Socialisation and Materiality in Religious Life. A Study of Orthodoxy in North-western Russia
Some results after a recently completed fieldwork
From August 2006 to the end of July 2007 I carried out fieldwork in a town of about 80,000 inhabitants, and in several surrounding villages, all situated in north-western Russia (Leningradskaya oblast’). My research addresses what is called in Russia the ‘rebirth of Orthodoxy’ after the collapse of the Soviet Union. I am looking in particular at religious socialisation and Orthodox conceptions of materiality as defined and lived out by active and less active participants in local religious life. This research offers an ethnography that allows understanding of the structuring of local religious life in contemporary Russia. It explores the production of religious and secular ways of thinking and acting.
Church shops sometimes combine selling religious goods and offering a space for charitable purposes.
Having a bath in a holy spring is highly appreciated by active and less active believers. Excursions to holy springs are included in the pilgrimage trips.
An Orthodox monk told the pilgrims that this tree gives positive energy, because it is full of the grace of God.
The research project comprised the following main themes:
Inside the church, money is given as ‘sacrifice’. Here ‘for the common candle’.
1) Religious socialisation and social integration. Undoubtedly visible in the Russian society, the engagement with Orthodox religion has been nonetheless only poorly documented by social scientists. Participation in the life of a parish produces effects of religious socialisation and social integration, in particular in the case of a core community: people who are both committed believers and whose personal life is tightly linked to the church. Religious socialisation occurs as well in the case of less regular churchgoers. In both cases the process has three interconnected aspects: an intellectual one, a physical one and an ethical one. First, religious socialisation is referred to as the acceptance of an abstract, or intellectual, knowledge about Russian Orthodoxy. Secondly, it means a physical embodiment, such as adopting the requested bodily attitudes and a precise dressing style; becoming familiar with religious objects and the ways to use them. Third, it implies the adoption of more general demeanour, or ethics, when one is in the church and/or outside (such as ways of speaking and socialising). I pay attention also to the vernacular term ‘votserkovlenie’ (literally ‘in-churchment’), by which is meant the process leading people to become familiar with their ‘own’ religion, or, what is even more, to become strong believers.
Every ritual performed by clergymen has a price. The Russian Orthodox Church prefers to speak of ‘sacrifice’ instead of ‘payment’.
2) Materiality. The meaning of material and immaterial things, of money, of selling and giving for free, as well as the meaning of silence and speech in mainstream Orthodoxy is assessed through a detailed study of a range of the most widespread discourses and practices in present-day European Russia. These practices comprise in particular networking among participants in local Orthodox life; circulation of material goods and services inside and outside the Church’s institutions; almsgiving and relations to the beggars (who are basically present in an overwhelming part of the churches in Russia); gifts to churches and to people; pilgrimage trips; rituals performed in the church and at home. Surprisingly, materiality appears to be central for the performance and achievement of what practising and non-practising Orthodox call ‘spirituality’ (‘dukhovnost’). In this respect, for example, money is given multiple meanings and roles inside the church. Observation of circulation and use of money reveals, on the one hand, its pervasive presence in the church and people’s profound need to deal with it, and, on the other hand, religiously dressed explicit and implicit assumptions, based on broader commonsense understandings, on how to avoid money’s potential danger and how to transform it into a means of salvation.
On Easter, the boxes foreseen for collecting believers’ gifts of money can receive coloured eggs as a sign of good wish, money being too common for this feast.
Among other general outcomes, I point to the composite nature of the contemporary ‘rebirth’ of Russian Orthodoxy. This revival is building on a mix of practices and moral positions combining traditional theological teachings, collective and private ethics of everyday life in the Soviet era, experiences of the post-Soviet economic and ideological crises in the 1990s, popular beliefs, and subjective aspects. By studying parishes’ life, the research goes beyond religion per se and aspires to address social transformations and production of ideology in the Russian society as part of a global world.
The results of this research are regularly presented (from October 2007 to the end of 2008) at the internal writing-up seminar of the group ‘Religion and Morality’ at the Max Planck Institute.