CITY, SOUL, AND THE NEW IMMIGRATION.(Review)

Gods of the City: Religion and the American Urban Landscape. Edited by Robert A. Orsi. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999. xi + 402 pp. Maps, illustrations, notes, and index. $39.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).

Gatherings in Diaspora: Religious Communities and the New Immigration. Edited by R. Stephen Warner and Judith G. Wittner. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998. vi + 409 pp. Notes and index. $59.95 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).

The 1965 United States Immigration Act opened the doors for a new wave of immigration that now accounts for some 10 percent of the American population and the most obvious facets of its social diversity. That these immigrants have also changed the face of American religion has been well---sometimes sensationally--noted in the media but far less in scholarly literature. The two volumes under review are bravura attempts to fill that gap, giving in the two dozen essays between them a score of close reports from the field plus three synoptic essays. These books must be counted as instant standards in the field and will be particularly valued for their live witness to the first stages of community formation among their subject groups. Historians' regard for them, however, will vary with their estimate of the books' respective cultural studies and sociological methodologies, neither of which comes over-encumbered with considerations of time, the past, or precedent.

Gods of the City bears the marks of its editor, Robert Orsi, professor of religious studies at Indiana University and author of prize-winning books on the devotion of Saint Jude and Italian Catholicism in East Harlem. The present volume bears a heavy East Coast flavor, with seven of its ten case studies coming from New York City alone, and concentrates on the religious rituals, public as well as private, by which new immigrants have marked out sacred spaces amid the welter of the postmodern city. Orsi's introductory essay is a strong exception to the aforementioned concern about ahistoricism, as he gives a nice capsule history of the American city since the antebellum era. Orsi especially attacks the suspicions that animated Protestant moralists and Modernist city-planners alike as outsiders trying to control the city and emphasizes the need for scholars to focus on insiders' (the immigrants') own efforts to define their world. Religion was central to those efforts, Orsi asserts: not rural leftover religion struggling to survive in an alien environment but an innovative, distinctly urban religion defined by pluralist contention, flux, and re negotiation of identity.

The essays that follow study recent-immigrant faiths, such as Haitian Vodou and Afro-Cuban syncretism in New York City, Catholic nationalism among Miami's Cuban exiles, and Hinduism in suburban Washington, D.C.; then move on to longer-settled Italian and Puerto Rican Catholics in New York City, a fine portrait of an aging Jewish congregation in the Bronx, and a quick look at Japanese Presbyterians in Seattle. Of these, Jack Kugelmass' "Moses of the South Bronx" is distinguished by its evocative prose and theological interest, while Madeline Duntley's portrait of Japanese inter-generational continuity and change shows clear historical consciousness. The volume ends with Diane Winston's analysis of Salvation Army activities in late-nineteenth century New York, which were so analogous to the public rituals of more recent arrivals as to belie the presentistic focus and exceptionalist thesis sometimes evident in this volume, more often in the other.

Historians of a social-scientific bent will appreciate the rhetorical and analytical precision of Gatherings in Diaspora. A product of the New Ethnic and Immigrant Congregations Project, headed by Chicago-based sociologists Stephen Warner and Judith Wittner, the book is unified by a consistent effort to analyze community formation via local initiative and a group-particular trajectory. It also strikes a helpful bi-coastal balance (four West Coast cases, five East Coast, one indeterminate) and brings in more nations of origin (China and Korea, Iran and Yemen, ...