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Religion and magic have played important roles within Eastern European societies where social reality and socio-political balance may differ greatly from those in the West. Although often thought of as being two distinct, even antagonistic forces, religion and magic find ways to work together. By taking on various examples in the multicultural settings of post-Soviet and post-socialist spaces, this collection brings together diverse historical and ethnographic analyses of orthodoxy and heterodoxy from the pre- and post-1989 periods, studies on the relationship of religious and state institutions to individuals practicing alternative forms of spirituality, and examples of borderlands as spaces of ambiguity. This volume is at the crossroads of anthropology, history, as well as cultural memory studies. Its archival and field research results help us understand how repurposing religious and magic practices worked into the transition that countries in Eastern Europe and beyond have experienced after the end of the Cold War.
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Seitenzahl: 341
Foreword by Patrick Lally Michelson
Alexandra Coțofană and James M. Nyce
Introduction
Tatiana Bužeková
Common work on the future: Concept of healing in neo-shamanism
Ekaterina Grishaeva, Olga Farkhitdinova,Gleb Khaziev, Valeria Shumkova
What Does it Mean to be a True Orthodox in Post-secular Russia: Attitude towards Magic among Orthodox believers in the Middle Ural
Victor Shnirelman
How to become the "Slavic Aryans": The founders of the Russian Neo-paganism and their ambitions
Alexandra Coțofană
The curse prayers of Saint Vasile or how to "declare war to the Devil"
Dzvenyslava Hanus
Maternity rituals in the Soviet Western Ukrainian borderland
Tatiana Khoruzhenko
"Media Witches" in the XXI century Russia
Sarah Rafailjovic
(Un)orthodox practice: magic and retraditionalization in post-socialist Serbia.
Anna Ozhiganova
Health magic in Russian New Age
The essays collected in Religion and Magic in Socialist and Post-Socialist Contexts are informed by two political events of the recent past, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Without those events and the sociocultural dislocations that ensued, interest in religion and magic in Eastern Europe very likely would have remained displaced by the more familiar stories, at least among Anglo-Saxon scholars, of secularization and disenchantment. Instead, the upheaval of those years helped to reveal an array of transnational, national, and regional cultures in Eastern Europe that, like cultures around the globe, are permeated by religion and magic. In turn, this resiliency of religion and magic in the broad geography of Eastern Europe has brought a new set of questions about the region to the fore of scholarship, including the articles collected in this volume. What roles, for example, have religion and magic played in the formation of cultural norms and social psychology in Eastern Europe after the discourses and practices of state socialism broke down? How did religion and magic preserve aspects of popular culture for successive generations, despite concerted efforts by avowedly atheistic states to lead their citizens beyond practices and epistemologies deemed superstitious, bourgeois, and reactionary? Do religion and magic transgress sociocultural and political boundaries in Eastern Europe; or do they help to reify those boundaries? Are popular and elite cultures cleaved by competing notions of religion and magic; or do shared practices across that divide blur the analytical binary of popular and elite? How might religion and magic constitute forms of resistance to cultural, institutional, and political power; or, conversely, how do religion and magic reinforce those very same power structures in acts of accommodation, legitimization, and privileging?
In the most immediate sense, the questions asked in this volume help reinforce a two-track shift in anthropological and ethnographic studies about Eastern Europe. The first took shape in the late Soviet period and has since claimed a leading place in contemporary scholarship about Russia and Eurasia but has come late, or not yet, to studies of Eastern Europe. Starting in the 1980s and finding sustained academic interest in the early 2000s, this return to anthropology and ethnography has sought, among other things, to account for regional and historical variety among the many peoples who inhabit the post-Soviet space and its peripheries; situate local practices and traditions in the larger frame of comparative politics; and track alterations and continuities in culture following the political, socioeconomic, and ideological ruptures of 1989–1991 (Mühlfried and Sokolovskiy 2011). Key to these studies are the categories "religion," "morality," and "community," which have been used by historians and social scientists to study how ethnic Russians and other citizens of the Russian Federation, have reconfigured traditional modes of social and cultural practice, sometimes even generating new forms of practice, so as to give meaning to their post-Soviet experiences, and, thus, generate a sense of belonging in an age of uncertainty (Steinberg and Wanner 2008, Zigon 2011). At the same time that religion has come to the fore of anthropological and ethnographic studies of post-socialist Russia and Eurasia, so too has disciplinary self-consciousness. As anthropologists and ethnographers of religion, morality, and magic expanded their studies into Eastern Europe, they also began to interrogate the intellectual and institutional histories of their own discipline. The result has not just been renewed interest in religion. Scholars now focus on the ways in which anthropology, including the anthropology of religion, has long been implicated in the ideologies and practices of power, knowledge, and empire maintenance (Cvetkovski and Hofmeister 2014), including modes of linguistic and ethnic analysis first established in the nineteenth century by Russian Orthodox missionaries as they appropriated "locally generated" categories of distinction (Graber and Murray 2015).
