'Remembering God' through Religious Habits: The Daily Religious Practices of Evacuee Karelian Orthodox Women

Abstract

Habitual religiosity, i.e. the buildup and maintenance of religious habits, hinges on the embodied dimensions of religious memory. The processes involved can be conceptualised using Pierre Bourdieu’s theory on the habitus and Paul Connerton’s outline of the dynamics of habit-memory and habits. With the help of these theoretical tools, I analyse interview material concerning the daily religious practices
of evacuee Karelian Orthodox women, focusing specifically on three basic customs: making the sign of the cross, prayer, and the veneration of icons. These I investigate 1) as practices largely governed by the native layer of the women’s habitus; 2) as habits that continue to structure the habitus; 3) as habits incorporating cultural content; and 4) as customs influenced by the cumulative weight of the women’s habit-memory. The discussion offers a view of evacuee Karelian Orthodox women’s life-long investment in religion, and shows how in the perpetuation of this form of religiosity, small practices can bear great significance.

Full text

Temenos Vol. 47 No. 2 (2011), 197–222© The Finnish Society for the Study of Religion
‘Remembering God’ through Religious Habits:
The Daily Religious Practices of Evacuee Karelian
Orthodox Women1
HELENA KUPARI
University of Helsinki
Abstract
Habitual religiosity, i.e. the buildup and maintenance of religious
habits, hinges on the embodied dimensions of religious memory. The
processes involved can be conceptualised using Pierre Bourdieu’s
theory on the habitus and Paul Connerton’s outline of the dynamics
of habit-memory and habits. With the help of these theoretical tools,
I analyse interview material concerning the daily religious practices
of evacuee Karelian Orthodox women, focusing specically on three
basic customs: making the sign of the cross, prayer, and the venera-
tion of icons. These I investigate 1) as practices largely governed by
the native layer of the women’s habitus; 2) as habits that continue to
structure the habitus; 3) as habits incorporating cultural content; and
4) as customs inuenced by the cumulative weight of the women’s
habit-memory. The discussion oers a view of evacuee Karelian Or-
thodox women’s life-long investment in religion, and shows how in
the perpetuation of this form of religiosity, small practices can bear
great signicance.
Keywords: social memory, habitus, habit, embodiment, lived religion,
gender, Orthodox Christianity in Finland, Karelian evacuees
Auli:2 I was raised Orthodox. […] I am of the generation when elementary
school started in the fall my mother held prayers at home before sending
us to school. I learned a practical [Orthodox way of] life… Since I was a
child, to bless myself with the sign of the cross, as was done at home. And
to make a cross on top of the [bread] dough and… to avoid evil, practical
things like that. The people of those times… Nowadays teaching and theol-
ogy are stressed a lot, but they did not know all those things; they had this
practical everyday religion instead.
1 I thank the two anonymous reviewers, as well as Terhi Utriainen, and Tuula Sakaranaho,
for their comments and insights. The writing of the article was funded by the Academy of
Finland project entitled Finnish Women Writing on Religion and Gender.
2 The names have been changed to protect the anonymity of my informants.

HELENA KUPARI
198
In the above quotation, Auli characterises herself as an Orthodox Chris-
tian. Her emphasis is on the ‘practical everyday religion’ she received from
her childhood home, which she describes through examples: prayers held
before the start of a school year, the everyday use of the sign of the cross,
and so on. In this article I discuss the practical everyday religion of women
such as Auli – Finnish Orthodox women originally from the area ceded by
Finland to the Soviet Union as part of the WW2 peace process. I focus on
three basic customs: the sign of the cross, prayer, and keeping and rever-
ing icons. Through these customs, my goal is to investigate the women’s
religiosity as a way of life, a life-long practice and a ‘state of the body’
(Bourdieu 1990, 68; see also Hervieu-Léger 2000, 72). In particular, I oer
a perspective on the role of the embodied dimensions of social memory
in the development and perpetuation of this type of religiosity. To deline-
ate the processes involved, I turn to the interrelated concepts of ‘habitus’,
‘habit-memory’, and ‘habit’.
Habitus, Habit-memory, and Habits
In Pierre Bourdieu’s social theory, the habitus describes the process through
which social structures are ingrained in embodied human identity and
‘lived through’ by the individual. The individual’s history in the social
world is remembered by her body as dispositions that mediate her future
actions in related situations. (Bourdieu 1990, 53–6; McNay 2000, 36–41.) The
dening inuence of the past, however, remains largely unrecognised by
the individual; as ‘embodied history’ the habitus is ‘internalised as second
nature and so forgoen as history’ (Bourdieu 1990, 56). The habitus is cre-
ated within and auned to the surrounding social world – more precisely
to a particular ‘eld’ or socio-cultural conguration within the social world
(Bourdieu & Wacquant 1995, 36; McNay 2000, 38).3 When the habitus and
the eld are in sync, the social world appears thoroughly reasonable to the
individual. In other words, when the individual’s dispositions anticipate
3 Many of Bourdieu’s analyses focus on the workings of a particular eld (see e.g. Bourdieu
& Wacquant 1995, 132–3). Recently, at least in feminist research, the intermingling of various
elds in individuals’ lives and their combined eects on the habitus has received more aen-
tion (e.g. Adkins 2003; Jokinen 2004; McNay 2000). The habitus of evacuee Karelian Orthodox
women as regards religiosity has been aected by a myriad of intertwining elds: religion,
family, gender, ethnicity, and economics, to suggest just a few. To accurately describe these
various elds is not possible within the scope of this article. I have therefore chosen to speak
of the ‘eld’ in an abstract manner, to refer to the structures inuencing the women’s habitus
in a general sense.

