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Post-Soviet Believers in Migration: Constructing Memory-Based and Space-Bounded Identity Narratives in Finland
Abstract
Understanding of space is central in migrant identity-building and integration to a host society. Identity also relates to time, which is effectuated by memory. This article shows how the interplay between religiosity and space may be central to believers’ identity narratives. Religiosity and memories of the past may affiliate migrants to a specific country. Through narrative analysis, I have shown five different ways Russian speakers from various denominations in Finland affiliate spatially—whether to the past country which does not exist anymore, country of origin, two home countries, host country or the global society. Each narrative has its own way of memorizing. The article shows multiplicity in Russian-speaking believers’ life courses and present-day identity-building in Finland. The article also demonstrates, in a migration situation, the effect on identity narratives of denominational background and recognition as sectarian or necessity of remediation.
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As the Soviet war veterans pass away, the next generation, those who experienced the war as children and adolescents, inevitably receive more public attention. This chapter addresses the growing prominence of the “children of war” in contemporary Russia and investigates how this generation is constructed at the crossroads of discourses on World War II memory and national identity, on moral values in the Russian society and on principles of social policy in a market economy. It analyzes bottom-up social initiatives and top-down strategies of the political elites in Russia aimed at the institutionalization of a special status for the “children of war.” The chapter also shows how the initiatives aimed at forging inter-generational solidarity and strengthening the public consensus on war memory often create new social hierarchies and lead to competition between different status groups.
This chapter examines a new addition to the repertoire of Victory Day commemorative traditions in post-Soviet space: the newly invented annual “Immortal Regiment” parade, in which people march bearing photographs of their ancestors who fought in the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945. The chapter focuses on attempts by the state authorities and their supporters to instrumentalize the new ritual and to appropriate the Red Army’s war dead, and the emotions they evoke. It explores the ways in which the figure of the dead Red Army soldier is being brought back to life in new ways as part of the current regime’s authoritarian project.
O ver a decade ago, I suggested that in order to speak meaningfully of "secular-ization," we needed to distinguish between three different connotations: a) Secularization as the decline of religious beliefs and practices in modern societies, often postulated as a universal, human, developmental process. This is the most recent but by now the most widespread usage of the term in contemporary academic debates on secularization, although it remains unregistered in most dictionaries of most European languages. b) Secularization as the privatization of religion, often understood both as a general modern historical trend and as a normative condition, indeed as a precondition for modern liberal democratic politics. 1 c) Secularization as the differentiation of the secular spheres (state, economy, science), usually understood as "emancipation" from religious institutions and norms. This is the core component of the classic theories of secularization, which is related to the original etymological-historical meaning of the term within medieval Christendom. As indicated by every dictionary of every Western European language, it refers to the 1 My book, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), put into question the empirical as well as the normative validity of the privatization thesis.
The collapse of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe brought widespread fear of a 'tidal wave' of immigrants from the East into Western Europe. Quite apart from the social and political importance, East-West migration also poses a challenge to established theories of migration, as in most cases the migrant flow cannot be categorised as either refugee movement or a labour migration. Indeed much of the trans-border movement is not officially recognised, as many migrants are temporary, commuting, 'tourists' or illegal, and remain invisible to the authorities.
This book focuses on Russian migration into Western Europe following the break-up of the Soviet Union. Helen Kopnina explores the concept of 'community' through an examination of the lives of Russian migrants in two major European cities, London and Amsterdam. In both cases Kopnina finds an 'invisible community', inadequately defined in existing literature. Arguing that Russian migrants are highly diverse, both socially and in terms of their views and adaptation strategies, Kopnina uncovers a community divided by mutual antagonisms, prompting many to reject the idea of belonging to a community at all.
Based on extensive interviews, this fascinating and unique ethnographic account of the 'new migration' challenges the underlying assumptions of traditional migration studies and post-modern theories. It provides a powerful critique for the study of new migrant groups in Western Europe and the wider process of European identity formation.
This article argues for reconfiguring the study of identity formation through the concept of narrative. It is motivated by two recent but seemingly unrelated developments in social theory and society. One is the emergence of a wide-spread ''identity politics'' and a concomitant scholarly focus on the ''social construction of identity.'' The other is the reconfigured approach to the concept of narrative that researchers from many disciplines have been formulating in recent years. Both are important developments not to be overlooked by social scientists and social theorists; both, however, have problems and limitations as they now stand. I argue in this article that the limitations of each potentially can be overcome by bringing the two thematics together. The key concept I propose to achieve this reconfiguration is that of narrative identity.
The Russian Orthodox Church portrays itself as a hierarchically ordered and socially influential "public religion," but occupies quite a tenuous position in contemporary Russian society. Following Marcel Mauss's idea of prayer as a social phenomenon, we argue that lay intercessory prayer as a way of assuming social responsibility is key to extending the Church's reach into the lives of casual believers (so-called zakhozhane). Although individualization of religious practice does occur in post-Soviet Russia, contemporary Russian Orthodox prayer is less about personal self-cultivation than about claiming and exercising competence within interpersonal networks. The notion of prayer as practical competence helps to understand the role of lay prayer in a clerically dominated church, and explains the enduring role of established, mainstream denominations as ambient faith in a secular society.