The fact that religion and magic now resonate in anthropological and ethnographic studies of Eastern Europe is reminiscent of the so-called religious turn in the study of modern Russia, which began in the 1990s as part of an academic response to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Whereas Religion and Magic in Socialist and Post-Socialist Contexts largely concentrates on the post-history of state socialism's demise in Eastern Europe, the religious turn in Russian studies is mainly interested in the pre-history of a different chronological marker, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. As the consequences of communist revolution in Russia seemed to come to a close nearly seventy-five years after its triumph, historians in North America, Europe, and Russia became more liberated from émigré and Cold War narratives about the course of Russian history. In the wake of this reconsideration about the meaning of 1917, scholars began to rediscover that the Russian empire was a variegated religious habitus, that is, a multivalent cultural topography populated by an array of religious modalities, identities, and cosmologies. Orthodox Christianity, Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, Islam, Judaism, and Buddhism, as well as the many other faiths and religions practiced in the empire and its peripheries. These then often became analytical categories through which historians would explore Russia's imperial space. Almost a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union, lived religion, especially lived Orthodoxy, assumed a central place in scholarship about Russian history. These studies told us that the discrete cultures of Russia's Orthodox heartland, as well as Russia's imperial borderlands, were thoroughly religious, in the sense that religious experiences, practices, and attitudes shaped behavior, psychology, and perception at both the individual and societal level, and that Orthodoxy simultaneously constituted a source of cohesion and a source of disruption. Religion, in other words, informed the prosaics of everyday life, providing a seemingly fixed and culturally acceptable way to act in and make sense of the world, while at the same time calling into question the sociopolitical structures that underlay local and imperial communities (Worobec 2006, Werth 2011).
One result of this historiographical development has been to make religion a key to understanding and narrating the course of Russian history. Scholars of Orthodox Christianity in the late imperial period have shown how an imperative to recover what was imagined to be authentic Orthodoxy eventually became an ideological competition over tradition, practice, and authority within the Russian Church, gradually fracturing that institution into an array of antagonistic groups, each of which laid claim to representing and embodying "right belief." What was intended to generate unity and community among the Orthodox faithful, imagined by its advocates as the pillar of some socio-cultural Russian Orthodox order, lead to fragmentation and cacophony (Shevzov 2004, Dixon 2006). Historians of Muscovite and imperial Russia have similarly turned to the study of magic, witchcraft, sorcery, and folk medicine, to explore how historical actors responded to and tried to make sense of daily hardships; to bring into relief the opaque contours of a mostly oral culture; and to elucidate modes of resistance to patriarchy, patronage, and serfdom (Ryan 1999, Worobec 2001, Smilianskaia 2003, Kivelson 2013). These studies similarly cast a light on the everyday lives of the Orthodox faithful, whose experiences and interpretations of the world were deeply shaped by a non-canonical sense of enchantment, while also demonstrating how attempts by church and state to regulate or eradicate such practices played a role in reconfiguring, but not eliminating, magic as practice and experience (Lavrov 2000). Collectively, these studies have helped to blunt the precision by which historians had used political chronology to demarcate historical change in Russia and have helped to situate Russian culture in a pan-European context, thereby bringing previously ignored currents of Russian history into the frame of comparative analysis.
This digression into the particulars of religion and magic in the study of Russian history illuminates a central feature of this volume. The anthropological study of religion and magic in contemporary Eastern Europe does more than recover cultures theoretically long neglected and illuminate societies in transition. In giving a voice to "native ethnographers" and in focusing on the "native subjectivity" of those who live religion and magic at the local level, Religion and Magic in Socialist and Post-Socialist Contexts is participating in the de-colonization of historiography. It reveals, for example, the resilience of the idea of backwardness in academic and journalistic accounts of Eastern Europe, which frequently use such categories of interpretation" to rank, evaluate, and plot the course of Eastern Europe; and this demonstrates that sociocultural trends in Eastern Europe still largely remain "under Western eyes" (Malia 1999), an interpretative gaze that for more than two centuries has premised Western Europe's pride of place in schemes of enlightenment and civilization on the assumption that the oriental other occupies lower rungs of those schemes (Wolff 1994, Todorova 1997). Read in conjunction with anthropological, sociological, and psychological accounts of religion and magic in Western Europe and North America (de Blécourt, Hutton, La Fontaine 1999, Orsi 2005, Urban 2015), this volume demonstrates that such practices do not make Eastern Europe exotic or primitive, but rather part of a practical and epistemological continuum that stretches well across the hermeneutic divide of East and West. More broadly, Religion and Magic in Socialist and Post-Socialist Contexts challenges the ways in which scholars and commentators have commonly read sociocultural change in Eastern Europe as a move toward "post-socialism," a seemingly nineteenth century trajectory broadly dependent on political events that did not always substantially alter local society and culture, as partly evidenced by continuities in the practice of religion and magic in Eastern Europe before and after 1989–1991.
