CITIES

CITIES . In order to obtain the deepest historical understanding of urban religiosity, one may begin with the Neolithic site of Çatal Hüyük, located on Turkey's Anatolian Plateau. The main mound represents the continuous habitation of a coherent cultural group between about 7000 and 5700 bce, making this one of the oldest known cities in the world. The earliest excavations exposed residential abodes adjoining structures identified as shrines in a section of the city described by James Mellaart, the principal excavator (1967), as a sacred or priestly quarter. The remarkably preserved shrine rooms reveal a dominant female image, molded on the walls in plaster with arms upraised and legs extended, sometimes portrayed as pregnant and sometimes portrayed with an animal's head emerging from her womb. Other images of animal heads in plaster adorn the walls of the shrines, and short pillars with mounted bulls' horns adorn the edges of raised platforms. Multiple plaster representations of breasts molded around animal skulls, or with animal skulls protruding from them, hang on the walls of some shrines, while stone statuary of a female image associated with leopards coincides with painted plaster images of leopards in other rooms. Detailed paintings in a single shrine portray giant vultures swooping down on decapitated human figures. Burials under the raised platforms of shrines and residences indicate initial exposure of the dead and elimination of flesh through the action of birds, before the final interment of bones, sometimes with red ochre or grave goods.

A different vision of early urban religiosity comes from the ancient site of Jericho, well known from a number of biblical passages and excavated repeatedly since the nineteenth century. Excavations in the 1950s found what may be the oldest monumental architecture in the world: a circular watchtower 28 feet in diameter and surviving to a height of 24.5 feet behind fortification walls. A population of perhaps 3,000 people lived here in the early eighth millennium bce. Settlers at this site in the following millennium were using small female figurines with hands supporting their breasts, often interpreted as fertility goddesses. They also were burying their dead beneath the floors of houses, but removing their skulls in order to plaster and paint them in a lifelike manner, insert shells in their eye sockets, and exhibit them (Kenyon, 1970, pp. 39–57, 331).

These first cases of population concentration, civic architecture, and occupational specialization introduce several recurring themes in the discussion of religion and its relationship to cities. The first theme concerns the style of religiosity connected with urbanization: death and the invocation of fertility seem to constitute fundamental problems at the origins of town life. The second theme concerns the disposition of sacred and public space, represented in the case of Çatal Hüyük by the presence of buildings apparently dedicated to the performance of rituals. One may ask whether the multiplicity of sites indicates many publics oriented around specific kinship groups or priestly lineages, or whether this multiplicity connotes a concept of the sacred and ritual practice uniting all members of the settlement within an overarching community of citizens. The two examples of burial practices mentioned above suggest ritual practice occurring within more restricted social environments based on kinship or participation within specific rituals.

City-Gods and Rulers: Mesopotamia

The first detailed portrait of urbanization on a regional scale becomes possible during the fourth millennium bce in Mesopotamia—old Sumer and Akkad, the territories that would become Babylonia. Archaeological work has traced here the transition from village farming communities to cities, and the study of the earliest cuneiform writing from the end of the millennium has allowed a deeper look at belief systems and social organization. Thorkild Jacobsen (1976) describes Sumerian religiosity as being based on an understanding of the entire universe in terms of its "numinous" qualities. The different features of the natural world follow patterns of change and growth that corresponded to the many attributes of sacred power, resulting in thousands of names for spiritual entities linked to natural and artificial phenomena. The attempts to understand these entities through their signs and to manipulate the rules for their manifestation form the background for massive numbers of cuneiform records concerned with divination and correct behavior. The attempts include astronomical observation and various performances in which groups of people invoked or placated sacred forces, including the calendar-based agrarian festivals celebrating the death and rebirth of anthropomorphic images of fertility. Tendencies toward representation of the sacred in human form seem to have become more prominent when larger populations concentrated in central places. As the Mesopotamian plain became dotted with cities, along with places dedicated to subsidiary sacred forces conceived as divine persons, each settlement created the "house" of a god associated with the life of the entire community.

The center of the divine presence was the temple, a quadrilateral roofed structure with an image of a deity, which most sources describe as an anthropomorphic statue made of wood and ornamented with precious substances. When a statue was installed with the correct rituals, the god entered into it and became one with it. As a living presence, the statue/deity enjoyed a daily round of services, including baths, offerings of food and drink, music, incense, and the worship of devotees. The temple household included kitchens for food preparation and habitation quarters for functionaries who prepared offerings, performed worship, and maintained the temple infrastructure. In order to support offerings and the personnel of the gods, temples came to control economic resources in the form of land or investments in commercial undertakings. The earliest written sources from the late fourth and early third millennia mostly describe economic transactions involving temples. This characteristic of the source material has supported the theory that the administration of the earliest cities was theocratic, with temples performing the management and distribution functions that allowed expansion of agriculture and trade (Wiggermann, 1995, pp. 1861–1862).

The perennial scholarly problem is tracing the interactions between the theocratic model of early urbanization and a model based on kingship. The earliest rulers of Sumerian city-states were "lords" (en) selected from a restricted body of citizens after rites of divination. The installation of the ruler occurred through a sacred marriage with the deity, at times represented by a priest or priestess of the city god's temple. The preponderance of temple economic transactions, the absence of buildings clearly identifiable as "palaces," and the primarily honorific actions of the lords suggest that their ability to wield independent power initially remained limited. Armed conflict among Sumer's cities in the early third millennium, a time when "city-states" emerged, indicates that war leaders were becoming more important in determining the outcomes of economic or territorial struggles. In the city of Lagash, for example, administrative texts dating between 2500 and 2350 bce suggest that the king controlled the city's economy through the domains of the city's main temples. The person regarded as the fulfiller of this tendency was Sargon of Akkad (Agade), who in the late twenty-fourth century bce brought all Mesopotamian city-states under his authority, reputedly campaigning as far as the Mediterranean Sea. Sargon claimed to be an appointee of the supreme god Enlil, and arranged for his daughter's appointment as priestess of the moon-god Sin in the city of Ur, thus posing as a traditionalist who preserved the archaic hegemony of independent cities. His grandson, Naram-Sin, initiated major renovations at Enlil's temple in Nippur, but also appointed governors over cities and appeared as a divine being in his own right (Franke, 1995). Even after the eclipse of Naram-Sin's empire, kings of Sumerian city-states represented themselves with divine attributes, while still claiming that their power derived from the favor of their city's leading deity. The many deities of Mesopotamian sites came to constitute a pantheon governed by the king-like Enlil, who ruled from the temple city of Nippur in conjunction with an assembly of the gods and through Enki, the master of intelligence, whose hometown was Eridu.

