Religion, Identity, Postsocialism
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Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology Department II Religion, Identity, Postsocialism The Halle Focus Group 2003 - 2010 Religion, Identity, Postsocialism The Halle Focus Group 2003-2010 Edited by Chris Hann Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology Halle/Saale (Department II) 2010 CONTENTS Preface i Chris Hann I INTRODUCTION 1 Broken Chains and Moral Lazarets: the politicization, juridification and commodification of religion after socialism 3 Chris Hann II REGIONAL CLUSTERS 23 CENTRAL ASIA Religious Identities in the Ferghana Valley 27 Irene Hilgers Local Islam in Postsocialist Khorezm (Uzbekistan) 30 Krisztina Kehl-Bodrogi Modern Murids: Islamic Revival in the North Caucasus 34 Galina Khizrieva Muslim Life in a Kyrgyz-Uzbek Town 37 Julie McBrien Religious Frontiers after Socialism: Missionary Encounters and the Dynamics of Conversion in Kyrgyzstan 41 Mathijs Pelkmans Becoming Muslim in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan: An Anthropology of Moral Reasoning 45 Johan Rasanayagam Moral Education, Islam and Being Muslim in Tajikistan 49 Manja Stephan EAST-CENTRAL EUROPE Nation, Religion and Tolerance in Eastern Europe 55 Juraj Buzalka Charismatic Christianity among the Roma in Romania 59 László Fosztó Moral Education in Romania and the Republic of Moldova 62 Monica Heintz Contents Re-orientalizing the Church: Charity and Morality in the Hungarian Greek Catholic Church 65 Stéphanie Mahieu Modes of Religiosity in Eastern Christianity: Religious Processes and Social Change in Ukraine 68 Vlad Naumescu Living Cosmopolitanism? Religious Revival and Local Identity in Odessa 72 Tanya Richardson EASTERN GERMANY Religion at Prison Release in Eastern Germany 77 Irene Becci Catholics in Eastern Germany: A Case Study in the Anthropology of Moralities 81 Birgit Huber Business and God in Saxony: Life Histories and Moral Narratives of Christian Entrepreneurs 85 Esther Peperkamp ‘Heaven on Earth’: Conversion and Morality in Eastern Germany 89 Małgorzata Rajtar EUROPEAN RUSSIA The Strategies of the Russian Orthodox Church in the Context of Religious Revival in Russia 95 Milena Benovska-Sabkova Entrepreneurship, Religion and Morality in Contemporary Russia 99 Tobias Köllner Religious and Secular Concepts of Evil in Contemporary Russia 103 Tünde Komáromi ‘Orthodox Atheist’ – Religion, Morality and Education in Postsocialist Russia 107 Agata Ładykowska Community and Economy in Parish Life 111 Detelina Tocheva Religion, Identity, Postsocialism Cultivating Responsible Persons in the Drug Rehabilitation Programme of a Russian Orthodox Church in St. Petersburg 114 Jarrett Zigon SOUTH-EAST ASIA Urban Spirit Mediums and the Construction of Moralities in Modern Taiwan 119 Friedrich Binder Ancestor Worship and Pilgrimage in Late Socialist Vietnam 123 Andrea Lauser Spirited Dialogues: Contestations of Religious Landscapes in Central Vietnam’s Littoral Society 127 Edyta Roszko Resettled Ancestors: Religious Change among the Bru (in the Central Highlands of Vietnam) 130 Gábor Vargyas LITHUANIA AND POLAND: VOLKSWAGEN FOUNDATION PROJECT ‘Seven Ways to God’: The Dynamics of Religious Pluralism in Rural Southern Poland 137 Agnieszka Pasieka Meaning and Experience in Symbolic and Material Exchange Practices: The Church, the Priest, the Living and the Dead in a Lithuanian Rural Catholic Community 140 Lina Pranaitytė Catholic Hegemony, Common Sense and Secularism in Urban Lithuania 143 Ingo W. Schröder Religious Pluralism in Poland: contradictio in adiecto? Internal Diversity in the Roman Catholic Church 146 Kinga Sekerdej III CONFERENCES, WORKSHOPS AND PANELS 149 IV PUBLICATIONS 161 Preface Religion was the main theme of the sixth conference of the European Associa- tion of Social Anthropologists, which was convened in Kraków in July 2000. There was general agreement among participants that, a decade after the col- lapse of Soviet socialism, far too little was known about how religious beliefs and practices had persisted through decades of repression, and what role faith communities of many kinds were playing in postsocialist societies. This is a field in which the quantitative data collected by other social scientists can be usefully supplemented with the qualitative data which result from long-term fieldwork, the hallmark of modern socio-cultural anthropology. Even in Kraków, the city where Karol Wojtyła served as Bishop, Archbishop and Cardinal for so many years before he was elevated to the papacy, the deeper significance of religion in changing socio-political conditions might be more complex than journalistic stereotypes of a monolithic Polish Catholicism allowed for. The Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Social Anthropology is uniquely equipped to respond to such a