Entangling Urban and Religious History: A New Methodology

Urban religion is in need of history. Looking at religious practices and religious change in today’s metropolises is seen increasingly as a task for historians of religion. On the one hand, this is part of the broader trend in religious studies to take space more seriously (Knott 2005; 2008). On the other, it is the discipline’s acknowledgment of the fact of planetary urbanization and the global importance of developments in the mega-cities not least of the“global South”(e. g. Becker et al. 2014; Garbin and Strhan 2017; Berk-ing, Steets, and Schwenk 2018). The methods proposed so far include spatial analysis, anthropological ethnography, network analysis, all kinds of qualitative social research, microhistory, and hermeneutic as well as phenomenological approaches led by con-cepts like lived religion and material religion. In such studies, the focus is often on urban space, social relationships, and new forms of religion beyond established practices and institutions. The general forms of urban life and the very process of urbanization – typically accepted as a given and seemingly irreversible –have only rarely been addressed beyond Western modernity (e. g. Garbin and Strhan 2017; Rüpke2020b). In this article, we propose “religion and urbanity” as a method to overcome such limitations. Focusing on what we claim to be a reciprocal formation, the study of the entangled history of religious change and the development of religions on the one hand and of urbanization on the other reconnects “urban religion” to history of religion and critical comparisons more generally. At the same time, it invites cooperation with (researchers from) urban studies, which, from urban planning to urban history, have only reluctantly considered religion beyond a European scope.