‘REMEMBERING GOD’ THROUGH RELIGIOUS HABITS 199
and match the objective structures of the social world, the overall feeling is
that of events unfolding as they are supposed to. (Bourdieu 1990, 56–7, 68.)
On the other hand, if the social world surrounding the individual evolves,
the habitus may fall out of pace with it. When there is a mismatch between
habitus and eld, the living through of the habitus grows less self-evident.
The individual’s dispositions no longer perfectly correspond with the func-
tioning of the social world, which can create unanticipated outcomes and
make the social world lose some of its common-sense character. (Bourdieu
1990, 62; Bourdieu & Wacquant 1995, 161–2, 168; Jokinen 2004, 292; McNay
2000, 51–72.)
In the habitus, the individual’s ‘internalised’ and ‘embodied’ memory
of her past functions as an interpretative grid through which every new
situation is assessed. The same paern is identied in Paul Connerton’s
conception of habit-memory. Habit-memory refers to social memory
that is sedimented into the body through culturally specic habitual
practices. Habits are practices whose frequent repetition has made
conscious deliberation over their performance redundant. This entails
that habit-memory is by nature pre-reexive. While at the moment of
their actualisation practices carry a cognitive content (structures, values,
principles, categories etc.), this content does not usually reach the level
of conscious reection. Rather, it is the body that in the performance of
the practice remembers and understands it. (Connerton 1989, 72–3, 88,
95.) Moreover, according to Connerton, habits come with an inherent
impulse to keep performing them. This feature is explained in Bourdieu’s
theory of the habitus: every repetition of a certain practice reinforces the
underlying habit-memory, which in turn forties the disposition to repeat
the practice once again. (Bourdieu 1990, 56; Connerton 1989, 94; Jokinen
2004, 293–4.) The habitus, in a sense, is a description of the dynamics of
habits and habit-memory.
Meredith McGuire (2008) argues that lived religion, religion as it is ex-
perienced by individual believers, is based rst and foremost on practices.
Building on Bourdieu and Connerton, she suggests that ‘religious rituals
and practices are ways individuals engage their socialised senses in the
activation of embodied memory’ (McGuire 2008, 100). With McGuire’s
suggestion as a guideline, I now turn my aention to the basic religious
practices of evacuee Karelian Orthodox women.4 I view these practices as
4 The term used in Finnish translates as ‘Karelian evacuee’. The population of Karelia was in
fact ‘evacuated’ from their original homes to ‘mainland’ Finland and seled there. I therefore
systematically use ‘evacuee’ here, even though nowadays ‘refugee’ might be more common.

HELENA KUPARI
200
religious habits, governed by the women’s habitus and their habit-memory
concerning religion.5
The Religiosity of Evacuee Karelian Orthodox Women
The two separate wars (1939–40 and 1941–44) fought between Finland
and the Soviet Union during WW2 resulted in the double evacuation of
altogether over 400 000 Finnish Karelians from their homelands (Waris
et al. 1952, 17). In the aftermath of WW2, these areas were permanently
ceded to the Soviet Union. In 2007 and 2008, I interviewed 26 Finnish
Orthodox women who themselves or whose parent(s) had been among
the Karelian evacuees.6 At the time of the interview the women were on
average 75 years old. During the first evacuation from Karelia (winter
of 1939/40), most of them had thus been children or teenagers. Three
5 It should be noted that the individual habituses and habit-memories of evacuee Karelian
Orthodox women are variants of each other (Bourdieu 1990, 60); to speak of the habitus or the
habit-memory of the women in the singular is a generalisation. In the article, I use the terms
‘habitus’, ‘habit-memory’, and ‘habit’ solely in the sense dened above. I use the term ‘practice’
to refer in a more general sense to totalities of specic skilled acts (Connerton 1989, 94) that
are performed repeatedly (e.g. the practice of morning prayer) or larger entities consisting of
multiple such totalities (e.g. the practice of praying or Orthodox practice). The term ‘custom’
I use interchangeably with ‘practice’ with reference to individual totalities of acts.
6 The interviews form the primary material in my ongoing doctoral study on the religiosity of
evacuee Karelian Orthodox women. The study continues along the lines of previous research
on the lived religion of (Finnish and Russian) Karelian Orthodox women (e.g. Pentikäinen 1978;
Nenola 1986; Keinänen 2003; Järvinen 2004), expanding its geographical and chronological
frame to late 20th century Finland.
I contacted potential informants by sending leers to Orthodox parishes and Karelian associa-
tions throughout the country, by visiting lay Orthodox associations in the Helsinki area, and
by requesting the assistance of colleagues in Northern Karelia (a region in present-day eastern
Finland). I interviewed each informant once at her home, the semi-structural interviews lasting
on average 2 hours 20 minutes. The interview tapes were transcribed verbatim and stored in
the archives of the Finnish Literature Society.
The kind of interview material I have collected, consisting largely of the recollection of past
religiosity, is highly constructed. It reects both the signicance of the past for the informant
at the time of the interview (Climo & Caell 2002, 13, 16–17; Fingerroos & Haanpää 2006, 33)
and the interview situation itself, since the informant always narrates the past taking note of
her present audience (Bourdieu 1977, 18; Korkiakangas 1996, 36). Thus it is worth noting, rst,
that with increasing age many of my informants reported a growing interest in reminiscing
about the past (cf. Butler 1963; Saarenheimo 1997, 34–7; Vakimo 2001, 23–6, 73); and, second,
that they produced their accounts in response to questions posed by a non-Orthodox and
non-Karelian interviewer. In my analysis I have taken into account the nature of the material.
Nevertheless, in this article I primarily focus on the content of the women’s accounts, not their
nature as accounts.

‘REMEMBERING GOD’ THROUGH RELIGIOUS HABITS 201
of the informants were born only after the second evacuation (summer
of 1944).7
Back in Karelia, the families of most of the informants had lived in Border
Karelia, north of Lake Ladoga, in villages with a clear Orthodox majority. Bor-
der Karelia was a historically Eastern Orthodox region, with a culture based
on an agrarian worldview with many syncretistic elements – although by the
eve of WW2 modernisation had gained a foothold there as well (Heikkinen
1989, 56–60; Laitila 1998). The older the informant, the longer she had been
able to live in a markedly Orthodox community, where at least some elements
of the ethnic Orthodox lifestyle still held good. Anna’s account shows how
during her childhood in Border Karelia, Orthodoxy was the norm:
Anna: It [Orthodoxy] has certainly given me a lot since childhood. There
were not many Lutherans around there. We were just Orthodox. Close where
we lived was a chapel, the tsasouna. We stood there on Sundays, with our
hair combed and plaited. And stood nicely. At every holiday [...] we were
always there. What was really special was that after Easter we could ring
the tsasouna bells. When we were in school, we went to ring the bells on
the way home [from school]. Yes… Did Orthodoxy give us everything we
needed as children?
Wartime brought my informants face to face with a new reality. The Ka-
relian evacuees included two thirds of the Finnish Orthodox population,
about 55 000 people. The evacuees scaered far and wide, seling mostly in
areas that formerly had been all Lutheran (Koukkunen 1982, 59). There was
a shortage of Orthodox infrastructure, of priests, and of qualied teachers
of Orthodoxy as a school subject; of those of my informants who aended
elementary school after WW2, a majority did not have regular instruction
in their own religious denomination. (Koukkunen 1982, 100, 119–20, 123–9.)
Senja’s description of her church experience tells of the conditions in which
many of the younger informants were socialised into Orthodoxy.
Senja: Well, the rst special event was when we got to go to church in Kuo-
pio. To me it was [special], to see what a church was like *laughs*. It has
stayed in my mind.
7 The term ‘evacuee Karelian’ is commonly used only of people who personally experienced
the evacuation(s) (Sallinen-Gimpl 1994, 12), but I use it also of the four informants who either
had not yet been born at the time of the evacuations or whose mothers had left the ceded areas
before the war(s) to start a family.

