Conversion After Socialism: Disruptions, Modernisms and Technologies of Faith in the Former Soviet Union 9781845459628

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Conversion after Socialism

CONVERSION AFTER SOCIALISM Disruptions, Modernisms and Technologies of Faith in the Former Soviet Union

Edited by

Mathijs Pelkmans

Berghahn Books New York • Oxford

Published in 2009 by Berghahn Books

www.berghahnbooks.com ©2009 Mathijs Pelkmans

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Printed in the United States on acid-free paper. ISBN: 978-1-84545-617-7

CONTENTS Acknowledgments

1 Introduction: Post-Soviet Space and the Unexpected Turns of Religious Life Mathijs Pelkmans

2 Conversion to Religion? Negotiating Continuity and Discontinuity in Contemporary Altai Ludek Broz

3 Redefining Chukchi Practices in Contexts of Conversion to Pentecostalism Virginie Vaté

4 Christianization of Words and Selves: Nenets Reindeer Herders Joining the State through Conversion Laur Vallikivi

5 Right Singing and Conversion to Orthodox Christianity in Estonia Jeffers Engelhardt 6 The Civility and Pragmatism of Charismatic Christianity in Lithuania Gediminas Lankauskas 7 Networks of Faith in Kazakhstan William Clark

8 Temporary Conversions: Encounters with Pentecostalism in Muslim Kyrgyzstan Mathijs Pelkmans 9 Conversion and the Mobile Self: Evangelicalism as ‘Travelling Culture’ Catherine Wanner 10 Postsocialism, Postcolonialism, Pentecostalism J.D.Y. Peel

Notes on Contributors Index

vii 1 17 39 59 85 107 129 143 163 183 201 203

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

When embarking on the project that resulted in this book, the idea met with instant enthusiasm. Colleagues working in the former Soviet Union had all observed the influx of foreign missionaries and had often encountered cases of conversion. Such observations indicated that the region did not simply witness a ‘revival’ of repressed religious traditions and that religious dynamics were bound to have many unexpected and controversial characteristics. Moreover, examining conversion in post-Soviet settings allowed for entering longstanding anthropological discussions on similar processes in colonial and postcolonial contexts. While postsocialist cases of conversion are similar to those described for other locales through their link to dreams of modernity and the highlighting of tensions between globalization and communality, the militant secularism of the Soviet state and its peculiar cultural policies assured that conversion dynamics would be significantly different, thus providing scope for comparison and debate. I am particular grateful to Chris Hann, director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, who very early on gave his full support to organizing the conference ‘Religious Conversion after Socialism’, held in Halle in April 2005. I am indebted to my co-organizers Laszlo Foszto and especially Irene Hilgers, whose sudden passing away has left all who knew her with immense sadness. I wish to thank all those who presented and discussed the papers, and in particular Heather Coleman, Frances Pine, Johannes Ries and Oskar Salemink. Most chapters collected in this volume are revised, expanded and updated versions of the papers presented at the conference, with the exception of the chapters by Ludek Broz and Gediminas Lankauskas, which were solicited at a later stage. The final preparation of the manuscript was enabled by a fellowship at the Centro Incontri Umani in Ascona, where Angela Hobart offered her kind hospitality and provided an excellent environment for editing and finalizing the revisions of this volume. Mathijs Pelkmans

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION: POST-SOVIET SPACE AND THE UNEXPECTED TURNS OF RELIGIOUS LIFE Mathijs Pelkmans This book is about the unexpected twists and turns of religious life after seventy years of militant secularism in the former Soviet Union. Throughout this region, the new arrival and increased activity of foreign religious groups has caused a commotion. The Russian Orthodox Church, for example, has repeatedly made vilifying statements about the activities of new religious movements on Russian soil. The employed images – of ‘hordes of missionaries’ who belong to ‘totalitarian sects’ and ‘buy people with so-called humanitarian aid’1 – highlight the fear these religious movements instil in representatives of what are locally termed ‘traditional religions’ (traditsionnye religii). These reactions cannot be simply dismissed as paranoia; they also reflect dramatic changes in the religious landscape across the region. To give a few examples from the chapters in this volume: the largest evangelical church of Europe is now located in Ukraine (Wanner, Chapter 9); Kyrgyzstan has one of the highest densities of Christian missionaries in the Muslim world (Pelkmans, Chapter 8); and Baptist and Pentecostal churches are successful among indigenous groups of Siberia who had previously withstood the pressures of the Orthodox Church and had continued to practice shamanic rituals even after decades of Soviet rule (Vallikivi, Chapter 4; Vaté, Chapter 3). Although missionary activity and the occurrence of conversion have been vigorously discussed in national arenas throughout the region, social scientists have been remarkably silent on the subject. This book rectifies this obvious gap. In doing so it also sheds new light on the dislocations wrought by postsocialist change. In eight ethnographic accounts the authors analyse missionary encounters and conversion dynamics in different parts of the former Soviet Union. They show how conversion is rooted in the disruptive qualities of the new capitalist era, and document its often unsettling effects at the individual and social level. The sense of disorientation produced by the fall of the Soviet state and the evaporation of communist ideology is perhaps most powerfully evoked by the title of

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Yurchak’s recent book, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More (2006). Many of the services previously provided (or subsidized) by the state – healthcare, education, transport and provision for old age – suddenly became the concern of individuals whose salaries, due to hyperinflation, had been reduced to little more than pocket money. While a small group of well-positioned people benefited extravagantly from this ‘post-Soviet chaos’ (Nazpary 2002), the large majority was left scrambling for survival. Under these conditions, the messages of hope and the sense of community offered by new religious movements proved highly attractive. A focus on conversion addresses the unexpected features of this new relevance of religion, thereby challenging the problematic notion that religious life after socialism can be characterized as a revival of repressed religious traditions. Religion served new needs and was linked to new imaginaries. Moreover, only certain religions gained ground. As elsewhere in the contemporary world, the religious forms that thrived were ‘passionate religious movements’ (Berger 1999: 2), concerned less with tradition and ritual and more with truth, morality and visions of the future. These movements were quick to jump on what they perceived to be the ripe fields of atheist rule; their plain and concrete answers to terrestrial problems often proved more attractive than Orthodox Christianity and mainstream Sunni Islam (in their various local forms). The ascendance of these ‘new’ religions was also clearly related to asymmetries in the new ‘spiritual marketplace’. While following the currents of Western influence and thriving on the ideology and mechanisms of the ‘free market’, they are often also motivated by a critique of the ‘corruption’ produced by this capitalist dynamic. By examining conversion in the former Soviet Union, this collection enters longstanding anthropological debates about similar processes in (post)colonial societies. As some of those studies suggest, conversion in the post-Soviet world is linked to dreams of modernity (cf. Hefner 1993; van der Veer 1996), and highlights the tensions between globalization and communality (cf. Englund 2003; Marshall-Fratani 1998). At the same time, the militant secularism of the Soviet state and its (unintended) success in inscribing ethno-religious distinctions assured that missionary encounters and the dynamics of conversion have taken on different characteristics in the diverse landscape of post-Soviet Eurasia from those in (post)colonial societies.

Disruption

A central premise of this book is that missionary activity and conversion dynamics – as well as the controversies they provoke – should be seen in light of the dislocations wrought by postsocialist change and the advance of free-market capitalism. Generally speaking, the implosion of communism and the victory of neoliberal capitalism – as a powerful and seductive but surprisingly empty ideology with unsettling effects – have increased the attractiveness of religious movements offering concrete answers to complex problems (cf. Comaroff and

Introduction

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Comaroff 2000). But obviously, social and political dislocations do not necessarily induce conversion processes; vice versa, conversion experiences entail more than a response to difficult times. A brief description of an unsuccessful Christian mission to the Muslims of Central Asia in the early twentieth century serves to highlight some of the particularities that made conversion a common and controversial theme after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the early 1900s, when the Tsarist Empire showed its first signs of decay, sectarian Protestants made small but determined attempts to convert the Muslim population of Central Asia, an endeavour from which the Russian Orthodox Church, pressurized by the tsarist authorities, had largely shied away (Vladimir 2000; Geraci 2001; Crew 2006). Little is known about these missions, but the fate of one of them – the German Mennonite mission to contemporary Kyrgyzstan – is documented in internal publications of memoirs and correspondence (Janzen 1988; Reimer 1992; Friesen 2000). The origins of this mission stemmed from the conjuncture of Mennonite migrations to Central Asia and tensions between community-oriented ‘church Mennonites’ and evangelical ‘Mennonite brethren’ (Friesen 2000). Rather than being permanently divided, these two groups continued to interact. Thus, when two Mennonite brethren who had completed bible school in Europe felt that ‘God directed our heart towards a special country – Russian Turkistan’, their final destination was the Talas valley, where church Mennonites had settled in the 1880s (Reimer 1992: 34). The missionaries’ strategy was to incite the evangelical zeal of these local Mennonites in order to make a concerted effort to convert the Muslim Kyrgyz. In terms of organization the strategy was a success. No less than ten local Mennonites became directly involved in missionary activities, while the community as a whole provided construction material for a mission hospital and financed evangelization trips to Kyrgyz villages (ibid.: 35). But the ultimate goal of the missionaries proved far more difficult to achieve. The Kyrgyz flatly rejected or simply ignored the Christian message. At best they were amused by these attempts to teach them the Gospel, tolerating the visits of missionaries because of the offered medical aid (ibid.: 70). In their letters, the missionaries repeatedly expressed their despair about the enmity they encountered and wondered if they would ever see the fruit of their labours. Seven years after having started their work, the missionaries reported the first two conversions: one Kyrgyz man who ‘had been a great thief’ and a Kazakh teacher who had left his region of birth to live in the Mennonite community (ibid.: 73). The missionaries presented these cases with modest optimism, hoping that these were signs that God was changing the hearts of the Muslims. But the indigenous response to these ‘successes’ was revealing: they pitied the converts for having become German (ibid.: 91). The Kyrgyz viewed the Germans as barbarians whose mission activities only reinforced their conviction that Christianity was something of Europeans. Over the next six years (1916 to 1922) no further cases of Kyrgyz converts to Christianity were reported. To the Kyrgyz the idea of converting to Christianity continued to be inconceivable. Seventy years later, after the communist experiment had ended, new German missionaries

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made inquiries about the fate of the Mennonite mission. They were disappointed to learn that no one remembered the missionaries and that none of the few Kyrgyz ‘converts’ had left a sign that indicated lasting religious change. Rather than producing converts, these pre-Soviet Muslim–Christian encounters, like those in tsarist Georgia (Pelkmans 2002, 2006b) and Kazakhstan (Geraci 2001), had the effect of hardening conceptions of ethno-religious difference. In their seminal work Of Revelation and Revolution, the Comaroffs document the ‘long conversation’ between British missionaries and Tswana and outline a process by which the latter were drawn into European discourses and practices, eventually finding themselves enmeshed in an overtly Christian order of signs and values (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991). Across post-Soviet Eurasia, by contrast, such conversations ended rather abruptly. In Kyrgyzstan, Mennonite mission activities died out in the 1920s, while the remaining Mennonite community grew more inward looking throughout the Soviet period (cf. Peyrouse 2004). But remarkably enough, when Mennonites resumed missionary activities in the Talas valley in the 1990s, their church attracted at least a hundred Kyrgyz members. Evangelical and Pentecostal churches working in other provinces were even more successful in converting Kyrgyz (Pelkmans 2006a, 2007; Chapter 8, this volume). In light of this, I am tempted to suggest that similar numbers of converts among Kyrgyz would not have occurred if the missionaries had been able to continue their activities in a world undisturbed by Soviet rule. A brief note on another nineteenth century mission underscores the extraordinary difference between the two periods. In his study of the rather haphazard and ultimately unsuccessful Russian Orthodox mission to Kazakhstan, Geraci (2001: 275–6) argues that it would be unfair to judge this mission by the low numbers of Kazakhs it converted as it only existed for thirty-five years. Historical evidence proves him right: conversion is often a slow process that spans centuries. However, this observation also accentuates the extraordinary nature of religious shifts currently occurring in post-Soviet Eurasia. Besides producing larger numbers of converts in a short period, the new Christian missionaries have also caused more controversy, inviting the wrath of representatives of ‘traditional religions’ and triggering (often half-hearted) measures by secular authorities to counter the ‘evangelical threat.’ Obviously, it is impossible to make a neat comparison between the religious encounters before, and those after, the Soviet era. For one, the ‘traditionalist’ Mennonites (like the Orthodox Christians) of the early twentieth century do not compare easily to the charismatic forms of Christianity that became so successful in the early 2000s. And although several similarities between both periods can be highlighted – the collapse of government structures, economic crisis, the thriving of millenarian sentiments – the landscape in which the missionaries operated was profoundly different. The postsocialist transitions of the 1990s followed seventy years of Soviet modernization which had eroded communal ties and had instilled new conceptions of selfhood, culture and religion. The crucial difference with the earlier epoch, it seems, is not so much societal disruption as such, but rather how these disruptions related to the prevailing modalities of life on which they acted.

Introduction

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Therefore, to understand why conversion assumed significant proportions at the turn of the twenty-first century, it is insufficient to focus on the strategies used to convert and the motives underlying conversion alone. First of all, we need to analyse what made conversion a conceivable option. To answer this question, it is essential to review the impact of the Soviet modernist project on conceptualizations of religion and identity.

The Possibility of Religious Shifts

The cases of conversion discussed in this book are all, to an extent, the outcome of intentional acts. Although the converts involved may have had limited options or have made only haphazard decisions (e.g., Pelkmans, Chapter 8), these were nevertheless conscious choices. This element evokes one of the crucial paradoxes of conversion. Anthropologists see religion as tightly embedded in social contexts, and constitutive of social networks and cultural practices. But if specific religions tangle individuals into larger networks, then how is it possible that people shift their religious affiliation? The most obvious answer is that, because of the embedded character of religion, conversion occurs most frequently under conditions of societal distress, when social networks and institutional structures lose their strength or break down. That is, contemporary societies with high rates of conversion tend to be those in which grand projects of modernization have run into disarray or have been overtaken by the destabilizing effects of global capitalism (Pelkmans, Vaté and Falge 2005). Across post-Soviet Eurasia, moreover, such disruptions followed decades of anti-religious policies. Initially, most scholars of religion focused their discussion largely on how successful or unsuccessful the Soviet regime was in creating an assertively atheistic society. While some stressed the decline of religious knowledge and the destruction of religious institutions (Greeley 1994; Bourdeaux 1995), others highlighted the tenaciousness of religion vis-à-vis Soviet repression (Husband 2000; Bennigsen and Wimbush 1985).2 This narrow focus has reinforced the assumption that we are dealing with a process of continuity – or interrupted continuity – between contemporary religious forms and their presocialist referents. However, rather than assuming or denying continuity, we need to acknowledge that Soviet rule did more than simply repress religions. It also influenced understandings of religion and modes of religiosity (see also Shahrani 1984; Saroyan 1997). While Soviet rule was unique in the way it combatted religious expression, it was at the same time firmly rooted in the Western project of modernity. And as in the West, one crucial byproduct of this modernist project was the objectification of religion. As such, it fostered the modern notion that religion constitutes a separate category to which individuals can define their stance. Furthermore, this process was directly related to the Soviet authorities’ classificatory efforts by which ethno-national categories became not only imagined but penetrated the everyday life of Soviet citizens (see, e.g., Hirsch 2005).

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Along similar lines, Asad has argued that ‘the centrality of self-constructive action is due to a specific epistemic structure’ (1996: 265), the modern project which made it possible for people to conceive of themselves as having an identity and of being able to select and integrate new elements in that identity.3 What needs attention, then, is the process by which people came to have a ‘religious identity’ and by which religion became objectified. The point I wish to highlight is that, even before conversion became a conspicuous phenomenon, such changes in popular conceptualizations of religion and its ties to personhood had created the basis for self-constructive action vis-à-vis religion. The combination of identity politics and religious objectification in the Soviet Union had several unanticipated results. First, it reaffirmed, and inscribed in popular consciousness, ideas about the close connections between religious and ethno-national categories. That is, the understanding of religious affiliation was increasingly framed around ideas of cultural heritage, leading some observers to speak of the ‘folklorization’ of religion (Peyrouse 2004; Bellér-Hann 2002). This also meant that adherence to an ethno-national group automatically conjured up a specific religious tradition. Even when not professed, religion continued to be the real sense of difference. Thus, a Kazakh who was a member of the Communist Party and held an atheist world-view would still claim to be a Muslim as this indicated his cultural background.4 From a local perspective, the notion of ‘atheist Muslim’ was not perceived as an oxymoron. Another example is that among the non-Christian populations of Siberia and Central Asia, Jesus was often seen as the ‘Russian God’ (see the contributions to this volume). Perhaps the best indication of the ethno-religious principle is the exception pointed out by Broz in his chapter about the Altai region. He argues that Altaians did not think of themselves as ‘having’ a religion until recently. Tellingly, this lack of ‘having’ a religion coincided with the idea that they were equally lacking culture. Broz’s analysis shows some similarities to Epstein’s (1995) and Borenstein’s (1999) depiction of the post-Soviet religious landscape as consisting of an undifferentiated mass of ‘believers’ (veruiushschii) who were free to pick and choose from diverse religious traditions. However, Broz also demonstrates how the recent surge of national ideology and the influx of missionaries produced more exclusive notions of religion to which Altaians increasingly needed to define their stance. The idea of roaming religious consumers is even more problematic in most other cases represented in this volume. As indicated, most people in the Soviet Union had accepted the idea that religions are bounded and concrete entities connected with specific ethnicities. It is because of this local salience of ethno-religious concepts that most contributors to this book are able and willing to speak about conversion – as a shift of religious affiliation – at all. Rather than ‘freely’ picking and choosing religious elements, the ethnicization of religion meant that conversion acts had social consequences that reached far beyond specifically theological concerns. The interrelated processes of the ‘ethnicization’ and ‘folklorization’ of religion that developed during Soviet times are crucial for understanding the twists and turns of religious change after the implosion of communist ideology. In the early

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1990s, one trend was the further appropriation of religion by national ideologies, promoted by new elites as a source of political legitimation and mobilization. Russian Orthodoxy, for example, ‘moved from its old imperial and meta-ethnic meaning to a more exclusive and ethnically bound one [which was] more publicly visible, and more politically instrumental’ (Agadjanian 2001: 481). In this volume, Wanner points out that in Ukraine a religious and national resurgence occurred simultaneously because political leaders positioned religion as a key attribute of nationality. Intensified incorporation of religion in national ideologies also characterized the situation in most Central Asian republics. In Uzbekistan, for example, the Karimov regime staged ideas about spiritual heritage that included Uzbek heroes, national monuments and folklore in order to promote a compliant and unthreatening form of ‘Uzbek Islam’ (Rasanayagam 2006). National forms of religion were particularly attractive in the initial phases of post-Soviet independence. But the ‘nationalization’ of religion also produced discontent from within, and excluded those who fell outside the bounds of the (imagined) nation. In addition, ‘nationalized’ religions became increasingly vulnerable when newly independent states failed to deliver on promises of affluence, stability and security. With the deepening of economic inequality, the newly dispossessed (Nazpary 2002) became increasingly open to religious forms that provided plain and hopeful explanations of human suffering, and offered entrance into tightly knit moral communities. These increasing tensions between national and religious categories produced various outcomes. Discontent with ‘official’ Muslim structures reinforced the attractiveness of decentralized Muslim networks that voiced frustration with the outcome of the postsocialist ‘transition’ and stressed textually-based interpretations of ‘true Islam’ (Rasanayagam 2006). However, as Rigi (1999) has argued, the demands of these new Muslim movements were not always compatible with the ideas of ‘post-Soviet’ people, especially those of urban women. The young Kazakh women he describes turned to religion to find recourse from the hardship and ‘immorality’ of post-Soviet urban life. But far from being welcomed, these ‘modern-looking’ women often faced hostile attitudes from newly pious Muslims. The tensions thus produced rendered these women’s original ‘Muslim identity’ increasingly problematic, creating a space in which well-funded evangelical missionaries could profit. The indigenous people of Chukotka in north-eastern Siberia present an interesting variant on this theme. Vaté (Chapter 3, this volume) describes the process by which the Chukchi adjusted to Soviet life while covertly continuing to practice shamanic rituals. The renewed prominence of Orthodox Christianity after 1990 worsened the already inferior status of Chukchi as pagans (iazychniki) within a Russian-dominated public sphere. Discontent with this negative labelling, yet equally unwilling to accept a specifically Russian religion, Chukchi became increasingly responsive to Pentecostal Christianity. It offered a way to dispose of the inferior status of pagan without submitting to Russian-imposed values. Their conversion was in this respect an antiestablishment position strengthened by the appeal of international support and connections.

