Alexander Panchenko

• European University at Saint Petersburg

The introductory paper deals with theoretical issues related to the study of ritual and the sacred in secular and post‑secular cultures. Social research in recent decades shows that the unambiguous opposition between religion and secularism is not quite workable as a socio‑historical concept, and that perceptions of the sacred in modern societies t...

The paper focuses on the resemantisation and the new mythologies of Russian obscene language in present day Orthodox culture and larger cultural contexts. The social history of Russian obscene language (known as mat or maternaia bran’) still appears to be quite obscure and intriguing. Unlike profanities in many other European languages that employe...

The paper deals with applicability of the ‘memetic approach’ and ‘epidemiology of culture’ in present day folklore research. These theoretical models could be supplemented by certain ideas and hypotheses borrowed from actor-network theory and the cognitive science of religion. The development of contemporary folkloristic theorising could proceed fr...

The article examines religious, ritual, and moral contexts in the history of semantics and social trajectories of the Russian obscene vocabulary and phraseology known as “mat”. Transhistorical representations of the “Russian mat” as a steady set of lexemes and formulae do not seem to be correct. Moreover, it is possible to discuss not only historic...

The introduction to the journal issue's special theme on “The Icon and the Axe: Discourses on Blasphemy and Sacrilege in the Russian Culture” deals with some theoretical aspects of anthropological research focusing on blasphemy, sacrilege, and desecration. The history of religious, secular, and post-secular cultures from the Middle Ages to the pres...

“Material religion” as a research program is a relatively new development in the study of religion in the social sciences and humanities. Though this approach has its own forerunners and predecessors, one can argue that it took shape in the wake of an epistemological critique of social and cultural anthropology which treated religion as embedded in...

In the 2000s, Russian Orthodox believers underwent a moral panic related to the spread of new informational technologies and the rise of state individual identification systems. Among other factors contributing to the panic was the legend about “the Beast Computer in Brussels”. This article deals with its initial history, translations of the legend...

This article challenges the empirical usefulness of historical and anthropological approaches (Walter Burkert, René Girard, et al.) when considering sacrifice as a socially acceptable projection of aggression inherent in all human beings. Ideas formulated by Burkert and Girard were later criticised by a number of anthropologists and students of rel...

The four articles in this section deal with anthropological study of New Age beliefs and practices in post-Soviet Russia. They are in part the result of a joint German–Russian research project titled New Religious Cultures in Late Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia: Ideology, Social Networks, Discourses, supported by the German Research Foundation and t...

In the second chapter of The Gift, Fyodor Konstantinovich Godunov-Cherdyntsev recalls a “Kirghiz fairy tale” about a human eye that wants “to encompass everything in the world.” The plot of the story goes back to a Talmudic parable about Alexander the Great. The parable was retold in Russian by a number of writers and scholars in the 19 th and earl...

Several of the most prolific and influential conspiracy theories have originated in Eastern Europe. The far reaching influence of conspiracy narratives can be observed in recent developments in Poland or with regard to the wars waged in Eastern Ukraine and in former Yugoslavia. This volume analyses the history behind this widespread phenomenon as w...

Several of the most prolific and influential conspiracy theories originated in Eastern Europe. The efficacy of conspiracy narratives can be observed in recent developments in Poland or with regard to the wars waged in Eastern Ukraine and in former Yugoslavia. This volume analyses the history behind this widespread phenomenon as well as its relation...

One important aspect of religious practices and representations concerns the way information is handled. This article understands religion as a form of imagination, giving human properties to “nonhuman” agents (and vice versa), and thus, the rules of communication and interaction with such agents play a special role in religious culture. Webb Keane...

In the 4th part of "My Past and Thoughts", Herzen recalls his life in Novgorod in 1841–1842 and, inter alia, tells a story about a certain «Doukhobor leader», allegedly imprisoned by the Emperor Paul I. Even though the story looks rather far-fetched, it seems to stem from real historical events — the 1800 investigation into the religious dissenters...

The introductory paper to the thematic block deals with fundamental issues of present day historical, anthropological, and religious studies of the so called “old Russian sects” of the 18th and 19th centuries. Russian religious dissenters of this period could be hardly viewed as homogeneous or integrated religious culture both historically and soci...

Conspiracy theory is a powerful explanatory model or a way of thinking, which influences many cultural forms and social processes across the contemporary world. Recent academic research into conspiracy theories provides a set of interpretations ranging from medicalization (social/political paranoids) to the concept of ‘popular knowledge’ as a speci...

Introduction. During the Soviet years, formal religious observance was subordinated tostate regulation. But controlling religious and para–religious practices outside ‘cult buildings’ was more difficult. Before 1917, such practices had been entrenched, attracting the hostility of church authorities, particularly during the period of intensive moder...

During the last decades of the twentieth century, the study of popular religious cultures in ethnology, folkloristics and historical anthropology underwent serious changes related to the crisis of dogmatic, institutional and systematic explanations of religious folklife. The changes are particularly obvious in the rejection of the residualistic ‘tw...

The present article deals with the question of emergence of new religious movements in contemporary Russia. Although sociological approach to the study of new religious movements proceeds usually from the theories of secularization, the author claims that the appearance of these movements should be viewed also in various contexts of national and hi...

Village sacred places—revered stones, springs, trees, stone and wooden crosses, and so forth—have recently attracted attention from Russian scholars (Aleksandrov 1983; Zolotov 1981; Kurbatov 1995; Makarov and Chernetsov 1988; Panchenko 1996 a and b; Shorin 1991; and others). They, however, usually regard these monuments as "sources for studying pag...