This awareness of the ways in which Eurocentric, often Protestant, categories shape the study of religion and magic (Fitzgerald 2000, Styers 2004, Masuzawa 2005 Keane 2007), not to mention how those categories inform the study of non-Western cultures and societies, draws our attention not only to the subject matter examined in this volume, but also to the nativist framing devices used here. As this volume directs the study of religion and magic in Eastern Europe beyond the contours of Western scholarship, it implicitly raises the question as to why other narratives, such as "post-secular," offer a more meaningful description of contemporary Eastern Europe. Many of the articles in these pages, for example, suggest that twentieth-century Eastern Europe was far from a secular habitus, that the practice of religion and magic was a cultural constant in the years prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall. So why should any political event like the demise of the Soviet Union be considered the start of a post-secular moment in Eastern Europe? Is it because religion and magic have now become mainstream after decades of state-sponsored censure? Is it because the state and other institutions of power have appropriated religious rituals and practices in the symbols and ceremonies of officialdom? But why should the shift from private, often clandestine, practice to public performance determine claims that a previous moment in historical time was secular and the present moment is post-secular? To raise questions about academic narratives previously ascribed to the historical trajectory of Eastern Europe is also to raise fundamental questions about such narratives.
Similarly, claims that Orthodox Christianity constitutes a type of religion that generates cultures and societies distinct from those generated by Roman Catholicism and Protestantism are largely the result of earlier attempts to make the dominant confessional religion of Eastern Europe into some kind of discrete, determinative force, an argument that appears not only in the work of Western European thinkers seeking to distinguish West from East or Central European thinkers hoping to lay claim to belonging to the West, but also in the work of East European thinkers who sought to rank their own cultural geography over that of the West. This particular conceptualization (the last) of Orthodox Christianity is especially evident in the privileging of native modalities and "popular belief" in ideological struggles against cultural imperialism from the West. Such privileging initially found discursive viability during the reign of Nicholas I (1825–1855), when a small number of educated Russians, most notably the Moscow Slavophiles, responded to the assertion that Russia was a backward culture that resided in the philosophically moribund East and/or that it resided outside the flow of historical time altogether, with counterclaims that Russian Orthodox culture was both distinct from and superior to Western culture. These counterclaims soon gained credence in capital-city society and in institutions of higher education, as the cultural and epistemological integrity of the Russian people (russkii narod) was increasingly perceived to be under threat from the West (Gerasimov, Glebov, Mogilner 2013), a concern that was exacerbated by Russia's disastrous campaign in the Crimean War (1853–1856). The result was the formation of a new discourse among educated Russians organized around the advantages of backwardness, the vitality of native culture, and the centrality of folk Orthodoxy (narodnoe pravoslavie) in understanding Russian culture.
The paradox then, as it is now, resides in the fact that this invitation to reconsider the idea of backwardness and the invitation to study native culture and popular belief are indebted to categories and narratives largely derived from the West. Among the Slavophiles, whose theories once again resonate in Russia, this new narrative entailed the inversion of philosophical, theological, and historical trajectories first articulated in Germany and France , whereby Russia succeeded Europe as the vanguard of history (or an agent of Providence) and the East was to triumph over the West in the study of national and civilizational cultures (Michelson 2010). To be both the other and to reclaim interpretative authority regarding local culture meant, in this context, relying onto plot devices inherited from ostensibly alien cultures and confessions. Virtually all attempts to de-colonize methodology, historiography, and narration both in the past and in the present, in other words, are almost always wedded to the imperialist, rationalist, world-historical, and Western categories they seek to displace, including the very notion of decolonization (Shepard 2006). What this volume helps reveal is scholarship's long reliance on Western or Protestant modes of analysis and narration when it comes to magic and religion; the necessity to challenge those modes of interpretation by drawing on countervailing theories and by turning to native sources; and to acknowledge the likelihood that such shifts in scholarship and hermeneutics almost always subvert the epistemologies that they seek to overcome.