By the eighteenth century bce, when Sumeria came under the hegemony of emperors based in Babylon or Assyria, a radical transformation of urban sacrality had taken place. A ranked hierarchy of personified deities now stood behind the phenomena of nature, dictating the fate of the world within a complex array of laws that required obedience and observation of ritual injunctions (Bottéro, 1992, pp. 208–231). Adjacent to now-expanded temples at the centers of major cities stood massive stepped pyramids or ziggurats, which probably included shrines on their summits accessible by long flights of stairs. Religious institutions, especially in northern Mesopotamia, appeared less like the organic outgrowths of the urban fabric and more like massive interventions of wealth and power located on heights above the population, culminating in massive urban planning projects of the "neo-Babylonian" kings in the seventh and sixth centuries (Van De Mieroop, 1997, pp. 84–86). The Babyonians placed Marduk at the head of the pantheon and the Assyrians placed Assur on top, each representing his capital city as in the older dispensation, but now portrayed as lords of the universe supported by emperors as their divinely appointed representatives on earth, demanding conformity from those below them. Thus, urban religion came to legitimize empire, and the city became a cosmogram constructed by and for political leaderships. Paradoxically, as the imperial motif was coming to dominate the city's sacred center during a period of expanding social and economic complexity, we notice the creation of architecture of privatized worship (Crawford, 1991, pp. 71–73, 101), an increasing attention to the human individual, and a concern with a personal god.

Ceremonial Centers: China and the Americas

Perhaps the most influential body of scholarship concerned with religion and the city has engaged in a comparative study of the cosmographic qualities of the ceremonial center, as originally exemplified in Mesopotamia. Paul Wheatley's classic study of the Chinese Shang and Zhou cities (second–first millennia bce) propounded the study of the ceremonial center as a program for understanding "traditional" urbanization in Asia and, by extension, throughout the world:

Whenever, in any of the seven regions of primary urban generation …, we trace back the characteristic urban form to its beginnings we arrive not at a settlement that is dominated by commercial relations, a primordial market, or at one that is focused on a citadel, an archetypal fortress, but rather at a ceremonial complex. … Beginning as little more than tribal shrines, in what may be regarded as their classic phases these centers were elaborated into complexes of public ceremonial structures, usually massive and often extensive, and including assemblages of such architectural items as pyramids, platform mounds, temples, palaces, terraces, staircases, courts, and stelae. Operationally they were instruments for the creation of political, social, economic, and sacred space, at the same time as they were symbols of cosmic, social, and moral order. (1971, p. 225)

Wheatley's particular interest concerned the change of the Zhou city center from a ceremonial enclave—a walled enclosure for an altar of the god of the soil and a temple of ancestors—toward a multifaceted administrative, military, and economic hub for a "spatially integrated hinterland" (pp. 175–178, 186–187). For this project he built on the centuries-old doctrines of geomancy (feng-shui), scholarship linking Chinese city planning to "cosmo-magical" elements already visible in Shang or Zhou divination records, and the orientation of excavated cities toward the cardinal directions. The project, however, had the more ambitious goal of linking Chinese materials to comparative theories of "astro-biology" that aligned earthly prosperity to a cosmic order, manifest in the stars, through orientation of the built environment around a universal axis. Wheatley was interested in constructing an urban progression from village farming community through dispersed ceremonial center to compact city, considering the "ideal-type ceremonial center … as a functional and developmental stage in the evolution of city life" (p. 329). The goal of this effort, shared by many in the social sciences of the twentieth century, was an understanding of these "foci of orthogenesis" as characteristic of the premodern, distinct from the "uniqueness of the present-day city" (pp. 478–482).

The framework of the ceremonial center has proven particularly durable in the study of precontact Mesoamerica, where urbanization originated in the early first millennium bce in Mexico's Olmec culture and achieved its "classic" form between the second and tenth centuries ce in central Mexico and the Maya world. The heart of the early Mesoamerican city consisted of shrines on raised platforms dedicated to the worship of deities and often associated with burials accompanied by grave goods. The most spectacular city was Teotihuacan in central Mexico, which emerged as a significant site around 100 ce and reached its peak around 500 ce, when its population was between 125,000 and 200,000. A primary road (called by the later Aztecs the Street of the Dead) bisected Teotihuacan beginning in the north at the giant Temple of the Moon, passing by the giant Temple of the Sun, and ending after 1.5 miles at the Great Enclosure and the Citadel housing the Temple of Quetzalcoatl. There were more than one hundred religious structures along the Street of the Dead alone. In addition, the city included over two thousand "apartment compounds" associated with their own platforms, suggesting that every residential unit of sixty to a hundred persons had its own shrine or temple (Marcus, 2000, p. 67; Cowgill, 2003, pp. 41–44).

