Sonja Luehrmann/Соня Люрман (1975–2019)

Abstract

Sonja Luehrmann/Соня Люрман (1975–2019) William G. Rosenberg (bio) Sonja Luehrmann was one of the brightest lights ever to graduate from Michigan’s rigorous joint-degree program in history and anthropology – itself quite a luminous cluster of stars. With native fluency in German, English, and Russian, and near native competency in less exotic languages like French, Bulgarian, Mari, and even Japanese, she had the rare ability to understand diverse cultures through lived experience as well as the celebrated anthropological gaze, and in social contexts where natives like myself were immediately attracted by her cultural and linguistic fluency. Through it all – her upbringing and schooling in Germany, undergraduate work at Berkeley, graduate study in Frankfurt and Ann Arbor, and especially her years of work among the Mari people in the hinterlands of Russia’s Mari El republic – Sonja remained her own person. I vividly remember worrying about her when she wrote during her dissertation research that she intended to take a dip in a frozen lake near Yoshkar-Ola on the Great Feast of Epiphany on January 19, to better bond with local Russian Orthodox Christians, a focus of her research. She responded to my apprehension by gently castigating me – if one can be gently castigated – for well-meaning concern that was detrimental to her scholarship. Sonja was always clear about her priorities. In addition to her husband Ilya Vinkovetsky and her children, who spoke fluently in three languages by the time they entered grade school, one of these priorities was religion. For someone like myself who tends to think of faith as a problematic filter to objectivity, Sonya never wavered in her determination to keep the two in proper balance, nor in her gentle (again) efforts to set me straight on the subject. Indeed, her determination to understand fully religious life in Mari El in all its dimensions was driven by her [End Page 313] appreciation of how important it was to the ways the local faithful navigated the Soviet system, and especially the ways it was institutionally resurrected, so to speak, after the collapse of the USSR. Faith also clearly sustained Sonja through the many tribulations of field research in what most might consider a wilderness, as it clearly did when she experienced the trials of any academic career. In this way, too, she was a wonderful student as well as, with the passage of time, a friend. She accepted criticism thoughtfully; with intelligence and grace, she defended positions that I and others thought might be modified; and she greatly valued her relationships with smarter and less smart student and faculty colleagues alike. (Among her other achievements, she brought the largest cohort of friends to her dissertation defense that I’ve ever seen at Michigan.) Even after she settled into her career at Simon Fraser, her letters always reflected her “centeredness,” a word I am thinking is probably not in the official anthropology lexicon. I first got to know Sonja when she took my seminar in Russian and Soviet history in 2003 (I think) – in any case a long time ago. Sonja wrote a stunning paper titled “Colonial Politarism and Comparative State Power: Post-Soviet Ethnography Goes to Alaska,” one of the few over many years that I’ve saved in my files. I’m not usually at a loss for criticism, but had little to offer in this case, besides a few uninteresting comments, except a strong recommendation that she send it out for publication – a price I told her she had to bear for doing such impressive work. (The essay was soon published in Slavic Review, and was a cornerstone of Sonja’s first book, Alutiiq Villages under Russian and U.S. Rule published by the University of Alaska Press in 2008.) I recovered my critical voice to a degree when she was working on her dissertation. I had some doubts about her argument that the techniques of Soviet antireligious propaganda in Mari El provided fertile methods for post-Soviet religious proselytizing, and raised them with her along the way as well as at her dissertation defense. In typical fashion, Sonja both had confidence in her own analytical judgment and enough respect for my criticism to return to...