research need by organizing comparative team projects. In this case, as with my Department’s first Focus Group, which in- vestigated rural property relations, the common baseline was provided by socialism. As with the projects on property, behind ideological uniformity, actual relations between socialism and religion were very different. The paths followed in the 1990s also diverged in interesting ways. On this occasion, we decided to pursue comparisons primarily within regional clusters, leaving open the possibility of comparing and contrasting these clusters within a wider Eurasian framework. The first cohort of Focus Group members joined the MPI in early 2003. Their main themes addressed the new position of religion in the public sphere. Under the rubric “Religion and Civil Society”, we sought to engage not only with the new landscape of Non-Governmental Organizations, but also with older referents of civil society and everyday understandings of civility and tolerance. The scholars of this first phase worked in two regional clusters, Central Asia and East-Central Europe. In the second phase, between 2006 and 2009, we shifted the emphasis away from politics and the public sphere towards norms, values and the new mean- ings of religion for individuals in the changed social conditions. Under the heading “Religion and Morality”, the researchers of this second cohort worked in three regions: Eastern Germany, European Russia and South-East Asia. There was constant interaction between members of the various clusters and much continuity between the two phases. Indeed, the groundwork for the focus on morality was to a large extent established by two of the post-doctoral members of the first cohort. In effect they formed a single intellectual com- munity. For the purposes of this final report, I have therefore combined them under a new title: the term ‘identity’ is broad enough to encompass all these ii Religion, Identity, Postsocialism projects, from those who concentrated on collectivities at national and supra- national levels to those more interested in continuity and change at the level of local communities, families and ‘selfhood’. In addition to these five clusters (most of which included Associated Pro- jects by colleagues not holding a full-time position or scholarship from the MPI), four researchers investigating contemporary Catholicism in Lithuania and Poland have been funded separately by the Volkswagen Foundation. Strictly speaking, they are not members of this Focus Group and their projects are still running as this publication goes to press in January 2010. However, given the similarity of their themes, we have decided to include provisional reports on this research in this booklet, thus constituting a sixth regional clus- ter. This final report draws on materials already published on the homepage of the MPI and in our biannual reports. However, the bulk of what follows is made up of newly commissioned individual reports by the thirty-one scholars involved, most of them now widely scattered outside Germany. I thank them for their continued commitment to this initiative, their cooperation in produc- ing this report and their helpful comments on my introductory materials (for which, of course, I alone take the final responsibility). It seemed sensible to group the individual reports in their regional clusters; within each region, the order is alphabetical. A full record of the workshops and conferences organized by this Focus Group precedes the unified bibliog- raphy. It remains for me to thank numerous external research partners and guests who have contributed to the activities of this Focus Group over the last seven years. It is impossible to name them all but we are particularly indebted to Alexander Agadjanian, Ingeborg Baldauf, Glenn Bowman, Melissa L. Cald- well, José Casanova, Vytis Čiubrinskas, Hermann Goltz, Paweł Jessa, Roger Just, Grażyna Kubica-Heller, Anke von Kügelgen, Wolfgang Levermann, Marcin Lubaś, Sonja Luehrmann, Zdzisław Mach, Paul Robert Magocsi, Vasilios Makrides, David Martin, Jacek Nowak, Jürgen Paul, Detlef Pollack, Aleksander Posern-Zieliński, Kathy Rousselet, Stanisław Stępień, Galia Valtchinova and Monika Wohlrab-Sahr. Finally, thanks also to our copy editor Elisabeth Arweck; to Bettina Mann, whose interest and support for these projects have gone far beyond her duties as MPI research coordinator; and to Berit Westwood and Katharina Wiech- mann, who have shared with me the bulk of the work in preparing this report for publication Chris Hann 6 January, 2010 I INTRODUCTION Introduction 3 Broken Chains and Moral Lazarets: the politicization, jurid- 1 ification and commodification of religion after socialism Chris Hann In 2003, I introduced our new projects on “Religion and Civil Society” with the following portentous paragraphs on the Institute’s webpage: What is