'They're so into it': Perceptions of 'Religion', Orthodoxy and Belonging in Post-Yugoslav Serbia

Nicholas Lackenby

doi:10.5507/rh.2021.006

Abstract

Much has been written about how people embraced new religious identities following the collapse of socialist regimes. This article argues that it is also important to consider the perspective of those (sometimes sceptical) people who may be less eager to participate in new, emergent forms of embodied religious practice. In the ethnographic context of post-Yugoslav Serbia, I ask how 'religion' is perceived, constituted, and evaluated from the sidelines. How do local perceptions of what 'religion' is connect - and collide - with wider ethno-moral communities? I make this argument through a close analysis of an interview with a female interlocutor, a woman who - whilst declaring herself to be unambiguously 'Serbian' and 'Orthodox' - is uncertain about the religious transformations that she sees happening around her. Anthropologists must attend to the positionality of people who may feel at once related to and detached from societal transformations, and how they make sense of such changes in their own terms.

Highlights

Much has been written about how people embraced new religious identities following the collapse of socialist regimes
As European socialist regimes collapsed at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, new forms of religious practice – previously restricted by atheistic, secular policies – were free to re-emerge into the public sphere
I focus on the case of post-Yugoslav Serbia

Summary

Contact Address

As European socialist regimes collapsed at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, new forms of religious practice – previously restricted by atheistic, secular policies – were free to re-emerge into the public sphere. Milica seemed quite aware that such a revelation would surprise me, and that there was a dissonance between her quite extended discussion of Orthodoxy and the fact that the first (and at that moment only) time she had attended a Liturgy was in her early thirties She conditioned her point slightly, noting that both her older brother (whom she described as being ‘more into’ Serbian traditional customs) and her husband (whom she described as coming from an ardently ‘Orthodox’ family) had never attended a Liturgy. My overall point here is that what Milica is faces is not a religious ‘market place’ or a variety of exciting, charismatic alternatives to Orthodox Christianity (cf Pelkmans 2009; Slagle 2011) Rather, she finds herself in a position of weighing up the beliefs and embodied expressions of a faith tradition which she feels unambiguously is her own, by birthright. Her process of assessing emergent forms of piety became especially clear when we spoke about fasting

Fasting and sincerity

Between religion and nation

Findings

Conclusion