New Religious Movements in the Russian North: Competing Uses of Religiosity After Socialism (NEWREL)

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This project is one component of a larger international collaboration of researchers from 6 countries developed under the auspices of the European Science Foundation's EUROCORES program know as "BOREAS-Histories from the North: Environments, Movements, Narratives." The collaboration brings together researchers from Estonia, Finland, France, Russia, Switzerland and the United States on common questions regarding changes in the religious landscape of the Russian North following the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the turn away from socialism. The NSF-funded component consists of two linked research projects, both of which are in turn related to the larger NEWREL collaboration. The projects will be carried out in the Russian Far East using ethnographic methodology. Both projects will contribute to an understanding of religious phenomena occurring in the interstices between more readily recognized spaces of organized and institutionally supported religion. One of these projects will investigate new religious movements, voluntarism and social mechanisms of durability in Kamchatka by focusing on the local meaning of the building of religious structures. The durability of religious experience will be contrasted with notions of heritage and tradition, especially in smaller indigenous communities. The PI will examine memory, participation and anticipation as experiential modes of past, present and future. This will elucidate the particular temporal qualities associated with religious experience and practice. The other project will investigate missionaries, humanitarian aid, and the ideology of neoliberalism by exploring the connections between missionary groups in Alaska and their target communities in Magadan. Rather than focusing on the religious aspects of the conversion experience, the project examines the impact of missionary activity on local economic ideology and practice. Understanding the social dynamics of the missionary encounter in the Russian Far East is particularly important in the context of moves by the Russian government and the Russian Orthodox Church to inhibit foreign missionary activity in Russia.