The hypercentralization of Teotihuacan stands in contrast to settlements in eastern Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, and Honduras, where dozens of states arose, each focused on its own ceremonial complex. One example is Tikal, one of the superpowers of the classic Maya world, where more than 4,000 structures dispersed over an area of 6.2 square miles housed a population of between 50,000 and 90,000 inhabitants in the sixth century ce. The central area known as the Great Plaza, about 100 meters square, included high pyramids with surmounting temples on the west and east sides, and an array of lower pyramids on the north side. The south side of the plaza included an extensive palace complex or "acropolis" and, between the palace and the eastern pyramid, a ball court. Four main causeways linked the plaza to seven more large complexes within a 1.2-mile radius (Escobédo and Valdés, 1998; Grube, 2000, pp. 219–221).

Intensive research on landscapes and the decipherment of Maya hieroglyphic script in the late twentieth century have provided understandings of sacred cosmological concepts and the organization of space in the Mesoamerican city (Arellano Hernández et al., 1999, pp. 34, 108–113, 129–133, 136–139). The universe is tripartite, consisting of a middle world on the surface of the earth, the starry sky of the gods above, and an underworld of death below. It is also quadrilateral, oriented to the four cardinal directions associated with the sun's equinoxes, special colors, and characteristics, and revolving around a central axis where the world tree grows. The gods are natural forces and also superhuman beings connected with specific geometric positions in the universe and controlling different natural phenomena. People pay close attention to their spatial position in order to align themselves most effectively with natural powers and also to enable through their alignments the auspicious aspects of creation. These alignments occur in daily life and in every household, but appear most forcefully in the architecture of the urban center. Major monuments demonstrate orientation to sacred caves or mountains in the surrounding environment, and to the positions on the horizon where celestial bodies rise or set (Šprajc, 2004). Pyramids are mythical mountains, centers of the universe, surmounting caves where deceased ancestors and beings from the underworld reside. The gods presiding over their "places of sleep" in palace temples and on the summits of pyramids, like honored ancestors, are distant beings contacted through rituals of petition and supplication. The ball games played on the ubiquitous courts of the Maya cities seem closely connected to stories of the descent of the hero-twins to the underworld and their triumph over death, known from surviving Maya artwork or literature and from ethnographic study (Grube, 2000, pp. 186–189, 200, 270, 291). The plazas of the ceremonial center are described as oceans, lakes, or standing water, and the city of Izapa in Chiapas demonstrates the cosmological significance: about 2,000 years ago, the citizens diverted water from the nearby river into channels that fed reservoirs surrounding an enormous pyramid, transforming the site into the primordial sea at the world's creation, from which the pyramid-mountain of sustenance rises to support the first maize (Kappelman, 2001, pp. 83–86).

Earlier scholarship on the classic Maya envisioned a theocratic society concerned with the cyclical rhythms of cosmic time and pursuing the peaceful goals of an agrarian economy. More recent research, based on the comparative study of material culture and epigraphy, has portrayed an economically complex world involving long-distance trade, dominated by nobilities and royal families of fifty warring states who supervised the assembly of the ceremonial centers. With the adoption of divine names at their enthronement, rulers took the position of ajaw (leader, priest, and king), and after 400 ce they often described themselves as the "divine kings" (k'uhul ajaw) of particular territories. Rulers saw themselves as the personification of the world axis, and iconography displays them in the costume of the world tree flanked by serpents' heads representing branches and a headdress of the bird of heaven. The kings enacted public dance dramas in costume, taking the roles of deities such as the god of maize in the stories of creation. Royal men and women, at times under the influence of hallucinatory substances, pierced their bodies in order to collect their blood, aiming simultaneously at visionary experiences. Their blood, dropping on paper, would be burned along with copal, the sweet-smelling "blood" of trees—an activity connected to the idea of the breath-soul, related to aromas and also to sound—that is, to music. There are numerous references to smearing the mouths of gods with blood—in effect, feeding the gods—which involved the public sacrifice of animals and captured enemies. Success in military campaigns correlates closely with construction projects at the end of calendar periods, occasions for the reenactment of the destruction and re-creation of the world order (Arellano Hernández et al., 1999, pp. 92–93; Grube, 2000, pp. 149–153, 292). In these ways the geography of the sacred center became entwined with the public rituals and militaristic ambitions of hereditary political elites.

Attempts to understand the ceremonial center through material culture have underlain the study of various preliterate societies of North America, ranging from the Southwestern pueblo cultures of the Anasazi, oriented around sacred subterranean halls (and peaking between the ninth and thirteenth centuries ce), to the Eastern cultures oriented around artificial mounds. Among the latter, the Mississippian complexes (peaking between the ninth and fourteenth centuries) typically include central plazas adjoining earthen mounds, surrounding clusters of family habitation structures, and protective wooden stockades sometimes with defensive ditches. Population estimates for these sites range from 500 at the smallest to perhaps 25,000 at the largest in Cahokia, Illinois. Within the matrix of political, commercial, and environmental factors that could have supported these complexes, making the surviving architecture a "sociogram" providing clues to stratification, these monuments were obviously sacred sites embodying concepts of centrality, symmetry, boundaries, and domains. The largest, flat-topped mounds seem to have supported shrines or the habitations of elites who performed sacerdotal functions. The alignment of wooden post circles at Cahokia suggests orientation with celestial bodies. Many objects of daily or special ritual use (e.g., pipes) provide a rich body of imagery, including animal figurines, cross-in-circle motifs, and a recurring birdman image. Several examples of more spectacular human statuary provide insights into agrarian ritual iconography. Early travelers' accounts and ethnographic studies, along with archaeological evidence from burials within and around mounds, suggest that rituals of death and renewal were important. Religious beliefs among the contemporary Creek Nation provide illuminating, if speculative, links to the monumental landscape through narratives of human origins in the earth beneath mounds, associations with mountains, and ritual alignments of human groups along axes of a central square (Brown, 1997; Wesson, 1998; Dalan et al., 2003, pp. 149, 184).