HELENA KUPARI
202
Helena: How old were you?
Senja: I was probably eleven years old.
Helena: Before you got to know...
Senja: Before I got to know what a church is. An Orthodox church, that is. I
didn’t know because I hadn’t seen one. Well, I had when I was a lile girl, but
I was three or two years old then. You don’t remember anything about that.
Additional problems were caused by tensions between newcomers and
locals. Karelian evacuees often encountered discrimination (see Raninen-
Siiskonen 1999, 153–65), and the Orthodox faith was a cause of heightened
suspicion. The post-war atmosphere emphasised national homogeneity, one
cornerstone of which was Lutheranism (Hämynen 2008, 39–41; Kananen
2010, 63–101; Laitila 2009, 341–3). The joint impact of all these hardships was
a low Orthodox self-esteem. Conversion to Lutheranism was not uncommon,
and many distinguishing features of Orthodoxy (rituals, religious celebra-
tions etc.) lost at least some of their importance. (Heikkinen 1989, 326–32,
334; Laitila 2009, 342–3.) However, my informants stressed that Orthodoxy
remained a strong presence within the childhood home, even if outside the
home Lutheranism was the dominant faith.
Of my 26 informants, 22 married a Lutheran and four an Orthodox man.
Of those whose husbands were Lutheran, 18 had all their children baptised
into the Lutheran Church. This was typical of post-war Finland: nine tenths
of all the marriages contracted by Orthodox Church members were with a
non-Orthodox spouse, and if the mother was Orthodox and the father Lu-
theran the children were almost universally baptised as Lutherans (Huotari
1975, 12, 158–65).8 Most of my informants were thus the single Orthodox
members of their adult family. This seing aected the women’s religious
practices, especially while there were children living under the same roof.
While in their personal religious practice the women usually adhered to
Orthodox customs, the children’s Lutheranism often set the tone for famil-
ial occasions such as church aendance and religious holidays (cf. Huotari
1975). As Sinikka, for example, describes it: ‘At that time [after her child was
born] I took part in Lutheran activities quite a lot. In a way, my Orthodox
practice lessened. I went less to our church and more to a Lutheran one; we
went there as a family. It was kind of a phase.’ Furthermore, many inform-
8 Before 1970, Finnish law stated that children were primarily baptised according to the
religion of the father. The parents could overrule this arrangement, however, with a wrien
agreement. In 1970 the situation was reversed and the mother’s religious aliation became
the one favoured by the law. (Huotari 1975, 26.)

‘REMEMBERING GOD’ THROUGH RELIGIOUS HABITS 203
ants describe this period of their life as one during which they had neither
the time nor the energy to practice Orthodoxy as diligently as they would
have liked. Almost all of the women worked outside the home when their
children were small, and the responsibilities of work and the home interfered
with their religious life.
Elvi: When I got married, it [active participation in parish life] came to an
end. It did surface every once in a while and we did go to church and so
on. Still, it wasn’t the same. Nevertheless, when I got older, even when my
husband was still alive, I started participating more. [...] Now I am very
pleased that I have time. And I can do whatever without anyone [interfering].
[...] Nowadays, I think that it [Orthodoxy] is quite a xed part of my life.
At the time of the interviews, almost all the women were retired. Over
half of them were widows and most lived alone. The women had a strong
Orthodox identity and were religiously active in various ways: going to
Divine Services regularly, frequenting the meetings of the lay Orthodox
association, and/or following domestic customs. All of those who had had
children were already grandmothers, and family (including when Lutheran)
was an important factor in their religious practice, in the form of prayer,
religious holidays, cemetery visits and church aendance. Many women,
like Elvi in the above excerpt, stressed how retirement had made it possible
to concentrate on religious practice more fully than before. On the other
hand, many of the women also had to take their poor health into account
in planning their religious activities.
The above overview of the religious lives of the evacuee Karelian Or-
thodox women I have interviewed points towards some of the factors that
have inuenced and continue to characterise their religiosity. First, there is
the childhood socialisation into Orthodoxy: the women have practiced the
same religion all their lives. Second, their religious activity: Orthodoxy has
remained important to these women throughout their lives. This is by no
means a self-evident outcome; many Orthodox women of their age converted
to Lutheranism after marrying a Lutheran (cf. Raninen-Siiskonen 1999,
177–80). Third, gender: the women’s religious lives echo gendered cultural
conventions and convictions concerning religious activity, the bearing of
traditions, familial relations and so on (see e.g. Woodhead 2002). Fourth,
multiple marginality: the women represent a minority form of Christianity
in Finnish society, as well as usually within their own adult families. Fifth,
the changing status of Orthodoxy in the surrounding society: during the

HELENA KUPARI
204
women’s lifetime Orthodoxy has gone from the dominant majority Church
to a stigmatised minority one and nally to a respected minority one (Hä-
mynen 1996; Kärkkäinen 1999, 206; Laitila 2009). Sixth, the overall change in
the surrounding society: the women were born into a modernising agrarian
society, but at the time of the interviews lived in a late-modern urban one.
During their lifetime, the status of religion as a whole has also altered, in
phase with other societal changes. (See e.g. Kääriäinen & Niemelä & Ketola
2003; Laitila 1998.) Seventh, the loss factor: the changes mentioned in the
two previous points (5 and 6) did not all happen peacefully but through
a dramatic rupture: the evacuation from Karelia and the loss of the home.
Finally, the age of the informants: several women mention that with in-
creasing age religion has become newly relevant to them (see Teinonen &
Routasalo 2003). In the following analysis, I take note of some of the ways in
which these factors have inuenced the women’s everyday religious habits.
Approaching the Habitus: Evocations of Childhood Religion
In describing their current religious practices, my informants frequently
and spontaneously linked these to similar practices, beliefs and aitudes in
their childhood home. Moreover, the women also constructed connections
between their religiosity as such and the religion of their childhood sur-
roundings. Whether spontaneously or when asked to describe their present
religiosity, the women uniformly grounded it in their childhood religion.
The connections were often constructed through everyday practices, such
as prayer, the sign of the cross, and the veneration of icons:
Helena: I would like to start with a general question: How would you de-
scribe yourself as an Orthodox woman? How might you describe it?
Esteri: Well, we were Orthodox at home… Our daily rhythm went just like
my parents had taught me. In the morning, the rst thing was to say a prayer,
when you had a wash. You cross your eyes, that is, you make the sign of the
cross. Always with the mealtime prayer and after you nished eating, you
had to make the sign of the cross when leaving the table. It was like a thanks
to Orthodoxy. [...] It stuck, the way of the parents. And it has followed me;
I have observed [those customs] down to this day.
Toini: Well, I am probably [...] just a normal Orthodox woman. Not too pious,
but not a pagan either. Just normal. [...] In the morning and evening, you
remember to pray and cross your eyes and so on. It stems from childhood.

