Shrines and Sovereigns: Life, Death, and Religion in Rural Azerbaijan
Comparative Studies in Society and History 2011;53(3):654–681. 0010-4175/11 $15.00 # Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2011 doi:10.1017/S0010417511000284 Shrines and Sovereigns: Life, Death, and Religion in Rural Azerbaijan BRUCE GRANT New York University Shrines fill the Eurasian land mass. They can be found from Turkey in the west to China in the east, from the Arctic Circle in the north to Afghanistan in the south. Between town and country, they can consist of full-scale architectural complexes, or they may compose no more than an open field, a pile of stones, a tree, or a small mausoleum. They have been at the centers and periph- eries of almost every major religious tradition of the region: Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism. Yet in the formerly socialist world, these places of pilgrimage have something even more in common: they were often cast as the last bastions of religious observance when churches, mosques, temples, and synagogues were sent crashing to the ground in rapid succession across the twentieth century. In this essay I draw attention to a number of such shrines in the south Cau- casus republic of Azerbaijan. My goal is not to celebrate these settings for their promotion of an alternative route to religiosity under communist rule, as many have done before me, but rather to consider the ways in which the very popular attachments to shrines over so many centuries offer a window onto the plas- ticity and porosity of political, religious, and social boundaries in a world area that otherwise became better known over the twentieth century for its leaders of steel, curtains of iron, and seemingly immobilized citizens.
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