The concept of the ceremonial center remains an important tool for describing the relationship between cosmological systems and the organization of space, as well as the relationship between ritual performances and the geography of the city, especially for social elites. In general, the study of earlier time periods has relied necessarily on the interpretation of the built environment as an expression of such systems, and thus the landscape of the cosmogram appears more often as an overarching principle of social organization. With access to written records, scholars tend to highlight the interactions of stratified social groups under conditions of political struggle and economic development, within the parameters of varying ecosystems.

Temple Urbanism in South Asia

The study of urbanization in South Asia reveals the varying fate of the cosmogram within a variety of social and environmental variables. In the case of the earliest cities within the Harappan (Indus Valley or Saraswati) Civilization, which reached its mature stage between 2500 and 1900 bce, there are no indications of temples or other religious monuments. Amid hundreds of sites scattered over the largest geographic expanse of any primary urbanization, only the Great Bath complex at Mohenjo-Daro provides a hint of ritual purpose (Possehl, 2002, pp. 148–152). With the resurgence of urban sites in northern India during the early first millennium bce, despite strong indications of religiosity provided by the "mother goddess" figurines available from many excavations, sacred centers are not visible in the urban fabric within the concentrated habitation patterns of walled cities (Allchin, 1995, pp. 224–225, 268–272). Truly monumental religious architecture emerges only in the late first millennium bce in the form of Buddhist monastic institutions, which do display, in the stupa complex associated with Buddhist relics, features of the world axis and orientation to the cardinal directions (Mitra, 1971). Early Buddhist monasteries are not urban centers, however; generally they stand in the suburbs of cities or along commercial routes.

We do not encounter the centrally located sacred center in South Asian cities until the late first millennium, with the transition from monastic to temple architecture. All the features of the cosmogram appear in the temple, beginning with the consecration of the maṇḍala at its base, with a sacred axis and deities at the cardinal and intermediate points. The foundation and square "womb room" built above, with the main image of the deity at the center and subsidiary images on the outer walls, combine with quadrilateral pillared halls and the surrounding walls of compounds to create a unified geometry of the gods manifested on earth. The towering spire over the central shrine represents the Himalayan mountain home of the gods; the shrine becomes the vimāna or chariot of the deity moving through space (Michell, 1977).

By the eleventh century, with an urban revival in full swing throughout the subcontinent, temples were attracting resources from kings, agrarian leaders, and merchants who were looking for markers of legitimacy. In places like Tanjavur or Bhubaneswar, temple gigantism emerged at the heart of the cities; in other areas, multiple temple nodes with surrounding habitation sites created a distributed urban pattern reminiscent of classic Maya urbanism. A distinctive style of urban planning in southern India produced "temple cities" through the accumulation of additional surrounding walls (resulting in compounds hundreds of yards in width), or through the accumulation of concentric streets, each inhabited by different occupational specialists or castes, surrounding the temple grounds (Kulke, 1995; Champakalakshmi, 1996). Within the temple cities, the experience of sacred space provides clues to history and structure. For example, at the temple of Suchindram near the tip of peninsular India, the east-west axis of the complex creates a haptic experience of moving towards the town, connecting the devotee with the collective memory of the town's foundation. The bathing tank beside the temple creates a polarity between the upper, "male" town located around the temple of Śiva and the lower, "female" town located near the bathing tank and the goddess shrine—part of a configuration including four other goddess shrines on the periphery of the city. Festivals at the temple also preserve these urban memories (Pieper, 1980, pp. 65–80).

Between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, Vijayanagara, the "city of victory," became capital of an empire uniting southern India within a single political formation for the first time. The archaeological remains of the city include dozens of temples and civic structures enclosed in part within massive defensive walls; combined with literary sources, they provide an unparalleled view of the relationship between sacred and administrative geography. The performance of kingship within the capital exemplified concepts of the ruler as upholder of law, agent of material prosperity, and mediator within cycles of good and evil. Annual alternations between a period of rest, when the court, army, and king resided at the capital, and a period of movement (which included war, pilgrimage, or peaceful missions in the empire and beyond), created specific configurations of action within space. The transition between the two periods witnessed the celebration of the Mahānavami festival that commemorated the propitiation of the goddess Durgā by the epic hero-king Rāma before he marched against the evil Rāvaṇa, involving the display of the king's military strength, the wealth of his household, and his marital alliances. Simultaneously, the festival represented the reorganization of an older sacrality and memories of place. During the early phases of their rule, when they operated as little kings, the Vijayanagara kings had obtained the support of Pampā, a local goddess associated with a small shrine. When the kings emerged as a regional power, they adopted a male deity, Virūpākṣa (a manifestation of the pan-Indian deity, Śiva), as their dynastic emblem. They constructed for this god a temple lying west of a newly laid-out administrative zone and south of their old seat of power, and celebrated his "marriage" to the local goddess, Pampā. When Vijayanagara became the capital of an empire, the kings and their city took on cosmic significance associated with Rāma, an incarnation of the pan-Indian god Viṣṇu. A newly constructed Rāma temple in the royal core divided the "zone of performance" to the east from the "zone of residence" to the west, splitting the king's two bodies, as it were. Displays of the king's office and festivals occurred in the former zone, whereas the latter contained the royal quarters and the old temple dedicated to Śiva, now the protector of the household rather than the kingdom. Road construction now oriented the royal core towards a mythic landscape of Rāma, rather than Śiva or the goddess Pampā. Shrines of various members of the court and of other communities allied themselves with this new orientation, many being located on the main road that led out of the Rāma shrine (Fritz et al., 1984, pp. 146–154).