Patrick Lally Michelson
January 2017
Willem de Blécourt, Ronald Hutton, Jean La Fontaine, eds., Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: The Twentieth Century (London, Athlone Press, 1999).
Roland Cvetkovski and Alexis Hofmeister, eds., An Empire of Others: Creating Ethnographic Knowledge in Imperial Russia and the USSR (Budapest: CEU Press, 2014).
Simon Dixon, "The Russian Orthodox Church in Imperial Russia 1721–1917," in Eastern Christianity, Vol. 5 of The Cambridge History of Christianity, ed. Michael Angold, pp 325–347 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
Timothy Fitzgerald, The Ideology of Religious Studies (Oxford: Oxford Univeristy Press, 2000).
Ilya Gerasimov, Sergey Glebov and Marina Mogilner, "The Postimperial Meets the Postcolonial: Russian Historical Experience and the Postcolonial Moment," in Ab Imperio, No.2 (2013), pp.97–135.
Kathyn Graber and Jesse Murray, "The Local History of an Imperial Category: Language and Religion in Russia's Eastern Borderlands, 1860s–1930s," in Slavic Review, Vol. 74, No.1 (2015), pp.127–52.
Leonid Heretz, Russia on the Eve of Modernity: Popular Religion and Traditional Culture under the Last Tsars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
Webb Keane, Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007).
Valerie Kivelson, Desperate Magic: The Moral Economy of Witchcraft in Seventeenth-Century Russia (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2013).
AleksandrSergeevichLavrov, Koldovstvo i religiia v Rossii, 1700–1740 gg. (Moscow: Drevlekhranilishche, 2000).
Martin Malia, Russia under Western Eyes: From the Bronze Horseman to the LeninMausoleum(Cambridge: Harvard University Press,1999).
Laurie Manchester, Holy Fathers, Secular Sons: Clergy, Intelligentsia, and the Modern Self in Revolutionary Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2008).
Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
Patrick Laly Michelson, "Slavophile Religious Thought and the Dilemma of Russian Modernity, 1830–1860," in Modern Intellectual History, Vol. 7, No.2 (2010), pp.239–67.
Florian Mühlfried and Sergey Sokolovskiy, eds. Exploring the Edge of Empire: Soviet Era Anthropology in the Caucasus and Central Asia (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2011).
Robert Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
Will F. Ryan, The Bathhouse at Midnight: A Historical Survey of Magic and Divination in Russia (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University, 1999).
Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006).
Vera Shevzov, Russian Orthodoxy on the Eve of Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
Elena B. Smilianskaia, Volshebniki, bogokhul'niki, eretiki: Narodnaia religioznost' i "dukhovnye prestupleniia" v Rossii XVIII v. (Moscow: indrik, 2003).
Randall Styers, Making Magic: Religion, Magic, and Science in the Modern World (Oxford: Oxford Univeristy Press, 2004).
Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford Univeristy Press, 1997).
Hugh B. Urban, New Age, Neopagan, and New Religious Movements: Alternative Spirituality in Contemporary America (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2015).
Christine Worobec, Possessed: Women: Witches, and Demons in Imperial Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1999).
Christine Worobec, "Lived Orthodoxy in Imperial Russia," in Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, Vol. 7, No.2, Spring 2006, pp.329–350.
Paul W. Werth, "Lived Orthodoxy and Confessional Diversity: The Last Decade on Religion in Modern Russia," in Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, Vol. 12, No.4 Fall 2011, pp.849–865.
Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press, 1994)
Alexandra Coțofană and James M. Nyce
As the first of two volumes, this collection is intended to fill some of the theoretical and ethnographic gaps in the study of religion and magic in socialist and post-socialist Europeand its peripheries. Although we use the word"socialist"throughout the two volumes, we understand the biases (empirical and ideological) inherent in this term, and invite further research to expand on (and critique) the problems of using thisterm to represent such an intricate and complex cultural space as the oneinvestigatedby these volumes.Giventhis, we invite readers to consider these chapters not just as individual examples of Eastern European entanglements of the state, society,and the occult, but also to consider how the meanings ascribed to East and West work in the communities presented.