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These cases illustrate the new attributes of individual identity that developed in response to Soviet secularism, and attained religious characteristics after the Soviet experiment ended. Ever since Geertz (1963), religious identities have been labelled as ‘primordial bonds’ that are rooted in the past as opposed to the ‘modern’ notion of civic identity. But the cases presented in this volume show that such dichotomies clash with post-Soviet realities. Ironically, whereas the ‘secular’ establishment mobilized notions of primordial ethno-religious identity in its attempt to foster obedient civility, new religious movements linked people to modernity while deterritorializing identity by recasting it as a morally empowering choice (see Wanner, Chapter 9; McBrien and Pelkmans 2008).

Fading Modernity and the Appeal of the Modern

The relation between conversion and modernity has been discussed at length in anthropological literature. One of the earliest and most influential theses on this topic was by Horton (1971, 1975a, 1975b), who explained conversion as a quest for meaning in the face of modernization, arguing that the broadening of social horizons produced by colonial and postcolonial conditions increased the attractiveness of the encompassing world-views offered by Christianity and Islam. Although criticized for its intellectualist bias and inattentiveness to power relations (see, e.g., Fisher 1973), many anthropologists of conversion in (post)colonial contexts nevertheless adopted Horton’s central thesis that conversion can be seen as a product of a transformation from microcosm to macrocosm. Hefner, for example, argues that Horton ‘quite properly draws our attention to how incorporation into a larger social order acts as a catalyst for both conversion and the reformulation of indigenous religion’ (1993: 21). Others have taken this perspective to challenge conventional modernization theories by demonstrating that modernity is not necessarily secular but can be ‘enchanted’ (Meyer 1996) and that ‘religion, especially in a colonial context, can serve as a vehicle for inducting subjects into modernity’ (Werth 2000: 514). The relevance of such arguments resonates with the chapter by Vallikivi on the Nenets, a small reindeer herding group in the Russian North (Chapter 4). Vallikivi argues that their marginal status and exceptional isolation during Soviet times made the Nenets susceptible to exogenous spiritual ideas once capitalist change started to affect their communities in the 1990s. Rather than simply assuming that these changes catalyse conversion, Vallikivi examines the interactions between Russian Baptist missionaries and the Nenets. The Nenets valued these missionaries as gobetweens who provided access to economic markets and acted as transmitters of literacy. Aside from these utilitarian attractions, the Nenets and Baptists were linked by their shared ‘illegal past’, as both were outlawed during the Soviet period. Being separated from the state, the Baptists could more easily access the Nenets who saw in them good-willing agents rather than a threat to their reindeer and livelihood. The new bonds thus produced were salient in protracting interest in the spiritual messages of the Baptists.

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But the exceptional history of the Nenets simultaneously shows why the type of explanation put forward by Horton does not easily transfer to other post-Soviet contexts. Apart from reindeer herders and some others, converts usually did not move from ‘indigenous religions’ to ‘world religions’. Instead, they had been immersed in the Soviet ideological system and were (if only nominally) part of religious formations such as Islam, Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity. A further limitation of the microcosm to macrocosm thesis is that the political and economic changes of the 1990s can hardly be seen as a variant of modernization. In fact, these changes were often experienced in precisely the opposite way. Thus, Platz (2000) depicts postsocialist change as a trajectory towards ‘demodernized society’, while Verdery (1996) speaks of a ‘transition to feudalism’. These intentionally provocative images highlight the fact that the societal trajectories after socialism were often not about broadening horizons, but instead about shrinking possibilities. What then, is one to make of Peter van der Veer’s (1996) provocative thesis that ‘conversion to forms of Christianity in the contemporary period is not only a conversion to modern forms of these religions, but also to religious forms of modernity’?5 Life after socialism often entailed a widening gap between the dreams of modernity and the realities of life. However, as the dislocations produced by capitalist encroachment deepen, the appeal of the modern appears to strengthen (cf. Creed 2002). This last element surfaces in Lankauskas’s chapter, which discusses the Pentecostal Word of Faith Church in Lithuania (Chapter 6). This Church presents the bible as a ‘modern book’ and its new premises as an ‘ultra modern’ building. At the same time, its moral codes reject the post-Soviet condition by criticizing drug abuse, alcoholism and corruption. This dual message points to the complex relationship between Pentecostal Christianity and modernity. While on the one hand employing images of the modern and successfully adopting new media, they also confront the amorality of capitalist change. Their strength is to be able to establish locally tight networks of faith within which people find refuge from insecurity and destitution in the outside world. In short, they thrive on the exact discrepancies between the rhetoric of modernization and the disruptive realities of post-Soviet everyday life by effectively channelling sentiments of hope and resentment in a morally laden world-view directed towards a brighter future.

Technologies of Religious Change

The disparities produced by the disarticulation of labour, capital and markets have created both the physical and ideological environment in which evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity thrive. As symbols of ‘the West’ and of ‘modernity,’ they are well positioned to cater to people’s expectations, hopes and needs. Moreover, they are better entwined in global networks of finance than the Russian Orthodox Church or the ‘nationalized’ Islamic institutions.6 Undeterred by centralized bureaucratic clerical structures, the ‘new’ religious movements balance and prosper on the junction between forces of globalization and localization. They are embedded in wider transnational networks yet

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vigorously adjust religious messages to local concerns and translate them into a locally contextualized vocabulary.7 In a discussion of conversion in Africa, Ranger argued that the common tendency to focus exclusively on missionaries, and to see missionaries and local Christians as opposing categories, fails to recognize the complexity of missionary encounters and of religious change (1987a: 182–3). Instead, he argued, ‘we should see mission churches as much less alien and independent churches as much less “African”’ (1987b: 31, quoted in Meyer 2004: 454–5).8 This is undoubtedly also true for postSoviet Eurasia. Although some churches try to reproduce the exact structures and doctrines of their parent churches in the West, these tend to be less successful than those that are led by local pastors and attempt to ‘contextualize’ their religious messages (see Clark, Chapter 7).9 Moreover, while financial and institutional support is predominantly from Europe and the U.S., other links that connect evangelical activity across post-Soviet space are far more complex and multi-directional. In Ukraine, which was known as the Soviets Union’s ‘bible belt’, the most successful Church is led not by a Western missionary, but by an African preacher. The matter does not stop there, however. As Wanner indicates in this volume, Ukrainians have started to play a crucial role in mission work across post-Soviet space. Thus, Ukrainians trained in foreign-funded bible schools in Kiev show up in Vaté’s account of north-eastern Siberia as well as in Pelkmans’ chapter on Kyrgyzstan (Chapters 3 and 8). Within Central Asia, Kyrgyzstan has a special place in the evangelical imagination, being seen as a stepping stone to the rest of the Turkicspeaking Muslim world. Kyrgyz missionaries have also travelled to the Altai where, as Broz notes (Chapter 2), they work alongside American and Korean missionaries. These instances draw attention to the central importance of ‘outreach’ – on mobilizing believers to convert the unsaved – within evangelical and especially (neo)Pentecostal churches (see also Robbins 2004b: 124). It would be problematic to accept the title of the Russian-language booklet Every Christian is a Missionary (Maierz 1991)10 at face value, but its popularity among Kyrgyz Christians illustrates the emphasis on reproducing the missionary labour force. This activism is certainly an important factor contributing to the success of evangelical forms of Christianity as the various chapters testify. To gain insight into the mechanisms by which these contacts translate into individual religious change, attention to detail is crucial. In his chapter, Clark describes small groups of believers who become personally involved in the lives of potential converts. As with Harding’s (1987) account of Baptist conversion in the U.S., the crucial mechanism by which conversion is produced in these groups is by talking. The dreams, experiences and dilemmas of potential converts are reinterpreted within the new Christian framework. Moreover, these settings are also important in overcoming tensions between converts and their families. Besides offering emotional, social, and economic support to converts, ‘experienced believers’ translate Christian messages into ‘culturally appropriate terms’ to provide new Christians with the vocabulary needed to deal with negative reactions. Interestingly, the word Christian is often replaced by ‘follower of Isa [Jesus]’, a practice which avoids some ethno-religious

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sensitivities and lends credence to the ideal of forming a world community of faith that transcends cultural and ethnic differences. Transcendent views of culture are not only promoted by Evangelicals. In his chapter, Enghelhardt shows some of the unexpected ways in which ‘cultural’ dilemmas and emotions converge in conversion to Orthodox Christianity among Estonians. He focuses on what he calls ‘right singing’ to highlight the importance of emotions in a spiritual quest that pertains to morality, while also linking the convert to the imagined worlds of the Byzantium Empire. Obviously, the ‘elitist’ elements of this type of conversion make it unlikely that singing will attract large numbers of people, but by examining this small group we learn about the emotive, vocal and spiritual characteristics of ‘transition’ and the importance of translating these into narratives that resonate with intimate personal experiences. Such ties between technologies, experiences and emotions reflect the tension between utilitarian and intellectual depictions of conversion. As Robbins (2004a) argues, these approaches can make room for one another as they explain different stages in conversion trajectories. The notion of ‘rice Christians’,11 popular among secular Westerners who find it difficult to accept the powers of spirituality, assumes that the worldly motives that put the conversion process in motion also dominate its outcome (Robbins 2004a: 85; see also McBrien and Pelkmans 2008). But as Vallikivi points out (Chapter 4), we should not only focus on the original motives of contact but acknowledge that the motives may disappear from both discourse and memory, to make room for new forms of (collective) selfhood that have their own dynamism.

Discussing, not Defining, Conversion

Most authors in this volume use the term conversion with one of its most basic meanings – changing from one ‘religion’ to another – while being aware of the objections that have been levelled at such usage. The Comaroffs have argued that ‘the very use of “conversion” as a noun leads, unwittingly, to the reification of religious “belief”; to its abstraction from the total order of symbols and meanings that compose the taken-for-granted world of any people’ (1991: 251). A reification of belief would indeed be highly problematic, especially in the former Soviet Union where so many people grew up with only limited involvement in religious life, if any. That is, the contents and features of conversion acts need to be demonstrated rather than assumed. However, there are good reasons why the term should not be offhandedly dismissed. As David Gellner argues, ‘conventionally, religious change is only labelled “conversion” if it occurs across a boundary. Thus, as boundaries have become sharper between “religions”, so the issue of conversion has grown in political significance’ (2005: 755). As we have seen, such boundaries were reified by Soviet politics and became even more important in post-Soviet contexts. Moreover, while the Comaroffs speak of ‘the taken-for-granted world’ of people it should be stressed that Soviet cultural politics, like modernist projects elsewhere, left little taken for granted about the symbols and meanings by which people conceptualize ‘culture’ and ‘religion’.

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This book shows that it is possible and desirable to use the term ‘conversion’ as a sensitizing concept whose features differ from context to context and need to be demonstrated, analysed and explained. Thus, although conversion should not be used as an analytic concept with universal features, it is nevertheless useful to discuss academic attempts to define conversion, as these indicate which assumptions need revision and which blind spots require attention. Classical definitions of conversion narrowly focused on a (partly mythical) ‘Pauline model’, which saw conversion as an all-embracing personal transformation.12 This view infused stable and absolutist qualities to ‘pre-’ and ‘post-’ religious adherences, something which runs in the face of many conversion accounts. Sociologists of religion have made revisions to this classical model. They have outlined the ‘typical’ stages of conversion (Rambo and Farhadian 1999), the ‘typical’ convert (Snow and Machalek 1983), and debated whether the ‘central’ element of conversion is to be located in the shift between religious groups or in a shift in discursive articulation (Stromberg 1993; Wohlrab-Sahr 1999). Although these studies have provided much information, by trying to pin down the ‘core’ of conversion they have ignored the social and political embeddedness by which its features are defined (Hefner 1993). This oversight also characterizes several articles in the recent volume The Anthropology of Religious Conversion, edited by Buckser and Glazier (2003). In this volume, Rambo argues that conversion rarely involves a complete transformation and that conversion trajectories attest to the fact that ‘most human beings change incrementally over time’ (2003: 214). Conversion is, in the words of another contributor, a project that is never finished (Coleman 2003: 15–27). In the introduction to the volume, moreover, Austin-Broos ‘softens’ our understandings of conversion by presenting it as a ‘passage’ rather than as an abrupt breach (2003: 1). However, there is a danger in insisting that conversion is an ‘unfinished project’ or ‘passage.’ It reinfuses understandings of conversion with an individualist bias that assumes that converts are atomistic actors operating in an anonymous and pluralistic religious marketplace. Such a view may (or may not) be useful for understanding religious shifts in cosmopolitan urban environments, but is particularly problematic in situations where religion is politicized or where religious affiliation is tightly connected to ideas about ethnicity and nationality. At this point, it is useful to revisit one of the classical definitions of conversion. Nock described conversion as a ‘definite crossing of religious frontiers in which an old spiritual home was left for a new one once and for all’ (Nock 1933: 7). The problems with this definition are obvious: conversion is not necessarily definitive, while the ‘old’ and ‘new’ spiritual homes may lack solid foundations. However, in line with Gellner’s (2005) observation, it seems warranted to reserve the term conversion for acts that involve the crossing of conceptual, social and/or religious boundaries or frontiers. In other words, instead of trying to define the content of conversion, it is more fruitful to understand the ‘movement.’ Conversion is rarely an unfettered personal journey or passage to new realities. Rather, the act of conversion involves crossing boundaries while altering those boundaries in the process. The rigidity and porosity of these

Introduction

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boundaries depends on many factors. Therefore, the cultural, social and spiritual content of conversion and its implications will vary between different contexts. This volume documents a wide range of contexts in which conversion assumes different characteristics. At one extreme is Engelhardt’s account in which conversion is a process without a clear breaking point (Chapter 5). To his Estonian converts, the quest or journey seemed more important than arriving at a final ‘spiritual home.’ In a different context, Broz describes people who did not have an ‘old spiritual home’ but were actively trying to obtain ‘religion’ (Chapter 2). Though in this case the absence of concrete previous affiliations meant that conversion sparked little controversy, Broz also shows that new dilemmas emerged when people started to deal with the exclusivist features of ‘world religions’. In other instances conversion is far more disruptive, especially so on the Christian–Muslim frontier in Central Asia. In his chapter, Pelkmans shows that ‘context’ is more than just a static background against which conversion takes place (Chapter 8). He shows that conversion to Pentecostalism did not necessarily imply a radical transformation of spiritual convictions. But although conversion was in this sense incomplete, the negative reactions of neighbours and relatives made it impossible that his informants could also socially balance ‘half-way’ between Muslim and Christian communities. The resulting dynamics of conversion and reconversion created not only special Christian niches in a Muslim environment, but also new dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. In this sense, conversion does not only involve the crossing of boundaries, but also the creation of boundaries by converting. In its wide-ranging geographical and topical scope, this collection shows that conversion is a strategic theme for understanding wider transformations of social and religious life, and gaining insight into the ways individuals cope with these transformations. Linked to the disruptive qualities of state disintegration and of new economic disparities, these acts of conversion in turn produce new social formations and cleavages whose contours are only now beginning to show. By critically assessing the circumstances and dynamics of religious change, and by analysing the precise roles of missionaries, local religious institutions and the state in processes of conversion, the chapters advance anthropological knowledge about conversion, reaching beyond the postsocialist settings in which they are rooted.

Notes

1. Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad at the 1996 world conference on missions (quoted in Witte 1999: 7–9). 2. Notions such as ‘parallel Islam’ (Bennigsen and Wimbush 1985) or the ‘domestication of religion’ (Dragadze 1993) have reinforced the idea that if religion was repressed on some levels, it persisted – in original form – in others. 3. Identity, as something that people have, is a product of the specific historical processes of the modern era and is closely tied to the formation of nation states (Verdery 1994: 37; van der Veer 1996: 19). 4. This tendency was reinforced by the common practice of Soviet authors of referring to the populations of Central Asia and the northern Caucasus as ‘the Muslim part of the population’ (Anderson 1994: 94). 5. This quote is taken from the back cover of van der Veer’s (1996) book.

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6. This applies particularly to the ‘official’ Muslim structures. In part a legacy of Soviet politics, these structures largely copy the administrative structures of the newly independent republics (Saroyan 1997). 7. As noted before, certain radical Muslim networks are equally effective in this sense. However, they mostly gain adherents from within (nominal) Muslim communities. The recent special issue of Central Asia Survey on ‘Post-Soviet Islam: Anthropological Perspectives’, edited by Johan Rasanayagam (2006), is the most recent collection of essays dealing with this topic (amongst others) in a post-Soviet context. 8. See also Wanner (2004). She shows that in Ukraine the ‘mission field’ is characterized by alliances and rifts that cross-cut an imagined division between foreign missionaries and local evangelical believers. 9. The clearest exceptions to this trend are the top-down and standardized religious messages of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Unfortunately, their success in ex-Soviet Republics has been poorly documented. 10. The title given here is the direct translation of Kazhdyi Khristianin – Missioner, which is published by Logos, a German evangelical publisher. The work’s original title is The World Christian Starter Kit, and is a translation of Meyers (1986). 11. The term Rice Christians was first used in South and East Asian countries to refer to people who converted to Christianity out of the need to survive, but remained relatively disinterested in its spiritual message. 12. The ‘Pauline model’ of conversion refers to the biblical story of Saul, persecutor of Christians, who on his way to Damascus had a spiritual encounter with Jesus. After this encounter he took on the name Paul and started his missionary work (see Acts 9: 1–19).

References

Agadjanian, A. 2001. ‘Revising Pandora’s Gifts: Religious and National Identity in the Post-Soviet Societal Fabric’, Europe–Asia Studies 53(3): 473–88. Anderson, J. 1994. Religion, State and Politics in the Soviet Union and Successor States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Asad, T. 1996. ‘Comments on Conversion’, P. van der Veer (ed.) Conversion to Modernities: The Globalization of Christianity. New York: Routledge, 263–73. Austin-Broos, D. 2003. ‘The Anthropology of Conversion: An Introduction’, in A. Buckser and S. Glazier (eds), The Anthropology of Religious Conversion. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1–12. Bellér-Hann, I. 2002. ‘Rivalry and Solidarity among Uyghur Healers in Kazakhstan’, Inner Asia 3(1): 73–98. Bennigsen, A. and S.E. Wimbush. 1985. Muslims of the Soviet Empire: A Guide. London: Hurst. Berger, P. 1999. ‘The Desecularization of the World: A Global Overview’, in P. Berger (ed.) The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics. Washington, DC: Eerdmans, 1–18. Borenstein, E. 1999. ‘Suspending Disbelief: “Cults” and Postmodernism in Post-Soviet Russia’, in A. Barker (ed.) Consuming Russia: Popular Culture, Sex and Society since Gorbachev. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 437–62. Bourdeaux, M. 1995. ‘Introduction’, in M. Bourdeaux (ed.) The Politics of Religion in Russia and the New States of Eurasia. Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 3–12. Buckser, A. and S. Glazier (ed.) 2003. The Anthropology of Religious Conversion. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Coleman, S. 2003. ‘Continuous Conversion? The Rhetoric, Practice, and Rhetorical Practice of Charismatic Protestant Conversion’, in A. Buckser and S. Glazier (ed.) The Anthropology of Religious Conversion. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 15–27. Comaroff, J. and J. L. Comaroff. 1991. Of Revelation and Revolution, Volume I: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. –––––. 2000. ‘Millenial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming’, Public Culture 12: 291–343. Creed, G. 2002. ‘(Consumer) Paradise Lost: Capitalist Dynamics and Disenchantment in Rural Bulgaria’, Anthropology of East Europe Review 20(2): 119–25.

