chapter one religion- sociology（第一章宗教-社会学）.docVIP

Mapping the Sacred in the Mother City: Religion and Urban Space in Cape Town, South Africa David Chidester On 9 April 1998, Thabo Mbeki, who was then Deputy President of South Africa, spoke at the United Nations University in Tokyo on the topic, “The African Renaissance, South Africa and the World.” As a slogan in search of a reality, the African Renaissance was a theme that Thabo Mbeki placed at the center of his political program, speaking frequently about this promise of rebirth, recovery, and renewal in Africa. The phrase “African Renaissance” was clearly a hybrid term. By appropriating a term that referred to the fifteenth-century rebirth of civilization in Europe, a recovery of the arts, culture, and learning associated with the urban centers of Greco-Roman antiquity, Mbeki intentionally challenged the conceptual opposition between the “primitive” and the “civilized” that Europeans had long projected onto Africa. Significantly, the African city was at the center of Mbeki’s understanding of an African Renaissance. In his speech in Tokyo, Mbeki began by reviewing three crucial moments in a two-thousand year history of representations of Africa that we can reconstruct here in terms of the presence or absence of African cities. First, in the ancient account provided by Pliny the Elder, Africa was characterized by the absence of cities, as a region populated by strange creatures—people without noses, tongues, or heads; people with dog’s heads; people who ate human flesh; and so on—who for all their “diverse forms and kinds” had one thing in common: They lacked any rational system of urban governance (see Friedman, 1981). In one part of Africa, Pliny maintained, people did have a king, but that king turned out to be a dog, “at whose fancy they are governed.” In Greco-Roman antiquity, we might recall, the very notion of religion was embedded in the life of the city. Through public sacrificial ritual, citizens participated in a religious affirmation