Sociabilities and Religiosities in Urban Senegal

Abstract

This article addresses the question of how social positioning and stratification influence religious diversity in urban Senegal. The author approaches religious diversity from a sociological point of view, with a methodological focus on intra-religious diversification. Based on contrastive case studies carried out in Dakar, the article analyses how forms of sociability that are characteristic of a specific social milieu contribute to distinctive religious identities and how people’s social embeddedness shapes their own religious self positioning. Linking Georg Simmel’s (1984) concept of sociability with the formations of individual religiosities, the article provides an empirically grounded theoretical reflection on the interrelatedness of religious diversity with social heterogeneity in urban West Africa.