Courts, Markets, and Performance in South Asia

Muslims had long been active within South Asia, mostly as traders, but Turkish military campaigns from the northwest beginning in 1000 resulted in two additional models of sacred space based on Islam, resembling urban developments typical of southwest Asia (Lapidus, 1969; Bianca, 2000). The first model revolves around the royal or administrative court, and places the mosque (masjid) at the center of urban life within the fortified center. This model is visible by the fourteenth century in the capital of the Sultanate at Delhi, including the mosque and spectacular Quṭb Minar in Tughluqabad, as well as the provincial capitals of Islamic successor states such as Bidar, Bijapur, and Golconda in peninsular India. Recent research on old Delhi or Shahjahanabad, founded in the mid-seventeenth century, highlights not only the major public monuments established by an imperial master plan but a variety of subsidiary mosques, gardens, and utilities laid out by political subordinates. A hierarchical matrix of neighborhoods (mahalla) including semi-public and private spaces revolves around local mosques, temples, Sikh shrines (gurdwara), and, later, Christian churches (Ehlers and Krafft, 2003). The second model is based on the Ṣūfī shrine (dargāh), where the memory of a saint's holiness leads to a concentration of buildings around his burial place. An early example is the shrine of Bābā Farīd al-Dīn Ganj-i Shakar in the Punjab town of Pakpattan, where the saint settled down at the site of a river ferry during the thirteenth century. After his death and the passing down of his spiritual power to family successors, his hermitage became the site for monumental architecture, pilgrimage, and a network of social interactions based on economic development or the legitimacy of political leadership within emerging caste formations (Eaton, 2000, pp. 203–246). A similar phenomenon happened in Delhi, where the thirteenth-century hermitage of the saint Niẓām al-Dīn Awliyāʾ became the focus for a kasbah that eventually became part of the expanding city.

The roles of urban commercial interests in the construction of religious centers have become of greater interest to researchers focusing on recent centuries. A study of Chennai (Madras) between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries identifies three types of dialogue between communities, the marketplace, and sacred sites. The first produced eclectic or generic all-community temples, "a celebration of the common mercantile nature" of the trading communities of the "native" settlement called Georgetown and of the personnel of the British East India Company. The second involved different castes constructing community-only temples, where social rivalry was manifested through processions, flags, or debates over the rights to use certain streets. The third produced temples that served as a "branch offices" of more impressive or older shrines. The three types of temple demonstrate how "foreigners" could find a place in South Asia, and how social difference and similarity could find voice through the vocabulary of religious architecture and community space (Waghorne, 1999a, pp. 654, 682).

Another study of Chennai during colonial and postcolonial times examines the relationship between the more prominent Beeri Chettiar merchants, who were largely Tamil-speaking worshipers of Śiva, and their rivals, the Komati Chettiars and Balijas, who were Telugu-speaking worshipers of Viṣṇu. Their economic competition led to a number of community conflicts and riots during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and also to the division of Georgetown into a western part occupied by the Komatis and an eastern part occupied by the Beeris. Temples associated with one of these communities, displaying their prestige, wealth, and status, shaped not only the boundaries of "community" but also the forms in which authority functioned. Even today, processions from the Kandasami temple in Park Town, earlier considered a "satellite" area of the Beeri Chettiar community, travel to the older "center" where the community no longer has houses, businesses, or control over the main community temple. Through controversies over the processional route, extensions of it into new areas, and the patronage of the festival, new leaders seek to direct the caste—now a citywide community—from the power base of a new temple that was once spatially peripheral and ritually subordinate (Mines, 1994).

The relayering of spatial and social histories within sacred centers and performances accompanies the growth of cities into manufacturing, technology, and service hubs. For example, the city of Bangalore began as a fort-settlement in the sixteenth century consequent to the decline of Vijayanagara, became a "garden city" in the colonial period, and popularly appears now as "India's Silicon Valley." In the high-tech city, public religious performances remain modes of civic life that attract devotion while preserving urban memories. The Karaga festival, Bangalore's largest religious extravaganza, occurs for nine days in the month of March or April every year. The key moment is the incarnation of the goddess Draupadī, wife of the Pāṇḍava brothers from the epic Mahābhārata, who is simultaneously cosmic power (śakti). She manifests herself in the form of a sacred icon and within the body of a male priest from the Tigala community who, by carrying the icon, becomes conjoined with her. The annual "birth" of the goddess occurs in Bangalore's Cubbon Park at a small covered well, the remainder of a large lake eliminated by office buildings and sports complexes. Her birth is a reminder of the city's earlier environment—a network of lakes, wells, and ponds—and the processions of the goddess over a nine-day period include visits to the former locations of water bodies, many of which were destroyed through construction activities, pollution, or neglect after 1950. The daily festival processions also visit various Hindu temples and the tomb of the Ṣūfī saint, Haz̤rat Tawakkal Mastan, signaling the participation of diverse publics in this "theater of the civic." The festival, which conjures for participants an alternative urban landscape, attracts over 100,000 participants on its final day, and is spreading in smaller versions throughout the suburbs of the metropolis (Srinivas, 2001).

Urban Violence and Religion

The focus of this article so far has been on the pacific embedding of the sacred, but religion in the city also seems to cause deadly conflict, providing justification for riots, bombings, and civil war in places such as Beirut, Belfast, or Sarajevo. No single theory can explain all instances of "religious terrorism," but Mark Juergensmeyer (2000) suggests that they are performative and function as "theater." Most of the groups and individuals behind these events work from a "script" of cosmic war, and social struggle is perceived in terms of a spiritual confrontation. They perceive themselves as martyrs and heroes, rather than terrorists, and satanize or depersonify the "enemy." They engineer events for their graphic and emotional impact on witnesses and various audiences through transnational media. The "stage" of theatrical terror is often urban because the events target symbols or hubs of modern societies: embassies, markets, subways, airports. During the 1995 gas attack on the Tokyo subway system by Aum Shinrikyō, for example, bags of poisonous sarin were meant to do the most damage when the train lines converged at Kasumigaseki subway station located close to the main buildings of the government, humiliating national security organizations. The repeated attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City aimed simultaneously at a symbol of global capitalism and at the U. S. government, viewed as an imperialist power.