‘REMEMBERING GOD’ THROUGH RELIGIOUS HABITS 205
Always before leaving for school you had to cross your eyes, like a bless-
ing, and so on. It’s a normal life. You don’t pay aention [to it], it happens
naturally like eating. [...] It’s an everyday thing.
In establishing a link between their present-day religiosity and their child-
hood religion, the women most often described daily religious life in the
childhood home. In Esteri’s account above, childhood religion is depicted
as being part of everyday life, starting from the rst waking moments.
Moreover, Esteri denes herself as Orthodox by stating that down to this
day she has followed her parents’ example in Orthodox practice. Toini
too uses a description of the same childhood custom (crossing oneself) to
depict her present-day religiosity. She notes, as does Esteri, the regularity
of religious practice; it being part of morning and evening routine. Fur-
thermore, she also stresses religion as something ‘normal’ and ‘natural’.
It is not something separate from the rest of life but ‘happens naturally’.
Both these descriptions portray the ease with which in their childhood
religion and life in general ed together – how Orthodoxy was ingrained
in everyday rhythms and routines. This tight interlacement of religion and
daily life is the anchor to which both Esteri and Toini tie their present-day
religiosity. Throughout my material, in similar accounts, evacuee Karelian
Orthodox women state that the experience of Orthodoxy as a self-evident
aspect of life, realised through recurring customs such as praying and cross-
ing oneself, has continued to characterise their religiosity from childhood
down to the present.
Childhood memories, and Karelian evacuees’ memories of the lost Ka-
relia, can sometimes be prone to nostalgia, a type of rhetorical idealisation
of the past that grows up around the idea of loss (Korkiakangas 1996, 37–8;
Raninen-Siiskonen 1999, 101–11). Nostalgic tones can also be discerned in
my informants’ accounts comparing their childhood religion with a later
one. However, the women were also capable of critical reection concerning
the past. Vieno, for instance, distanced herself from the childhood practice
of crossing oneself before various chores: ‘[W]hen my mother started a
chore, she always made the sign of the cross. We [Vieno and her siblings]
were obviously a bit amazed by it, but when we started weeding we all
crossed ourselves. Nowadays it amuses me somehow; today Orthodox
families are not quite so rigorous.’ What is noteworthy is that as a detailed
description of the practice in question, Vieno’s account does not dier from
other, more positive ones. Generally speaking, the women seemed to take
seriously the task of reporting past customs. In most cases, this incentive

HELENA KUPARI
206
to be informative eectively balanced out the tendency toward nostalgia.
(See Saarenheimo 1997, 108, 171.)
In explaining a particular religious practice or dening their religiosity
more generally, my informants also focused on the process through which
they had originally adopted it. The accounts commonly depict childhood
socialisation into Orthodoxy in a passive and embodied manner. Orthodox
customs or worldview could for instance be seen as something one has
‘grown within’ or ‘grown into’. Both expressions conjure up the image of
an organic process, depicting Orthodoxy either as a nurturing environment
or a natural outcome. Taking the metaphor even further, Kirsti eloquently
describes the adoption of ‘an Orthodox state of mind’ as a kind of osmosis.
According to her, Orthodoxy ‘was transferred through skin contact, through
the surrounding atmosphere. Not everything in it can be read [i.e. studied];
part of it is transferred to people unbeknownst to them.’
Giving such descriptions, the women emphasised that Orthodoxy and
Orthodox practices were for them not something learned through conscious
study but something unconsciously embraced in growing up in an Orthodox
environment. In other words, they stressed the importance of childhood
socialisation into religion. They also emphasised that in the process religion
had become an essential and irremovable part of their lives and their identity.
The most eective way to make the point was to use corporeal metaphors
that conceived of childhood practices as ingrained in the women’s body.
Soja, for example, described the sign of the cross as being ’so deep within
[her] that it will not come out easily’. Orthodoxy might also be described
as residing ‘in the back of the head’ or being ‘stuck to the scalp’. A particu-
larly powerful bodily metaphor is used by Raili, who in the excerpt below
compares Orthodoxy ‘almost’ to a gene. The expression conveys that for
Raili, Orthodoxy is fundamental to her very being. Raili ties this feeling to
having experienced an ‘Orthodox God’ in childhood:
Raili: Let’s say that I have been Orthodox already since before birth. It is
like a second [sic], almost like a gene; it’s in you already. So, it feels so hard
to imagine, I cannot even imagine being Lutheran, that I would change
to Lutheranism. I think that religion has to, it has to start with the child.
That you experience having an Orthodox God, even if God is the same for
everyone but still...
In their accounts concerning childhood religion as the basis of later religios-
ity, the interpretations oered by these evacuee Karelian Orthodox women

‘REMEMBERING GOD’ THROUGH RELIGIOUS HABITS 207
come quite close to Pierre Bourdieu’s ideas concerning native membership
as a particular way of partaking in a eld. Bourdieu (who uses the metaphor
of a ‘game’ to describe the social interactions going on in a particular eld)
notes that the player’s belief and investment in the game are the highest
when she is ‘born into the game’, because in that case she is not aware that
it is a game – one social construct among others (Bourdieu 1990, 67; see also
Connerton 1989, 29–30). In emphasising their socialisation process into Or-
thodoxy as something unconscious, or saying that they received Orthodoxy
in their genes, the informants are in a way describing the process of being
born into a game. In addition, in stressing the impossibility of relinquishing
Orthodoxy and converting to another faith (which Raili does in the account
above) the women are expressing their awareness of how dierent the situ-
ation is when a game such as religion is deliberately adopted. Moreover,
since native membership in a eld entails the habitus being in sync with
it (at least if nothing too dramatic has happened either to the individual
or to her surroundings), the result is a world in which everything seems
to make sense. The women’s descriptions of their childhood religion as an
inseparable and natural part of their way of life capture this experience of
equivalence between habitus and eld. Finally, Bourdieu characterises the
practical sense guiding the player as not a state of mind but ‘a state of the
body’ (Bourdieu 1990, 68–9). The corporeal metaphors the informants used
to describe their relationship with Orthodoxy are, in my reading, in part
a description of the embodiedness of their practical sense of Orthodoxy.
All in all, what I am suggesting is that through the accounts discussed
here, the women describe how the native layer of their habitus continues to
guide their present-day religious practices. Judging from the accounts, the
women’s religiosity remains strongly shaped by their childhood experiences
and their upbringing in an Orthodox environment. Childhood Orthodoxy
– experienced as rhythms, routines, rituals, techniques, gestures, positions,
sensations etc. – is rooted in their habit-memory. In describing their eve-
ryday childhood practices as the basis of their later religiosity, the women
approach a depiction of this embodied knowledge of religion.
The Sign of the Cross, Prayer, and the Veneration of Icons as Religious
Habits
The observance of simple, private and domestic customs such as praying,
crossing oneself, and keeping and revering icons, are one aspect of evacuee
Karelian Orthodox women’s religion that has been preserved to some extent

