by Niketas Beloborodov
On Sunday, September 7, the Department of Religious Studies launched its new international conference, “Neighborhood Religion in Roman Antiquity.” The three-day event brought together scholars from across North America and Europe for a series of presentations and discussions. The conference was co-organized by the department’s new chair, Tony Keddie, along with Marianne Bjelland Kartzow (University of Oslo), Harry Maier (Vancouver School of Theology), and Emiliano R. Urciuoli (University of Bologna).
In their introductory remarks, the organizers stressed the pressing need to explore neighborhood religion at non-elite levels, as opposed to more traditional studies of official “polis religion.” How does religion appear at various levels of social relations? How do immigrants of diverse cultural backgrounds continue their religious practices? How do they relate to each other in the environment of urban neighborhoods? These were the questions the conference participants would seek to answer during the sessions.
The first day’s agenda featured an insightful introduction to the topic of neighborhood religion, deliberately sidestepping direct links to the Ancient Mediterranean. This approach allowed researchers to bridge their discussions on Roman Antiquity, the focus of the remaining two days, with more contemporary issues, highlighting the profound interdisciplinary mission of the enterprise.
In the keynote lecture titled “Seeding Change in Neighborhood Spaces and Encounters,” Petra Kuppinger (Monmouth College) presented her ethnographic fieldwork from a long-term research in one neighborhood in Stuttgart, one of the most culturally diverse German cities. The community she studied is home to people of many different origins. There are residents of Turkish descent, Kurds, Iraqis, Afghans, Bosnians, Italians, Ukrainians, as well as people from African countries, especially Ghana and Kenya. They live alongside native Germans, including German Muslim converts. The neighborhood appears to be quite insulated and tight-knit, since it is bordered by multiple railroad tracks and not well integrated into the rest of the city’s grid. This unique positionality has contributed to how bonded its community of neighbors is despite many evident cultural differences. Kuppinger’s inquiry was concerned with how interreligious dynamics have been changing in this neighborhood, as well as the role and power of individual agency in such changes.
The talk started with a story of a local school theatre where an Afghan girl wearing a hijab played the Cinderella part. This was followed by many other such stories involving the neighborhood school all-children swimming classes, multicultural summer BBQ festivals, public halls accommodating dance parties for Muslim women, and religiously inspired gatherings for all Christians at a local urban garden. All these stories, carefully collected during Kuppinger’s participant observation—or, as she put it, “hanging out with my ears open”—show that the neighborhood’s ethnic and religious diversity has not led to a divide. Instead, the community residents are accustomed to finding compromises and negotiating every little aspect of their shared social life. Perhaps the most illustrative anecdote was about a brief debate between two Muslim mothers, a newly converted German and a Turkish, concerning a Christmas decoration event at the school. While the strict convert mother opposed the idea of letting her child participate in such an activity, the Turkish mother reassured her that one decoration event related to a Christian holiday would certainly not make her child leave Islam and that, therefore, there was no need to strip the kid of the opportunity to engage in a social activity with other children. The convert mother agreed that the event would be fine for her child if the same kid was not supposed to make explicitly Christian decorations. This was indeed a clear example of a successfully negotiated compromise.
Edmund T. Gordon (UT-Austin) presented his feature talk, “Church Homes: Black Sociality to Social Memory.” In his careful historical account, Gordon focused on how Austin’s ever-shifting racial geography manifested itself in the history of two Black community congregations, First (Colored) Baptist Church and Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church. A result of powerful agency and relentless effort of Black Christian leaders in the first decades after the Civil War, these congregations became spiritual cornerstones for the communities around them, fostering neighborhood networks and contributing to local social life. By early 1900s, however, central Austin’s racial demography had changed significantly, with huge parts of the land now purchased by the expanding University of Texas and many communities, such as Wheatville, losing their Black-majority population. In fact, Black population in Austin has been in decline for many decades, and the trend is still in effect despite the skyrocketing overall population numbers in recent years. Today almost all of Austin’s historically Black neighborhoods have undergone significant gentrification or are now owned by UT. While the university was purchasing land in central Austin, Black residents of these communities were gradually relocating northward and, more massively, eastward. Gordon illustrated such a “migration” with a map showing the four historic sites of First Baptist Church (Colored). Initially established at the corner of Ninth and Guadalupe, where Austin History Center is now, right in front of Wooldridge square, the church had to move several times during the twentieth century and is now located far beyond I-35.
Gordon’s concluding remarks centered on the fragility of social memory. With racial changes in central Austin communities’ demography, the role and place of the two oldest African American congregations changed as well. From being the religious centers providing spiritual bonds and networks for certain neighborhoods in the past, they now came to be mostly community gathering centers for Austin’s Black population, significant spaces for social memory and identity. At the same time, the memory of these churches’ historical locations and neighborhood connections, as well as of the Black communities of residents who made this history possible, is prone to erasure in the environment of downtown gentrification. Gordon emphasized that “autochthonous and authentic culture emerges from the relation between place and people.” He further stressed that “the loss of social memory of spaces of Black life undermines Black claims to cultural citizenship in American cultural democracy.” He described his work as part of a social memory restoration project that he considers a form of reparative justice and important commemorative practice.
As was pointed out during the Q&A session, these back-to-back talks presented a productive contrast, demonstrating two different situations in which modern neighborhood communities may find themselves. While the Stuttgart neighborhood case is an example of a bonded, yet diverse, community that tends to negotiate cultural differences and foster compromise, the history of Austin’s racial demography and community shifts reveals a cultural vulnerability characteristic of Black social memory in the U. S. South.
Niketas Beloborodov is a PhD student in the Department of Religious Studies at UT. His research focuses on Classic Maya religion and writing.