Perhaps the deepest scholarship on urban religious violence concerns Europe during the Reformation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the Wars of Religion pitted Catholic and Protestant against each other. Cities are crucial to all discussions of the Reformation, for it is mostly in urban centers that the leading reforming figures found ministerial positions, publishers, or followings, even if (as in the case of the Peasants' War of 1524–1525) there were important interactions with the countryside. Some of the most egregious cases of religious violence occurred within urban environments: the Anabaptist kingdom of Münster (1534–1535), which evolved into a totalitarian communism before its extermination, or the Saint Bartholomew Day's Massacre (1572), which began in Paris and spread throughout the major cities of France. Theological tracts and city archives have allowed scholars to investigate the players in religious violence—persons from artisanal or manufacturing trades and the urban proletariat, who interacted with clergy, the urban patriciate, and the nobility. During the late twentieth century, numerous local histories have shed light on these struggles to redefine the City of God and the New Jerusalem.

The scholarship ranges between two approaches, one concentrating on intellectual or theological ideas and the other concentrating on social, political, or economic variables. Some authors who try to blend these approaches use the latter as an envelope for discussing the writings of theologians (whose biographies are important parts of analysis) and the deliberations of ministerial councils (e.g. Williams, 1962, pp. 241–298; Strayer, 1976, pp. 206–207). Analyses informed by political economy remain sensitive to theology but focus on class struggle or the attempts by urban communes to preserve their political freedom and order within an incipient world system (Ozment, 1975; Heller, 1991). Influenced by the French Annales school, the "linguistic" and "cultural" turns in historiography, and a new social history crossing disciplinary boundaries, Natalie Davis embeds her work within the concrete conditions of production and class but situates the Reformation in Lyon within a symbolic analysis of "the moment of social interaction." Approaching Protestantism and Catholicism as two languages attempting to grasp the challenges of the city, she presents their alternative visions of sacred space, time, and the body as a prerequisite for understanding the "rites" of violence and a concern with pollution (Davis, 1975, pp. 152–188; Davis, 1981; Benedict, 1981, pp. 63–64). Another classic study of the city of Romans demonstrates that the class struggle in the late sixteenth century achieved public expression and was comprehensible for townspeople only through religious idioms that are amenable to analysis through comparative anthropological discourse (Ladurie, 1979). Finally, as part of a movement back to religion through sociology and poststructuralism, a major study of Reformation violence begins with an examination of cases where children committed atrocities. Violence becomes a ritual performance expressing a code, "prophetic because implicated in a prophetic collective consciousness, in a mental eschatological conjuncture, for which it is necessary to research the constitutive schemas" (Crouzet, 1990, vol. 1, p. 93). A continuing stream of studies on the urban Reformation attempt to blend culture and society, theology, and the built environment, within the context of institutions or communities (e.g., Roberts, 1996; Tittler, 1998).

In more recent times, South Asia has been the scene of the world's most intractable "communal" rioting, peaking in 1947, when approximately one million people died in massive demographic shifts, but continuing at the rate of several hundred recorded incidents annually within India. The roots clearly go deep into doctrinal, theological, and social phenomena of the nineteenth century, the intellectual categories developed under colonialism, and the problematic of "secularism" in the postcolonial nation-state. The major religious confrontations since independence (the civil war between Sinhalese and Tamils in Sri Lanka, the 1984 anti-Sikh riots after Indira Gandhi's assassination, the 1992 Hindu-Muslim riots in India after the demolition of the Babri Masjid) clearly occured as responses to political events. The main scholarly issue concerns the many clashes that occur regularly in cities, constituting a persistent source of religious animosity that may erupt into civil war. A veritable industry of research and analysis has grown around this problem, ranging from the official reports of governments, journalists, and citizens' bodies after each occurrence to scholarship from social scientists aimed at understanding the etiology of individual events, common patterns, and the potential for preventative public policy. Detailed studies by Asghar Ali Engineer and associates (e.g., 1984) have demonstrated a complex interaction of sociocultural and economic variables, and a process by which neighborhood incidents lead to violent action, typically with the instigation of male activists and local politicians. Some scholars have attempted to categorize these variables in order to determine the "riot-proneness" of specific communities (Varshney and Wilkinson, 1996), although Paul R. Brass (1997, 2003) also implicates security forces as major players in the production of the "institutionalized" communal riot. Stanley Tambiah (1996) compares incidents with religious overtones in Sri Lanka and India to riots in Pakistan that feature coreligionists, in an attempt to create a comparative understanding of "ethnic" conflict within sociological categories.

Pilgrimages and Religious Movements in the City

If the daily social practices within cities divide, differentiate, or hierarchize the specialized zones frequented by their citizens, then religious pilgrimages, which break down the division between citizens, can work to eliminate class categories and transgress urban boundaries. One could argue, in fact, that the movement through space to participate in collective celebrations is one of the primary manifestations of religiosity and urbanism alike. Many pilgrimage destinations originated as cities or became cities when people clustered around sacred attractions. Mass public transportation has made pilgrimage, this gravitation toward sacred spaces, one of the most significant manifestations of religious localization.