HELENA KUPARI
208
intact throughout their lives. Although none of the women claimed to fol-
low childhood practices to the leer (in fact, many reported major changes),
usually the women had been able to adapt these particular customs to their
dierent life situations. In one form or another, they have been a part of the
women’s religiosity all along. In describing their present-day practices of
revering icons, praying, and making the sign of the cross, my informants
often emphasised their habitual characteristics. In the following two sec-
tions I view these customs as habits in the sense outlined by Connerton,
taking up both features stressed by him: an impulse to follow the practices
regularly and a strong pre-reexive component.
All of the women had at least one icon on display at their home. Often
they had several, in corners and on tables, of dierent sizes and motifs,
sometimes with an oil lamp hanging in front of the icon and/or a traditional
käspaikka cloth to cover the frame. In the interviews, the women spoke of
their icons with pride. Many informants mentioned that having an icon
was something ‘self-evident’, or that it belonged in the home ‘like a clock
on the wall’. While icons were in most cases depicted as basic Orthodox
paraphernalia, there were contradictory accounts as well. For one thing, it
was not uncommon for the women to note that they had ‘always’ had an
icon. The impulse to emphasise one’s proper behaviour implies that this
was not the case for everyone. As it is, a few of my informants recounted
that in the early stages of their marriage they did not have a home icon.
As Mara, for instance, put it: ‘It’s only now that people speak so openly
[about their Orthodoxy], but it was not so then. I didn’t have an icon at the
time’ (during the rst years of her marriage in the 40s and 50s). (For similar
examples see Huotari 1975, 116; Raninen-Siiskonen 1999, 180.) The fact that
Mara ‘remained silent about’ her Orthodoxy at home shows that when
the overall environment favoured one religion over the other, the dominant
religion easily gained the upper hand even within families.
Several women mentioned regularly lighting an oil lamp or burning
candles in front of an icon. A few informants prayed or crossed themselves
before an icon daily, while others reverted to these practices on special oc-
casions, such as at times of crisis. The most basic religious practice concern-
ing icons, however, was simply looking at them – or ‘resting one’s eyes’ on
them. Tarja, for instance, told of her custom of looking at a particular icon
on entering and leaving her home. Tarja’s account opens up a view into a
daily religion consisting of small and subtle practices. In such religiosity, a
glance can be an important religious habit.

‘REMEMBERING GOD’ THROUGH RELIGIOUS HABITS 209
Tarja: And when I come [home] I glance – the icons have to be placed so
that when you enter through the door there is one icon that you can im-
mediately spot. So, the last thing before I close the door [in leaving], I look
[at the icon]. Then, when I return, I always look [at it] rst. It has, the habit
has become a thing.
Kirsti: And they [the icons] also have a very important function in that, if a
person does not have the time to pray or to practice piety much, glancing at
them reminds you of these things. In the same way that when you pass by
pictures of your family members, it is enough to glance at your grandchildren
or your daughter’s or son’s family to bring them to your mind, dear as they
are. Icons have the same signicance; they provide safety and they also bring
that dear, important thing silently to you. From the walls, they remind us.
Kirsti too speaks of the signicance of having icons at home and of looking
at them. She, however, dierentiates between ‘glancing at icons’ and the
(more deliberate and demanding) practice of piety. According to Kirsti,
icons have an important function as reminders of religion amidst a busy
everyday life. As well as instruments of religious practice, then, the inform-
ants’ icons also worked as aide-memoires. By their mere presence, the icons
made religion visible in the women’s daily lives – directing their aention
to things spiritual. (See Hallam & Hockey 2001, 77–85.) As Kirsti notes, with
icons one doesn’t have to consciously practice a specic religious custom
to focus on one’s faith; instead, the surroundings themselves continuously
reect that faith. Thus the icons created a space for religion in the home, in
fact transforming the home into a religious space.
The most common and regular practice mentioned by the women in
their descriptions of everyday religion was prayer: in the evening, in the
morning, at mealtimes etc. Virtually all the women recounted reciting a
prayer or praying in their own words before going to bed at night. Most
informants also noted that, in addition to these constants of their day, they
prayed whenever the situation called for it – giving thanks to God, ‘sighing’
towards the sky, or repeating the Jesus Prayer. As to the sign of the cross,
many of the women crossed themselves several times a day. It was especially
common to make the sign of the cross as part of one’s evening and morning
prayers; some of them also did it before mealtimes or when entering and
leaving the home. On the other hand, a couple of the informants reserved
the sign of the cross for such occasions as aending a religious ceremony,
going to church or a meeting of the Orthodox lay association, or visiting the

