s Semiotics of Poetry and the decoding of poetry as a sphere of resonance‘
The paper consists of two parts: an interpretative commentary of carm. 9, 15 and a short sketch of a modell for ‘The decoding of poems as a sphere of resonance’. In the commentary of the poem the different intertexts, all leading back to one major hypotext, define the significance of the poem. In the modell I have tried to describe decoding poetry as a social practice on the basis of Michael Riffaterre’s modell of decoding poetry and Hartmut Rosa’s modell of the sphere of resonance.
Congratulations to Martin Christ
Martin Christ, member of the Max-Weber-Kolleg, resives the Hermann-Knothe-Preis – Research Prize of Upper Lusatia (Hermann-Knothe-Preis – Wissenschaftspreis der Oberlausitz). Christ received the prize for his article “The Century of the Reformation in a Bohemian Small Town, Lauban and its Lutheran Preachers, c. 1520-1620” („Das Jahrhundert der Reformation in einer böhmischen Kleinstadt, Lauban und seine lutherischen Prediger ca.1520–1620“).
For more information:
Congratulations to Martin Christ on Winning Research Prize
The research group ‚Religion and Urbanity‘ within the the Max-Weber-Kolleg starts own Blog
The blog considers the mutual formation of urbanity and religion from antiquity to the present. It focuses on specific case studies, like Mediterranean cities of the ancient world, early modern political and religious centres or modern Indian towns, but it also introduces more wide-ranging, theoretical investigations. It is run by the DFG-funded Kollegforschungsgruppe “Religion and Urbanity: Reciprocal Formations”.
Emiliano Rubens Urciuoli presented a working paper on ‚An Archetypal Blasé? Justin Martyr and the Segmentation of Christians’ Urban Life‘
When Georg Simmel authored The Metropolis and Mental Life in 1903, urbanization was spurred by fossils fuels and metropolises were about to become one of the most prominent man-made features of the planet. The relationship between metropolis and modernity was such that the former was seen and the crucial ‘site of intensification’ of the former. Nevertheless, this paper sets out to show that the general question posed by Simmel’s famous Dresden lecture, that is, ‘how the personality’ of a city-dweller ‘accommodates itself in the adjustments to [the] external forces’ of a vast and dense city-space, can be profitably referred back onto the life of some urban populations of past agrarian societies. More specifically, the paper argues that, unlike small towns and more radically than other large centers, the megacity of imperial Rome was liable to produce what Simmel calls the ‘psychological basis of the metropolitan type of individuality’ and relates to the massive ‘intensification of nervous stimulation which results from the swift and uninterrupted change of outer and inner stimuli’. The paper aims to sketchily investigate the ‘amount of consciousness’ that the imperial city of Rome required from a Christ-believing intellectual, Justin of Neapolis, who settled in Rome by the mid-2nd century and mainly dedicated himself to teaching classes of Christian doctrine and mapping other Christians’ misbelieves and misdeeds: lecturing on truth and cataloguing heresies. How did Justin psychically and behaviorallyreact to metropolitan phenomena such as the serial accumulation and spatial distribution of religious knowledge, dissemination of religious freelancing, multiplication and scattering of religiously motivated meetings, overstimulation from claims, messages, and experiences-deemed-religious? Following Simmel’s heuristic track, the paper examines the way Justin’s ‘personality’ made it to accommodate to the ‘external forces’ of the city of Rome. More specifically, it looks at how this ‘intellectually sophisticated’ personality ‘branche[d]’ out in three intertwined directions, namely that of a (1) Christ believer, (2) a teacher, and a (3) ‘heresiologist,’ and coped with a city which was replete with Christ groups, supplied a multitude of potential students, and sprouted several heresies-to-be. In the conclusion I will push my arguments to the very limits of the sociological imagination of Justin’s metropolitan psychic life and urban experience.
Kai Brodersen has given a working paper on ‚Resonant /loci/? Vertical and (very) horizontal resonances in AD 333‘
In AD 333 an anonymous traveller crossed the Roman Empire from Bordeaux to Jerusalem and back. The journey took almost a year, and included „pagan“, Jewish and Christian /loci/ (sites) which the author referred to by alluding to /loci/ in the oral or written tradition. But which /loci/ resonate as /lieux de mémoire/ with the author and her or his audience? How does this resonate with applying „resonance theory“? And can this method help us to solve the puzzle of the religious identity, and the gender, of the traveller?
Christoph Henning gave a working paper on ‚Politics of Nature, left and right: Comparing the Ontologies of Georg Lukács and Bruno Latour‘
The text compares the ontologies of Latour and Lukács, with a focus on questions of nature. I argue that Lukács is to be preferred to Latour both in terms of philosophical consistency and political viability.
Martin Christ gave a working paper on ‚Burials and Graveyards in Early Modern German and Swiss Towns‘
This explorative essay is based on my first archival visits in March 2019 and focuses on urban centres of the early modern German-speaking world. It argues that the display of wealth and power during burials of high-ranking men and women influenced the urban community at large. It also shows how cemeteries displayed urban hierarchies, by illustrating who was an important member of the urban community and who was excluded.
Carsten Herrmann-Pillath gives a working paper on ‚Rethinking the Status of Ecological Economics as a Science: The Art of Co-Creation‘
The text is the background paper for my keynote lecture at 13th International Conference of the European Association for Ecological Economics held at Turku, Finland, June 18-21, this year. It argues that the sciences of climate change and economics face an intellectual crisis because of a fundamental misconception about the relationship between science and the real world. This takes the idea for granted that subject and object can be unequivocally separated in the scientific endeavour, thus aiming at achieving an objective ‘view from nowhere’. Against this I posit that for understanding hypercomplex systems involving human action it is essential to recognize that subject and object stand in a relationship of co-creation with each other. In a co-creative setting, science becomes art, and art is the appropriate epistemic approach in generating knowledge that can guide meaningful and effective action. I suggest the framework of semiotics for putting this thesis on a firm philosophical ground on which appropriate methodologies can flourish, such as ventilated in participatory modelling approaches in Ecological Economics. An important theoretical concept is ‘design’: Design is the science of artfully creating agent-environment interaction patterns mediated by technology.