Scholars have been especially interested in the modes through which pilgrimage has altered the understanding of urban space. As Maurice Halbwachs (1992, pp. 193–235) has pointed out in his essay "The Legendary Topography of the Gospels," early Christian embedding of Jerusalem's meaning in the narratives of the Gospels occurred through pilgrims' exercises of spatial localization. A new way of moving through space affirmed the Christian reading of Jerusalem, where places were already commemorated and associated with ancient memories of Jewish history. Christian pilgrimages through Jerusalem, making use of sites already part of collective memorabilia, endowed them with different meanings by situating them within new narratives or actions. In a similar process, the Qurʾān reinscribed an originally pantheistic pilgrimage site, the Kaʿaba, as the activity space of Abraham, linking Islam with Judaism and Christianity, while pilgrimage to Mecca established a series of conceptual categories and somatic experiences that remapped the city and its environs. This process is happening constantly in the contemporary world, as new pilgrimage sites regularly appear alongside the manifestation of charisma by saints and other spiritual figures.

In a phenomenon similar to that which occurred in thirteenth-century India, Sufism is still proving a rich ground for the generation of sacred cities and pilgrimage networks. For instance, Shaykh Aḥmad (Amadou) Bamba (1853–1927) of Senegal rests in a mausoleum in the city of Touba, the early development of which he oversaw. This city and its Great Mosque (inaugurated 1963) is a place of pilgrimage for his disciples, or Mourides. Supported by contributions to its infrastructure from Mourides, in less then a century Touba has become Senegal's second largest city. Devotees have produced a thriving visual culture that includes devotional icons, murals, cosmological architecture, writing, and other forms that grace homes, businesses, vehicles, junkyards, walls, and clothes in the city. This visual culture has also been a crucial part of the social and expressive explosion in the capital, Dakar, since Senegalese independence in 1960, and it features in public debates about identity, memory, and an alternative modernity. Although the saint belongs to the colonial period, he reveals new messages even today for his followers and is a conduit for healing and miracles. The potency of his image works through the transnational chains that link Senegal to other cities through migration, import-export economies, and employment networks (Roberts and Roberts, 2003).

The example of Aḥmad Bamba demonstrates the relevance of pilgrimage phenomena to the study of "religious movements," a branch of scholarship that forms part of a larger "social movements" literature examining intersections between religion and political and cultural processes such as postcolonialism and transnationalism. This scholarship looks at the contemporary proliferation of what are sometimes described as "New Age movements," "new religions," "revitalization movements," and "fundamentalist movements," many of which flourish on urban soil. Some of these movements, such as the Bahāʾīs, propound an avowedly universal message and attempt to create novel, transurban forms of expression. Others, such as the Swaminarayan movement originating in Gujarat (and globalized through Gujarati merchant communities), or evangelical Christian missionary efforts in Asia and Africa, preserve a universal message within an envelope of older "Hindu" or "Christian" traditions.

Japan has been the scene for intensive studies of many "new religions" emerging in the twentieth century under conditions of hyperurbanization. Sōka Gakkai, perhaps the best known, has been most successful at crossing national boundaries and becoming a global organization. It began in the 1930s as a religious organization meant to propagate doctrines of one of the smaller Nichiren Buddhist sects. It grew rapidly as a lay evangelist organization promising meaning and comfort in postwar Japan, becoming a national and global movement with about eight to ten million middle- and upper-class followers (over a million outside Japan) in the 1990s. It sponsors an educational system, art museums, newspapers, and various cultural organizations and is involved in social activism including the fostering of world peace and antiwar activities. It is heavily urban-based (tightly organized into prefectural, city, district, and block groups). Members are encouraged to improve their material conditions and also spend time in daily prayer, meetings of the groups, and proselytizing. The Sōka Gakkai belief is that religion must be the basis of a moral and just society; social institutions need to be purified; and modern, rationalized Buddhist beliefs must fuse with all features of society. Despite the continued embedding of ritual within a Japanese Buddhist format, the envelope of rational peacefulness and acceptance of material success have allowed Sōka Gakkai to attract members from a variety of cultural and national backgrounds (Metraux, 1996).

Some religious movements support distinct "ethnic" identities even when they try to avoid them, contributing to or perpetuating a layer of cultural segmentation within urban environments. The movement dedicated to the Indian guru Sathya Sai Baba (b. 1926) has expanded to include perhaps ten million people worldwide, most of them in urban areas. In a study of this movement in Trinidad, Morton Klass (1991) focused on its roles among urban and suburban Indian (and Hindu) Trinidadians who form the overwhelming majority of devotees. He points out that there are political differences between Indian Trinidadians and Afro-Trinidadians attributable to different notions of their cultural resources and pancultural affiliations; Afro-Trinidadians, therefore, remain a minority in the Sai Baba movement. A separate study of the Malaysian Sai Baba movement in the city of Kuala Lumpur in the mid- to late 1990s explored the way the Indian-dominated leadership attempts to include Chinese devotees. A nonsectarian and multiethnic profile including Chinese devotees "enhances the hope which this neo-Hindu movement offers to members of the marginalized Indian minority to win an audience among the Malay majority and thus achieve recognition as the rightful proprietors of an eternal, all-subsuming and unifying spiritual vision." Nonetheless, ethnic boundaries in Kuala Lumpur tend to be reproduced (Kent, 2000, p. 5).