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Crew, R. 2006. For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Dragadze, T. 1993. ‘The Domestication of Religion under Soviet Communism’, in C. Hann (ed.) Socialism: Ideals, Ideologies and Local Practice. London: Routledge, 148–56. Englund, H. 2003. ‘Christian Independency and Global Membership: Pentecostal Extraversions in Malawi’, Journal of Religion in Africa 33(1): 83–111. Epstein, M. 1995. ‘Response: “Post–” and Beyond’, Slavic and East European Journal 39(3): 357–66. Fisher, H. 1973. ‘Conversion Reconsidered: Some Historical Aspects of Religious Conversion in Black Africa’, Africa 43: 27–40. Friesen, R. 2000. Auf den Spuren der Ahnen, 1882–1992: Die Vorgeschichte und 110 Jahre der Deutschen in Talas-Tal in Mittelasien. Minden, Germany: Verlag Kurt Eilbracht. Geertz, C. 1963. ‘Primordial Sentiments and Civil Politics in the New States’, in C. Geertz (ed.) Old Societies and New States. New York: Free Press, 105–57. Gellner, D. 2005. ‘The Emergence of Conversion in a Hindu-Buddhist Polytropy: The Kathmandu Valley, Nepal, c.1600–1995’, Comparative Studies of Society and History 47(4): 755–80. Geraci, R. 2001. ‘Going Abroad or Going to Russia? Orthodox Missionaries in the Kazakh Steppe, 1881–1917’, in R. Geraci and M. Khodarkovsky (eds), Of Religion and Empire: Missions, Conversion, and Tolerance in Tsarist Russia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 274–310. Greeley, A. 1994. ‘A Religious Revival in Russia’, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 33(3): 253–72. Harding, S. 1987. ‘Convicted by the Holy Spirit: The Rhetoric of Fundamental Baptist Conversion’, American Ethnologist 14(1): 167–82. Hefner, R. 1993. ‘World Building and the Rationality of Conversion’, in R. Hefner (ed.) Conversion to Christianity: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives on a Great Transformation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 3–44. Hirsch, F. 2005. Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Horton, R. 1971. ‘African Conversion’, Africa 41(2): 85–108. –––––. 1975a. ‘On the Rationality of Conversion: Part One’, Africa 45(3): 219–35. –––––. 1975b. ‘On the Rationality of Conversion: Part Two’, Africa 45(4): 373–99. Husband, W.B. 2000. ‘Godless Communists’: Atheism and Society in Soviet Russia. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. Janzen, H. 1988. ‘Im Wilden Turkestan’ – Ein Leben unter den Moslems. Giessen: Brunnen Verlag. McBrien, J. and M. Pelkmans. 2008 ‘Turning Marx on His Head: Missionaries, “Extremists”, and Archaic Secularists in Post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan’, Critique of Anthropology. 28(1): 87–103. Maierz, G. 1991. Kazhdyi Khristianin – Missioner. Bielefeld: Logos. Marshall-Fratani, R. 1998. ‘Mediating the Global and the Local in Nigerian Pentecostalism’, Journal of Religion in Africa 28(3): 278–315 Meyer, B. 1996. ‘Modernity and Enchantment: The Image of the Devil in Popular African Christianity’, in P. van der Veer (ed.) Conversion to Modernities: The Globalization of Christianity. New York: Routledge, 199–230. –––––. 2004. Christianity in Africa: From African Independent to Pentecostal-Charismatic Churches. Annual Review of Anthropology 33: 447–74. Meyers, G. 1986. The World Christian Starter Kit. Buckingham: WEC Publications. Nazpary, J. 2002. Post-Soviet Chaos: Violence and Dispossession in Kazakhstan. London: Pluto. Nock, A.D. 1933. Conversion. London: Oxford University Press. Pelkmans, M. 2002. ‘Religion, Nation and State in Georgia: Christian Expansion in Muslim Ajaria’, Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 22(2): 249–73. –––––. 2006a. ‘Asymmetries on the “Religious Market” in Kyrgyzstan’, in C. Hann et al. The Postsocialist Religious Question: Faith and Power in Central Asia and East-Central Europe. Berlin: Lit Verlag, 29–46. –––––. 2006b. Defending the Border: Politics, Religion, and Modernity in the Georgian Borderlands. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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–––––. 2007 ‘“Culture” as a Tool and an Obstacle: Missionary Encounters in Post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13(4): 881–99. Pelkmans, M., V. Vaté and C. Falge. 2005. ‘Christian Conversion in a Changing World: Confronting Issues of Inequality, Modernity, and Morality’, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology Report 2004–2005, 23–34. Peyrouse, S. 2004. ‘Christianity and Nationality in Soviet and Post-Soviet Central Asia: Mutual Intrusions and Instrumentalizations’, Nationalities Papers 32(3): 651–74. Platz, S. 2000. ‘The Shape of National Time: Daily Life, History, and Identity during Armenia’s Transition to Independence, 1991–1994’, in D. Berdahl, M. Bunzl and M. Lampland (eds), Altering States: Ethnographies of Transition in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 141–38. Rambo, L. 2003. ‘Anthropology and the Study of Conversion’, in A. Buckser and S. Glazier (eds), The Anthropology of Religious Conversion. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 211–22. Rambo, L. and C. Farhadian. 1999. ‘Converting: Stages of Religious Change’, in C. Lamb and M. Bryant (eds), Religious Conversion: Contemporary Practices and Controversies. London: Cassell, 23–34. Ranger, T. 1987a. ‘An Africanist Comment’, American Ethnologist 14(1): 182–85. –––––. 1987b. ‘Religion, Development and African Christian Identity’, in K. Holst Petersen (ed.), Religion, development and African identity. Uppsala: Scandinavian Institute for African Studies, 29–57. Rasanayagam, J. 2006. ‘Introduction’, Central Asian Survey 25(3): 219–33. Reimer, J. 1992. Seine letzten Worte waren ein Lied. Lage: Logos Verlag. Rigi, J. 1999. ‘Conversion of Young Women to Foreign Religious Sects’. Paper Presented to the Department of Anthropology, University of Edinburgh. Robbins, J. 2004a. Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. –––––. 2004b. ‘The Globalization of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity’, Annual Review of Anthropology 33: 117–43. Saroyan, M. 1997. ‘Minorities, Mullahs, and Modernity: Reshaping Community in the Former Soviet Union’. University of California International and Areas Studies Digital Collection, Research Series no. 95. http://repositories.cdlib.org/uciaspubs/research/95. Shahrani, N. 1984. ‘“From Tribe to Umma”: Comments on the Dynamics of Identity in Muslim Soviet Central Asia’, Central Asian Survey 3(3): 27–38. Snow, D. and R. Machalek. 1983. ‘The Convert as a Social Type’, Sociological Theory 1: 259–89. Stromberg, P. 1993. Language and Self-Transformation: A Study of the Christian Conversion Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. van der Veer, P. 1996. ‘Introduction’, in P. van der Veer (ed.) Conversion to Modernities: The Globalization of Christianity. New York: Routledge, 1–21. Verdery, K. 1994. ‘Ethnicity, Nationalism, and State-making:. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: Past and Future’, in H. Vermeulen and C. Govers (eds), The Anthropology of Ethnicity: Beyond ‘Ethnic Groups and Boundaries’. Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis, 33–58. –––––. 1996. What Was Socialism and What Comes Next? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Vladimir, Archbishop. 2000. ‘Christianity and Islam in Central Asia’, R. Sagdeev and S. Eisenhower (eds), Islam and Central Asia: An Enduring Legacy or an Evolving Threat? Washington, DC: Center for Political and Strategic Studies. Wanner, C. 2004. ‘Missionaries of Faith and Culture: Evangelical Encounters in Ukraine’, Slavic Review 63(4): 732–55. Werth, P. 2000. ‘From “Pagan” Muslims to “Baptized” Communists: Religious Conversion and Ethnic Particularity in Russia’s Eastern Provinces’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 42 (3): 497–523. Witte, J. 1999. ‘Introduction’, in J. Witte and M. Bourdeaux (eds), Proselytism and Orthodoxy in Russia: The New War for Souls. New York: Orbis, 1–27. Wohlrab-Sahr, M. 1999. ‘Conversion to Islam: Between Syncretism and Symbolic Battle’, Social Compass, 46(3): 351–62. Yurchak, A. 2006. Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Chapter 2

CONVERSION TO RELIGION? NEGOTIATING CONTINUITY AND DISCONTINUITY IN CONTEMPORARY ALTAI Ludek Broz Both those who think they exemplify the new and those who think they exemplify the old may, in pursuing that very division, be radical agents of change. —Marilyn Strathern (1999: 89)

This essay examines an apparent paradox in the religious lives of contemporary Altaians of the Altai Republic in south-west Siberia.1 In contrast to the commonly held belief that all social groups uphold a religion or religions, this chapter begins with the observation that, while Altaians, especially during Soviet times, maintained that they never ‘had’ a religion, they are now working extremely hard towards achieving that goal, with the result that they have ended up with several religions and world-views at once. Ironically, through their search for ‘religion’, some are realizing that perhaps they always ‘had’ a religion. In this chapter, I explain this unusual puzzle by arguing that what is happening in contemporary Altai involves an intensive and widespread conversion to a Western notion of religion. This process is closely connected with the drive towards nation- and nationalculture building that, since the early 1990s, has characterized many of the peoples once living within the former Soviet Union. In the case of the Altaians, two main paths of ‘conversion to religion’ may be identified: those involving the adoption of well-established, but foreign denominations (such as Russian Orthodox Christianity, evangelical Christianity, Buddhism and Islam); and those associated with various kinds of Ak Jaŋ activism, paganism or shamanism, which emphasize the reformulation and purification of existing Altaian tradition. The most striking common denominator of these conversions seems to be the widespread willingness to embrace (the notion of) a religion, hence my argument concerning the ‘conversion to religion’.

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My argument builds on the work of Agnieszka Halemba. In her recent book, Halemba (2006) argues that current changes in the religious life of Altaians are predicated on a process of national and cultural revival, and that this revival is characterized by increasing efforts at arriving at an institutionalized form of religion in which all can participate. While agreeing with her main points, this chapter approaches contemporary religious life in the Altai Republic from a slightly different perspective. Inspired by research among Altaian evangelical Christians, mentioned only in passing by Halemba, I will explore whether the concept of conversion, so central to the discourse of evangelical Christianity, can also be applied to describe changes in religious notions among Altaians more generally. Generally speaking, the category ‘Altaians’ refers to a ‘complex national/ethnic label, given to diverse groups of Turkic-speaking inhabitants of Altai, excluding the Kazakhs’ (Halemba 2008). The label Altaians has been in official use since 1948 when the ethnonym ‘Oirots’ was abandoned and the Oirot Autonomous Oblast’ was renamed the Altai Mountain Autonomous Oblast’. Recently, some Altaian sub-groups2 have also achieved official status: in 2000, the Chelkandu, Tuba and Telengits were included in Russia’s official list of the ‘Small Peoples of the North, Siberia and Far East’. Even though subsequent censuses straightforwardly classified people as either Altaians or Telengits and so forth, in popular understanding these categories are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, the Telengits, for example, would maintain that they are also Altaians. Fieldwork for this chapter was conducted in the capital and only city of the republic, Gorno-Altaisk (population 50,000), and in the village of Ulagan (population 2,600), the administrative centre of Ulagan region in a remote southeastern part of the Altai Republic.3 In official censuses, the population of Ulagan is classified as Telengits, so it could be argued that the latter would be a more precise ‘ethnic’ designator for the population. However, since all Telengits see themselves also as Altaians, and are (to varying degrees) involved in wideranging political projects aimed at promoting Altaian cultural, ethnic or national identity, I will refer in this chapter generally to Altaians. While social reality – and local opinions – allow for talking generically about ‘Altaians’, this is not the case for religious affiliation. Without wishing to enter into the broad anthropological debate about what is religion, I will use the word ‘religion’ to show what it does for the Altai, as a tool by which to demarcate one group from another. That is to say, upholding one’s specific religion means that one does not belong to another religion nor practise other rituals, and one is therefore not the same as other people of other religions. On the one hand, this idea of mutual exclusivity structures and informs relations between various religious groups, while on the other it separates all adherents of ‘religion’ from those classified in this chapter as being without religion. The first section of the chapter situates Altaian evangelical Christians, Orthodox Christians, Buddhists and various Ak Jaŋ activists in the context of national and cultural revival. The discussion will show that it is important for all groups to demonstrate continuity with Altaian traditions in order to be seen as a legitimate denomination. The second section shows why and how adherents of these groups can all be seen as converts to the idea of religion, and how this sets them apart from other – ‘non-converted’ – inhabitants.

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In February 2005 I went to see a celebration of Chaga bairam (or more commonly Chaga) in a kindergarten in Gorno-Altaisk. A succinct definition of Chaga is difficult to arrive at. Chaga is recognized by the local government as the Altaian New Year, celebrated around the beginning of February.4 In recent years, this recognition has led to Chaga being additionally celebrated at regional and village levels. In some regions, it is also celebrated unofficially within the family or the village community. Yet, despite its ubiquity, there still remains no consensus as to what Chaga precisely is or, indeed, should be. There are various different perspectives on the matter. Some Altains reject Chaga’s validity altogether, regarding it as the result of foreign, specifically Buddhist, influence. Others limit their criticism to modern-day manifestations of the celebration, and seek to change these. Another group, meanwhile, opposes its generalization on the grounds that Chaga is typical of only certain regions in the republic. In the context of this debate, it is telling that, whereas Chaga went uncelebrated in the kindergarten in Ulagan village, it was held in the kindergarten I visited in Gorno-Altaisk. The city’s kindergarten has a special class in which the children are introduced to ‘native’ Altaian customs and speak in Altaian. These

Figure 2.1. Celebrating Chaga in a kindergarten: the ‘Altaian’ costume competition. (Photo L. Broz).

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classes consist predominantly of children belonging to the educated classes, whose parents are anxious that their children learn Altaian, which is otherwise hard to do in the predominantly Russian-speaking city.5 On the day of the Chaga celebrations, all parents with children in the Altaian class were invited to take part in the festivities. The traditional Chaga ritual began in the schoolyard, where it was well below minus twenty degrees centigrade. The republic’s most renowned alkyshchy (a granter of blessings) had made a small fire around which the children gathered. The alkyshchy began by blessing those assembled, then fed the fire with butter, milk, flour and bread. After this the children and their parents walked around the fire several times and then they all moved to another part of the kindergarten’s garden to tie sacrificial ribbons (jalama) to a tree. Next, the parents and their – by now half-frozen – children reentered the building to take part in the cultural programme, which consisted of musical performances, little theatrical sketches and a competition in which children were judged on who was wearing the most beautiful traditional Altaian costume. With a parent-ethnographer presiding as the main judge, there was no doubting the seriousness with which the competition was taken.6 Last, children from the ‘non-Altaian’ classes and a boy from an evangelical Christian family, neither of whom had been present during the prior, and specifically ritual, part of Chaga, participated in the cultural programme.

Evangelical Christians

Altaian evangelical Christians are a small but growing community.7 Either encouraged by foreign groups or directly founded by them, several Churches arrived in Gorno-Altaisk in the mid 1990s. Of these, the largest and most successful are the New Life Church, the Korean Presbyterian Church and the Seventh Day Adventists. In the media, the transnational connections of these churches is often portrayed negatively, the main point of criticism being that it is only foreign money (from the U.S., South Korea or Germany) which enables the construction or purchase of church buildings and provides material and financial benefits to church members.8 Negative publicity – including accusations of insincerity and the betrayal of Altaian identity – complicate the lives of Altaian evangelical Christians. To be an Altaian, as Halemba (2006) points out, means at least two things. Firstly, all people with a historical (meaning one’s parents were born in Altai) and spiritually shaped relation to Altai are described as Altaians. Thus, for example, Russian ‘old settlers’,9 whose ancestors arrived in the region in eighteen century, are contextually referred to as Altaians (ibid.: 19). Simultaneously, the term Altaian refers to ethnicity as it is understood in the modern Soviet way: that is, as something primordial and genetically given. The way in which these meanings intersect may be described by employing the contrasting concepts of ‘code for conduct’ and ‘shared substance,’ first coined by David Schneider (1968) while working on American kinship patterns. Applied to the Altaian context, ‘code for conduct’ refers to knowledge of both Altaian language and customs, ritual and

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other practices of proper dwelling through which a native relationship with Altai is engendered; while ‘shared substance’ refers specifically to the racialized concept of Altaian ethnicity. People with a historic claim to Altaian identity find this claim threatened if they diverge from their specific code for conduct. The recent case of the Kazakhs of KoshAgach provides a salutary example. Arriving in the region approximately a hundred years ago, the Kazakhs jeopardized their special Altaian identity by travelling to Kazakhstan in the early 1990s in pursuit of a better life. Indeed, on their return a few years later, the already disillusioned Kazakhs found themselves no longer welcome in Altai itself. Halemba (2006: 40–1) convincingly argues that Altaian’s rejection of the returning Kazakhs stemmed from the conviction that the latter had somehow betrayed Altai and hence lost their Altaian identity as a result of their sojourn in Kazakhstan. More seriously, a failure to follow the code for conduct by those with a claim to shared substance – that is, people who are ‘ethnically’ Altaian – creates rupture rather than simple loss. This became apparent in a short discussion I witnessed between a teenage boy and an Altaian language teacher. The young man challenged the female teacher by saying: ‘There is no need to learn Altaian. Russian is more important, it is everywhere, in TV, at school. We live in Russia and after all I am Russian’. The teacher stood up, marched the boy to the classroom mirror and said: ‘Look at your face (mordu, a Russian word). You are not Russian and Russians will never accept you as one of them. You better make sure your own people accept you’. The teacher, I suggest, was referring to the discrepancy between the (unalterable) shared substance manifested in the ‘Asiatic face’ and the code for conduct represented by a firm knowledge of Altaian. What in this context is described as one’s first language is not necessarily the language one first learns as a child (which may be either Russian or Altaian). Rather, the Altaian language achieves its pre-eminence as part of the prescribed code for conduct; and, in order for a person to be Altaian, native-level language skills must complement the shared substance associations. Regarding the Chaga celebration, I believe that Altaian evangelical Christians face a comparable clash of ideals. The Altaian evangelical father and his son did not take part in the ritual celebrations described as this would have violated the Bible’s first commandment: ‘I am the Lord thy God … you shall have no other god before me’ (Exod. 20: 2–3; Deut. 5: 6–7). Had the boy gone to the ‘nonAltaian’ class (where several ‘ethnic’ Altaian children go), his participation in Chaga would have been automatically limited to the cultural programme. Yet, since his parents subscribe to the idea that shared substance should be complemented by code of conduct – most significantly language competence – they sent their child to the Altaian class, where participation in the Chaga ritual is also expected. As aspects of this clash with their evangelical beliefs, these parents and their children found themselves hovering rather awkwardly in the dressing room until the ritual had finished. Their lukewarm commitment to Chaga – and their subsequent symbolic marginalization – mirrors the evangelists’ general position within Altai’s public discourse. Indeed, their opponents label evangelicals as ‘sectarians’ (sektanty), a

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condescending term reviving many of the negative meanings Soviet ideology projected on religion in general. When religion was rehabilitated after socialism and began again to play an important role in national and cultural revival, the term ‘sect’ absorbed the ‘sins of religion’. Ultimately, the same term has come to signify the dark other of postsocialist religious life. Thus, in both the media and everyday conversation, sects are known to be detrimental to the state and individuals alike. While seen as irrational, such sects are also understood to employ a malevolent rationality in the ways in which they maintain control over the minds of their members.10 Accordingly, in public discourse, their adherents are caricatured as marionettes, incapable of understanding the deceit in which they are involved. At a deeper level, they are criticized for having violated the principle that, to be Altaian, one must possess both shared substance and code of conduct. In short, the accusation that one belongs to a sect is paired automatically with the notion that one has abandoned or betrayed Altaian culture and is, therefore, no longer fully Altaian. Yet, the clear-cut division between ritual and cultural parts of the Chaga celebrations also provide a way out for the beleaguered evangelical Christians. In the Soviet context, kul’tura (‘culture’) rose to be ‘one of the main value-charged ideological terms’ (Volkov 1999: 211). The notion of culture was, moreover, tightly linked to the ideal of self-perfection. Thus, ‘to be cultured’ (byt’ kul’turnym) entailed the possession of good manners, as well as an interest in literature, theatre and other manifestations of culture in an ‘opera-house’ sense. Throughout the early 1990s, both Russians and educated Altaians would repeatedly complain to me that they were surrounded by people with ‘no culture’. I, on the other hand, being from Europe and often seen reading or using a handkerchief to blow my nose, was referred to as a person ‘of culture’. In the context of national revival, the term ‘culture’ gradually broadened its meaning so that it came to stand for ‘national culture’ and ‘tradition’. Within an enriched meaning, as Wagner points out, the term retains its ‘several associations’ – all of which derive significance from each other through a process of ‘creative ambiguity’ (1981: 21). In contemporary Altai, the multiple associations of the term culture mean that it can refer to a nationally defined whole that, in addition to religion, also includes Altai’s arts, crafts, literature, folklore and dance traditions. Then again, however, culture in Altai can be taken to refer solely to the latter list, and thus excludes the question of religion. To evangelical Christians in Altai, a distinction between culture and religion is crucial. Notionally at least, this distinction renders it possible to change religion without losing one’s (national) culture. To reconcile their Christianity with Altaian culture, Altaian evangelical Christians utilize what some scholars have described as ‘appropriation of Christianity’ (Meyer 1994: 45). For the purposes of this essay, I will use the concept to refer to participation in an ongoing cultural revival in ways that are compatible with the adoption of evangelical Christianity. Thus, Altaian evangelical Christians actively support Altaian language and music, and services and Bible-study groups use the Altaian language. In these services, traditional instruments like the komus (mouth harp) and topshur (a two-stringed instrument), as well as well-established throat singing techniques, are often used. Even during

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Church gatherings in which Russians form the majority of the congregation, people show respect to Altaian culture. Indeed, these are the only occasions in Altai where I witnessed Russians singing in Altaian. Moreover, Altaian evangelical Christians are often passionate about Altaian costume, carving and ornaments; many Church members are in fact professional artists, musicians, dancers and craftsmen themselves. In that sense, Altaian evangelical Christians are at the vanguard of Altai’s national revival. To reconcile ‘Altai-ness’ and Christianity historically, some believers even represent Christianity as an essentially Eastern rather than Western religion. They do this, for example, by highlighting similarities between Altaians and the shepherds of the Old Testament. Moreover, some believers and missionaries elaborate on theories of Nestorian influence from medieval Mongolia that are allegedly visible in Altaian epics and morality. Unsurprisingly, the visible use of recognizably Altaian cultural symbols – such as singing techniques, hats made of fox paws and so forth – by evangelical Christians triggers charges of cultural abuse. Evangelical Christians are also sometimes accused of misleading people so as to convert them on the sly. Nevertheless, it would be wrong to describe cultural appropriation as a primarily evangelical strategy, the struggle for Altaian identity being no less real or sincere among other Altaians as among converts to Christianity. The difference is that Altaian evangelical Christians are required to struggle to merge their Altaian and evangelical identities into a coherent whole.