Wolff (1994) has arguedthatEastern Europe is more or less an intellectualconventionof the Enlightenmentmovement, a geographical and ideological shift from the previously accepted North/South axis. This East-West binary was created by nineteenth century scholars (although the legacy predates this), who saw Paris asthe center of Europe, and serveda larger project of constructing Eastern Europe as a space of backwardness, in order to affirm the progress of the West. Superstition,"extreme"religiosity,and irrationality are essential to the definition of this space, opposed to the West, which in part explains the fascination of nineteenth century Anglo-Saxon scholars with Eastern folklore, tradition,and belief(Buchowski 2004). However, this volume'spapers, their literature reviews,and bibliographies will give many readers some sense of what thelocal literatures and native scholarshave had to say on subjects related to religion and traditional belief.
In the 1950s, the Cold War led scholars once again to ask questions about the origin and nature of the state. At that time, Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, given their post war conditions, were taken by Anglo-Saxon scholars to be something like natural laboratories in which the social anthropology of the state could be observed (Ssorin-Chakiv 2003, Shafir 2008). Perhaps the first of these anthropologists was Sanders who in 1949 publishedBalkan Village(Cole 1977, Sanders 1949). An earlier noteworthy text comes from Ruth Benedict who wrote on Romania as part of the war effort,and then worked on Romania, Poland,and Czechoslovakia post-war (Benedict 1946, Mead and Metraux 1953). Joel Halpern is well known for his fieldwork in Serbia in 1953 (Halpern 1958) and later turned his attention to the rest of Eastern Europe. Given their theoretical interests, prior ideological commitments,and mentors (Halpern's advisors included Mead, Conrad Arensberg,and Philip Mosely) it is not surprising that these researchers were less concerned with religious belief than with the local operations of socialism and Marxism (Mintz 1974, Kideckel 1977). Still, village ritual was covered in some of these studies, which paved the way for later ethnographies on the role ritual had in the post-socialist state (Agadjanian 2001, Bernstein 2013, Buyandelger 2014). Givenearlyresearchers'interests and theoretical commitment, it is not surprising that in their studies of religious ideology and practice, what can be callednative subjectivityreceived little attention. This did not change much after 1989, when researchers focused mostly on how the Eastern regimes failed as modernist projects and the resultant consequences of these failures. Materialistic exchanges and material culture, a consistent theme in this region's Anglo-Saxon ethnology, continueto be an important research topic (Sampson 1984, Ledeneva 1998, Chelcea 2002). As for popular belief, not ritual, the cupboard remained bare.
Since the late 1980s revolutions, there has been more scholarly interest in religion in the former Eastern bloc, especially in the role religion plays in post-socialisttransformations(Lindquist 2000, 2005, 2006, Knox 2005, Kivelson 2011, Kizenko 2013, Naumescu 2008, Wanner 2008). The number of Western ethnographers visiting Eastern European countries before 1991 was not very high (Romania was the only exception, as will be discussed below).Even so,the topic of religion was mostlyneglected, except through the study of ritual (Kligman 1981),and the linksthat thisbody of work had to state policies.
One major concern of researchers looking at the Soviet bloc and its zonesof influence, when it came to religion, was the relationship between religion and the attemptsofsocialist statesto build modernity (Chirot 1978, Leustean 2007). This is often looked at through the study of ethnic and national identity (Hann 1988, Kligman 1988, Dorondel 2002, Deletant 2012). Anthropologists were also concerned with rituals of burial as a means to explore the place socialism and religion had in everyday life (Balzer 1980,1981, Verdery 1999). In scholarship focused on Eastern Europe, the study of ritual became legitimatized, as means, through a Durkheimian lens of analyzing religion as an institutional and personal expression. While this gave anthropologists access to people's everyday experiences of belief and practice, littleon the topic has been published. From several years of fieldwork in Romania, we have evidence of complicity between magical figures and the elite under communism, but few other scholars so far have paid much attention to this issue.
For Anglo-Saxon anthropological scholarship after the 1980s, Romanian fieldwork isfoundationalnot only to how we see Eastern Europe as a research area, but to how we define most state formations which claim adherence to Marxist principles in the region. Katherine Verdery's term'post-socialism'has become universally employed and it has mostly been spared the kind of scrutiny most of the anthropological lexicon has received. All one has to do is think of the attention given to other terms in the discipline, liketotemism,manaorreligionitself. We tend to give the termpost-socialismits credibility and seldom question its authority, primarily because it came from researchers working in centers of political, academic, and economic power. The question then is: after the'post-socialisms'of various Anglo-Saxon anthropologists, what is left for the native ethnographer to theorize,and how and when do we get to hear native voices—both of local scholars and those of the community itself (Buchowski 2004)?Tismăneanu (2003) offers'Stalinism'as an alternative to'socialism', sinceStalinism provided the model for state policies in some of Eastern European countries. However, other scholars argue that some of the Eastern European national and political autarchic impulses make the term Stalinism less tenable, and that we should use the term communism instead, especially since this was the term more commonly used by political elites of Eastern Europe in their quest for hegemony (Skalnik 2000, Buchowski 2004).
