Sociality in Modern Cities

Sociality in Modern Cities August 14, 2015

Since Ferdinant Toennies introduced the categories, sociologists have often contrasted the gemeinschaftlich forms of social life in traditional societies with the gesellschaftlich forms in modernity. As Nancy Ammerman explains the distinction, the former are marked by “affectivity, particularism, ascription, and diffuseness. In such communities, relationships had emotional depth, were idiosyncratic, were lifelong, and had functional breadth across many aspects of daily life.” In modern life, by contrast, relationships are characterized by “affective neutrality, universalism, status achievement, and specificity. Here, social relations are cooly rational and to the point, and all people are treated with equal (dis)regard, according to the particular place they have earned for themselves” (Congregation and Community, 349).

In this scheme, religion “either disappeared into universal moral principles . . . , or it assumed a place as segmental as the rest of urban existence – a small niche in the complicated lives of urban persons and communities – or it became an internal, individual meaning system” (349).

On theoretical and empirical grounds, Ammerman thinks the dichotomy unhelpful: “By beginning with evolutionary assumptions (that tradition inevitably gives way to modernity), our theoretical models have too often been unidirectional and unilinear. More of one meant less of the other” (350). In reality, we know that developments are no unilinear. And Ammerman’s research has demonstrated that modern urbanites also have close, affective, non-functional relationships. 

That doesn’t mean that modern urban society and traditional village relationships are identical, but the primary difference is not the presence of absence of community: “Urban life is not best characterized by a decline in the number and closeness of a person’s ties, but by the fact of their chosenness and their embeddedness in a larger matrix of the very sorts of segmented relationships that are indeed a new feature of life in modern cities” (351). Attachments are still formative: “We only know who we individually are as we build that identity out of the attachments in which we are embedded. It is the multiplicity of those attachments – not their absence – that produces the celebrated individual freedom of the modern world” (353).  Gemeinschaft didn’t disappear; it within the gesellschaftlich urban environment, alongside cooler, more rational relationships.

 The fact that the relationships are chosen doesn’t mean they lack commitment, and that is nowhere better seen than in congregations. Ammerman thinks of religious congregations as a uniquely modern social formation, a modern-traditional form of community, modern because chosen and traditional because committed, affective, often deep. That also means that the dichotomy of community/society mistakes what happens to religion in the modern world: “Where religious identities are not fundamentally ascribed, individual choice is fundamental to congregational life. . . . Yet they are communal gatherings, collectivities, that afford their members an opportunity for connections with persons, groups, divine powers, and social structures beyond their own individuality. The substance and depth of those commitments are no less real simply because an individual is committed to other institutions, or because this commitment may not last a lifetime” (352).


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