Religion as a Tool to Unite and Protect

In his study of missionary encounters in Kyrgyzstan, Mathijs Pelkmans notes the appearance of ‘unexpected synergies between Communist cultural legacies and new Evangelical cultural appropriations’ (2007: 882-3). In addition, Pelkmans observes that the ethno-religious composite – the idea that, by default, being Kyrgyz means being Muslim – is being increasingly challenged by textually oriented Muslim movements as well as evangelical Christians. Noting parallels in the ways communists and evangelical missionaries attempted to dissolve the union between religion and culture by ‘folklorizing’ the latter, Pelkmans argues that this synergy has supported the rise of evangelical Christianity in the area. In Altai, the situation is different. There is no easily identifiable ethno-religious composite, partly because Altaians have not historically upheld any world religion.11 Missionaries from the Orthodox Mission, originating in 1830, categorized Altaians simply as ‘pagans’. Later, when –ism words increasingly started to penetrate scholarly discourse on religion, Altaians became known as adherents of shamanism or Burkhanism (Anokhin 1994: 1; Gordienko 1994: 36). The Burkhanist movement – later known as Ak Jaŋ (‘white faith’) – began in 1904 with the appearance of a messenger of the Altaian mythical hero, Oirot Khan, before the herder Chet Chelpanov.12 Later on the messenger revealed to Chet’s fourteen-year-old stepdaughter that the Oirot Khan ordered people to gather in preparation for his imminent return. This message resulted in huge gatherings of Altaians in the Tereη valley. Since expectations of the return of Oirot Khan

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contained blatant anti-Russian language, local Russians – supported by Tsarist and Orthodox authorities – violently targeted the movement. Remnants of the movement, however, survived until changes in Soviet national policy occurred in the late 1920s and early 1930s (Sherstova 1997: 176). In the 1990s, the question of Ak Jaŋ was reopened by Altaian intellectuals. Religion, the primitive outcast of socialism, returned to kindle heated debates of ethno-cultural revival. Altaian intellectuals hoped that a common religion would help Altaians maintain their national identity which, according to some, they were about to lose (cf. Halemba 2006: 27, 38). These intellectuals imagined an ethno-religious composite as the desirable state of affairs, as well as a powerful force preventing assimilation into Russian culture. Yet, when it came to realizing it, various views turned out to be fatally incompatible.

Buddhism

When it comes to the creation of a national religion, the republic’s intellectuals appear to advocate two basic choices: either Altaians should adopt a world religion; or they should create a specifically Altaian religion out of suitable, existing components. A major supporter of the first choice is V.E. Kydyev, the distinguished journalist and publisher whose publishing house continues to play an important role in Altai’s cultural revival. Kydyev is known for being convinced that only a strong world religion, distinct from Russian Orthodoxy, will be able to serve as an efficient barrier to ‘Russification’. In his view, Islam would hardly be a suitable religion because it is associated with the unpopular Kazakh minority and, even before 9/11, evoked images of the terrorist in Russia. Moreover, as Kydyev acknowledged with a smile, it would be ridiculous to expect fully grown Altaian men to undergo circumcision.13 In one of our conversations, Kydyev told me about a meeting he had in 1993 with a Tuvinian pastor. The latter had suggested to him that evangelical Christianity might be the best option for the Turkic peoples of southern Siberia. While distinct from Russian Orthodoxy, the pastor argued, evangelical Christianity would be similar enough to decrease the possibility of clashes occurring between Altaians and Russians on religious grounds. Moreover, such a move would link Altaians and Tuvinians to the world’s more prosperous countries, such as the U.S.A. and South Korea. One would expect that, in the reigning antievangelical milieu, Kydyev would have dismissed this suggestion as nonsense. However, the opposite was the case: he discussed it as if it were a serious, if unrealized, option. The religion which eventually won his sympathy though was Buddhism – a choice which seems informed by the evocative power that the ‘deep past’ holds in postsocialist national revivals. After all, revival, as the word suggests, entails utilizing the past to advocate a particular vision of the future. Adherents of Buddhism in Altai emphasize the cultural proximity (referring to Mongolia and Tuva) and historical influence of Buddhism on Altaian culture. Adopting a revivalist stance, they claim merely to be dusting down a wellpreserved Altaian tradition rather than proposing something new. According to

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this view, Altaians have been Buddhists all along without realizing it (see Halemba 2001: 39). One Altaian Buddhist told me that, as a child, he had always wondered about the underlying meanings of the particular behaviours and customs he was taught, the origins of which had never been satisfactorily explained to him. Only after he started to study Buddhism seriously (in Buriatia and St Petersburg) was he able to fathom the logic behind these seemingly irrational Altaian traditions. Burkhanism, or Ak Jaŋ, is seen by Buddhists as proof of the Buddhist nature of Altaian traditions, with Burkhan in their view standing in for Buddha – indeed, one NGO engaged in the propagation of Buddhism is called Ak Burkhan. From this perspective, the question of whether Chaga is traditionally Altaian or Buddhist is irrelevant. The creeping process of conversion to Buddhism is no less controversial than conversion to evangelical Christianity. Halemba (2006), for example, describes the antagonism of villagers in the Kosh-Agach district to some Buddhist monks’ participation in their village’s Chaga celebrations. As a result, the first Buddhist stupa in the republic was destroyed by local ‘unknown vandals’. Recognizing this tension, Kydyev has started to speak of the need for ‘two wings for Altaians’. One ‘wing’ should be Buddhism; while the other should be grounded in an Altaian land-and-place-oriented spirituality. Kydyev’s model is inspired by Japan’s Shinto-Buddhist symbiosis and he hopes that, if realized, the plan would lead to a decline in anti-Buddhist sentiments.

Ak Jaŋ Today

S.K. Kynyev is a strong opponent of both Buddhism and evangelical Christianity. Rather, he proposes the notion of a specifically Altaian religion, by which he means Ak Jaŋ – a term he prefers to Burkhanism as he sees the latter as merely one stage or aspect in the development of Ak Jaŋ. Kynyev is leader of an organization known as Kin Altai.14 Aside from those pertaining directly to commerce, his activities range from organizing meetings of spiritual specialists and conferences about topics like Turkic national costume, to making ethnographic journeys through Altai, during which he gathers information from elders about Altaian traditions. Among his primary achievements, Kynyev counts the building of dozens of worship sites (tagyllar) throughout Altai. Kynyev has been successful in generating interest in Ak Jaŋ, but less so in keeping people within one framework. At the moment, there are several competing groups in Altai who claim to practice Ak Jaŋ, or Altai Jaŋ (‘Altaian faith’) or, as they sometimes put it, ‘paganism’ (normally referred to by the Russian term iazychestvo). Although I have suggested that the promoters of Ak Jaŋ aim to create a specifically Altaian religion, this does not prevent them from expressing an appreciation of, and interest in, similar forms of spirituality elsewhere. According to Kynyev, each nation has its particular ‘white faith’ (Ak Jaŋ) and he invests a lot in terms of money, time and effort in the development of international as well as inter-faith relations. The use of the Russian term iazychestvo for naming Altaian

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spirituality seems to suggest a bridge between various world traditions. As a young female sympathizer of Ak Jaŋ once told me: ‘they [the Orthodox clergy and Soviet authorities] used to say that we have no religion. But, in fact, we have the one which is the oldest, the most ancient of all: iazychestvo (paganism)’. Taken together, these statements suggest that the attraction of Ak Jaŋ to the people of Altai is located both in its deep history and its global occurrence, which allows it to be imagined as the world’s oldest religion. Several times I heard arguments about the invention of the first religion, and the idea that paganism was stimulated by the discovery of fire. With its notion of social evolution, there are echoes here of atheistic schooling. Yet, while atheistic schooling introduced the social evolutionary timeline as a proof of progress toward atheism, Ak Jaŋ activists turn this associated value judgment on its head. Thus, the same discourse of social evolution is ironically now being used to both advocate a specifically spiritual agenda and fight competing denominations. In this framework, Chaga is also assigned a position on the grand historical scale. For Kynyev, Chaga is a pre-Buddhist tradition of the region, which was only later adopted by Buddhists. Thus he opposes those Ak Jaŋ activists who associate Chaga with Buddhist influence and suggest that rather than reject it, it should be reclaimed. Ak Jaŋ activists, then, prefer an ethno-religious composite, while evangelical Christians favour an open relation between nationality and religious conviction. Their ideas about culture, nationality and religion, however, have much in common. Both orient themselves toward the past and emphasize continuity with perceived Altaian tradition. The need for such continuity is self-evident among the supporters of Ak Jan; yet, as shown above, it applies equally to evangelical Christians who elaborate on theories of medieval Nestorian influence or similarities between Altaians and Old Testament shepherds.

Religion – Agreement on the Subject of Disagreement

Another element shared by many religious players in Altai is an ambivalent attitude toward the term religiia (‘religion’). Needless to say, at the level of official recognition, all groups present themselves as ‘proper’ religions, rather than as sects. Religion is for them an entity which is exclusive in the sense that, for example, being a Protestant automatically excludes one from being simultaneously a Muslim. This partly coincides with the notion of religion formulated by atheist, communist schooling. Here, religion was also an identifiable entity, which was exclusive not only with regard to other religions but also to communist conviction and therefore seen as essentially wrong and negative. However, the negative connotations attributed to religion by communist propaganda have not been fully erased even today, and from time to time they resurface in various guises in contemporary debate. Different religious players are therefore ready to distance themselves from the label in order to discursively protect their denomination or even fight other denominations by labelling them a ‘religion’. Hence, Ak Jaŋ activists sometimes describe Ak Jaŋ as an Altaian ‘world-view’ (mirovozrenie) rather than as a religion per se, thereby suggesting that it is spiritually deeper, older and more encompassing than other religions. Likewise, Buddhists sometimes

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contrast the rational, intuitive and philosophical nature of Buddhism with the blindly religious nature of other groups. In turn, evangelical Christians talk about the nature of their faith (vera as opposed to the religiia of others) as far removed from the ritualistic nature of the Orthodox Church. Yet, even when denying that their ‘faith’ constitutes a religion, the evangelical ‘faith’ is still made commensurate with those other ‘religions’ by being conceptualized as mutually exclusive of them. As we have seen above, the Protestant converts would not on principle participate in the ritual part of the Chaga celebration. Given the contradictions and similarities of the religious agendas described, I suggest that the Altaian engagement with religion may best be characterized as ‘an agreement on the subject of disagreement’ (Amselle 1997). Uniquely, this engagement is often articulated through communist anti-religious propaganda. The title of this essay asks a question: ‘Conversion to Religion?’ In phrasing it like this, I imply the possibility that, until recently, Altaians simply had no religion in the exclusivist sense, though now they have begun to entertain the thought of embracing one. A discussion of the dynamics unfolding in the Ulagan region – where an agreement on disagreeing about religion is still largely absent – goes someway toward explaining this problematic.

Discontinuity

In autumn 2004, I was sitting in the kitchen of a retired elementary school teacher, Marina Ivanovna, telling her of my latest news. My regular visits, during which I would bring her up to date, were something I always remembered to do, and something Marina clearly appreciated. We had known each other since 1998, when I did three months of research in the village as part of my undergraduate studies, and we had developed a close bond since. That afternoon I told her that, on the following day, I was planning to go to the village of Balykcha with a friend of mine who also happened to be a distant relative of hers. The village is in the Chulishman valley, which Marina Ivanovna considers to be her homeland.15 As

Figure 2.2. Jalama offerings (Photo L. Broz).

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she was not merely an elder whose authority I respected but also a native of the valley, she felt she should advise me on the spiritual aspect of my journey. She suggested I take with me two strips of jalama, ribbon torn from new, usually white, material, which is used in many contexts as an offering to the local eeler. The word ee is often translated as ‘landlord’ or ‘owner’ (khoziaiin in Russian) but when paired with words like water, land or mountain it refers to the master spirits of a particular entity. The relation between the entity and the spirit is not always clear: for example, the question of whether tuudyŋ eezi is a spirit owner of the mountain, or an animated aspect of the mountain itself, is rarely answered. Nor is the relation between ee of a particular entity and the master spirit of Altai (Altaidyŋ eezi). It is nevertheless clear that eeler of all sorts deserve respect and the appropriate form of communication, of which a jalama offering is one.16 In light of this, the rational behind Marina Ivanovna’s advice was obvious: I was about to enter a ‘huge and powerful’ territory, to which I had not journeyed for a long time, and I should therefore make a jalama offering on the mountain saddle to maintain a good relationship with the local ee and thereby secure a successful journey. As she considered me a knowledgable person, Marina Ivanovna did not elaborate much further on these points. Rather, she preferred to focus on the technicalities of making the jalama (prescriptions for its length and width) and the correct way of fastening it. When it became time to leave, she re-assured me: ‘Anyway, I shouldn’t worry. Valera is joining you and he’ll supervise you on how to do it properly’. Of course, this comment would have been entirely natural had Valera not been one of the republic’s best known converts to evangelical Christianity. Marina Ivanovna’s daughter, who had just entered the kitchen, pointed out the contradiction, observing that, as a Protestant, Valera would not now tie the jalama or, indeed, maintain any form of relationship with the local eeler. Clearly astonished, the old woman enquired whether Valera was wholly Protestant. Until that moment, she had never been surprised that Valera had converted, but she simply could not understand how this fact prevented him from making sacrifices to the local eeler. There is space here to tell of another, related incident. In May 2005, while walking together towards our houses from the village centre, I asked Vera Alexeievna, a neighbour in her fifties, if she was going to attend the spring prayers (mürgüül) planned for the following Sunday. These prayers are referred to as a collective ritual offering to the master spirit of Altai (Altaidyŋ eezi) and, having been introduced in the 1990s by local Ak Jaŋ activist O.K. Askanakov, they are a reasonably new phenomenon in Ulagan. Nevertheless, they have gained a number of participants, and this has created some tension in the neighbourhood. Indeed, on this occasion, Vera Alexeievna replied disapprovingly that Askanakov was an ‘extremist’ (ekstremist) and that she did not subscribe to stuff like the mürgüül. She quickly added that her family did, of course, make sacrificial offerings (jalama) at the appropriate places and also made sure to visit the sacred healing springs (arzhan suu). She continued by saying that, although her family was Orthodox by baptism, they attended church only infrequently.

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Now, both stories are connected to the notion of kire,17 which in this context means ‘norm’, ‘share’, ‘portion’ or ‘balance’. Every hunter, for example, has kire – the amount of animals it is appropriate to shoot on a hunting expedition, as well as within one’s lifetime. Exceeding one’s kire leads to kinchek (often translated into Russian as grekh, ‘sin’; though adherents of Buddhism translate the word as ‘karma’). Kinchek may lead not only to punishment for the violator but can also be passed on to one’s offspring. In the context of hunting, it is often related that the sons of greedy hunters – that is, those who have exceeded their kire – are unsuccessful, or disinterested, in hunting. Indeed, anyone who is greedy or stubborn is likely to be described as kirezi jok kizhi (a person without kire), while a kirelü person (one with kire) by contrast is perceived as gentle, restrained, honourable and decent (Tybykova et al. 2005: 210). In Marina Ivanovna’s view, Valera was clearly a good man. After all, he worked hard to feed his large family, abstained from drinking, and was known for his honesty and reliability. Yet, from Marina’s point of view, good people should respect local eeler – both directly by making offerings, and indirectly by respecting the kire. Valera’s willingness to not sacrifice potentially implied a failure in the kire idiom as well. To Marina, such actual and potential failures were incomprehensible in the case of a man she regarded as a good person. This suggests that, within the Altai community, the conversion process to evangelical Christianity does not involve a switch merely from one discrete set of spiritual ideas and practices to another. Rather it has wider moral implications. To be specific, it is perceived as a destabilization of kire-defined moral personhood. This interpretation helps to clarify the point made by my neighbour, Vera Alexeievna, in the second story. She accused Askanakov and his associates of being ‘extremists’ and it was not uncommon to hear negative sentiments regarding Ak Jaŋ. In 1999, Askanakov and his sympathizers constructed a worship site (tagyl) on Kara Kaia, a mountain above the village of Ulagan. The construction of the tagyl was the cause of a rift between Askanakov and Kynyev, the more famous advocate of Ak Jaŋ. Kynyev had previously supported the Ak Jaŋ revival in Ulagan, but opposed the placement of a tagyl in a place which contained the word ‘black’ (kara) in its name. Askanakov stood firm and left to form his own separate group; not, it should be noted, the first schism to be triggered by Kynyev. This internal disagreement was followed by a public one that included other sectors of the Altaian population. Indeed, a group of local Orthodox Christians erected a wooden cross on the top of the Kara Kaia a few hundred meters above the tagyl. Among Ak Jaŋ proponents, this was perceived as a wilful intrusion on sacred ground and a symbolic attempt to assert the superiority of Christianity over Ak Jaŋ. Their response was meted out within a few weeks: more ‘unknown vandals’ removed the cross and threw it in the Bashkaus River. Soon after this, the Orthodox Christians responded by erecting a new cross with a concrete foundation in the same place.18 Around that time, Valera – the evangelical convert whose behaviour had so astonished Marina Ivanovna – was asked by a former classmate about what he was going to do regarding the battle over Kara Kaia. Valera now proudly recalls that he was not bothered by the fracas over the

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mountain. It had, after all, always belonged to its creator anyway. Instead, what most bothered him was the state of the souls of the people living in Ulagan. He would, he remembers answering to the classmate, fight with all his might for their salvation. It is significant, I believe, that from the classmate’s point of view, the controversy did not involve only Orthodox Christianity and Ak Jaŋ; rather, he also expected evangelical Christians to get involved. Valera’s response could be seen as confirming this view since he used the mountain rhetorically to pursue his religious agenda and set off his denomination from others. Here is the core argument of my chapter. In the second story, Vera Alexeievna accused Askanakov and his associates of being ‘extremists’, yet quickly pointed out that she herself performs sacrifices to the local eeler, while also to some extent trivializing her commitment to the Orthodox Church. In making these claims, Vera was representing herself and her family as people who – regardless of their specific belief or denomination – live in congruence with the general Altaian notion of kire. Further, her accusation of extremism was not directed against an evangelical ‘sect’; rather, she was targeting a group of Ak Jaŋ revivalists. This suggests that, from the perspective of kire-defined moral personhood, both groups – the ‘evangelical sectarians’ and the ‘Ak Jaŋ extremists’ – are seen as comparable. The question asked by Valera’s classmate similarly suggested a connection (even though realized in terms of an alleged clash of interests) between evangelical Christians, Ak Jaŋ revivalists, and Orthodox Christians. Such a view coincides well with Halemba’s observation from the Kosh Agach region. Her informants suggested that people like Ak Jaŋ activist Kynyev ‘who consciously engage in the dissemination of their religious views are acting in a way which reminds them closely of the missionary activities of Orthodox Christians, Catholics, Jehovah’s Witnesses and new Protestant Churches’ (2003: 179). I suggest that evangelical Christians, Orthodox Christians and Ak Jaŋ followers appear similar because they share the notion of religion as a discrete set of spiritual ideas, practices and attitudes which are mutually exclusive. I therefore suggest to view followers of these denominations as fellow converts to such a notion of religion. Even though Ak Jaŋ followers would reject the label ‘converts’ because they claim to pursue the spiritual practices of their ancestors, the way they handle these practices, as clearly defined and mutually exclusive to Christianity (or Buddhism), makes them similar to Christians or Buddhists as fellow converts to the idea of religion. On the other hand there are people, like Vera Alexeievna, who apparently do not subscribe to the notion of religion. Thus in that specific sense these non-converts do not have religion even though they are involved in many practices which are likely to be seen as religious.

