Category: Concepts & Theory
बड़े सार्वजनिक चौकों में सुंदर फव्वारे, शानदार स्नानगृह और बड़ी बावड़ियाँ ही शहरी जीवन की निशानी नहीं हैं। शौचालय भी शहरी और सुसंस्कृत जीवन का हिस्सा हो सकते हैं, आज हम यही देखने वाले हैं तीन अलग-अलग समय और स्थानों के प्रसिद्ध शहरों के उदाहरण से – प्राचीन रोम का शहर आखन, मध्यकालीन स्पेन का मदीना अल-ज़हरा, और अंत में हड़प्पा सभ्यता के शहर। (शहरी दक्षिण एशिया में ऐतिहासिक जल स्थानों पर मेरे काम पर, यहां दी गई ग्रंथसूची सूची देखें और मैक्स वेबर सेंटर के साथ मेरी प्रोफ़ाइल देखें)।
The KFG “Religion and Urbanity: Reciprocal Formations” is pleased to announce its 2025 annual conference on “Making Boundaries – Performing Religion and Urbanity”. We cordially invite paper proposals engaging with the various aspects drafted in the concept note…
The programme for the KFG’s annual conference on “Religion, Urbanity and Trade: Processes of Mercantilisation in Urban Space” has now been finalised. It can be found and downloaded in this post…
On 6 and 7 June 2024, the “Religion and Urbanity” research group held an international workshop in Erfurt entitled “Making New Faith In/Visible.” Bringing together scholars from a range of disciplines, the workshop delved into the critical, yet often underexplored question of how religious movements negotiate their visibility—or invisibility—within urban settings…
„Borders“ (Grenzen) is the topic of this year history competition of the state president of Germany by the Körber Foundation (Netzwerktagung zum Geschichtswettbewerb des Bundespräsidenten 2024/2025). To kick start the event, Sara Keller and Sebastian Dorsch have been invited to give an impulse talk at the preparatory workshop of the Körber Foundation…
When visiting Harmandir Sahib (Golden Temple) in the Panjabi city of Amritsar in India, it is virtually impossible to not notice bullet marks and other signs of destruction preserved in the gateways, walls and columns around the central sanctum sanctorum in the middle of the holy pool, sarovar.
How do megachurches, with several thousand worshippers per week, find space in a densely populated city-state like Singapore, characterized by limited space? The urban landscape and use of city space are tightly regulated by the government. Fast-growing neo-Pentecostal megachurches, needing large auditoriums for their worship services, often fail to gain permission from the state to build churches that cater to 5,000 or more worshippers…
A press photograph portrays a woman wearing an old-fashioned white bonnet and a red mantle, her mouth covered by a cloth of the same colour. Her clothing is a reference to a widespread dystopian narrative initiated by Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale in 1985 that has become a global narrative thanks to numerous media adaptations, and particularly the successful Hulu TV series released from 2017 onwards…
Why was the Seán Mc Dermott St Magdalene asylum – which contained also a Magdalene Laundry – located where it was? And how does this placing relate to discourses on Irish women in the city? The article offers an introduction to the historical context of the Magdalene Laundries in nineteenth and early twentieth century Ireland.
Eine Zeitreise in die Antike, das erste Jahrtausend v. Chr., und eine Reise aus Mitteleuropa in die Gegenden, in denen man zu schreiben verstand. Erst mit Hilfe der Schrift gelang es Expertinnen und Experten das flüchtige Element Wind so dauerhaft in Gedankengebäuden einzufangen, dass wir uns heute noch damit auseinandersetzen können.
von Verena Fugger. Wenn es um das Thema „Archäologie in Syrien“ geht, werden den meisten LeserInnen dieses Blog-Beitrags vermutlich noch die durch zahlreiche Medienkanäle verbreiteten Bilder der Sprengung des Beltempels in Palmyra durch Gruppen der Terrormiliz Islamischer Staat am 31. August 2015 lebendig in Erinnerung sein. Abgesehen von der unfassbaren humanitären Katastrophe, die dieser Krieg über die Bevölkerung brachte, gehörten die Zerstörung und Plünderung archäologischer Fundstätten, historischer Altstädte wie jener von Aleppo und musealer Exponate zu den größten Gräueltaten des Terrorregimes. Unwiederbringlich verloren sind zahllose Kulturgüter, die – wenn sie nicht durch direkte Kriegshandlungen oder Vandalismus zerstört worden sind – ihren Weg aus den örtlichen Museen in den illegalen Kunsthandel und von dort mittlerweile auch nach Deutschland gefunden haben.
Jörg Rüpke. Religious change and changes of urbanity (summarizing urban practices and reflexive urban imaginations) must be analysed in their mutual dependency to give better accounts of both, urban history and religious history. Many crucial developments in local and trans-local religion and religions need to be reviewed with regard to their specifically urban conditionality. At the same time, such urban conditions and the very discourses and practices that defined conditions as urban have not been “independent variables” for religious change but are themselves in part the outcome of religious practices and agents.
The report by Zahra Naghshband (University of Erfurt) on the 2024 international conference “Urban Co-Temporality: Historical and Theoretical approaches”, organised by the “Religion and Urbanity” research group and the Erfurter RaumZeit Forschung, has now been published on H-Soz-Kult.
The definition of the term “mercantilisation” relates to the “processes of transforming social practices and objects into merchandise” (Ascher 2007, 28). Therefore, mercantilisation describes the basic transformation of human as well as non-human (inter)actions, any kind of artefacts and material residues like natural ressources and energies into services or commodities…
How did aspects of gender, faith and class interplay in Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries? And which position do they occupy in Irish discourse today? The article charts both activist and academic approaches to the Magdalen Laundries in the past decades, and how aspects of gender, faith and class interplayed in them.
