Old belief between "society" and "culture": Remaking moral communities and inequalities on a former state farm

Religion, Morality, and Community in Post-Soviet Societies

Volumn , Issue , 2008, Pages 115-147

  Rogers, Douglas ^a  

^a YALE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 82255171389     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: None     Document Type: Chapter

References (42)

1. The understanding of morality as an external and coercive system of norms is classically associated with the writings of Émile Durkheim; see especially his On Morality and Society: Selected Writings, ed. Robert Bellah (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973).
2. Recent recuperations of morality for a post-Durkheimian anthropology of morality and ethics include James Faubion, The Ethics of Kinship (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002);
3. Wendy James, The Listening Ebony: Moral Knowledge, Religion, and Power among the Uduk of Sudan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988);
4. Mikael Karlström, "Modernity and Its Aspirants: Moral Community and Developmental Eutopianism in Buganda", Current Anthropology 45(2004):595-619;
5. James Laidlaw, "For an Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom", Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 8(2002):311-45;
6. Michael Lambek, "The Anthropology of Religion and the Struggle between Poetry and Philosophy", Current Anthropology 41(2000):309-20;
7. Saba Mahmood, The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 2005);
8. and Joel Robbins, Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
9. Although morality and ethics are quite commonly invoked in the anthropology of postsocialism, these concepts have received sustained theoretical attention much less frequently, as in Markets and Moralities: Ethnographies of Postsocialism, ed. Caroline Humphrey and Ruth Mandel (Oxford: Berg, 2002).
10. The historical literature on priestly and priestless Old Believers is massive. For the best recent summary in English, see Roy R. Robson, Old Believers in Modern Russia (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1995).
11. The Pomortsy Old Believers who populated Sepych were descended from the famous Vyg Monastery on the White Sea, which was classically described by Robert O. Crummey, Old Believers and the World of Antichrist (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970).
12. In the landscape of post-Soviet religion, Sepych is somewhat atypical for being isolated enough that it has not been directly visited by foreign missionaries, whose institutions and discourses play an important role in many other analyses. See chapters 6 and 9 by, respectively, Melissa Caldwell and Zoe Knox in this volume as well as Catherine Wanner, "Advocating New Moralities: Conversion to Evangelicalism in Ukraine", Religion, State & Society 31(2003):273-87.
13. Many of these other aspects of Old Belief in Sepych are "unbracketed" and discussed in greater detail by Douglas Rogers, Between Work and Prayer: A Historical Anthropology of Ethics in the Russian Urals (forthcoming). My focus on the politics of moral community in this chapter draws some inspiration from anthropologists' and historians' work on "moral economies", although my focus here is less on the content of a particular moral economy than on conflicts among several overt attempts to create one.
14. See E. P. Thompson, "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century", Past and Present 50(1971):76-136;
15. James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Resistance and Rebellion in Southeast Asia (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1976);
16. Mark Edelman, "Bringing the Moral Economy Back in⋯ to the Study of 21st-Century Transnational Peasant Movements", American Anthropologist 107(2005):331-45;
17. and, in the Russian case, Mark D. Steinberg, Moral Communities: The Culture of Class Relations in the Russian Printing Industry, 1867-1907 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
18. The Upper Kama has been brilliantly and extensively studied by Russian scholars. See I. D. Koval'chenko, ed., Russkie pismennye i ustnye traditsii i dukhovnaia kultura (Russian written and oral traditions and spiritual culture) (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo Moskovskogo Gosudarstvennogo Universiteta, 1982);
19. I. V. Pozdeeva, ed., Mir staroobraidchestva (The world of old belief), vols. 1-6 (Moscow: INION RAN, 1992-2005);
20. and G. N. Chagin, ed., Staroobriadcheskii mir Volgo-Kamy (The old believer world of the Vol'ga-Kama) (Perm': Permskii Gosudarstvennoi Universitet, 2001).
21. Caroline Humphrey, Marx Went Away but Karl Stayed Behind;
22. updated edition of Karl Marx Collective: Economy, Society, and Religion in a Siberian Collective Farm (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999).
23. See, above all, Nikolai N. Pokrovskii, Putishchestvie za redkimi knigami (Excursions for rare books) (Moscow: Kniga, 1984).
24. Tamara Dragadze, "The Domestication of Religion under Soviet Communism", in Socialism: Ideals, Ideologies, and Local Practice, ed. C. M. Hann (London: Routledge, 1993).
25. On obshchenie, see especially chapter 3 by Zigon in this volume; and Margaret Paxson, Solovyovo: The Story of Memory in a Russian Village (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005).
26. On obshchestvennost', see especially Dale Pesman, Russia and Soul: An Exploration (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000);
27. Vadim Volkov, "Obshchestvennost': Zabitaia praktika grazhdanskogo obshchestva" (Public-mindedness: The forgotten practice of civil society) Proet Contra 2 (1997);
28. and Michael David-Fox, "Review of 'Obshchestvennye organizatsiiya Rossii v 1920-e gody'", Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 3(2002):173-81.
29. Some of the unfamiliar and threatening economic relationships of the post-Soviet period in Sepych are discussed by Douglas Rogers, "Moonshine, Money, and the Politics of Liquidity in Rural Russia", American Ethnologist 32(2005):63-81.
30. "Pomogite dostroit' tserkov'", Zaria (Vereshchagino), July 7, 1994.
31. Humphrey, Marx Went Away, 488, also notes the instrumental role played by the agricultural collective in religious affairs in rural Buryatia.
32. On the fate of municipalization reforms in rural Russia, see Douglas Rogers, "How to Be a Khoziain in a Transforming State: State Formation and the Ethics of Governance in Post-Soviet Russia", Comparative Studies in Society and History 48, no. 4(2006):915-45.
33. In addition to the meanings of "culture" I focus on here, see Jennifer Patico, "To Be Happy in a Mercedes: Tropes of Value and Ambivalent Visions of Marketization", American Ethnologist 32(2005):479-96;
34. Catriona Kelly, Refining Russia: Advice Literature, Polite Culture, and Gender from Catherine to Yeltsin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001);
35. and Laura Adams, "Performing National Identity in Uzbekistan", unpublished manuscript, Harvard University.
36. Sonja Luehrmann, "Recycling Cultural Construction: Desecularization in Post-Soviet Mari-El", Religion, State & Society 35(2005):33-56; the quotation is on 38.
37. While museum workers in urban centers were retooling their expertise relatively quickly, these projects (like so many others) often lagged in the countryside, helping to generate the kinds of conflicts described here. See, e.g., S. M. Dimukhametova et al., eds., Muzei XXI veka: Vzgliad v proshloe i budushchee-Materialy mezhdunarodnoi nauchno-prakticheskoi konferentsii (The museum of the 21st century: A look at the past and the future) (Perm': Permskii Oblastnoi Kraevedcheskii Muzei, 1999).
38. On post-Soviet museums, see also Alexia Bloch and Laurel Kendall, The Museum at the End of the World: Encounters in the Russian Far East (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
39. Religion, then, tracks well with other observations about gender relations in rural areas after the Soviet Union; while women's roles were amplified in the household sector and subsistence economy, public positions increasingly sidelined women. See especially Michael Burawoy, Pavel Krotov, and Tatyana Lytkina, "Involution and Destitution in Capitalist Russia", Ethnography 1(2000):43-65;
40. Humphrey, Marx Went Away;
41. Rogers, "Moonshine, Money, and the Politics of Liquidity";
42. and Rosamund Shreeves, "Broadening the Concept of Privatization: Gender and Development in Rural Kazakhstan", in Markets and Moralities, ed. Humphrey and Mandel.