Introductory Essay: The Anthropology of Religion after Socialism

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes In addition to the papers published here, the Chicago panel included presentations by Sascha Goluboff (a co-organizer) on Mountain Jews in Azerbaijan, by Galina Lindquist on religion and charismatic healing in Moscow, and by Douglas Rogers on Old Belief in the Urals. Catherine Wanner chaired the panel and William Kelleher and Eriberto Lozada served as discussants. For the purposes of this introductory essay, I adopt a fairly narrow definition of anthropology: scholarship produced by researchers who are affiliated with anthropology programmes or who have published in anthropological journals. I take it for granted that all of this work is impressively interdisciplinary. However, adequately addressing the full range of perspectives that have shaped the field would simply be unwieldy in the present context. My thanks to Sonja Luehrmann and Philip Walters for suggestions that improved this essay. Among anthropologists of the region, it is customary to refer to the states in question as ‘socialist’ rather than ‘communist’. ‘Socialism’ picks up on the self-description of these states themselves (none of which actually declared success in reaching the historical stage of communism) and also points to a range of commonalities across the region, including single-party rule and centrally-planned economies. Our panel addressed only the socialist and postsocialist states of the former Soviet bloc. See also Lockwood, 1975 Lockwood W 1975 European Moslems: Economy and Ethnicity in Western Bosnia (New York, Academic Press) [Google Scholar], for an early approach to religion and ethnicity in the region. Piers Vitebsky takes this claim as the point of departure for a study of postsoviet shamanism in Siberia, asking whether the postsoviet situation has made things any easier (2002, p. 191). See also Kideckel, 1983 Kideckel, D. 1983. Secular ritual and social change: a Romanian example. Anthropological Quarterly, 56, 2: pp. 69 – 75 [Google Scholar], and Sadomskaya, 1990 Sadomskaya, N. 1990. Soviet anthropology and contemporary rituals. Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique, 31, 2 – 3: pp. 245 – 54 [Google Scholar]. Hann is also the director of a large project investigating religion after socialism at the Max Plank Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany. The project promises to produce a large and collaborative body of work, both on the topics I outline here and others. See the description at www.eth.de/research/postsocialist-eurasia/religion/civil-religion.html. In a separate study, Verdery (1999 Verdery K 1999 The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change (New York, Columbia University Press) [Google Scholar]) worked from conflicts among religious elites over the remains of an eighteenth-century Romanian archbishop to illustrate her claims about the ways in which attention to ‘the political lives of dead bodies’ can illuminate a broad spectrum of postsocialist transformations. Lindquist's recent work has also focused on religious practice, healing and transformations of the self (see especially 2000b). The literature on missions in historical anthropology is large and growing, and Peter van der Veer is not alone in pursuing this line of argument. Comaroff and Comaroff (1991 Comaroff J Comaroff J 1991 Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa vol. 1 (Chicago, IL, Chicago University Press) [Google Scholar]), for instance, explore at length the Protestant ethics inculcated in British nonconformist missionaries who set off to convert Southern Africa in the nineteenth century. Taking place in parallel with the expansion of capitalism, the route by which many South African Tswana came to identify themselves as Christian is also one of the primary ways in which modern European modes of understanding took root in the consciousness and personhood of non-Europeans. See also Keane, 2002 Keane, W. 2002. Sincerity, “modernity”, and the Protestants. Cultural Anthropology, 17, 1: pp. 65 – 92 [Google Scholar], on Protestant missions to the Indonesian island of Sumba. This is not, of course, to say that these elements have been or should be excluded from anthropological analysis. Susan Gal and Gail Kligman, for instance, effectively incorporate anti-abortion laws enacted with the support of religious conservatives into their analysis of shifting gender regimes after socialism (2000, p. 15 – 36; see also Zielinska, 2000 Zielinska E 2000 Between ideology, politics, and common sense: the discourse of reproductive rights in Poland in S. Gal and G. Kligman (eds), Reproducing Gender: Politics, Publics, and Everyday Life after Socialism, (Princeton, Princeton University Press) [Google Scholar]).