Exorcising Demons in Post-Soviet Ukraine

Abstract

This chapter explores the making and unmaking of a monastic community in post-Soviet Ukraine. The postsocialist revival of religion occurred within a ferment of unrest that saw the splintering and emergence of many religious communities. This process of religious restructuring has often been attributed to sociopolitical transformations, the emergence of competitive markets of religion, and the rise of nationalism. There has been little systematic inquiry into the transformations each religious tradition underwent in terms of content and modalities of expression, and little engagement with the anthropological literature addressing processes of cultural transmission. The chapter approaches the religious tradition of western Ukraine, a local variant of Eastern Christianity as a living tradition, a “cosmology in the making.” The account is based on a search for correlations between the social organization, forms of religious transmission, and variation in religious knowledge in this tradition.