HELENA KUPARI
210
cemetery. The dwindling use of the sign reects the general ‘Lutheranisa-
tion’ of Orthodoxy in post-war Finland. Pressed by the normative Lutheran
culture, the Orthodox – including some of my informants – suppressed their
practices in an eort to t in. (Heikkinen 1989, 327–8, 334; Huotari 1975,
115; Laitila 2009, 342–3.)
Recurring religious practices, such as praying and crossing oneself, estab-
lish rhythms and cycles in daily life. They contribute to the conception of the
ow of time, creating punctuations and regularities – time for religion (see
Keinänen in print; Munn 1992, 105–9). When repeated frequently throughout
the day, praying and crossing oneself contribute to giving everyday life a
religious contour. As Soja puts it: ‘[Orthodoxy] is here. And every day. And
every evening and morning.’
Many of my informants described their domestic practices concerning
icons, of praying, and of making the sign of the cross as something they
‘always’ repeat come a specic time and/or place. While this may be in part
strategic (presenting oneself as a good Orthodox woman), the women’s focus
on regularity still carries weight. Furthermore, it was not uncommon for the
women to express an inherent sense of obligation, urgency or inevitability
accompanying these practices. They felt compelled to observe them. Senja,
for instance, explains that she is incapable of not crossing herself when she
wakes up and before going to bed: ‘It’s been wedged into my head; I can’t
help doing it’. In describing her custom as something innate, she conveys
how the incentive for performing the habit arises from her habit-memory.
Anna: Already when I was lile, it felt like the icons were guiding it [life in
the childhood home]. It [Orthodoxy] was part of everyday life. Everyday
life. We crossed ourselves, as I told you, when we sat down to eat, and when
we left the table we did it again. When we got up in the morning we crossed
ourselves. At night when we went to bed, we crossed ourselves again. How
did it feel so natural? It was part of everyday life. Even today I think that
I could not start my daily life in the morning if I wasn’t allowed to pray.
When I wake up, I sit on the edge of the bed and give thanks for the night.
I pray that… God will help me during the day and… for the children, that
they will have their health and strength.
In the above account, Anna moves spontaneously from describing the
practice of religion in her childhood home to explaining her current practice
of morning prayer. She connects the sense of necessity accompanying her
practice with her childhood Orthodoxy. Her account approaches the root

‘REMEMBERING GOD’ THROUGH RELIGIOUS HABITS 211
of the force of the women’s religious habits. In the habitus, the women’s
habit-memories turn into dispositions concerning ways of acting in dier-
ent situations. With every recurring similar experience, the corresponding
habit-memory and thereby the disposition are reinforced. This paern cre-
ates a built-in tendency toward stability and a bias towards early experience.
(Bourdieu 1990, 53, 60–1.) In Anna’s case, every subsequent morning prayer
is thus further support for the practical sense that the childhood custom
truly is the proper way to start one’s day. Thus the women’s religious habits
perpetuate their existing religiosity (Connerton 1989, 93–4).
The Cultural Contents of Habit-memory
The evacuee Karelian Orthodox women I interviewed had dierent aitudes
towards discussing the religious signication of their habitual practices.
While a few of the informants spontaneously oered theological explana-
tions for their customs, most were not that comfortable with interpreting
them. Especially when it came to the sign of the cross, some women were
hard put to verbalise what it meant. Mara, for instance, was taken aback
by my question as to the meaning of the sign: ‘It’s the… it’s Jesus Christ. My
goodness, there’s nothing to say except think about Jesus… Jesus.’ Rauha
too was hesitant to suggest an interpretation of the practice: ‘I don’t know. I
think that it [the sign of the cross], it means everything. Just, like the triune
God, it’s like that, it means all things… That’s what I think, yes.’ Although
some women seemed a bit intimidated by my position as a scholar of re-
ligion (even though I had explained that I am not an expert in theology),
and others conveyed a more general apprehension with regard to doctrinal
issues, I do not think that either of these was the main reason for Mara’s
and Rauha’s reactions.
Both Bourdieu and Connerton note that cultural content that is incor-
porated in habit-memory through habitual practices cannot necessarily be
made explicit or verbalised. This is because the practices are often adopted
and reproduced unconsciously. The body becomes charged with cultural
content without active reection ever taking place. Moreover, once the con-
tent is embodied, its common-sense status guards it from conscious aen-
tion and scrutiny. This is why habit-memory in fact makes such an eective
mnemonic system that societies entrust to it the values and principles they
consider most important. (Bourdieu 1977, 94–5; Connerton 1989, 102.) The
two women’s problems in giving a verbal interpretation of the sign of the
cross can be seen to reect the embodied character of the cultural content

HELENA KUPARI
212
inscribed in the gesture. Obviously there are verbal explanations of the sign
and its symbolism – many informants, for instance, used one that describes
it as a threefold blessing (see e.g. Arseni 1999, 237). The signicance of the
gesture, however, is essentially learned not through theoretical study but
by making it: through ‘the hidden persuasion of an implicit pedagogy’
(Bourdieu 1977, 94) imposed by the surrounding society.
In addition to having trouble explicating the cognitive content of some
of their basic religious habits, my informants on occasion also referred more
explicitly to the pre-reexive nature of these practices. As was established
in the previous section, many of my informants emphasised the constancy
in their daily lives of prayer, crossing oneself, and the veneration of icons.
Some also described the performance of these practices – especially the sign
of the cross – with adjectives such as ‘automatic’ and ‘routine’. As Elvi, for
example, puts it: ‘The sign of the cross is a maer of routine in the liturgy.
You almost know at which times you cross yourself; in those parts of the
service it comes automatically.’ Both expressions have the connotation that
the performance of the practices is not guided by the conscious mind; they
come from one’s habit-memory. Elvi thus conveys that it is her body that
knows when to make the sign of the cross. The same point is made by Toini:
‘You can’t make a list of occasions for doing it [i.e. crossing oneself]. When
you need it, it comes naturally.’ Toini’s account is descriptive of the workings
of habitus more generally. What she is saying is that the uses of the practice
are not known to her in the form of a comprehensive list, a set of rules that
would cover all possible instances. Rather, her habitus recognises appropriate
situations for making the sign as they come. When this happens, she does not
need to reect upon whether to cross herself or not; her habitus has already
made the decision for her. (See Bourdieu 1990, 54; Connerton 1989, 83, 90.)
However, whereas many informants were content to describe their
practice of crossing themselves as routine, a couple of the women were
not satised with this description alone. They stressed that the sign is not
a mechanical act, but consists of a mental dimension as well. Consider, for
instance, Lempi’s account: ‘I wouldn’t say that you need to reect on making
the sign of the cross every time. But I don’t like for it to be done negligently,
in passing; it is not that kind of a thing. [...] In a way [you need] to know
that this is not any kind of symbol. Because it is simultaneously a credo.
You don’t cross yourself if you don’t believe at all.’ Lempi emphasises that
the sign of the cross carries signicance: it is a declaration of one’s faith.
However, she does not suggest that the cultural content be thought over on
every repetition; one only needs to recognise that it exists. In a way, what

