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May 2020
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4 Reads
Slavic Review
Intimate Divisions: Street-Level Orthodoxy in Post-Soviet Russia. By Detelina Tocheva. Halle Studies in the Anthropology of Eurasia, vol. 35. Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2017. xv, 185 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Photographs. €29.90, paper. - Volume 79 Issue 1 - Sonja Luehrmann
July 2019
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11 Reads
Canadian Slavonic Papers
March 2019
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81 Reads
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17 Citations
Signs Journal of Women in Culture and Society
Russia is gaining a reputation for rigid gender stereotypes, ranging from hypersexualized political performance to images of deeply religious women enforcing conservative moral standards. This article argues that we can look beyond this binary by recognizing that even the conservatives work with a set of kinship-gender arrangements that are far removed from patriarchal ideals. Based on interviews with self-identified Orthodox Christian psychologists who provide pregnancy counseling as part of a church-based pronatalist movement, I examine the difference between the ideal kinship models espoused by these counselors and the actual kinship scenarios they assume when narrating interactions with clients. While expressing patriarchal ideals of male providership in a heterosexual marriage, these female counselors assume that intergenerational ties between women are more likely to provide stable support for the pregnant woman and her children. Drawing on feminist anthropological approaches to kinship as a malleable framework for the reproduction of life, I argue that the church, while promoting father-centered nuclear families, often provides support to people who live in household forms that were common during the Soviet period but have become precarious in post-Soviet Russia. Valuing single-mother and female-focused households, along with other nonconforming family models, would be a step toward supporting locally comprehensible forms of gender equality.
May 2018
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79 Reads
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19 Citations
Journal of the American Academy of Religion
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.
February 2018
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13 Reads
American Journal of Ophthalmology
September 2017
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177 Reads
Canadian Slavonic Papers
June 2017
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58 Reads
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14 Citations
Hau Journal of Ethnographic Theory
A broad understanding of sincerity includes the assumption that intentions matter for evaluating an action. Studies of Western Christianity often tell of an increasing focus on internal self-interrogation that led to an ideal of sincerity as a form of modern selfexpression. Based on research with Russian Orthodox women who expiate abortions, I argue that intention matters here too, but not always and not in the form of deep interiority. During confession and pilgrimage, there are external criteria for evaluating oneself and others, including the ability to carry out plans without distraction and bear hardships without complaint. Some standards originate in the Soviet period, but judging intentions based on observable actions has a long tradition in Orthodox Christianity, traceable to Louis Dumont’s idea of the outworldly individual and its modern adaptations. Dumont’s perspective opens the way to investigating the temporal and social contexts in which a focus on sincere intentions can emerge.
December 2016
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2 Reads
Current Anthropology
November 2016
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7 Reads
Social Anthropology
April 2016
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20 Reads
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4 Citations
Material Religion The Journal of Objects Art and Belief
... On the other hand, this contribution also aims to shed light on crucial questions at the intersection of theology and cultural anthropology. The concept of 'religious activism' is used by social anthropologists interested in the visible activities of religious people and communities in various contexts, for example as part of research on social movements or women's activism (Elisha 2008;Caldwell 2017;El Haitami 2013;Luehrmann 2019). The engagement with the theologies of those religious communities under scrutiny is often limited. ...
March 2019
Signs Journal of Women in Culture and Society
... One must simply start praying in order to stop abortion. Because the prayer is a form of communication with the divine or an entity covered by mystery, it holds hidden possibilities (Kormina and Luehrmann 2018). Therefore, it is presented as an effective way to reach the protest's goal of ending abortion. ...
May 2018
Journal of the American Academy of Religion
... De même, Alice Forbess (2010), enquêtant au sujet de l'éducation des novices dans un monastère roumain, met en lumière le rôle fondamental joué par les sens dans le processus de transformation qui concerne les moniales. Sur la centralité des sens dans l'expérience orthodoxe, on trouve également les travaux de Sonja Luehrmann (2010Luehrmann ( , 2016Luehrmann ( , 2018aLuehrmann ( , 2018b Kormina Jeanne, qui a mené des enquêtes en Russie, rappelle l'importance de la relation avec les objets matériels dans le monde et dans la pratique orthodoxe. Ainsi, les icônes et les reliques contiennent en elles une « présence divine ou transcendante!» et donnent accès à des « expériences religieuses !» individuelles et collectives en même temps (2018 : 155). ...