New Life

How do adherents of religion see the non-converted? As I have shown in the first part of this chapter, followers of the various denominations often display patronizing views of the imagined nation as a whole. Buddhists, for instance,

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describe the ‘humble Altaians’ as non-conscious followers of their path, while Orthodox Christians present the Altaians as inexperienced members of their Church.19 In both cases the discourse of continuity is being utilized. Such inclusive patronizing is, however, not the only manner in which those who are inarticulate in terms of religious affiliation are conceptualized. To capture the range and complexity of views among these ‘converts to religion’ towards those remaining outside the boundaries of their communities, I present contrasting discourses – of rupture and discontinuity – emerging from the act of conversion. In their conversion stories, Altaian evangelicals talk about establishing a new life in Christ after having started to believe (uverovali, priniali Isusa). In their personal testimonies, which form an integral part of services (especially, but not exclusively, when newcomers are present), believers describe their lives within a fixed framework. Their conversion is invariably presented as moment of new life, rebirth and liberation (osvobozhdenie). Such liberation involves the shaking off of old ways and, in particular, old addictions, especially alcoholism. I had known Alexei since 1998. In 2004 I found out that he (and the other members of his nuclear family) had converted to evangelical Christianity. He told me how his sudden acceptance of Jesus had changed his life, including help him overcome alcoholism. Yet, several episodes of drunkenness, which I happened to witness, undermined his happy conversion narrative. Alexei’s wife talked about their struggle as being a part of the conversion process. She said that Alexei had not liberated himself fully yet (poka ne sovsem osvobodilsa). On the one hand she presented conversion as a breaking point – a moment through which new believers realize the discontinuous nature of the past – yet, on the other hand, her husband’s excesses reminded her that conversion was only the beginning of a life-long project of ‘learning how to live with Christ’. The combination of the idioms of ‘breaking point’ and ‘life-long project’ allows converts to express a sense of rupture with the past, as well as the ongoing nature of their conversion. Even though in the Altai Republic only evangelical Christians as a rule employ the narrative of being ‘newly born’, I have occasionally heard comparable life stories among adherents of other denominations. Viktor, a spiritual leader of the Orthodox Church community in Ulagan, told me how he embraced Christianity. After a period of simmering interest, he suddenly ‘experienced a taste of Christian life’ (pochustvoval vkus christianskoi zhizni). This was a real point of change in his life, after which he began to fast, to celebrate Orthodox festivals and to engage more deeply with all aspects of his religion. Eventually, he formed a community of Orthodox believers in Ulagan, restored a chapel there, and started to build a church at the foot of Kara Kaia, the mountain mentioned above. It should be noted, however, that the postulation of radical personal change marked the fact that Viktor stood out in the local Orthodox community and perhaps it boosted his status as a lay spiritual leader. Perhaps more often I encountered narratives involving personal discontinuity among Ak Jaŋ followers in Altai. A schoolteacher and spiritual leader of the local Ak Jaŋ revival, Klaudia Michailovna, shared her thoughts about spirituality during one of my journeys through Altai with Kynyev. Her story began with a

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description of Klaudia’s spiritual needs and of how she was seeking a way to fulfil these. First she had read about yoga, studying the works of Nicholas Roerich,20 and then looked to Buddhism for answers. Eventually, she met Kynyev and realized that she had, at last, found what she was looking for: Altaian spirituality, Ak Jaŋ, presented itself as the most fulfilling option. Through Kynyev, she claims to have ‘found herself’ and, as a result, her life has changed. Now, she seeks to develop her spiritual gifts and has revived the communal rituals of her village. Similar stories were quite common among Ak Jaŋ followers. Kynyev himself, for example, signalled his spiritual change by changing his Russian name Sergei to the Altaian one of Akai.21 When thinking about what converts break with in their narratives we can again see Altaian evangelical Christians as being the most expressive among the ‘converts to religion’. Apart from stressing that they have left behind their personal sins, it is clear that the ‘description of the “old” religion that one has left is often a part of the conversion narrative’ (van der Veer 1996: 1). Thus, Anatolii, an Altaian convert to evangelical Christianity, described himself as a former ‘pagan-shamanist’ (iazychnik-shamanist)22 who has become a follower of Jesus. In his own words, he had abandoned the ‘veneration of cloths’ (a denunciative description of jalama offerings) for the ‘living God’. This kind of depiction of one’s personal past is common among evangelical Christians but less so among followers of other religions. While ‘conversion to religion’ enables one to state the denomination of one’s ‘former religion’, the assumption of such labels as ‘pagan-shamanist’ by the nonconverted, or indeed their imposition on them, is far trickier.23 Travelling through villages with Urmat, an Altaian evangelical missionary who studied in Kazakhstan, we entered the house of a couple who had seemed to be receptive to Urmat’s teaching on previous visits. There were evangelical posters and calendars hanging in honorary places on their walls; yet, there were also other things hanging there. Pointing to a bunch of thorny bushes paired with a bunch of juniper above the door, Urmat asked, ‘Why, by God, do you hang these?!’ It was a rhetorical question, since Urmat knew that such bushes are traditionally meant to protect a house from evil forces. Therefore, even though Urmat asked gently and calmly, the question generated a heavy silence. From within this silence, Latour’s (1999: 270) observation, that the most painful aspect of anti-fetishism is the ‘accusation’ of it, seemed almost destined to ring forth. What could be described as an unfinished set of spiritual ideas and practices proved once again its ‘additive’ capacity, to use Hefner’s (1993: 23) words. Instead of switching from paganism-shamanism as evangelical converts imagine themselves, the couple from this story simply ‘added’ what seemed to be an interesting and powerful force to their repertoire. The fact that Urmat labelled the couple pagan-shamanists revealed him to be working with the ‘either/or’ model of religion held by ‘converts to religion’, from the perspective of which the couple were seen as mixing incompatible things.24 Thus, although it is difficult to define what was left behind in the process of conversion, what all ‘converts to religion’ seem to gain is the idea of the syncretist nature of the non-converted.

Conversion and Religious Pluralism in Altai

Conclusion

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In a recent article, Engelke demonstrated that, in African anthropology, Sundkler’s (1961) emphasis on continuity in the conversion process – captured in the metaphor ‘new wine in old skins’ – has long been influential (Engelke 2004: 82–3). According to Engelke, this is partly due to the lack of general anthropological theories of change; and, pace the general consensus, he argues that informants’ narratives of rupture or complete break should receive more serious consideration (cf. Meyer 1998). Engelke rightly points out that ‘we stand to gain from the language of breaks not because it replaces the language of continuity but because it compliments it’ (Engelke 2004: 106). Interestingly, Engelke’s informants ‘rejected [through conversion] many aspects of “custom” explicitly’, yet the anthropologist found that many ‘traces’ remained (ibid.: 106). In the cases of my Altaian informants, however, the situation was rather different. Here, the conversion process saw not merely the remains of traces, but also a fullblooded and conscious effort to build continuity as well as discontinuity. In the first part of this essay, I focused on contexts in which continuity was sought after by Altaian converts. When it came to questions of national identity and cultural revival, demonstrating the congruence between their religious stance and perceived Altaian tradition was considered of paramount importance by representatives of all denominations struggling for positive recognition in Altaian public discourse. Sometimes, as in the case of Kydyev, conversion itself was presented as a strategic move to secure local ‘culture’ or ‘tradition’ (cf. van der Veer 1996: 12). In other contexts, such as those detailed in the second part of the chapter, discontinuity was emphasized. Through narratives of rupture, informants contrasted their current religious stance with their former lives as well as the lives and religious affiliations of others. The critical outsider may well question the status of these narratives of rupture and suggest that they merely tend to obscure patterns of continuity. Yet, as Engelke points out – following Robbins (2003) – there is value in recognizing that ‘they are trying to change’ (Engelke 2004: 106). Similarly, we can say that there is value in recognizing that, in other contexts, my Altaian informants were trying to stay the same. At least in Altai, both continuity and discontinuity are not only present in the process of conversion, but are also recognized and aimed for by Buddhists, evangelical Christians as well as Ak Jaŋ followers. In examining what else these groups have in common within an Altaian context, I argued that each shares a particular exclusivist notion of religion as a discrete set of spiritual ideas, practices and attitudes. I group them, therefore, under the label of ‘converts to religion’. Such a classification coincides with the views of people like Vera Alexeievna, who see ‘converts to religion’ as ‘extremists’. By extension, my classification depicts people like Vera Alexeievna as non-converts; that is, as not subscribing to the notion of religion and thus, in a way, not having religion. This brings us to the paradox regarding the religious life of contemporary Altaians that I mentioned in the introduction. The banner of religion is being widely touted as the most effective method of cultural-national revival that will

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unite Altaians. Yet, those subscribing to the modern notion of religion are not able to reach their ideal of having one, unifying religion. Firstly, they possess diverse views about what religion to follow. Secondly, the narrow understanding of what religion is effectively obscures their goal. What, for the purpose of this chapter, I called an open, unfinished set of spiritual ideas and practices could in fact be, or was referred to, as a different kind of religion or religiosity. Thus from the point of view of researchers like Halemba, whose definition of religion is much more open than the one currently invoked among Altaians, ‘additive’ openness and diversity might be seen as the unifying theme of the Altaian religion. Indeed, the title of Halemba’s doctoral thesis, ‘Unity in Diversity’ (Halemba 2001), identifies this notion. Yet, converts to the concept of religion see each other as competitors and look at the ‘additive’ diversity of those not converted as detrimental deviations. This effectively bars them from reaching the desired state of having one, all-encompassing, religion.

Notes

1. I would like to thank Agnieszka Halemba, Caroline Humphrey, David Gullette, Rebecca Empson, Mathijs Pelkmans, Laur Vallikivi and Richard Gauvain for their comments on earlier versions of this paper. I also benefitted from the comments of participants at Cambridge University’s Mongolian and Inner Asian Studies Unit seminar where I presented some of the arguments in this paper in March 2006. 2. I have chosen the word ‘sub-groups’ to signify what is locally called etnosy altaiskogo naroda (‘ethnic’ groups of the Altaian nation) or plemia (tribes). 3. My doctoral fieldwork (2004/5) was kindly supported by the Cambridge Committee for Central and Inner Asia, the Anthony Wilkin Studentship, Corpus Christi College Cambridge, the Richards Fund and the Chadwick Fund. In Altai I was a research associate of Gorno-Altaisk State University. 4. The word Chaga stems from the Mongolian Tsagaan, meaning white, pure or sacred (Halemba 2006: 111). Equivalent New Year celebrations can be found elsewhere in Inner Asia (such as the Mongolian Tsagaan Tsar). Although they are often referred to as ‘the beginning of a new lunar year’ (ibid.: 111), the celebrations do not rotate through the solar year. Instead they can be thought of as the beginning of a solar year adjusted to the lunar cycle, similar to Easter, for example. 5. The population of the republic is about 200,000. Russians form the majority, while there are about 60,000 Altaians (including newly emancipated subgroups). Kazakhs are the third-largest group, forming about 10 per cent of the population. 6. Altaian ethnographers are the prototypical example of local intellectuals and are, as pointed out above, deeply involved in the process of cultural and national revival. 7. This trend is not restricted to Altai(ans). Similar trends are discussed in studies of Siberia and other parts of Russia (Filatov 2000; Lunkin 2000; Krindatch 2004) and indeed the entire postSoviet space (this volume). 8. The arrival of foreign missionaries has been equally negatively highlighted in the media. I estimate that currently there are about twenty foreign missionaries from such countries as the U.S., South Korea and even Kyrgyzstan. Their presence and their negative portrayal in the media has gradually mapped them on Altaians’ consciousness. When I first visited Altai in 1994, I was marked as a foreigner, one of the few that visited the region. In 1998 I met the first foreign missionaries but local residents did not, on the whole, associate me with them. However, during my doctoral fieldwork in 2004 this situation had changed: in many first encounters I was labelled as a missionary and dealing with this label became an integral part of my research stay.

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9. Many of these settlers were so-called Old Believers or Old Ritualists, who refused to accept Patriarch Nikon’s reform of the Russian Orthodox Church and separated from the Church in 1666/7. In order to escape subsequent persecution, Old Believers moved to remote and often newly acquired parts of the Russian empire such as Altai. 10. It is hardly surprising that all denominations object to being called sects. The handing out of evangelical leaflets was often followed by the comment ‘it is Christian, not sectarian. Don’t worry’. Sometimes I witnessed evangelical Christians referring to themselves ironically as ‘we, sectarians’ causing laughter among fellow believers. 11. Obviously, the decision whether or not there is an identifiable ethno-religious conglomerate depends on the way one defines religion. I should stress that I use the word religion as a local, emic term rather than as an analytic term. 12. The most important recent discussions of the Burkhanist or Ak Jaŋ movement are Sherstova (1997), Znamenski (1999, 2005) and Halemba (2006). 13. It should be noted that Islamic law schools are split on whether circumcision is a legal obligation for adult males to become Muslim. 14. This name literally translates as ‘Navel Altai’. In Altaian ‘navel’ is used metaphorically in ways similar to how the word ‘heart’ is used in Euopean languages to signify central position, high importance or breath taking beauty. 15. Marina Ivanovna was born in a herding camp (stoianka) north of the Chulishman valley. Her father died in the Second World War and she stayed in the camp with her mother till the age of ten when she was placed in the boarding school in Balyktuiul and Ulagan. The closest village to their camp, Chodro, was by that time liquidated partly due to the establishment of the Altaian National Park and partly because of kolkhoz restructuring. After her studies at the pedagogical college in Gorno-Altaisk, Marina Ivanovna moved back to Ulagan where she worked as a teacher till her retirement. 16. For further information on the concept of ee in Altai, see Halemba (2006, in press) and Broz (2007). For comparison with the Daur Mongol concept of ejin, see Humphrey (1996: 85, 108). 17. I am indebted to Altaian ethnographer Svetlana Tioukhteneva for first drawing my attention to this concept. She suggested that the notion of kire is as important to Altaians as concepts of time and space. 18. The controversy seems to be continuing. Orthodox believers started to build a church at the foot of Kara Kaia in the summer of 2005, interpreted by Ak Jaŋ followers as the worst provocation thus far. In the autumn of the same year an Orthodox church near Ulagan burned down, and various rumours about the causes of the fire circulated. 19. When the Orthodox mission was re-established in Altai at the beginning of the 1990s, Altaian intellectuals accused it of an expansive policy. The Church proclaimed the aim of the mission to be the education of those Orthodox believers who lacked proper knowledge of Orthodox conduct due to communism (see Halemba 2008). This line of approach is controversial because it begs the question whether non-practising and non-believing people can be regarded Orthodox Christians. Consequently, the Orthodox Church has often been accused of overestimating the number of Church members. 20. On the connection between Altai and Roerich, see McCannon (2002). 21. It is worth noting here that changing Russian names into Altaian ones is also common among evangelical believers. It is connected to the way people reconcile Christianity and Altai-ness, as discussed in the first part of this chapter. 22. I have deliberately avoided the term shamanism because, even though my informants sometimes used it, the term’s loaded meaning in scholarly discourse makes employing it problematic. Instead I have used the term paganism (iazychestvo), which is locally used in conjunction (or interchangeably) with the word shamanism. Moreover, it is clearer than in the case of ‘shamanism’ that it is an ascriptive term which has been eventually internalized. 23. I should repeat here, that by ‘non-converted’ I do not mean Ak Jaŋ activists who might intentionally call themselves pagans or shamanists. 24. Ak Jaŋ activists do not see their beliefs and practices in terms of mere cultural continuity. Rather they claim that Ak Jaŋ actually is the Altaian tradition. Thus when it comes to discontinuity

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Ludek Broz narratives, Ak Jaŋ followers tend to ascribe discontinuity to others, blaming ninety years of the Orthodox mission and seventy years of communism for the disintegration, loss and confusion among the general population. Whereas people like Vera Alexeievna proudly declare that they bring jalama offerings and also attend church, for Ak Jaŋ followers this illustrates the confusion and rupture with the pure past.

References

Amselle, J. 1997. ‘Napětí v kultuře’, Cahiers du CEFRES 12: 7–26. Anokhin, A.V. 1994[1924]. Materialy po Shamanstvu u Altaitsev, sobrannye vo vremia puteshestvii po Altaiu v 1910–1912 gg. po porucheniiu Russkogo Komiteta dlia izucheniia Srednei i Vostochnoi Azii. Gorno-Altaisk: Ak Chechek. Broz, L. 2007. ‘Pastoral Perspectivism: A View from Altai’, Inner Asia 9: 291–310. Engelke, M. 2004. ‘Discontinuity and the Discourse of Conversion’, Journal of Religion in Africa 34: 82–109. Filatov, S. 2000. ‘Protestantism in Postsoviet Russia: An Unacknowledged Triumph’, Religion, State and Society 28(1): 93–103. Gordienko, P. 1994[1931]. Oirotiia. Gorno-Altaisk: Ak Chechek. Halemba. A. 2001. ‘Unity and Diversity: Contemporary Spiritual Life of the Telengits of Ere Chui’, Ph.D. dissertation. Cambridge: University of Cambridge. –––––. 2003. ‘Contemporary Religious Life in the Republic of Altai: The Interactions of Buddhism and Shamanism’, Sibirica 3(2): 165–82. –––––. 2006. The Telengits of Southern Siberia: Landscape, Religion and Knowledge in Motion. London: Routledge. –––––. 2008. ‘What Does it Feel Like When Your Religion Moves Under Your Feet?’ Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 133(2): 283–99. Hefner, R. 1993. ‘Introduction: World Building and the Rationality of Conversion’, in R. Hefner (ed.) Conversion to Christianity: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives on a Great Transformation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 3–44. Humphrey, C. 1996. Shamans and Elders: Experience, Knowledge and Power among the Daur Mongols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Krindatch, A. 2004. ‘Patterns of Religious Change in Postsoviet Russia: Major Trends from 1998 to 2003’, Religion, State and Society 32(2): 115–36. Latour, B. 1999. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lunkin, R. 2000. ‘Russia’s Native Peoples: Their Path to Christianity’, Religion, State and Society 28(1): 123–33. McCannon, J. 2002. ‘By the Shores of White Waters: The Altai and its Place in the Spiritual Geopolitics of Nicholas Roerich’, Sibirica 2(2): 166–89. Meyer, B. 1994. ‘Beyond Syncretism: Translation and Diabolization in the Appropriation of Protestantism in Africa’, in C. Stewart and R. Shaw (eds), Syncretism/Anti-Syncretism: The Politics of Religious Synthesis. London: Routledge, 45–68. –––––. 1998. ‘Make a Complete Break with the Past: Memory and Post-colonial Modernity in Ghanaian Discourse’, Journal of Religion in Africa 28(3): 316–49. Pelkmans, M. 2007. ‘“Culture” as a Tool and an Obstacle: Missionary Encounters in Post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13(4): 881–99. Robbins, J. 2003. ‘On the Paradoxes of Global Pentecostalism and the Perils of Continuity Thinking’, Religion 33: 221–31. Schneider, D. 1968. American Kinship: A Cultural Account. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Sherstova, L. 1997. Taina Doliny Tereng. Gorno-Altaisk: Ak-Chechek. Strathern, M. 1999. Property, Substance and Effect: Anthropological Essays on Persons and Things. London: Athlone. Sundkler, B. 1961[1948]. Bantu Prophets in South Africa, 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Tybykova, A. et al. 2005. Altai Morphological Dictionary. Gorno-Altaisk: GASU. van der Veer, P. 1996. ‘Introduction’, in P. van der Veer (ed.) Conversion to Modernities: The Globalization of Christianity. London: Routledge, 1–21. Volkov, V. 1999. ‘The Concept of Kul’turnost’ : Notes on the Stalinist Civilizing Process’, in S. Fitzpatrick (ed.) Stalinism: New Directions. London: Routledge, 210–30. Wagner, R. 1981[1975]. The Invention of Culture, rev. edn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Znamenski, A. 1999. Shamanism and Christianity: Native Encounters with Russian Orthodox Missions in Siberia and Alaska, 1820–1917. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. –––––. 2005. ‘Power of Myth: Popular Ethnonationalism and Nationality Building in Mountain Altai, 1904–1922’, Acta Slavica Iaponica 22: 25–52.

Chapter 3

REDEFINING CHUKCHI PRACTICES IN CONTEXTS OF CONVERSION TO PENTECOSTALISM Virginie Vaté Closed to foreigners during Soviet rule, Chukotka, in the north-easternmost part of Siberia, began to open up to outsiders – under strictly regimented conditions – from the beginning of the 1990s. This new accessibility benefitted the activities of Protestant missionaries such as Baptists and Pentecostalists. Surprisingly, although indigenous peoples did not show much interest in Russian Orthodoxy in the nineteenth century (Znamenski 1999a; 1999b: 30–31), and in certain places resisted Soviet anti-religious policies by preserving their rituals (Vaté 2003), an intensifying process of conversion to evangelical Christianity has unfolded since the 1990s. Even though it is difficult to quantify the success of the evangelical churches, while in the field1 one cannot fail to note the impact of the Protestant presence on the way people – including non-converts – approach religion and everyday practices. I use the term ‘contexts of conversion’ to refer to this larger setting within which variable effects of and responses to evangelical Christianity are possible. This chapter addresses people’s ‘engagement with the logic of Christianity’ (Robbins 2007: 8). Robbins asserts that most anthropological theories have put greater emphasis on ‘cultural continuity as opposed to discontinuity and change’ (ibid.: 5), thereby ignoring ‘Christian converts’ claim to have experienced radical discontinuity’ (ibid.: 17). Taking up these issues, this essay explores how both continuity and discontinuity resonate in people’s lives in north-eastern Siberia and analyses how people express and interpret these (dis)continuities. Central to my approach is the concept of ‘interaction’, which stresses people’s agency and bypasses the problematic notion ‘syncretism’ with its evolutionist vision of history (see, e.g., Laugrand 2002: 22). Following Fienup-Riordan (1990: 69), Laugrand suggests, ‘studying conversion means to study an interaction, Christianisation being the result of a constant cultural negotiation’ (Laugrand 2002: 20, translation VV). Instead of trying to refine the term ‘conversion’, whose definition has been the subject of several debates (see, e.g., Rambo 2003: 213), this essay aims to

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contribute to the anthropology of conversion by ethnographically documenting how indigenous peoples of Chukotka negotiate the changes that confrontations with a new faith bring about in their lives and in their perceptions of their own identity. I will start with some general information about Protestant denominations in Chukotka and discuss how their influence has expanded. Then, I will present three different kinds of responses to the ‘logic of Christianity’: firstly, the redefinition of, and changes in, Chukchi practices by converts after conversion; secondly, the reinterpretation of these practices in terms of Christianity; and lastly, the reactivation of Chukchi practices as resistance to conversion.