‘REMEMBERING GOD’ THROUGH RELIGIOUS HABITS 213
Lempi is saying is that the practice comes with a proper aitude. Kirsti
expresses the same thing in noting that the aitude of ‘remembering God’
is brought on by crossing oneself: ‘The mere aitude, remembering God
with love, crossing oneself somewhere like [when] you pass [an icon]; to
my mind it is also a moment that touches eternity.’
The women’s ability to reect on the cultural content behind the sign of
the cross makes it evident that the custom is not simply habitual but has been
a conscious object of study as well, for example at school. Also, the women’s
reexivity is further enhanced by their minority status. They have had to
explain and justify their practices to others. In this vein, Lempi’s remarks
above also function to counter negative aitudes concerning Orthodoxy as
a ceremonial religion, in contrast with belief-oriented Lutheranism – one
of the critiques often raised against the Orthodox faith in the post-war en-
vironment (see Kananen 2010, 170–1; Piiroinen 1958, 4–5).
With regard to the cognitive content of their religious habits as such, a
certain basic and common essence is discernible from most women’s ac-
counts. This cultural message is embedded in the women’s habit-memory.
In the case of such lifelong practices as those considered here, it is thus
not separable from the dispositions the women adopted as children. The
cognitive content can be condensed into the idea of dependence: an urgent
need for God.
Hilja: Nowadays people don’t rely on God the way they used to. I remem-
ber from my childhood, there were a lot of old people in the village… They
always blessed themselves before starting on whatever chore. [...] Grandma,
when she started making bread, she blessed the dough with the sign of the
cross and before that she blessed herself. The cows were blessed when the
cale were let out to pasture [in the spring]. [...] And the seed grain was also
blessed before sowing.
In the women’s childhood religion, as Hilja somewhat nostalgically describes
it, recurrent daily practices such as crossing oneself were about puing
oneself in the hands of God. The women’s present-day practices essentially
signify the same thing. The gestures, positions, sights, sounds, and thoughts
that these practices consist of elicit – from the women’s habit-memory – the
aitude of relying on God. Elvi explains this: ‘It [the sign of the cross] is
coupled with the feeling that you surrender your aairs to a higher [power].
That you ask that power for help. [...] It always involves admiing that you
can’t run your life by yourself.’

HELENA KUPARI
214
Evolving Habitus, Changing Habits
Even though praying, revering icons, and making the sign of the cross have
been part of evacuee Karelian Orthodox women’s religion throughout their
lives, these practices have not been immune to evolution. In the course of
their lifetime the women’s daily religious customs have in fact undergone
considerable transformation. The private and small-scale nature of the
customs has probably been a factor protecting them from even more radi-
cal alteration (see Sallinen-Gimpl 1994, 311). However, the changes in the
women’s social surroundings, their life situations and their priorities have
been too massive not to have aected their personal religiosity as well.
During the interviews, the informants commonly recognised that the
customs under consideration here were not necessarily followed the same
way as during childhood, but at the same time insisted on continuity with the
childhood religion. This indicates that they had successfully adapted their
practices to their new surroundings and situations. The practices remained
meaningful to the women; furthermore, they continued to be triggered by
more or less the same dispositions as before. On the other hand, the women
also spoke of basic religious practices losing their relevance. Customs that
earlier had felt self-evident and necessary were no longer so. Revealingly,
the women described practices as ‘being forgoen’, ‘slipping’, or ‘slacken-
ing’. Kielo, for example, admits that crossing herself ‘has almost become
an evening duty. Sometimes [I do it] at the beginning of a meal, but I don’t
always remember. Yes, these customs are slackening.’ The expressions used
by Kielo and others depict a situation in which habits are uncontrollably fad-
ing away. These metaphors, in my reading, successfully describe a habitus
amidst a process of change. Living in a Lutheran-dominated environment,
as these women have done for the beer part of their lives, has been just one
thing eating away at their habit-memory of everyday Orthodoxy. In such a
scenario, it is not that one chooses to discard a certain practice; after a long
enough history of situations that do not support its use, one’s habitus no
longer imbues it with the same sense of necessity and urgency as before.
As a historical structure, aected by every experience and realized only
in and through these experiences, habitus is not a closed system (Bourdieu
1990, 53; McNay 2000, 43–4). Especially when there is a mismatch between
habitus and eld, new experiences no longer necessarily reinforce estab-
lished habit-memories and dispositions but start to alter them. The habit-
memory of the evacuee Karelian Orthodox women covered on average 75
years of history, including massive alterations in the surrounding social
world (the elds the women were involved in). Some of the layers of their

‘REMEMBERING GOD’ THROUGH RELIGIOUS HABITS 215
habit-memory are traceable from the women’s accounts concerning their
religious practice. In the following, I focus on one particular layer, that of
minority status, and one particular practice, the sign of the cross.
Some of the women’s accounts concerning Orthodoxy in wartime and
post-war Finland dier clearly from the kinds of descriptions of childhood
and present-day religion I have discussed so far. They focus on what it
was like to practice Orthodoxy amidst people unfamiliar with Orthodox
customs – the reality facing most Orthodox evacuees after they left Karelia.
In these accounts, the sign of the cross is not depicted as an unquestioned
part of religious practice. It does not come o as something shared by the
surrounding community but as something separating one from the rest.
In fact, several of the informants described the shyness and shame that
accompanied crossing oneself publicly in the post-evacuation context (see
also Heikkinen 1989, 332). These feelings arise from the clash between the
individual’s habit-memory and her conception of the norms of the sur-
rounding social world (Probyn 2004, 239).
Siiri: I think that at that time many children were ashamed of it [crossing
themselves], because of the mockery [by the local children]. Of course, it’s
completely natural for children to laugh at something that they’ve never
seen before, let alone been used to seeing. My mother told someone not to
mind about it [the laughter]. That you could see Lutherans pressing their
hands together in prayer. That it’s the same thing.
Siiri describes the period that the evacuees spent in temporary housing,
right after leaving Karelia. The evacuees were often accommodated in local
households, and these close contacts brought cultures into conict. Both
sides wondered at the other’s ways, but the evacuees, obviously, experienced
greater pressure to conform. (Sallinen-Gimpl 1994, 27.) Siiri’s account shows
that at least young people could be triggered into changing their practices.
The aention, the wondering, and the suspicion that Orthodox customs
aroused in the Lutheran locals sank into the bodies of the informants, result-
ing in a new practical sense concerning the sign of the cross: that crossing
oneself in public revealed something intimate and compromising about one.
Even after the initial drama surrounding the evacuations had subsided,
the lives of the Orthodox evacuees were characterised, much more than
they had been in Border Karelia, by their status as a religious minority.
This meant that the signicance of Orthodoxy within the family (and the
religious community) no longer coincided with its role in the overall soci-