The issues with Anglo-Saxon terminology do not end here. Thepost-appellation in social science and area studies is very much a case of relabeling/ recategorizing the native subjective in broad Western terms. By calling certain post-revolutionary countries post-socialist/post-colonial, foreign scholarship and policies manage to limit both analytic freedom, inside and outsidethesecountries, and the local forms of development. The social analysis these terms permit, and the fact that such analysis often happened very quickly after the collapse of the Soviet Union and neighboring regimes, means they often have had an interventionist quality to them, intended to legitimize Western voices, while silencing native voices and the alternatives and critiques they might put into press. Furthermore, as we have seen, certain disciplinary terminology used in reference to both Eastern Europe and Russia has seldom been critically deconstructed. One consequence of this is that some of the widely used"post-"appellations do not fit the lived experience of people or local, national, inter-state political realities. Further, the notion of post-socialism often sounds triumphal and like some kind of Western victory over other, more local possibilities. It can be argued these terms and attendant models obscure the interworking of global, regional,and national economies and set up an artificial, ideological binary of'Us'against'Them'.
On the ground, in Eastern European nation-states, the notion of post-socialism does not always resonate with lived experiences before or after 1989. In fact, onsite, as the articles in this volume show, one can often find far more continuitiesthanthe discontinuities pre/post-socialism assumes. This suggests that other analytic and interpretive motifs and terminologies should be inserted into the debate about what life was"really like"in Eastern Europe and Russia under a variety of regimes. By working solely within terms of pre-post socialism, the implication is that there was some arbitrary point in time when a socialist society became capitalist. However, on the ground, and in people's experience, socialism and capitalism often seem to work together. This alludes to the issue of whether both modernity and its endpoints have to follow the same single path. Collier (2011) challenges this idea and further argues that, unlike in the 1990s, Russia is no longer a failed neoliberal state, but can, instead, represent an example ofsustainable social modernity. Tangentially, afair number of articles in this current volume look at the connection religion and traditional belief have in this Russian modernity.
Recent studieshave dismantled someof the pre/post dichotomies. Chioni (2001) suggests that the term post-colonial can be reasonably applied to former soviet spaces, and argues that other related concepts, such as'resistance','liberation', and'hangover'be employed as well. Chioni believes that the post-colonial condition is as fundamental to the world's cultures asrace,genderandage. We might add to this listclassand note that Chioni's arguments have much to offer us. Further, his argumentis enforced by the fact thattheEastern European countries were not colonies per se. Such arguments seem to rest on very narrow definitions of these twoterms,and exempt Eastern European states from the important roles they played across history as both colonized and colonizers.
On the issue of colonizers and the colonized, the discipline of anthropology has its own fault line. Anthropology is not solely based on some'pure'logic or science. Rather, it is informed by colonial politics and ideology (Weber 1930, Girard 1987, Ferguson 1999, Habermas and Mendieta 2002, Collier 2011, Harvey 2011). The early beginnings of anthropology defined the territorial and culturalotheralong lines that were as much aesthetic and ideological asscientific, i.e., by absence or presence of reason (Husserl 1988, Abu-Lughod 1990, Hornborg 2011).
Reason was seen as a characteristic of the Western metropole, while unreason defined the colonies. Slowly, it became evident that thediscursiveseparation betweenwhat isWestern andwhat isnon-Western is thus not about geography, but represents an epistemic difference related to the colonial history of anthropology (Harvey 2005, Sharma and Gupta 2006, Ferguson 2010). From a different point of view, we could say that the local often seems exotic, simply because it is described from the perspective of another, culturally different local. To give an example, the occult was an easy target to paint as discursively opposed to reason. However, what is defined as reason is the product of a very long historically contingent debate about how the world works, and consequently about how it should be understood.In brief, the Western fascination with its own magic (and that of others) has helped establish what today we see as"reasonable",and to link this to what we call today post-Enlightenment secularism (Kapferer 2002).
As anthropologists have already noted, there is a need for decolonizing the discipline—in other words, to give equal space to native anthropology and voices in the kinds of analysis we do, as well as in what we advocate for on the basis of this knowledge. In short, this requires not only an epistemological and methodological turn, the consideration of where and how we historically produce knowledge. It also involves an ideological and political turn, which both acknowledges and works to dismantle dismissive and colonial hierarchies of taste and production. Anthropology's historically complicated relationship with magic is perhaps the best example of how the decolonizing of the discipline has not yet occurred, and that the modern opposition of science versus non-science sets up the divide between Westernmodelsmodernity andthose of Others.