The Context of Conversion

Chukotka covers a territory that is one and a half times the size of France and inhabited by 53,600 people, according to the 2002 census. This population includes 15,320 indigenous peoples, of whom 12,620 are Chukchis, 1,400 Evens and 1,530 Eskimos, otherwise Yupit or Yuit. Due to their proximity to the United States, these peoples suffered intense political pressure during the Cold War, and villages considered too close to the border were closed and their inhabitants resettled (Forsyth 1992: 366; Robert-Lamblin 1993: 79–80). Due to the influx of newcomers from the Russian ‘mainland’ (materik, R.)2 the indigenous peoples of Chukotka had become a minority on their own territory by the 1930s (Vakhtin 1994: 51). For them, as well as for other indigenous peoples of Siberia, the advent of Soviet rule meant disempowerment in many spheres of life: beginning in the 1930s, their subsistence activities (hunting and reindeer herding) were collectivized and administered by newcomers; their ritual practices were forbidden; they were partly sedentarized; and children were taken away from their parents to be raised in boarding schools, where they lost touch with their native language and were deprived of opportunities to learn the technical skills pertinent to the life of hunters and reindeer herders (Dikov 1989; Forsyth 1992; Vakhtin 1994; Schindler 1997; Csonka 1998). Even if Siberian indigenous peoples sometimes succeeded in creatively incorporating Soviet policies into existing ways of life (see, e.g., the surprising example of Yamb-to Nenets, who escaped Soviet power for several decades (Vallikivi 2003; Chapter 4, this volume), in many domains – including the education of their children – they largely lost the power to shape their own lives. The end of the Soviet regime did not radically change this situation (Csonka 1998: 23). In the first decade after Soviet rule, Chukotka went through a particularly difficult time. Its inhabitants were among those who suffered most in the 1990s, compared to other people in the Russian Federation, due in large part to the region’s governor, Aleksandr Nazarov (Csonka 1998; Gray 2005). People today remember the 1990s as the Nazarovskie vremena (‘Nazarov’s times’), a phrase that conjures up widespread corruption, lack of supplies (food, heating, electricity, transport and so on) as well as a persistent lack of freedom of expression in certain domains (on the ‘predicament of the indigenous

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movement’, see Gray 2005). The region remained isolated. Although the cold war had ended, foreigners still faced many difficulties in getting visas and had to register in every place they visited (which is still partly true as this book goes to press). An atmosphere of paranoid suspicion toward foreigners was deliberately maintained, notably in newspapers – attacks on foreigners are mentioned in Gray (2005: 174–5). What is more, reindeer herding, one of the main indigenous activities, faced a severe crisis. Attempts at privatizing reindeer herding in the 1990s failed. While reindeer numbered 465,000 in 1990, fewer than 100,000 remained in 2001.3 It is in this context that the first Protestant missionaries arrived. It seems one of the first was a Pentecostal missionary from western Ukraine, who arrived in 1991/2, and was soon followed by missionaries of other denominations. Early on, Protestant activities were concentrated in the main urban areas of Chukotka, such as Anadyr, the capital, as well as in district capitals such as Bilibino, Pevek and Providenia. With time, the influence of the Protestant groups extended to rural areas and small villages as well. This expansion occurred mainly through the activities of people who had converted while living in some of the towns just mentioned (particularly students) and who subsequently returned to their places of origin. They started to evangelize among their family and friends and were increasingly successful. In 2005, the Pentecostal missionary in Anadyr announced with satisfaction that at least fourteen settlements in Chukotka already had their own official groups of active converts (of a total of three cities and approximately fifty villages of varying size, located in eight administrative districts). The situation of the converts has changed over time. In the 1990s, most of those who had not converted spoke of Protestant denominations and their members with contempt and fear. But after some fifteen years of activities, Protestant churches have increasingly come to be considered a part of the religious landscape. By advertising their sober way of life and showing their sense of responsibility, some converts to Protestantism have gained a respected position in Chukotkan society, and in a few instances they have even come to occupy key roles in indigenous representative institutions. For example, a leader of a local division of the Association of Indigenous Less-Numerous Peoples of Chukotka complained to me that, in her village, members of the Pentecostal church have been sent as delegates to the Congress of Indigenous Peoples of Chukotka (held irregularly every two or three years in Anadyr) instead of those people who are actively involved in the work of the association on a regular basis. Whereas one might assume that conversion occurs mostly in those locations where ‘traditional’ rituals are no longer practised, the situation is more complex. In one of the herding brigades4 I used to stay with, reindeer herding rituals were still performed in the 1990s; in 2005, however, two out of five nuclear families had converted, while one family was still hesitant but had expressed a clear interest in Pentecostal messages. This success of Protestant missionaries must be approached through a complex of explanations. As Hefner emphasizes, ‘accounts of conversion must be “multicausal rather than mono-causal”’ (1993: 27, quoting Ikenga-Metuh

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1987:25). However, one fruitful avenue for approaching conversion in Chukotka is to apprehend it as a reaction to the hardships of the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. As I have argued elsewhere (Pelkmans, Vaté and Falge 2005), conversion may be interpreted as a strategy of empowerment. By converting, people make an active choice for their life and future, and through the act of praying converts feel able to exert some influence over their life as indirect agents – God will listen to their prayers and change their lives accordingly. In a context where, in the Soviet period, the state played a dominant role in structuring the individual’s entire life course, conversion may be understood as an attempt to regain agency. Indeed, evidence of this can be found in the narratives of converts. Furthermore, given that the dominant (Russian) ideology has always depicted Chukchis as ‘primitive’ (pervobytnyi, R.) conversion to Protestantism entails overcoming the stigmatized status of pagan (iazychnik, R.) without having to adhere to values imposed by Russians, since Protestantism (in contrast to Orthodox Christianity) is not considered a Russian religion. Finally, by converting, some Chukchis turn toward a religion that, in their perception, induces positive changes in their lives more effectively than their previous rituals. While Chukchi herding rituals are performed in order to perpetuate symbolic relations at several levels, including the human–reindeer relation, they are not intended to induce change. For Vakhtin, ‘the “Pentecostal option” offers a chance to break away from tradition, whether sanctioned by the ancestors, by Orthodox priests, or by the Bolsheviks’ (2005: 34). After the hardship of the 1990s, an interesting turnabout occurred in December 2000 with the election of Roman Abramovich as governor of Chukotka. According to Forbes, by 2007 Abramovich was the richest man in Russia and the sixteenth richest in the world with a fortune estimated at $18.7 billion, derived primarily from oil.5 In Europe, Abramovich is best known for his purchase of the Chelsea football team, and he actually spends most of his time in Great Britain, where he is registered as a resident. For reasons that remain obscure – those suggested by journalists include the desire for political immunity, prospects for oil exploitation in Chukotka, the passing fancy of a rich man, and even his need to atone for his ‘sins’ – Abramovich became interested in Chukotka in 1999, when he was first elected as a deputy for Chukotka in the Duma (the lower house of parliament). Abramovich’s coming to power in Chukotka resulted in significant improvements in the material conditions of Chukotkan citizens. When he was still a deputy, Abramovich created a foundation called the Pole of Hope (blagotvoritel’nyi fond ‘polius nadezhdy’, R.), an organization devoted to charity work with a particular focus on children’s welfare. Once he became governor, Abramovich launched a program aimed at the full restoration and reconstruction of Chukotka. The registration in Chukotka of the trading company Sibneft, of which Abramovich owned the majority of stock, brought an injection of money into the region: according to The International Herald Tribune, ‘taxes paid by the oil company covered nearly half of the region’s annual budget of 13.5 billions roubles’ in 2005.6 In addition to the regular payment of salaries, new houses have been built in many villages,

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old buildings in the capital have been painted and rebuilt, streets have been paved or repaired, and a new college (chukotskii mnogoprofil”nyi kolledzh, R.) and house of culture have opened. Finally, reindeer herding, supported once more by local government, regained its viability, and the number of animals started to increase again, reaching 154,000 in January 2006.7 All of these positive changes may have indirectly and unintentionally promoted conversion: missionaries and converts say that Abramovich has been sent to Chukotka by God (‘Bog postavil Abramovicha’), as I once heard it put. After all, people explain, citing Romans 13: 1, ‘there is no power but God’s’.8 Christian converts interpret the changes as being caused by their unwavering hopeful prayers in the 1990s. Even today, members of the Pentecostal Church in the village in which I did the most research never fail to include a prayer for Abramovich during the service. In this context, this chapter analyses how converts and non-converts respond to the emergence of Protestantism, or more specifically, Pentecostalism as a significant aspect of contemporary religious life in Chukotka. For converts, engaging with a new faith brings about certain changes in and reinterpretations of their lives. At the same time, for non-converts, being confronted with active evangelism sometimes leads them to see and use their practices in new ways. The following sections explore how people are now elaborating their new practices through the negotiation of ‘old’ and ‘new’ ways.

Redefining Chukchi Practices after Conversion

Conversion to Christianity often entails a change of attitude towards indigenous religious practices. Pentecostal churches condemn and prohibit most practices linked to what is called ‘paganism’ (iazychestvo, R.) Therefore, converts and missionaries are compelled to define the domain of ‘paganism’. As it is not, at the outset, really clear what ‘pagan’ practices are and what they are not, converts (and sometimes missionaries) need to be creative in their interpretations of both. The following three cases reveal how these negotiations unfold and raise questions concerning continuity and discontinuity in Chukchi life. Two cases describe ‘ordinary’ Chukchi converts living in a small Chukotka village, while the third is based on a story told by the leader of the Pentecostal Church in Chukotka. Ultimately, the cases show that the rhetoric and practices at stake in these processes of negotiation are surprisingly reminiscent of aspects of Soviet discourse on indigenous religions.

A New Garment from God?

The first case shows how converts may become actively involved in the reconstruction of their new life on a voluntary basis without the direct involvement of a missionary or Church leader. This also indicates that in a shamanic-animist context, where the ‘profane’ is not conceived as a realm

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distinct from the ‘sacred’, conversion implies a reinterpretation of practices in all spheres of daily life, not just in ritual contexts. Tatiana,9 a Chukchi nurse of around forty-five years of age, told me the following story. Tatiana had sewn a new garment made from reindeer skin for her husband. As is the common practice among Chukchi herders, once such a garment is finished it needs to be shown to neighbours or to others momentarily present. This open display of a new garment is meant to distinguish practices of everyday life from rules linked to funerals and other representations concerning death. Indeed, when an elderly woman is sewing a garment for her own or her husband’s funeral, nobody should see it, and the garment itself must not be completely finished because this might induce death to arrive before its time. As he always did, Tatiana’s husband made a visit to their neighbours as soon as he received his new clothes from his wife. But while her husband was away visiting, Tatiana started to feel very ill. She interpreted this as a sign that they had done something wrong. This in itself was not unusual: it is quite common for Chukchis to interpret illness or bad luck as a punishment for transgressing a rule, such as failing to feed the spirits or performing rituals incorrectly. But because Tatiana and her husband had converted, they now felt that they had somehow offended God. Tatiana and her husband concluded that they had betrayed God in following the Chukchi rule of showing off new clothes, rather than worshipping God to thank him for this garment. Tatiana and her husband felt compelled to reinterpret this behaviour according to their new ‘symbolic repertoire’ (Alvarsson 2003). The rule pertaining to the treatment of new clothing needed to be transformed in a way that reasserted their relation to God. Tatiana’s story was offered to me as proof of the reality of God (converts often say in Russian êto real’no, ‘this is real’). But it equally reflects the ‘reality’ of the process of religious change in Chukotka. It shows how Tatiana and her husband willingly introduced a significant degree of discontinuity into everyday practices on the basis of their personal interpretation of what being a Christian means. Central among these discontinuities, as the case exemplifies, is the new and important role played by the concept of sin, a development which resembles Robbins’s (2004) depiction of conversion to Pentecostalism in Papua New Guinea.

Conversion and Human Relations with Reindeer

Given that reindeer occupy a central place in Chukchi life, it is not surprising that some of the largest dilemmas revolve around the intimate relationship between people and reindeer. Conversion requires that this relationship be reinterpreted. The resulting redefinition of practices highlights two main issues: the articulation between discontinuity and continuity, and the interplay of form and content. I have previously described and analysed the reindeer herding ritual cycle (Vaté 2003, 2005a). Reindeer herding rituals are tied to the life-cycle of reindeer, and are primarily directed toward the welfare of the herd and, therefore, of the herding family. Chukchi herding rituals are also performed in order to reassert social and symbolic links at several levels: at the level of the familial unit, at the

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level of the encampment, and at the level of the community. They also confirm links between humans and various spirits and entities – living and dead – including other humans, wild game animals and reindeer. During these rituals, people feed spirits by throwing bits of ritual food in different directions, particularly toward the east (see Vaté 2006), and by anointing ritual objects – such as anthropomorphic fireboards, ritual string (taiŋykvyt, Ch.), animal skulls, and so forth (see Vaté 2005a: 44–6) – with marrow. Pentecostals in Chukotka consider such practices incompatible with conversion to Christianity. For converts, to attend church and continue to perform herding rituals would be considered ‘hypocrisy’ (litsemerie, R.) and would cause misfortune for both the practitioner and his or her entire family. Therefore – as converts told me in 2004, after I had been absent for a few years – Christians have completely abandoned the herding festivals. The statement regarding the abandonment of herding festivals was made specifically with reference to ŋênrir’’un, the main festival during which a number of reindeer (today a minimum of three, but often more) are slaughtered. Considering the special attitude of respect that herders express toward reindeer, the idea that massive slaughtering might be carried out in the tundra without any accompanying ritual practices seemed to me to be dubious or at least in need of closer scrutiny. Indeed, slaughter without ritual would be equivalent to slaughter for the sovkhoz (the state-run enterprise, today called the ‘office’ or kontora in Russian),10 where no respect for reindeer is expressed, something which most people dislike. Moreover, abstaining from carrying out ritual practices during ŋênrir’’un seemed improbable to me, because it would have meant that, since no brigade has converted in its entirety, some of its members just killed animals while other members performed a ritualized slaughter. Such disrespect for reindeer might cause most Chukchis to view the behaviour of conversion negatively. It seemed to me that Christian herders would at least have found new ways of building a relationship to reindeer, as this animal is so central to their life and identity. With this in mind, I went back to the field in 2005 and observed anew the ŋênrir’’un ritual, which I had previously seen in 1997 in three different brigades (Vaté 2003: 284–93). During this visit, I saw that, if conversion implies the abandonment of herding rituals, as converts claim, this does not prevent their transformation into festivals or feasts. This shift of corresponding meaning is facilitated by the predominance of Russian as the language of everyday communication, something which increased gradually over the twentieth century. Indeed, referring to ŋênrir’’un, people often say prazdnik (‘feast’, R.) This sometimes led to misunderstandings, as the youth did not always know how ŋênrir’’un is performed. Several times I heard the story of young villagers, educated in boarding schools and not belonging to a herding family, who participated in the festival for the first time (in rural areas it is usually performed only in the tundra) and asked, while they were busy helping with the butchering of reindeer and related activities that were central to the performance of the festival, ‘when will the feast start?’ What they could see did not match their idea of prazdnik. Thus, building on the ambiguity

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inherent in the Russian term, some Christians have turned ŋênrir’’un into a prazdnik that is deprived of its ritual aspect (or at least of what people defined as ritual), while maintaining a substantive link to the notion of ‘festivity’. The transformation of ŋênrir’’un entails more than mere word play: it is at the centre of negotiations concerning continuity and discontinuity, form and content. For instance, Pentecostalists are especially concerned with Chukchi ritual objects, which they consider to be ‘idols’. Conversion has encouraged converts to burn the ritual objects that were passed from generation to generation, sometimes even during the Soviet period when the use of these objects was condemned. Ritual objects do not lose their significance after conversion, but converts believe that such objects have the power to counteract conversion and to cause misfortune in their lives if they do not burn them. As a Chukchi woman explained to me in 2004: The only thing we rejected in terms of worshipping is taiŋykvyt [designating ritual strings in Chukchi, but probably implying here all ritual objects]. Even when we were not believers [veruiushie, R., meaning Christians in this context], we always knew that they exert an influence on our lives. These spirits that are present, they influence our lives. And when we come into another religion, another faith, they don’t remain quiet, they start to act on us. They want to take us back … progressively … [My mother] understood through various situations that if she believed in Jesus and at the same she worshiped taiŋykvyt … it had [negative] consequences for her children. All sorts of accidents started to occur.

The destruction of ritual objects radically shortens the ritual process, since all practices related to them are eliminated. This is a major example of how conversion introduces discontinuity into Chukchi ritual practices. However, during my fieldwork in 2005, I also observed how a converted elderly woman continued to carry out ritual practices more specifically linked to the relationship between humans and reindeer. This woman, whom I will call Olga, followed the rules concerning the proper treatment of reindeer: for instance, she gave the slaughtered animals water to keep them from suffering from thirst when travelling to the other world; she also, as is common, positioned the reindeer on a bed of willow (one of their favourite foods) when butchering the body; and she removed the velvet of the antlers to show that humans do not have a predatory relation with reindeer, in contrast to wolves (herders say, ‘Who would eat the meat and not clean the antlers!’). Olga continued to observe all these elements of the festival, thereby explicitly promoting an attitude of respect toward the reindeer. Another interesting element that remained in Olga’s ritual is the drum (iarar, Ch.) Each herding family possesses its own drum, which is symbolically attached to the iaranga, the nomadic tent covered with reindeer skins (see also Vaté 2005a), just as are all the other ritual objects. The drum is not anointed (or ‘fed’) with marrow during festivals, nor is it utilized in every ritual. Ŋênrir’’un is one of the few rituals in which the drum is still actively involved. The drums are usually prepared the day before the festival: a skin, usually made of a walrus

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Figure 3.1. Giving water to a slaughtered reindeer (V. Vaté)

stomach (unnêlgyn, Ch.; see Vaté 2005b), is put on the frame of the drum. After the slaughter of the reindeer, drums begin to sound, and they must resonate regularly throughout the festival. People say this serves to alleviate the sorrow of the female reindeer whose fawns were slaughtered. In this particular context, the drum might be considered a ritual object, although Olga maintained that it was a mere musical instrument. Through the use of this musical instrument, I suggest, she was able to sustain a special kind of relationship to reindeer. This example shows how, in a ritual context, practices are either abandoned or redefined in terms of content and value. After all, as informants indicated, what

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remains after conversion is the attitude of respect toward and the special bond with reindeer. It is particularly challenging for converts living in a village where reindeer activity is predominant to be able to reconcile Christianity with rules attached to this special human–reindeer relation.

What Is Culture, What Is Religion?

