Religion, Civil Society, and Morality

Between 2003 and 2010, the department organized a series of projects on the revival of beliefs and religious practices across the former socialist world, with Eastern Christianity and Islamic Central Asia as the strongest foci. Major themes included the entanglements of religion with ostensibly secular (especially national) identities, tolerance in postsocialist civil societies, the commoditization of rituals, and the juridification of the “religious market place”. Subsequent work led by Christoph Brumann explored Buddhist Temple Economies in Urban Asia .

Further Reading:
Chris Hann (ed): Religion, Identities, Postsocialism. The Halle Focus Group, 2003-2010.
Chris Hann and the Civil Religion Group: The Postsocialist Religious Question. Faith and Power in Central Asia and East-Central Europe. Münster: LIT Verlag (2006).
Stéphanie Mahieu and Vlad Naumescu (eds): Churches In-between. Greek Catholic Churches in Postsocialist Europe. Münster: LIT Verlag (2008).
Chris Hann and Hermann Goltz (eds): Eastern Christians in Anthropological Perspective. Berkeley: University of California Press (2010).
Julie McBrien: From Belonging to Belief: Modern Secularisms and the Construction of Religion in Kyrgyzstan. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press (2017).
Edyta Roszko: Fishers, Monks and Cadres: Navigating State, Religion and the South China Sea in Central Vietnam. Copenhagen: NIAS Press (2020).
Christoph Brumann, Saskia Abrahms-Kavunenko and Beata Świtek (eds): Monks, Money, and Morality: The Balancing Act of Contemporary Buddhism. London: Bloomsbury (2021).