This also impinges,fundamentally, on how reality both is defined and thought to be capable of manipulation. As such, if one is to understand power and how it both disappears and reappears, we have to better understand how science establishes ana prioridiscontinuity with magic, religion, and ideology. This helps conceal the workings of (social) reality and at the same time, helps to mystify almost all forms of hierarchy as well as to support the legitimization of inequity found in every society. To turn the table around, this volume has several studies by Eastern ethnographers, who describe how magic and religion in local communities can redefine, resist,and accommodate the power of the state and society.
Hanus (this volume) discusses her fieldwork in rural Ukrainian communities. Hanusinvestigateshow the state, prior to democracy, has intervened in one set of beliefs and practices, those related to maternity, and the effects this has had onvarioussocial groups along the unstable Ukrainian-Polish border. Many of therituals that once had magic and religious meaning in these communities, have become Soviet rituals and have thus gained new meanings. It is this impingement of the secular which led to the reinvention of tradition and ritual that interests the author, as Hanus shows how the secular and the Soviet entered very intimate aspects of personal and family life along the Polish-Ukrainian border.
Similarly, Shnirelman's study reveals how the Russian occult corpus is used today, how these beliefs and practices have been reinvented in different esoteric communities, and the role they have come to play in modern political and social discourse. Shnirelman presents magic as a common form of resistance in the last decades of the 20thcentury, one that he links tothecontext of the many reinventions of self, whichex-Soviet citizens are presently undergoing.How do we conceptualize the notions ofRussian and Sovietin relationshipwith each other? Shnirelman's investigation addresses the anthropological and historical aspects of this question.
Using the idea ofneo-shamanism, Grishaeva, Farkhitdinova, Khaziev,and Shumkova's paper picks up on Shnirelman's question about identity, but turns it in a different direction. Here, the question becomes: what does it mean to be Orthodox in post-secular Russia? Their analysis focuses on the important role that Christian Orthodoxy as an institution has played in theRussianstate-making after 1991, and how faithcan be definedin Russia, given this. The article raises awareness about the many Orthodoxies present in Christianity and how neoliberalismcan helpbuild religious identity in a post-soviet/post-secular world.
Ozhiganova's paper (this volume) also has much in common with Shnirelman's but here the author looks at two New Age communities (with quite different demographics) to phrase out the role"pagan"survivals play in these groups'appeal to Russians. Furthermore, Ozhiganova explains facets ofneo-paganism and magic in Russia that, when added to Shnirelman analysis, make clear why seemingly countercultural beliefs and aspirations can have very significant roles in today's mainstream Russian society.
In another ethnographic study, Bužeková shows how, using the termneo-shamanism, long standing Slovak positions regarding religion and healing are both modified and continue to be important in everyday life. The author finds that individuals can be both shamans and urbanites in post-socialist Central Europe. In other words, neoliberalism here provides opportunities for the practice and reinvention of magic and tradition, which in turn can create contexts for discussing democracy, civil society,and equality.
Taken together, these papers remind us of how little we know about how religious and magical belief and practice differ community by community, border toborderand under the various political regimes linked, in one way or another, to Marxist ideology.
This raises another issue that we were largely unable to address in this volume. This is the effect that the growth of Protestant fundamentalism has had not just on religious life, but also on the social institutions and discourses that inform private and public life in Eastern Europe today.
There is little on this here, but Hanus discusses Soviet responses to religion and traditional belief intheUkraine. The anthropological literature has also seldom focused on the Soviet atheist or secularization programs, how they differed nation by nation and how their message was diffused throughout the society (alsosee Luehrmann 2011). Nor do we know much about what these programs were contesting under communism and what the points of resistance to these programs may have been.
As for Christian Orthodoxy, once we turn away from church-state issues, like property restitution, there is little available in English other than confessional accounts. Even more problematic, these give little analytic insight into the faith,especiallyits felt and communal dimensions,and how they differ from the various forms of Western Christianity. This is an issue because Christian Orthodoxy helps to define some important domains—among them, experiential, aesthetic,and doctrinal ones—in ways often quite different than Western variants of Christianity.
The next volume, like thisone, will also be a collection of ethnographies. It will take up and expand some of the issues above as they play out in countries and cultures where religion has played important socio-political roles throughout history. However, it will focus more on cultures where Orthodoxy does not play a role asimportant asfor the ethnographies here (Buzekova being the only exceptionin our first volume).