The last example in this section is more specifically about the issue of form and content. It is based on an informal conversation I had with the Pentecostal pastor in Anadyr after I had switched off my tape recorder. The following is, therefore, not a precise transcription but a recollection of some important aspects of our conversation, which I noted after the fact. The pastor and I were chatting about Nadia, the daughter of Olga, who was mentioned in the previous case. Nadia was a mutual acquaintance – she led the Pentecostal Church in the village where I conducted fieldwork. Her father had died recently, but the pastor and, indeed, all family members expressed satisfaction that he had converted before passing away and that he had even been baptized. Upon his death, however, the converts of the village had to face for the first time the following question: What form should the funeral of a Chukchi Christian take? A ‘traditional’ Chukchi funerary ritual would consist of leaving the corpse of the deceased in the tundra. Although most villagers are nowadays buried in the village’s cemetery, Nadia’s father had spent most of his life in the tundra and, therefore, might have expected to be ‘buried’ there. But would this also be an acceptable burial for a Christian? Nadia had called the pastor on the phone in order to get his advice, and the pastor said that he did not see any reason not to respect this ‘Chukchi tradition’, since ‘it was a matter of culture’ rather than religion. As this assertion indicates, the pastor’s approach to religious practices is informed by the ‘process of [the] culturalisation of religion’ (Hamayon 2006: 3) that occurred during the Soviet period. Whereas Soviet policy, with its atheist approach, attempted to replace pre-Soviet rituals with new ones stripped of all religious content, evangelical missionaries follow the same logic today in showing openness to local practices, as long as they are defined as ‘cultural’ rather than ‘religious’ (Olga’s attitude toward the drum as a mere musical instrument corresponds to this view). Intentionally or not, the pastor offered a renewed version of the famous Soviet motto ‘national in form, socialist in content’, transforming it into ‘national in form, Christian in content’ (for a similar statement and a stimulating analysis of this issue in Georgia and Kyrgyzstan, see Pelkmans 2006, 2007). Interestingly, the notion of ‘culture’ (kul’tura, R.) is also at the centre of debates between converts and non-converts. Whereas non-converts reproach converts and missionaries for jeopardizing the transmission of indigenous cultures, the latter claim, to the contrary, that they are involved in promoting ‘culture’. By accepting the practices of Chukchi funerals, the pastor was also actively promoting Chukchi culture. The process of conversion itself is seen, as the Pentecostal pastor of Anadyr put it, as a way to save ‘indigenous cultures’ by ‘saving the people itself’. As a young Chukchi Pentecostal pastor of a village

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commented, ‘Through the word of God and the action of the Holy Spirit, the heart changes, and … I would endorse such a revival of culture among our Chukchi people’. One of the examples often referred to is the translation of the Gospel according to Luke into Chukchi (Kulikova 2004), which is used to encourage young Chukchis to learn and use their language. This interest in indigenous practices may also be linked to the feeling expressed by some converts that their conversion to Christianity, associated mostly with Russian or at least with non-indigenous practices and values, might be seen as a betrayal of their people. Galina, a Chukchi woman said: I thought, ‘The whole village will convert but I won’t. I will never give up my faith. This is such an infringement (posiagatel’stvo, R.) … How is this possible? It is our native [way]! It is our roots, our ancestors!’ … When I first considered converting, I [couldn’t help] thinking that [by converting] I would betray my people … But then I understood that it is my own business. My people won’t answer for me.

In this context, dissociation of ‘culture’ and ‘religion’ appears to be a way for converts to reconcile their indigenous identity with Christianity (see the discussion of a similar situation among the Khanty in Siberia by Wiget and Balalaeva 2007: 25). As Pelkmans explains, ‘despite the emphasis on individuality and private faith, evangelicals ended up strengthening these cultural connections in new ways’ (2007: 896).

These three examples, each in its specific way, show how missionaries and converts are confronted with the necessity of defining both ‘culture’ and ‘religion’ – issues that are usually the province of anthropologists. We have seen that, trying to establish borders between different kinds of practices, people use several sets of references, individual and collective, including ones that are rooted in the Soviet period. But reinterpretation is not only a process involving the anticipation of future behaviour. In the following section, we will see how conversion encourages converts to redefine some of their pre-conversion practices.

Reinterpreting Chukchi Practices with a Christian Meaning

In order to build coherence in their lives, some converts reinterpret Chukchi religious practices in light of Christianity. In this section, we will see two examples of this kind of reinterpretation, showing how converts establish a sense of continuity within processes characterized by significant discontinuity.

Dreams

Anthropologists have paid a great deal of attention to the issue of dreaming, particularly in animist societies. But the study of dreaming is also helpful to

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‘appreciate … different forms of … response to changes’ (Richling 1989: 149). For the Chukchis, dreaming used to play and still plays an important role. Through dreams, spirits and the deceased communicate with human beings (Bogoraz, 1975: 490–91). Such dreams have ambivalent meanings. Dreaming of a deceased person can be a bad omen, for instance, when the apparition means that the deceased misses the person to whom it appears and wishes to take him or her to the other world. But the deceased person who appears in a dream can also help: a herdsman, who had been looking for a lost herd, explained to me how his wife’s sister, who had died a few years previously, told him in a dream where he could find it. The significance of dreaming is not questioned by converts, some of whom refer to Acts 2: 17: ‘and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams’. In fact, dreams – as revelations – played an important role in several cases of conversion. Nadia, for example, told me how her final decision to convert was triggered by a dream she had after having met a Pentecostal pastor who visited her in hospital in Anadyr. In her words: Then, in the night, I had this dream of me being in a room. This room is not brightly lit, but is rather dusky. In that room I am cleaning the floor. I am cleaning the floor and around me there are drunken people who say to me: ‘Here you are! You are a believer!’ They call me all sorts of names, they want to humiliate me. But [their words] do not hurt me at all … When I stopped drinking [a few years ago], I felt hatred toward drunken people. And here I realize that I don’t have any disdain (prenebrezhenie, R.), any bad feelings. I feel totally quiet inside … I have golden clouds over my head and rays flow on me, and all the rest is still in the dark and I am in these rays and there is such peace (mir i pokoi, R.) inside my heart. And then a door opens in the room and Veronika [her daughter] comes in. She is all pale, thin, ill, she has some scabs (boliachki, R.). I see her, I start to cry. I woke up because I was already crying. I woke up and at once I started a prayer … I understood that I must go with God. I decided to serve God, to believe in God, to live following his laws. I woke up and I was already like a new person.

In this example, Nadia expresses having received an indirect message from God. Other informants expressed having experienced a more direct interaction with God. Zoia, for instance, told me that when she went back to the village, after having converted while in the city, she felt rejected and lonely. She went through a spiritual crisis and as a consequence she fell ill. During her illness, she explains, she had a vision: God showed me the past – loneliness, darkness, this infernal night (êta noch’ kromeshnaia, R.) And I understood at once that God said to me: ‘You want to go back there? Why do you do that? You left me again! You have received completeness (polnotsennost’, R.) [indicating that she is convinced that God has freed her from hereditary alcoholism], something new, and now you want to go back?’ I say: ‘That’s all, I understood’, and at once I kneeled and started to pray.

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If dreams retain their strength after conversion, how do converts understand dreams that occurred in the past, especially those they still consider important? This question was particularly crucial for Tatiana, whom I mentioned previously. Before she converted, Tatiana had told me several of her dreams. In particular, she had explained that her mother, who died long ago, had been continuously helping her through dreams. In these dreams, her mother helped her in making decisions, gave her valuable knowledge and even guided her in the performance of everyday activities. For instance, Tatiana explained to me that her mother taught her in dreams how to sew reindeer clothes. While her mother was alive, Tatiana did not learn how to sew reindeer clothes. She was an educated person – as noted, she is a nurse – and neither she nor her mother thought that she would be in need of this kind of knowledge, because she was not supposed to end up living in the tundra. But Tatiana married a herdsman and, consequently, had to provide him with clothing. According to Tatiana, her mother told her in dreams how to proceed and even guided her hands during the daytime while she was cutting the pattern and sewing. When she converted to Pentecostalism, Tatiana started to question this special relationship with her deceased mother through dreams. She was encouraged to do so by other believers, who were uncomfortable with Tatiana’s narratives. Tatiana told me that others had explained to her that this was not her mother but God himself, talking to her through the image of her mother. Still having an influence on Tatiana’s life, her pre-conversion dreams needed to be reinvested with Christian content. The seriousness of the issue is reflected by the fact that some members of the community of believers got involved. The revision of the content in its turn modified the form: Tatiana does not see her mother in dreams anymore. She confesses that this was painful for her in the beginning, but she says that she is now more confident in her faith and communicates directly with God. In that respect, dreaming retains its function as a means of communication with ‘supernatural’ entities, but for non-converts it facilitates communication with the deceased or other spirits, while after conversion dreaming becomes a privileged way of communicating with God.

Chukchi Rituals in the Light of Christianity

Although reinterpretations of Chukchi practices (especially those tied to rituals) usually imply a condemnation of them, some converts interpret biblical messages in ways that enable them to see different parts of their life (pre- and postconversion) as segments along a more coherent path. If converts abandon preconversion ritual practices, either in form or content, some still attribute a raison d’être to their past existence. This enables these converts to explain why their ancestors used to live the way they did and also to maintain an attitude of deference toward their ancestors, as is their due ‘in the Chukchi way’. This process appears to be particularly important for those converts such as Galina, mentioned previously, who was considering conversion but felt this would be a betrayal of her people and of her ancestors.

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Conversion to Christianity does not necessarily imply condemnation of old Chukchi practices as the following case illustrates. For Katia – a member of the educational staff (vospitatel’nitsa, R.) at the village’s kindergarten – there are obvious similarities between Chukchi herding rituals and those described in the Old Testament. For instance, Katia establishes a connection between ŋênrir’’un, the autumn festival, and a passage in Leviticus 14 which describes the cleansing ritual of the leper. And on the eighth day he shall take two he lambs without blemish, and one ewe lamb of the first year without blemish, and three tenth deals of fine flour for a meat offering, mingled with oil and one log of oil. And the priest that maketh him clean shall present the man that is to be made clean, and those things, before the LORD, at the door of the tabernacle of the congregation: And the priest shall take one he lamb, and offer him for a trespass offering, and the log of oil, and wave them for a wave offering before the LORD: And he shall slay the lamb in the place where he shall kill the sin offering and the burnt offering, in the holy place: for as the sin offering is the priests, so is the trespass offering: it is most holy: And the priest shall take some of the blood of the trespass offering, and the priest shall put it upon the tip of the right ear of him that is to be cleansed, and upon the thumb of his right hand, and upon the great toe of his right foot: (Leviticus 14: 10–14)

Katia sees in this excerpt the origins of the ŋênrir’’un festival. She said that she had never known the reasons for and origins of the festival, but after she read the Bible she understood that Chukchi rituals stem from the Old Testament. For Katia, the way the blood unction is made, as described in Leviticus, is similar to the drawings performed in the tundra at ŋênrir’’un (see Vaté forthcoming). During this festival, several reindeer are slaughtered, usually at least a male (tyrkyl’yn, Ch.), a female (rêkvyt, Ch.) and a young deer born in the spring (qêiuu, Ch.) Of these reindeer, one is usually slaughtered behind a sledge called a kaaran (Ch.) – that is, a sledge for children – and this reindeer (known as iitriir, Ch.) is usually a young spring-born deer (this is in part why the ritual is also known in Russian as ‘feast of the young deer’, prazdnik molodogo olenia’). Before skinning and butchering the reindeer, the mistress of the house draws signs on each family member with blood taken directly from the animal’s wound. These drawings (in Chukchi kêlikin, from kêlik, ‘to write, to draw’), which differ in each family, are made on several parts of the body, such as the cheeks, the area behind the ears, the forehead, and the armpits, wrists, knees and ankles. Elsewhere I have shown that these drawings reassert the bonds existing between humans, the nomadic dwelling (the iaranga) and reindeer, as well as affirming the link between reindeer and the different members of the household: that is, all the persons clearly related to the hearth of the iaranga (see Vaté 2003 and forthcoming). In addition, Katia sees another similarity between the offering that is described in Leviticus 14 and the ŋênrir’’un ritual: the animal that is used to make the

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unction is ‘without perversion’ (bez poroka, R.) In the case of ŋênrir’’un, a fawn of the year is slaughtered while in Leviticus it is a lamb of the year, ‘without blemish’. That is, by introducing the notion of purity, she offers a new interpretation of Chukchi rituals which, I would argue, was not actually present in the herding ritual. The comparison between Leviticus 14 and Chukchi rituals allows Katia to express several ideas. First, it enables her to stress that Chukchis are present in the Bible, since their practices are described in the Old Testament. This is not to deny that the ancestors were sinful, but it returns respect to the ancestors and shows that they were also children of God. For her, the ancestors did not live properly, but they also did not live without God, since their practices were derived from the Bible. The implicit message seems to be that one should not condemn too easily and radically Chukchi practices of the past. However, Katia thinks, now that ‘Jesus has come to them’, Chukchis should live according to the New Testament rather than the Old Testament. In this way, Katia explains the necessity of rupture with previous practices by bringing coherence and logic to the process of change. It is as yet unclear whether Katia’s interpretations are purely idiosyncratic or whether they have been suggested to her by missionaries. Such influence has, however, been reported elsewhere, such as in the Khanty context of Western Siberia. As Wiget and Balalaeva note: ‘[People] are encouraged in … syncretism by the Baptists. Together Khanty and non-Khanty Baptists work together to generate parallels’ (2007: 11). But whether encouraged or not by local missionaries, Katia’s reinterpretation offers a view of pre-conversion Chukchi practices that differs from the one usually presented by non-Chukchi missionaries. In most of the interpretations that I came across, Chukchi practices were referred to as being sinful in the highest degree and even as being responsible for the problems that the indigenous peoples of Chukotka faced during the Soviet period and in the 1990s. Katia, on the other hand, attempted to build a bridge between the life of her ancestors and her current life. Through her reading of the Bible, she came to see the life of her ancestors in a way that allows her both to be respectful of the old ways and to justify rejecting or transforming them.

Reactivating Chukchi Practices against Conversion

The presence of Protestant denominations in Chukotka has triggered not only cases of conversion but also resistance to conversion. To counteract Protestant proselytism, some non-converts have reactivated their religious practices. This was, for instance, the case with Vera, a teacher living in Anadyr. Vera’s daughter, in her early twenties, started to attend meetings of the Pentecostal Church. One day, Vera, who did not agree with her daughter’s choice, went to the church herself to see what was going on, thinking that she might possibly take her daughter back home. But Vera was frightened by the Pentecostal spirits, and she took her ‘snow beater’ with her.

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As its name suggests, the snow beater (tiviigyn or tivisgyn, Ch.) enables people to clear sticky snow from clothes and is a staunch ally of the Chukchis. In the Arctic environment, beating the snow is an important activity for at least three reasons: firstly, when one is underway, the snow which accumulates on the body makes one feel cold; secondly, before entering any warm space, one should get rid of the snow to prevent it from melting and making one’s clothes wet, for in the tundra it is hardly possible to dry things so being wet means freezing; and thirdly, the tent is beaten almost daily in order to keep the inside warm and prevent snow from melting and making the tent itself wet. But the snow beater is not only of help in fighting against the snow. It also provides indispensable protection against spirits: it blocks their path (zakryvaet dorogu, R.) and therefore protects against spirit attacks. This is why, for instance, small representations of snow beaters are sometimes sewn on children clothes. Also, after the funeral of a relative, one puts a snow beater on the threshold of a dwelling – be it a iaranga in the tundra or a house in the village – to prevent the spirit of the deceased from coming back and claiming those members of the family for whom he or she particularly cares. This is why Vera, an urban woman, leading a completely ‘nontraditional’ way of life (but still feeding spirits when required), remembered her snow beater, which she took with her when she attended the service and talked to the missionaries. But Vera went even further in her recourse to Chukchi practices. She decided to change her daughter’s Chukchi name, a practice used in the past to fight against disease. Vera sent her daughter’s fur hat (chapka, R.) and an accompanying letter outlining her troubles to relatives still living in her native village. According to what I was told in the tundra, fur hats are usually used to ‘guess’ the name of a newborn baby or to ‘guess’ a new name for a child who is often ill (and had an improperly ‘guessed’ name). Names are decided upon in the following way. Knowledgeable ‘guessers’ hold the fur hat by the laces that close it. Chukchi names are then enumerated, usually names of the dead or variants of their names. When the fur hat starts moving by itself, the appropriate name has been found. The name is then murmured in the left ear of the child, who is expected to recover if the name was guessed properly. Returning to the story of Vera, after a while she received a letter from her close relative in her native village asking ‘how Ragtyηau was doing’. Vera knew it was her daughter’s new Chukchi name. While she was asleep, Vera murmured the new name in her left ear, and her daughter woke up. According to Vera, from this time, her daughter stopped attending Church services. In this respect, the presence of Protestant denominations introduces change not only by enabling new forms of religious practices to emerge, but by creating a context in which non-converts deem the reactivation of dormant practices to be necessary to counter the process of conversion. This ‘context of conversion’, through the re-enforcement of continuity in form, introduces some discontinuity in content by providing a new meaning and a new function for these practices: fighting against conversion.

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Conclusion

In this chapter, I have provided ethnographic insight into how confrontations with evangelical Christianity influence Chukchi practices and interpretations of practices in selected field sites in Chukotka. In this encounter between two opposed systems, the adherents of each are forced to acknowledge the other while engaging in competitive interactions. It is a situation of religious change, directed, simultaneously, toward the adoption of a ‘new’ faith and to some extent to the revival of an ‘old’ one. The cases presented above show a wide range of responses to the presence of evangelical Christianity. The commonsensical view that people either adopt or reject Christianity would miss the central point that the presence of a new religion alters the religious landscape, and thereby induces changes that are far more subtle (but often no less far-reaching) than straightforward adoption or rejection. Indeed, whereas some people integrate Christian ideas into non-Christian practices or discover Chukchi rituals in the Bible, others may give new meanings and functions to practices that had been dormant in the recent past. What is particularly striking is the high level of commitment of the different actors (missionaries, converts and those resisting conversion) in elaborating on the ruptures and continuities in their practices, stressing the underlying ‘tension, between individual consciousness and the structural requirements of community life’ in contexts of conversion (Buckser and Glazier 2003: xii).

Notes

1. Since 1994, I have spent a total of approximately three years in Chukotka. Specific field research on conversion started in 2004 (with complementary fieldwork in 2005 and 2006). My research on this topic has also benefitted from my long-term experience and knowledge of the region and from maintaining regular contact with people in the field (through letters and phone calls), which has often prompted informal discussions on attitudes toward these new evangelical groups. Since autumn 2006, this research has been part of the BOREAS/ESF project ‘New Religious Movements in the Russian North’. I would like to thank the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology and the Siberian Studies Centre for their support for part of 2003 and from November 2004 to October 2007. I am also grateful to the Fyssen Foundation for providing a post-doctoral scholarship (2004), the French Ministry of Research and Higher Education for a doctoral scholarship, and the Institute Paul Emile Victor (IPEV or IFRTP) for the funding of ethnographic research. Finally, I would like to thank Roberte Hamayon for commenting on this paper and Mathijs Pelkmans and John Eidson for their comments and editorial help. 2. In this chapter, words in Chukchi and Russian are respectively indicated with the abbreviations Ch. and R. 3. Figures for 1990 come from a special issue of the newspaper Krainii Sever, 28 February 1998. Figures for 2001 were supplied by the Department of Agriculture of Chukotka. 4. Brigade is a Soviet term designating a group of workers, but in an extended sense it also refers to the group of people living and working together in the same encampment in the tundra. 5. Information from www.forbes.com. 6. Source: International Herald Tribune, 7 September 2006. Retrieved from: www.iht.com/ bin/print_ipub.php?file=/articles/2006/09/07/news/russia.php. 7. Information from www.chukotka.org.

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8. Quotations from the Bible are drawn from the authorized King James version (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 9. Names of informants have been changed to protect the privacy of the persons involved. 10. In Chukotka today reindeer herding still occurs in the context of state-run enterprises. For more on the reorganization of reindeer herding in Chukotka, see Gray (2004).

References

Alvarsson, J.-Å. 2003. ‘A Few Notes on Conversion to Pentecostalism, Especially among Ethnic Minority Groups’, in J.-Å. Alvarsson and R.L. Segato (eds), Religions in Transition: Mobility, Merging and Globalization in the Emergence of Religious Adhesions. Uppsala: University of Uppsala, 33–64. Bogoraz [Bogoras], V. 1975[1904–1909]. The Chukchee. New York: AMS Press. Buckser, A. and S.D. Glazier. 2003. ‘Preface’, in A. Buckser and S.D. Glazier (eds), The Anthropology of Religious Conversion. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield: xi–xviii. Csonka, Y. 1998. ‘La Tchoukotka: une illustration de la question autochtone en Russie’, Recherches Amérindiennes au Québec 28(1): 23–41. Dikov, N. 1989. Istoriia Chukotki s drevneishikh vremën do nashikh dnei. Moscow: Mysl’. Fienup-Riordan, A. 1990. Eskimo Essays: Yup’ik Lives and How We See Them. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Forsyth, J. 1992. A History of the Peoples of Siberia: Russia’s North Asian Colony (1581–1990). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gray, P. 2004. ‘Chukotkan Reindeer Husbandry in the Twentieth Century: In the Image of the Soviet Economy’, in D. Anderson and M. Nuttal (eds), Cultivating Arctic Landscapes: Knowing and Managing Animals in the Circumpolar North. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 136–53. –––––. 2005. The Predicament of Chukotka’s Indigenous Movement: Post-Soviet Activism in the Russian Far North. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hamayon, R. 2006. ‘Can Shamanism Become an Autonomous Religion and Meet Both Identity Claims and Adaptation Needs in Post-Soviet Siberia?’ Paper presented at the ‘Reassessing Religion in Siberia’ Workshop, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle (unpublished). Hefner, R. 1993. ‘Introduction: World Building and the Rationality of Conversion’, in R. Hefner (ed.) Conversion to Christianity: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives on a Great Transformation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 3–43. Ikenga-Metuh, E. 1987. ‘The Shattered Microcosm: A Critical Survey of Explanations of Conversion in Africa’, in K. Holst Petersen (ed.) Religion, Development, and African Identity. Uppsala: Scandinavian Institute for African Studies, 11–27. Kulikova, I.V. (trans.) 2004. Taŋpyŋyl Lukanên [translation into Chukchi of the Gospel according to Luke]. Moscow: Institut perevoda Biblii. Laugrand, F. 2002. Mourir et renaître. La réception du christianisme par les Inuit de l’Arctique de l’Est canadien (1890–1940). Québec: Presses de l’Université Laval. Pelkmans, M. 2006. Defending the Border: Identity, Religion, and Modernity in the Republic of Georgia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. –––––. 2007. ‘Culture as a Tool and an Obstacle: Missionary Encounters in Post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13(4): 881–99. Pelkmans, M., V. Vaté and C. Falge. 2005. ‘Christian Conversion in a Changing World: Confronting Issues of Inequality, Modernity, and Morality’, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology Report 2004–2005: 23–34 Rambo, L. 2003. ‘Anthropology and the Study of Conversion’, in A. Buckser and S. Glazier (eds), The Anthropology of Religious Conversion. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 211–22. Richling, B. 1989. ‘“Very Serious Reflections”: Inuit Dreams about Salvation and Loss in EighteenthCentury Labrador’, Ethnohistory 36(2): 148–69.

