Abstract
Religion, women and the reproductive body Previous research in religion has seldom studied physiological childbirth as a religious experience. This is partly due to the intellectualising legacy of the discipline which has regarded bodily practices as secondary to linguistic. The disciplinary concept of the 'sacred' also tends to emphasise transcendental and abstract qualities, thereby excluding phenomena that are associated with the body and materia from the sphere of the sacred. This is particularly so in the case of the female body which often has been looked upon as profane and impure. I will show how, mainly in the Finnish scholarly context, this dichotomous pattern of thought with its body/soul and magic/religion divisions has affected the study of childbirth rituals. I also intend to show what sort of femininity and embodiment these scholarly discourses have produced. Finally, I wish to show how women in the northern Russian Orthodox area have regarded their reproductive bodies; how they have reinterpreted the establishment traditions that associated them with sin and impurity and have instead sought to construct a positively understood femininity grounded in their ancient traditions of childbirth.
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