Modern Imaginaries and Urban Religiosity

Are there religious imaginations and practices distinctive to contemporary cities? In Gods of the City (1999) Robert Orsi argues that the dynamic interaction between religious traditions, contemporary cityscapes, and their social conditions results in specific maps, styles, and idioms of "urban religion." In The Madonna of 115th Street (1985), Orsi examines street behavior, processions, and festivals, like the festa of the Madonna of 115th Street in New York's Italian Harlem, as modes of boundary-making by immigrants, the creation and negotiation of ethnic identities, the production of community, and the theater or social drama of urban lives. Others, looking at recent diasporas in American cities, have examined strategies through which immigrant groups make sense religiously of an urban landscape that differs considerably from the spaces they left. Thus, Mama Lola, a Brooklyn Vodou priestess discussed by Karen McCarthy Brown (1999), travels back and forth between Haiti and Brooklyn and maintains social and spiritual loyalties in two places. She, like others, transposes Haitian places onto New York: Brooklyn's Prospect Park sometimes functions as the sacred forest of Vodou rituals. Such religious identities may retreat into basements, or are practiced behind closed doors, while signs of more acceptable Catholic identity appear publicly. The more affluent South Asian diaspora in the United States, normally with greater social and cultural capital than the Haitians, construct temples as a largely suburban phenomenon located close to freeways rather than within an "ethnic" part of the city (Waghorne, 1999b). Unlike the temple in India where one god or goddess or a sectarian tradition usually predominates, in the United States several deities live in harmony under one roof, in a manner that parallels the multiple religious affiliations of their suburban devotees.

Globalization and economic restructuring, combined with massive shifts of population, have reconfigured "place-based religious identities" in cities throughout the world. For example, in the small town of Dacula in Gwinnett County, Georgia—the fastest-growing county in the United States in the 1980s—one study has explored the relationship of urban deconcentration to the institutional dynamics of Christian congregations. Until the early 1980s, eleven out of twenty-four churches (such as Pleasant Hill Methodist and the black Mt. Zion Methodist) still traced their origins to the time before the town's founding, and five were founded subsequently. Within a period of thirteen years, however, eight new congregations were established, almost "as if locals had placed a sign on Highway 316 designating the area 'Church Growth Parkway'" (Eiesland, 2000, p. 48). As industrial and corporate jobs mushroomed around transportation infrastructure, the new congregations evolved strategies for attracting members, ranging from an exuberant mega-church to specialized ministries. Meanwhile, in Africa, Kano in northern Nigeria changed during the 1970s from a mercantile center into a large industrial metropolis with new suburbs growing around the old walled city. The crash of oil prices in the early 1980s resulted in a recession that produced challenges for local Muslim identity and practice in the face of state-based corruption and capitalist commodification. Michael Watts (1996) describes the rise of a fundamentalist (though not antimodern) Muslim leader in Kano among subaltern classes, such as migrant workers, for whom the state and its elites symbolized moral bankruptcy. The two paths of urban economic development elicit, on the one hand, the marketing of religion, and on the other, the use of religion as a source of revitalization.

Religion plays an important role in the heritage politics of various cities as they wrestle with the rise of the nation-state, socialism, democracy, globalization, and explosive demographic growth. Istanbul, for instance, has been a world city since the fourth century, serving as an imperial capital for the Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman empires and a major commercial node for Afro-Eurasia. Just before World War I, it had about a million people—a majority non-Muslim—including many Italian, Turkish, Greek, or Tartar inhabitants. Muslims, Christians, and Jews coexisted without intermarriage under Ottoman administrators, their religious and cultural lives compartmentalized within corporate entities. When the state adopted the project of modernization, binary constructs (East versus West, Islam versus Christianity, Turk versus non-Turk, local versus global) began to dominate public discourse. During the early twentieth century, anticolonial and nationalist policies took on ethnic content, and religion rationalized ethnic purification of Jews, Armenians, and Greeks. Thus, the vast majority of Istanbul's citizens were Muslims in the 1980s, when the state adopted a strategy aimed at transforming it into a world city. The capture of the city government by an Islamicist party that pushed for changes in public culture (such as dress codes for women) became an embarrassment for an avowedly secularist nation-state, aligned with financial interests in a concern that Islamicist culture could jeopardize Turkey's membership in the European Union. In a city with multiple pasts, the question of historic preservation during urban renewal projects became a deeply contested issue involving the interplay of nationalist and religious tropes. The nationalist discourse pushing for urban renewal viewed the neighborhood of Pera, for example, as a symbol of a non-Turkish "Europe in Istanbul," while Islamicists advocated the destruction of older buildings (some of considerable architectural merit) for the building of a mosque (Keyder, 1999). How the inhabitants of the city appeared and behaved in public and the nature of their buildings remained issues intimately connected with religious conceptions.

Urban planning thus struggles with the reinsertion of sacred spaces by several publics. In her study of Aboriginal claims to space in Perth, Australia, Jane Jacobs (1996, p. 127) provides another viewpoint on political agitations that "reactivated a (pre-) modern knowing of space within the specific conditions of modernity." The contests she describes concerned an area near the Swan River in Perth that had been used previously by the colonial government to establish a depot in 1833 excluding the Aborigines. In the 1980s this area was developed by corporate interests into a brewery and a hotel chain with theaters, office spaces, and a theme park—the quintessential signs of the service economy. Laws concerning Aboriginal land in Australia had tended to designate territory as sacred only when it was far away from urban centers, but Aboriginal claims in this case located the spiritual firmly within the area of the Swan Brewery. Aborigines occupied the area for a while in 1989. While their action ultimately failed and the area was given over to development, Jacobs argues that the Aboriginal occupation not only brought the sacred back to the city but set off an "anxious" politics of occupation by the government and developers. The controversy between "beer, work, tourism and sport" and "urban dreamings," as Jacobs categorizes it, puts into relief the binary imaginings of planners and the unpredictable potential for sacred upsurges within the city.

Rather than a steady decline of religion under conditions of urban anomie, we are witnessing the rise of spiritual leaders and religious movements who claim an authority that rivals the authority of nations, transnational corporations, and secular ideologies. For many believers among a world population that will be mostly urban after 2007 (United Nations, 2002, p. 5), religion provides alternative sources of value, critiques of capitalism, and avenues of cultural modernity.

See Also

Marduk; Maya Religion; Mesopotamian Religions, overview articles; Mosque, article on Architectural Aspects; Olmec Religion; Pilgrimage, overview article; Violence.

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James Heitzman (2005)

Smriti Srinivas (2005)