HELENA KUPARI
216
ety. During the rst post-war decades, the pressure to adapt to the majority
culture remained considerable. Raili, for instance, who was born after the
end of the second war, says that although she was raised to cross herself in
everyday life, the practice later died down. Her account also includes an
apt depiction of the dynamics of habitus, as she concludes that ‘it is not [...]
up to oneself; it is the environment that shapes the person’:
Helena: But in everyday life here at home you don’t happen to do it [i.e.
cross herself].
Raili: No, no. In the old days, my grandma raised me to do it. Then came the
inuence of Savo [the eastern Finnish region where Raili then lived]. It’s not
even necessarily up to oneself; it’s the environment that shapes the person.
Moreover, when you’re younger, at some point you were a bit ashamed of
it [crossing oneself]. [...] You got the feeling that you weren’t a real person
if you were Orthodox. Even though we are true believers.
Vieno, below, notes several subtle impulses that aect her crossing herself
in public – and describes the gradual and partial change of her habitus.
First, she notes that ‘as [she] got older’ she has felt more self-conscious
about crossing herself at restaurants, which suggests that in her case the
change in habitus is due to long-term exposure to Lutheran culture (rather
than traumatic short-term experience, as an evacuee for instance). On the
other hand, she says that she nevertheless ‘can’t start eating without’ cross-
ing herself, thus acknowledging the continuing inuence of the original,
childhood dispositions. Vieno’s account is a good example of the lag that
is part of the habitus: since it is built on the whole past of the individual,
it is often slow to change in transitional situations (Bourdieu 1990, 54, 62).
Helena: In what kinds of situations do you cross yourself these days?
Vieno: Well of course at church and at these Orthodox functions at home.
Still, at this age, what happens is, or maybe it’s a common trend, that when
you go out to eat at a restaurant you just do it quickly, [then] start to eat.
Inconspicuously. However, somehow it feels that you can’t start eating
without [doing it].
Helena: Oh, has this started recently, this restaurant thing?
Vieno: Well, not that recently, but as I got older anyway. And the grandchil-
dren, though some of them may roll their eyes a bit, they’re used to grandma
doing it [i.e. crossing herself], yes.

‘REMEMBERING GOD’ THROUGH RELIGIOUS HABITS 217
Many of the women who admied feeling embarrassed about crossing
themselves in public when they were younger stressed that nowadays the
situation is dierent. Raili ends her above reection by exclaiming: ‘[B]eing
Karelian and Orthodox is what I’m proud of today!’ The change from shame
to pride parallels the evolution of the status of Orthodoxy in Finland (cf.
Laitila 2009, 343). In essence, however, the contrary feelings reect the same
state of aairs: in post-war Finland, crossing oneself (publicly) was no longer
merely a religious gesture, but at the same time a statement. It identied the
practitioner as an Orthodox person, a member of a minority.
Many gender-oriented Bourdieu scholars have emphasised that in
modern societies individuals partake in various elds that can reinforce,
overlap, intertwine with, exclude, and even contradict each other. Their joint
eect on the habitus is destabilising, and can result in heightened reexiv-
ity concerning one’s habits and the structures that cause them. Heightened
reexivity in turn sometimes (though not automatically) creates opportuni-
ties for more political agency and the deliberate acting out of one’s identity.
(Jokinen 2004, 292, 295; Adkins 2003, 26–7; McNay 2000, 51–2, 56–7.) In the
case of evacuee Karelian Orthodox women, their multiple minority status
has obviously increased their ability to examine their religiosity – the ac-
counts discussed here being one product of this reexivity. Moreover, the
awareness that results from the experience of being dierent can permeate
the women’s religious practice as well, adding a conscious dimension to
their religious habits (cf. Adkins 2003; Jokinen 2004). Consider, for instance,
Vieno’s account above. Vieno recognises that her Lutheran grandchildren
take note of her crossing herself before eating, and seems pleased that she
is able to ‘give them memories of an Orthodox grandmother’ (as another
informant put it). In other words, even as Vieno follows the dispositions
ingrained in her habitus, she is simultaneously performing her Orthodoxy
for the benet of her grandchildren.
Conclusions
In this article I have investigated three basic religious practices of evacuee
Karelian Orthodox women – crossing themselves, praying, and revering
icons – from four angles: as customs mainly governed by the native layer
of the women’s habitus; as habits that continue to sustain their own exist-
ence; as habits that incorporate a certain cultural content; and as practices
inuenced by the cumulative weight of the women’s entire past relating to
religion. My purpose was to call aention to one aspect of stable and long-

HELENA KUPARI
218
term religiosity: its habitual character. The above discussion shows that for
evacuee Karelian Orthodox women, mundane and small-scale practices
can carry large-scale signicance. It is through such practices that religion
is infused in everyday life, as a constituent of the domestic space and daily
routine. Through them, the women have also been able (to some extent)
to hold on to a connection with their childhood religion despite the mas-
sive changes that have taken place around them – to preserve their ‘child’s
religion’ (to use a phrase emphasised by several informants). Moreover, it
is in part due to these practices that Orthodoxy has remained topical and
relevant for the women throughout their lives. The resilience and inuence
of the practices, I have argued, is in good part due to their nature as habits.
My other goal was to look at the involvement of embodied social memory
in habitual religiosity. The ability of the body to store cultural content in
the form of habit-memory is the foundation of any habit. In my analysis
of evacuee Karelian Orthodox women’s practices, the dynamics concern-
ing habit-memory were clearly visible. The persistence of the habits – and
changes in them – showed that habit-memory is based on repetition, but is
not immune to change. Rather, it structures religious habits and is structured
by them in return, more specically by the individual’s concrete experience
concerning every performance of the habit in question. In terms of theory, the
above discussion combined Connerton’s view of habit-memory as a specic
category of (social) memory with Bourdieu’s practice-oriented conception
of the habitus. I hope to have illustrated that, although not often used in
that capacity, Bourdieu’s theory makes a fruitful perspective from which
to approach the topic of social memory.
Finally, it has been my objective to open up a view, by no means exhaus-
tive, into the religious lives of evacuee Karelian Orthodox women. Their
experiences share common features with many other groups of elderly
and/or migrant women. My informants have lived through the height of
Finland’s development from an agrarian society to a late modern urban one.
They have witnessed the transformation of Finnish Orthodoxy, rst from a
local majority denomination to a barely tolerated evacuee one and nally
to a widely respected minority one. Through their religious practices these
women have participated in, reacted against, and generally positioned them-
selves in relation to all this turbulence. In the process their everyday religion,
notwithstanding its habitual nature, has at times been transformed into a
means of resistance, adaptation, or armation. More generally speaking,
the trajectory of the women’s religious lives represents one possible outcome
of the combination of long life, life-long investment in religion, and social

‘REMEMBERING GOD’ THROUGH RELIGIOUS HABITS 219
change. This combination enables a perspective into the changing status of
religion in modern societies as it is experienced by religious practitioners
themselves. The possibilities for research on individual religiosity it oers
have yet to be exhausted.
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