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Contents
Background
Content
Key Terms
Dialogue
References
External Links
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Background
Robert Orsi’s Gods of the City attempts to “define, describe and celebrate the role of urban religion in twentieth-century America” (ix). For Orsi, “[u]rban religion is what comes from the dynamic engagement of religious traditions (by which [he] means constellations of practices, values, and beliefs inherited and improvised, in ongoing exchanges among generations and in engagement with changing social, cultural, and intellectual contexts) with specific features of the industrial and post-industrial cityscapes and with the social condition of city life” (43). Gods of the City responds to an intellectual genealogy that locates American religion in rural areas and small towns. This limited representation of American religion undercuts the vibrant pulse of metropolitan im/migrant encounters and the dialogical, dynamic religious cultures formed therein. How do the religious experiences of persons in the city mean for studies of American sacred space? Each anthology contributor seeks to answer this question.
Currently the Grace Craddock Nagle Chair in Catholic Studies at Northwestern University, Robert Orsi studies American religious history and contemporary practice; American Catholicism in both historiographical and ethnographic perspectives; and theory and method in the study of religion. His other works – The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880-1950 (1985); Thank You, Saint Jude: Women’s Devotion to the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes (1996); and Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them (2004) – have established him as “one of America’s most instructive observers of urban culture and ethnic religious devotions” (ibid).
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Content
Robert Orsi begins his introductory chapter with a scene in the South Bronx. Juggling the worldviews of four central characters – a Franciscan nun who “[felt] God’s presence more strongly [in the South Bronx] than anywhere else,” a young German artist who transformed a wall of an abandoned school building into art, an older black woman resident who saw “more bad than good [in the South Bronx],” and himself, the nostalgic religious historian gazing upon crumbled remnants of his childhood, Orsi narrativizes competing theo-ethical narratives of the South Bronx (1-5). These co-journeying perspectives provide a microcosm of book’s larger project: multiple socio-religious negotiations within cityscapes. Key to this project is “read[ing] through and across the fantasy of the city as it has emerged over the last two centuries, attending to both the forces that have shaped this fantasy and their impress on the ways in which we construe urban popular experience, religious and secular” (12). The introduction differentiates between the religious practices of working-class im/migrants in the city and the experience of the city as a realm of “desire, fear, fantasy, and ‘sacrality’” (62).
Beginning with the turn of the twentieth century, Orsi maps the development of “urban America” in tandem with rampant im/migration. Much of the popular legacy of the irreligious city came from early rhetoric concerning the banal city; the allure of the city and fear of the other provoked anti-city moral imaginations. Small town creation within cities provided “pious evocations of the countryside throughout the nineteenth and twenties centuries [and] were meant to re-create, in the city, experiences of shame that middle-class Protestants understood as the necessary condition for good behavior and religious rectitude” (18). Orsi rightly elaborates upon African American migration (from the South to the North) as another significant factor in (racist) policing of the other in urban spaces. Theorizing the clashes between city dwellers as a struggle for control of the streets, Orsi documents the implementation of architecture with moral objectives. The story of im/migrant city inhabitants, then, has been one of subversion: “the counter-story to the narrative inscribed by architects, planners, and reformers on the streets and in the skies of American cities” (41). Religious creativity helped city dwellers to overcome spatial dilemmas, live through their environments, and craft “diverse religious ontologies” (44, 51, 53).
Orsi explore these religious negotiations more locally in “The Religious Boundaries of an In-Between People: Street Feste and the Problem of the Dark-Skinned Other in Italian-Harlem, 1920-1990.” Painting the dilemma of Italian immigration as one of racial “in-betweenness” (neither black nor white), Orsi describes the making of the Italian American in urban (religious) spaces. Other dark-skinned people – African Americans from the South, Puerto Ricans, and Haitians – became spatial (and racial) interlocutors through which Italian immigrants positioned themselves. Speaking to both a dominant white American culture and to other dark-skinned persons, “[t]he meaning of ‘Italian American’ emerged along a series of contested borders in the neighborhoods, churches, and workplaces, and in the imaginations of americani” (262). The Madonna of 115th Street became a specific site for this religious contestation. In many ways, Puerto Ricans were too close in religious culture and language for comfort (270). The intentional exclusion of Puerto Ricans – and inclusion of Haitians – complicated the question of religious and ethnic boundaries. Orsi points to two theological ends to the story on in-between religiosity in Harlem: scapegoating exorcism and theodicy (278-279).
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Key Terms
Cityscape
Control
(Religious) Difference
Encounter; Negotiation
Urban Religion; Urban Religious Cartography
Migration/Immigration; Out-Migration; Reverse Migration
Moral Sensationalism
Sacred (Street)
(Cultural Strategy of) Alterity
In-Betweenness
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Dialogue
Orsi enters a primarily social scientific conversation on urban religion and migration. Nine years prior to the publication of Gods of the City, anthropologist Karen McCarthy Brown (included in the volume) wrote her seminal work, Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn. One year before the publication of Gods of the City, sociologists Stephen Warner and Judith Wittner published a similar anthology, Gatherings in Diaspora: Religious Communities and the New Immigration.
Since the publication of Gods of the City, anthropologist Elizabeth McCalister wrote Rara! Vodou, Power, and Performance in Haiti and its Diaspora (2002) and sociologist Carol Duncan penned This Spot of Ground: Spiritual Baptists in Toronto (2008). While social scientific and historical approaches/methodologies to religion are not mutually exclusive, especially for Orsi who himself heavily relies on ethnography, perhaps the work of the religious historian is to offer multiple stories and theorizations of space/place religiosities. The volume grapples less with the why of the move and corollary constructions of thereness and hereness. Gods of the City seems more concerned with the how of urban religion. In other words, there is ample space to consider the internal life of the urban religion. Within the religious lives of city folk, Orsi depicts shifting cosmological/theological accommodations of cityscapes. Sometimes, I am left wanting this same analysis from social scientific explorations of urban religion and migration. For example, within the Spiritual Baptist faith, spiritual travel is already a core tenet of the faith’s practice. Migration to Toronto invites theological reflection and transition within the faith’s already in-bred movement. This Spot of Ground begins to explore these multiple layers of travel and movement. Given Orsi’s approach, however, more could have been wrought from the phenomenon of spiritual travel. While Orsi’s work pushes back against a historical current that only attends to particular bodies and places in the American religious landscape, his work also implicitly challenges social scientific theorizations of urban religion and, more broadly, religious diaspora.
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References
Brown, Karen McCarthy. Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.
Duncan, Carol B. This Spot of Ground: Spiritual Baptists in Toronto. Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfred Laurier Press, 2008.
Warner, R. Stephen and Judith G. Wittner. Gatherings in Diaspora: Religious Communities and the New Immigration. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998.
McAlister, Elizabeth A. Rara!: Vodou, Power, and Performance in Haiti and its Diaspora. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
Orsi, Robert, Ed. Gods of the City. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999.