The importance of the Orthodox Church as an institution in many of these state-religion-magic relationships is large. If ignored, there is a good chance we will think aboutsocio-cultural institutions in Russia and Eastern European in biased terms, regardless of the time period the author is writing about. In fact, most discussions of the transition in Eastern Europe, from "communism"to"democracy"suffers from bearing too much of a resemblance to the transitions between barbarism, savagery,and civilization/Christianity,popular in nineteenth century Anglo-Saxon anthropology. Discussions of social life and socio-political institutions in Eastern Europe suffer even more when magical and religious belief and the role both have in the Orthodox Church and faith are ignored or treated tangentially.
For example, it is not possible to understand such a modern phenomenon as Khoruzhenko's RussianMedia Witches (this volume) unless one takes, as she does, Orthodoxy into account. Khoruzhenko shows the role the media andadvertisinghave played in on the professionalization of witchcraft in Christian Orthodox Russia today and demonstrates how the media helps define expertise and provides competition and legitimacy toMedia Witches. This, in turn, helps fuel the ongoing debate incontemporaryRussia about the utility and reality of magic itself.
Rafajlović (this volume), like Khoruzhenko, centers on traditional and popular healers, but this time in Serbia. Rafajlović's ethnography presents witchcraft in relation to a kind of putative ahistoricity, in which neither past nor present regimes or ideologies have managed to convince Serbians of witchcraft'sillegitimacy. One irony is that the modernity Rafajlović presents seems to encourage'traditional'witchcraft practices especially among urbanites who wish to know what the future holds for them and/or gain wealth for themselves.
The traditional and the urban are not new themes in the anthropology of Eastern Europe.KatherineVerderyhas provided anthropology with acartography of Romania which, due to Verdery's extensive work and prestige, is often mistaken for Romania itself. However, almost none of her work refers to the church or to any belief or practice other than the secular or the"rational". The result is a geography of Romania in which central features of the cultural landscape either do not appear or whose scale (significance) is often misrepresented.
To see the kinds of issues this raises for making sense of social life in Romania, let us take just one example. As the faith of an overwhelming majority ofRomanians,"Orthodox religion in Romanian society (…) accepts magical aggression as a valid diagnosis for unhappiness"(Tătăran 2016:83). Most Anglo-Saxon denominations today would not explain misfortune this way. Nor would most Roman Catholic or Protestant clergy use binding or unbindingfrom magicto help laity for any reason. Nor would many of Western clergy see, as in Orthodoxy, that the church's rituals are a legitimate therapy for witchcraft and misfortune (Tătăran 2016:123). However in Romania today, as Tătăran (2016) points out, the issue is still not whether or not Orthodox priests canbind or unbind. Instead, the issue is: what is this one priest doing at this point in time and how does this affect myself and my family?
Coțofană (this volume) raises the analytic stakes here. She suggests the line, the firm line, between good and evil, Western Christians like tobelieve in, can lead us astray when it comes to both religion and social life in Romania. The issue is not if good and evil are at work in Romania. The problem is that what operates in the world is not entirely subject to this binary. One way to solve this dilemma is to appeal to something like theamoral familism, thatBanfield (1958) said he found in southern Italy. It may be that the logics inherent in Western Christianity are in themselves too finite, perhaps even too dogmatic and'empirical'to be put to the test in Romania. While Romanian Orthodoxy shares much the same pantheon of devils and angels with Western Christianity, this does not necessarily mean that the place or order they have (and the work they do) is the same for thesefaiths. In other words, there is something more (and different) at work in Romania.
It can be argued the rhetoric and models used in the anthropological literature on Eastern Europehavereduced religion and popular belief to its materialist"traces". This in turn has tended to reduce (or dismiss) the place belief, tradition,and conventions associated with them have had in the lives of our informants, a point Steinberg and Wanner (2008) have made in their discussion of Eastern European faith communities. While theoretical materialism is not congruent with informant experience, it does mirror the standard ideological position of the communist parties in Eastern Europe and the former USSR.
This raises the question of analytic and ideological complicity and may help explain why the positions regarding religion and magic have been so weakly developed by Anglo-Saxon anthropologists.The focus thus turns onquestionsabout the conditions and understandings under which anthropological fieldwork has been carried out in this part of the world. In other words, the devaluation and disappearance of faith, magic and religion from the post-war Anglo-Saxon anthropological record raises the question of ideological/political commitment either prior to (or derived from) their research in Eastern Europe itself.
It is a truism thatanthropologists