Today, few scholars can deny that models of widespread secularization were largely overstated. Religion has shaped and continues to shape globalization and transnationalism as much as these forces have shaped religion. This is particularly true of international migration and the flow of religious ideas, practices, organizations, and movements people in diaspora have established through their faith traditions. Various scholars have attempted to map the complexity of transnational migration and religion with a certain amount of success, but there is considerable work left to be done. Drawing heavily from key scholars in the field and my own work with Ebaugh on transnational service movements, this chapter attempts to bring these various perspectives together to explore and debate the contours of transnational religious spaces and networks.
The past two decades have witnessed a sea change in migration scholarship. Most scholars now recognize that many contemporary migrants and their predecessors maintain various kinds of ties to their homelands at the same time that they are incorporated into the countries that receive them. Increasingly, social life takes place across borders, even as the political and cultural salience of nation-state boundaries remains strong. Transnational migration studies has emerged as an inherently interdisciplinary field, made up of scholars around the world, seeking to describe and analyze these dynamics and invent new methodological tools with which to do so. In this review, we offer a short history of theoretical developments, outlining the different ways in which scholars have defined and approached transnational migration. We then summarize what is known about migrant transnationalism in different arenas - economics, politics, the social, the cultural, and the religious. Finally, we discuss methodological implications for the study of international migration, present promising new scholarship, and highlight future research directions.
The prevailing attitude to the national churches in the Nordic countries has often been described as ‘believing in belonging’. Based on a longitudinal survey data, this article argues that this notion no longer applies to the younger generation, often referred to as Generation Y. Instead, they are challenging traditional reasons for belonging to national churches. The number of church-leavers has been unusually high in Finland since the beginning of the 21st century, the vast majority of them young adults. These same young adults were confirmed in the church only a few years earlier. This study aims to understand why such a high number of young people leave the Evangelical Lutheran Church soon after confirmation. The study shows that for Generation Y, the Church-leaving process is linked to personal beliefs and values. They leave the Church because they do not find it to be in line with their own beliefs. Tradition and culture alone are not enough to keep them as members.
Along with the narrative turn in social sciences, the quality of research has become a more and more intricate issue. Action research reports are often narratives, located in the context of the evolving experiences of those involved. In this paper, the problem of quality in action research narratives is addressed, and some principles for assessing the quality of narrative research reports are proposed. The issue is explored both at a theoretical‐conceptual level and through a number of practical cases from the narrative‐biographical research project TeacherLife. As narrative researchers, the authors are not willing to accept an extremely relativistic stand. They argue the need for conceptual tools to grasp the problem of quality of narratives, but tools different from the traditional concepts of validity and reliability, which harbour markedly positivistic connotations. They propose five principles for judging the quality of action research from a narrative point of view. According to these principles, a good action research narrative firstly acknowledges the past course of events that have shaped the present practices (the principle of historical continuity). Secondly and thirdly, it is reflexive (the principle of reflexivity) and elaborates the story dialectically (the principle of dialectics). Fourthly, a decisive criterion for successful action research is that it produces some useable practices that, in one way or another, can be regarded as useful (the principle of workability). The authors agree with Aristotle, who claims that a good narrative involves a balance between ‘logos’, ‘ethos’ and ‘pathos’. They place emphasis on ‘ethos’ and ‘pathos’ through a principle of evocativeness. These criteria are not proposing as an established checklist, and the authors point to the overlap between some of them. They are drawn from experience in supervising action research projects, evaluating narrative reports and encouraging people to write authentic narratives of their research work.
Like consciousness and language, human memory is acquired through communication, socialization, and acculturation. It is,
therefore, about both one’s brain and one’s social and cultural relations and comprises three dimensions: the personal, social,
and cultural. Human memory is “embodied” in living personal memories and “embedded” in social frames and external cultural
symbols (e.g., texts, images, and rituals) that can be acknowledged as a memory function insofar as they are related to the
self-image or “identity” of a tribal, national, and/or religious community. Whereas the social or “collective” memory comprises
knowledge commonly shared by a given society in a given epoch, cultural memory in literate societies includes not only a “canon”
of normative knowledge but also an “archive” of apocryphal material that may be rediscovered and brought to the fore in later
epochs. The formation of a canon of “classical” or sacred texts requires techniques of interpretation to keep accessible the
meaning of the texts that may no longer be altered or multiplied. At that stage of cultural evolution, cultural memory changes
from ritual to textual continuity. Cultural memory becomes complex, splitting into the “classical” and the “modern,” the “sacred”
and the “secular.”
The purpose of this study was to look for the ways in which people who have recovered from various addictions understand and present their change process.
The research material consisted of 51 autobiographical stories of people who had been able to quit their addiction to alcohol, multiple drugs, binge eating, smoking, sex and gambling.
The basic logic of each narrative was first defined. The narratives were then categorized according to what they presented as the key to recovery. Composite stories were then constructed and analysed with regard to their emotional, causal, moral and ethical meanings.
The analysis revealed five different story types among these self-narratives: the AA story, the growth story, the co-dependence story, the love story and the mastery story. All of them helped to make the addiction and recovery understandable, they released the protagonist from guilt and had a happy ending by which the values of the story were realized. Each story type was told predominantly by representatives of a particular gender and addiction.
As there are several ways out of addictive behaviours there are also several ways to construe the change. People who try to quit addictive behaviours could be encouraged to make full use of the cultural stock of stories in creating an account that fits their own experience of defeating their particular addiction.
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