April 2016
Material Religion The Journal of Objects Art and Belief
... Šios pastangos neretai rėmėsi nekonvenciniu mokslu, skatino domėjimąsi antgamtiniais reiškiniais, ypač Indijos religinėmis tradicijomis (Honey, 2013). Be to, nuo chruščiovinio atlydžio iki pat Sovietų Sąjungos subyrėjimo žmogaus psichinių ir fizinių savybių ugdymas, asmenybės transformacija ideologijoje sieta su dvasingumu, apimančiu intelektualinius gebėjimus bei estetinį išsilavinimą ir suvokiamu kaip alternatyva religingumui (Luehrmann, 2013). Su Indijos religinėmis tradicijomis siejami, bet ir kaip nereliginės sveikatingumo praktikos interpretuojami vegetarizmas 30 , hathajoga ir meditacija daugeliui alternatyvaus religingumo praktikų buvo pirmasis žingsnis dvasinių ieškojimų kelyje. ...
July 2013
Cahiers du monde russe Russie Empire russe Union soviétique États indépendants
... Menzel, 2012Menzel, . 2013 (McBrien ir Naumescu, 2022;Luehrmann, 2011;Smolkin, 2018;McBrien, 2017;Pelkmans, 2009). ...
January 2011
... Some scholars put forward a logic, as men and women cannot concentrate on prayers, although Islam allows both to perform Hajj together. Correspondingly, Orthodox Jews and Christians also separate men and women while praying for similar reasons (House 1978;Hirsch and Reinman 2003;Luehrmann 2015). Recent theological debates on mosques among leading scholars and jurists have offered rational examples to respond to widespread misunderstandings about Muslim women's roles in mosques 1 . ...
December 2015
Journal of Religious and Political Practice
... Such insights evince the impact of what might be called generative antagonism, as pedagogical failures lead to more refined methods. Consider Luehrmann's observation that Soviet atheist researchers, while antagonistic in their approach to religion, overhauled their own understandings over time in order to better inform the methods of anti-religious propagandists; such "antagonistic insights" (Luehrmann 2015) have led some activists in India to emphasize participatory forms of rationalist exposé. Although perhaps only in a weak sense, these rationalists have grasped a version of what most anthropologists of religion have been arguing for quite some time: that many forms of religious commitment are not comprised of "beliefs," or testable propositional assents (e.g., Asad 1993; Engelke 2014:300); instead such commitments can be immanent in bodily and affective encounters with the divine. ...
June 2015
Social Analysis
... Interest in do-it-yourself (DIY) material worlds was part of this shift and has typically been conceptualised within the framework of consumption. Over time, interpretations of these practices have evolved -from early explanations that framed DIY as a mundane response to scarcity in planned economies or as tactics of survival and resistance (Anstett 2015;Gerasimova and Chuikina 2009;Kornai 1992;Smolyak 2014), to more recent approaches that explore public discourses of DIY (Golubev 2016;Kreis 2018;Orlova 2009;Vasilyeva 2014), DIY-centred communities (Cherkaev 2018;Vasilyeva 2018;Vinogradova 2012) and relations between DIY material culture and subjectivities (Golubev and Smolyak 2013;Kasatkina 2021;Luehrmann 2011;Orlova 2016;Reid 2014). In this paper, I further develop the argument that DIY material culture played a significant role in the formation of subjectivities in socialist societies. ...
July 2011
Cultural Anthropology
... Anthropologist Sonja Luehrmann (2009), studying the activities of religious organisations in the Republic of Mari El during the post-Soviet era, examined aspects of the institutionalisation of Mari worship traditions. She discovered that post-atheist religious ceremonies could be understood by analogy with mobilising events organised by schoolteachers, cultural workers or Komsomol 1 officials during the Soviet period. ...
January 2009