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Robbins, J. 2004. Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. –––––. 2007. ‘Continuity Thinking and the Problem of Christian Culture: Belief, Time, and the Anthropology of Christianity’, Current Anthropology 48(1): 5–38. Robert-Lamblin, J. 1993. ‘La situation socio-démographique des minorités ethniques de la Tchoukotka (eskimo et tchouktche)’, in B. Chichlo (ed.) Sibérie III. Les peuples du Kamtchatka et de la Tchoukotka. Paris: Institut d’Etudes Slaves, 73–95. Schindler, D. 1997. ‘Redefining Tradition and Renegotiating Ethnicity in Native Russia’, Arctic Anthropology 34(1): 194–211. Vakhtin, N. 1994. ‘Native peoples of the Russian Far North’, in Minority Rights Group (ed.) Polar Peoples: Self Determination and Development. London: Minority Rights Publications, 29–81. –––––. 2005. ‘The Russian Arctic between Missionaries and Soviets: The Return of Religion, Double Belief and Double Identity?’ in E. Kasten (ed.) Rebuilding Identities: Pathways to Reform in PostSoviet Siberia. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 27–38. Vallikivi, L. 2003. ‘Adaptation to the Other: Jamb-to Nenets in the 20th century’, Pro Ethnologia 12: 49–62. Vaté, V. 2003. ‘“A bonne épouse, bon éleveur”: genre, “nature” et rituels chez les Tchouktches’, Ph.D. dissertation. Paris: University of Paris X, Nanterre. –––––. 2005a. ‘Kilvêi: The Chukchi Spring Festival in Urban and Rural Contexts’, in E. Kasten (ed.) Rebuilding Identities: Pathways to Reform in Post-Soviet Siberia. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 39–62. –––––. 2005b. ‘Maintaining Cohesion through Rituals: Chukchi Herders and Hunters, A People of the Siberian Arctic’, Senri Ethnological Studies 69: 45–68. –––––. 2006. ‘La tête vers le lever du soleil: Orientation quotidienne et rituelle dans l’espace domestique des Tchouktches éleveurs de rennes (Arctique sibérien)’, Etudes mongoles, sibériennes, centrasiatiques et tibétaines 36/37: 61–93. –––––. forthcoming. ‘Dwelling in the Landscape among the Reindeer Chukchis’, in P. Jordan (ed.) Landscape and Culture in the Siberian North. London: UCL Press. Wiget, A. and O. Balalaeva. 2007. ‘Crisis, Conversion, and Conflict: Evangelical Christianity, Rapid Change, and the Eastern Khanty’, Sibirica 6(1): 1–29. Znamenski, A. 1999a. Shamanism and Christianity: Native Encounters with Russian Orthodox Missions in Siberia and Alaska, 1820–1917. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. –––––. 1999b. ‘“Vague Sense of Belonging to the Russian Empire”: The Reindeer Chukchi’s Status in Nineteenth Century Northeastern Siberia’, Arctic Anthropology 36(1/2): 19–36.

Chapter 4

CHRISTIANIZATION OF WORDS AND SELVES: NENETS REINDEER HERDERS JOINING THE STATE THROUGH CONVERSION Laur Vallikivi The Yamb-To Nenets, a small group of nomadic reindeer pastoralists, live in the eastern part of the Nenets Autonomous District (Okrug) of northern Russia. Unusually, during the Soviet period they were never collectivized but continued to live as private reindeer herders. This happened because, until the late Soviet period, the authorities did not – or, at least, pretended not to – know of their existence. As they were never registered with any Soviet institution, this small group of Nenets was able to live in the tundra on their own. Only a few YambTo Nenets have attended school and none have served in the army. Moreover, since the group was never collectivized, they were relatively unaffected by the Soviet institutions that had the greatest impact on other nomads’ lives, such as the collective farm system, schools, the army and official media. Since the first half of the 1990s, when the group was officially recognized by the state, about half its members have embraced evangelical Baptist Christianity. The conversion of the Yamb-To Nenets prompts fundamental questions about trajectories of religious change generally and about the ‘return’ of religion in the post-Soviet Russian context specifically.1 In this chapter, I explore the factors at work in conversion to Baptist Christianity of the reindeer herding Nenets. My aim is twofold. First, I wish to outline the structural constraints within which individual agency led a group of Nenets to religious conversion. Second, I explore how religious conversion triggers the emergence of new and profoundly effective forms of speaking and action within the group. As Hefner (1993) argues, the causes and motives for conversion reside both in larger socio-historical processes and in individual ideas and practices. In the present case, I suggest that isolation from Soviet state structures and the rapid changes of the post-Soviet period has made the Yamb-To Nenets more attracted to the new skills (such as trade, literacy and fluency in the Russian language),

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exogenous ideas (such as being part of a larger community), and various ‘modern’ technologies (for example, motor sledges) that are promoted by Russian missionaries among others. The ideas and desires of the young Nenets men who play the most significant role in the process of conversion reflect this interest in broadening the community’s horizon. Individual agency set into the larger historical and social context provides the matrix in which a dynamic transformation of perception and action is taking place. The recent process of conversion is, of course, informed by the histories of both the Nenets and Baptist missionaries. Interestingly, during the twentieth century, the Yamb-To Nenets and Russian-Ukrainian Baptist missionaries shared certain parallels in their relationships with the Soviet state. As will be discussed below, the Nenets herders were forced to hide themselves and their reindeer from the authorities during and after the collectivization programme of the 1930s. Though less ostracized than the Nenets, the Baptists were forced to conceal their religious activity during the same period, especially after the anti-religious campaigns of the 1960s, and found themselves on the peripheries of Soviet society. For both groups, the collapse of the Soviet Union brought the chance for change and the development of fresh perspectives. The Yamb-To Nenets could now herd their reindeer without fear of repression, while the Baptists were once again free to engage in missionary work. Although the differences in their experiences are significant, I suggest that the shared experiences of (self)isolation from the state of Nenets and Baptists have contributed to the success of the conversion programme among the former. The Nenets converts see the Baptists as unconnected to the state authorities and, therefore, as potentially less harmful and more trustworthy partners than other Russians. In turn, the Baptists think of the Yamb-To Nenets as a ‘lost people’, separated both from the Soviet state and from God’s community. Typically, the missionaries describe them as a group of children, eager for conversion. However, the Yamb-To Nenets occupy only a small part of the Baptists’ overall project of converting people in northern Russia. They also endeavour to spread the gospel among other Nenets and Komi reindeer herders as well as among village people, regardless of their ethnic background, all of whom were influenced by the anti-religious discourse which so pervaded Soviet educational institutions, the army and the media. Thus far, the attempts of the Christian missionaries have born less fruit among the other – formerly collectivised – Nenets of the region. Generally, these other Nenets groups, in spite of their knowledge of atheist teachings, continue to practise animistic rituals which are sometimes intermingled with Russian Orthodox rituals. The missionaries speak of the challenges posed by these post-Soviet ‘kolkhoz reindeer herders’, and explicitly blame the heritage of atheist discourse.2 Even if this is not the only reason for resistance, this discourse seems to have equipped most of the collectivised Nenets with the means to reject outright any attempts at their Christianization. The second objective of this chapter focuses on the process of religious conversion itself, targeting the motives for conversion and the various forms of

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agency involved. By embracing a new religion, the Yamb-To Nenets also embrace new modes of religiosity which entail a continuous process of selftransformation through collective performance. I explore how the conversion involves the remaking and appropriation of meaning through the specific use of language and bodily practices, a process that occurs gradually over time. This process involves the converts moving away from their initial motives, feelings and practices and opening up to a new, different realm of rituals and ideas. The initial impetus for change may be rendered obsolete as the conversion process unfolds and the reality of conversion itself is seen from a different perspective (cf. Robbins 2004). Here, I suggest that this process is triggered by speaking. Both Baptist and Nenets practices of speaking in ritual settings are based on a conviction in the efficacy of words. The main difference, though, is that logocentric Protestants value verbalization while animist Nenets value the limited use of words. Despite this shared sense of the power of words, the practices of each group regarding the style and context of word use are, of course, very different. The Nenets are used to the idea that words are not only representations of reality but agents in their own right which need to be uttered carefully. During the conversion process, they actively and purposefully find new ways to use words in their communication with the divine. The language and bodily practices that play such an important part in evangelical conversion also function to create newly bounded and newly constructed moral selves. New forms of collectivity and individuality, rooted in the Christian concept of personhood, evolve during the shift from local religion to Christianity (Dumont 1985). The new self is born through publicly acknowledging sin and entering into a hierarchical, or a filial, relationship with God. Many scholars have pointed out that the concept of ‘conversion’ is imbued with the Christian meaning of radical change. The Comaroffs question to what extent the concept of conversion does justice to ‘the highly variable, usually gradual, often implicit, and demonstrably “syncretic” manner in which the social identities, cultural styles, and ritual practices of African peoples were transformed by the evangelical encounter’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991: 250; cf. Asad 1996: 264). I am presenting their well-known critique not to argue that this is the only way to theorize conversion. I very much agree with Joel Robbins’s suggestion to take seriously the idea of a radical rupture in conversion (Robbins 2007a). But instead of juxtaposing these views, I see them as supplementary parts in the process of becoming a (Protestant) Christian. Actually, the tension between continuity and discontinuity is the driving force in creating a Christian identity. On the one hand, the logic of becoming a believer is founded on the value of radical difference. On the other hand, becoming radically different relies on gradually learning new things and reorienting one’s life, acquiring new modes of speaking and acting by making less radical steps. The aim of anthropological research on religious conversion should be a better understanding of the complex dynamics of religious conversion as a multiple phenomenon. It would be erroneous to see any religious conversion either as mono-causal, or as a one-way and final process.

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In this chapter I discuss how conversion as a process creates new forms of individuality and collectivity which encompass new uses of language and forms of embodied practice. To understand how converts rework their ideas in everyday life, I shall describe the changes in speech practices that are particularly crucial in understanding the techniques of self-transformation that accompany the conversion of Nenets. I develop the idea that meaning-making in this instance of Baptist conversion takes place in a speech community through specific uses of language during prayers, sermons and other forms of shared discourse. First, however, I will outline the social and historical context within which the specific motivations for conversion among the Nenets need to be understood.

Christian Missionaries in the Nenets Area

The Russian Arctic has provided an increasingly strong focal point for religious activity and discourse since the late 1980s, a process commonly described in terms of the ‘religious revival’ of shamanism and Christianity. Shamanism has become a much-debated local ideology in provincial towns across Siberia and the Russian North, although it is sometimes constructed in unexpected ways and has developed into something rather different from the kinds of shamanism practised in the past. Only in rare cases have shamanic activities – such as healing, forecasting future events, and searching for lost items or animals by shamans – continued uninterrupted through the Soviet era until today; more often, they have been integrated into performing arts or neo-shamanic healing practices (Balzer 1993; Hoppál 1999; Humphrey 1999b; Vitebsky 1995). Still, even if explicit practices of shamanic seances have disappeared, a generic shamanic world-view and its associated knowledge has continued to exist in the northern tundra and taiga up to the present day. In the 1990s, ‘world’ and ‘local’ religious views and practices increasingly started to intermingle in the Russian Far North. This applied in particular to different Protestant movements, who began to evangelize among indigenous and non-indigenous peoples. Thus far, few reports have been published on conversion among the so-called ‘numerically small’ northern peoples.3 Although these sources indicate that conversions have occurred mostly in settled communities, Protestant missionaries have recently commenced evangelization in the tundra and taiga among reindeer herders and hunters as well (see Vaté, Chapter 3, this volume). A powerful impetus for evangelization in the Russian North is derived from what I would call the Christian ‘apocalyptic geography’ that has been projected onto the Russian periphery. The Baptist missionaries in the Vorkuta area stressed that in order to understand their aims better I should read the following passage from the New Testament’s Acts of the Apostles: ‘But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth’ (Acts 1: 8). Only after the Gospel reaches the margins of the world will the second coming of Christ be made possible. This motif is repeated often in sermons and is woven into hymns.

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Pavel,4 the most active missionary among the Nenets and who is of Ukrainian origin like most of the Baptists who work and live in the region, once told me that when someone stands on the shore of the Arctic Ocean, they are only ten meters from ‘the edge of the world’ (kray zemli, R.), a phrase which, on the metaphorical plane, unifying space and time, hints at the imminent end of the world. Therefore, in the harsh Arctic environment, the Baptists’ eschatological belief in the ‘conquest’ of the edges of the world provides a powerful motive for their missionary activities. It is important to point out that the contemporary missionary encounter is not the first experience northern peoples have had with Christianity. Some indigenous groups made contact with the Russian Orthodox Church in the sixteenth century, while in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Orthodox missionaries travelled all over Siberia and Alaska. Their impact on local populations varied but was generally modest, especially concerning attempts to inculcate new values (Balzer 1999; Slezkine 1994; Znamenski 1999). In the north-eastern corner of geographical Europe – the area discussed below – the Orthodox missionary project had a deeper impact on reindeer herders than elsewhere in the northern tundra, largely due to the intensive missionary activity led by Archimandrite Veniamin between 1825 and 1830. According to the Archimandrite, out of the four thousand Nenets (known by their old name Samoyeds) who lived in the region, no fewer than 3,303 were baptized (Veniamin 1855: 114; cf. Khomich 1995: 248). During this six-year campaign, many sacred sites with wooden and stone god figures were destroyed – among others a Kozmin copse (harv’ pod, N.) in the Kanin tundra and sanctuaries on Vaygach island, the home of the Nenets demiurges Vesako (‘Old Man’) and Khadako (‘Old Woman’). For years to come, this encounter forced the Nenets to conceal both their shamanic practices and their ancestral and spiritual figures from the gaze of outsiders (Vallikivi 2003). If we compare the Nenets encounters with Christianity over the last two centuries, it is striking how different the outcomes have been. In part, this is because of differences in missionary strategy and the conversion techniques used. In the nineteenth century, the primary aim of the state-supported Orthodox Christian missions was to perform as many baptisms as possible. However, reindeer herders often continued their shamanic practices after being baptized. They thus became what have been described by some scholars as ‘nominal Christians’ (e.g., Forsyth 1992: 155), though it should also be mentioned that many Christian symbols were indeed incorporated into local rituals and religious ideas. The influx of Orthodox ideas and practices also came via the Izhma Komi who used to hire Nenets as reindeer herders.5 For instance, the baptismal rite itself became an important ritual among the Nenets. This rite was performed either by shamans or by other elderly men far into the late twentieth century, long after the last Orthodox clergymen had disappeared from the North. In the Yamb-To community, two men used to perform these infant baptisms. One was the grandfather of the first Baptist convert, who, according to his grandson, also carried out shamanic rituals. Even today, some Nenets continue to call themselves Orthodox believers, particularly when the Baptist missionaries quiz them about their religious identity.

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Baptist faith, by contrast, is based on the baptism of believers. It is accessible only to adults who have made a conscious choice to enter the community of believers by repenting and expressing their commitment and devoutness. To do this, they are required to demonstrate their faith through the display of specific acts, speeches and emotions. Russian-speaking Baptist missionaries preach a new way of life which is centred on the ‘living God’ and in which audible communication with God is an everyday obligation. The social and ontological changes produced by evangelical conversion need to be understood in relation to the intensive methods of refashioning identity. In this context, conversion is not to be understood as a ‘passive’ change (as perhaps is often the case in Orthodox conversions); rather, it must be experienced and expressed as a deep individual transformation.

The Yamb-To Nenets

The Nenets are the most populous of the forty-one ‘numerically small’ peoples of northern Russia. They live in a wide territory from the Kola Peninsula to the Taymyr Peninsula and share this territory with recent incomers of European origin who outnumber the Nenets and other indigenous populations many times. According to the latest Russian census (2002), there are 41,302 Nenets in all, of whom 7,754 live in the Nenets Autonomous Okrug.6 The latter are usually called the European Nenets, as opposed to the Siberian Nenets who live on the Eastern side of the Ural Mountains. My focus is on the Yamb-To (‘Long Lake’) community, a nomadic reindeerherding group of European Nenets of about 180 persons which migrates about the Great Land (Ngarka Ya, N., Bolshezemelskaya, R.) tundra which forms the eastern part of the Nenets Okrug. Family groups change campsites dozens of times a year. They move in summer with their reindeer to the cool and windy coastal pastures of the Arctic Ocean to rid their herds of mosquitoes and warble flies. When winter approaches, they migrate southward again in search of lichenrich pastures. At this time of the year, they visit Vorkuta, a former centre of the notorious labour camp area, to trade reindeer meat and fetch supplies of tea, bread, flour, sugar, salt and other necessities. Typically, Nenets live in one chum7, as part of either a nuclear or an extended family, at a distance of five to fifteen kilometres from neighbouring camps. In summer, when herding requires more labour, some families gather their herds so as to live together in camps of two to four chums. On average, the Yamb-To reindeer herders possess around 300 to 400 reindeer per family. During my stay in the tundra, I observed that the poorest families had less than one hundred reindeer, while the richest had several thousand. Families with less than 200 reindeer could not rely on herding alone, and supplemented their income with intensive fishing and hunting. The Yamb-To Nenets are one of the rare groups in the Nenets Okrug who maintained their nomadic way of life through the Soviet era. Most other Nenets in the region were forced to settle in the 1960 and ’70s. This was a part of a larger

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project which started with the collectivization of reindeer herding in the 1930s and was accompanied by large-scale purges of both rich reindeer herders (kulaki, R.) and shamans, the latter being seen as exploiters of the poor and class enemies (cf. Golovnev and Osherenko 1999; Slezkine 1994). Reindeer herders had never before experienced such intense intrusion by the state. From the 1960s onwards, most Nenets were sent to newly built villages in which women, children and the elderly stayed put most of the time, while healthy adult males were employed on the collective farms, working in shifts as herders in the tundra. In one fell swoop, the imposition of this new division of labour destroyed the structure of the Nenets nomadic family. Under the Soviet concept of ‘productive nomadism’, developed in the 1960s, a kolkhoz reindeer brigade could include only one woman, who was employed as a chum worker (chumrabotnitsa, R.) and was seen as responsible for the cooking and household maintenance of the entire camp. The aim was to industrialize reindeer herding and, concomitantly, to ‘civilize’ the nomads. Officials of the Nenets Okrug were especially zealous in their endeavours to eliminate nomadic ways of life, which were invariably depicted by Soviet ideologists as non-productive and primitive (Lashov 1964). Among European Nenets, the result was that reindeer became commodities, Nenets lost many of their previous subsistence skills, and communities suffered increased rates of suicide, violence and alcoholism (cf. Tuisku 1999). Becoming increasingly clandestine in their movements, and eventually occupying an illegal position in Soviet society, the Yamb-To Nenets managed to avoid collectivization. Other reindeer herders, both Komi and Nenets, called Yamb-To yedinolichniki (‘independents’), a term applied to any peasant who had not joined the collective or state farm.8 Accordingly, the Yamb-To Nenets were not registered as citizens, did not pay taxes and pastured their reindeer on nationalized lands allotted to kolkhozes and sovkhozes. Yamb-To families have slightly different stories about how they remained outside the collective farms. Yet, common to all such stories are motives of fear and escape, especially in the early period of Sovietization. One of my main informants and friends, Yegor,9 told me that his grandfather was categorically against joining the kolkhoz in the 1930s, the decade in which collectivisation was officially completed (Tuisku 1999: 81). One of his grandfather’s brothers was sent to the Second World War and never returned. Another brother with over a thousand reindeer had to join a kolkhoz. The third left for the east across the Urals, and that was the last they heard from him. Yegor’s grandfather himself intentionally reduced the number of his reindeer to a hundred. ‘He was afraid’, said Yegor. ‘He did not want to keep too many reindeer. If you had a few, you were not harassed. If you had [more reindeer], you would pay for it’. The boundaries of the Yamb-To community were never clearly defined but rather ebbed and flowed. Several families with small herds started to move away from the areas of active collectivization to avoid confiscation of their reindeer and arrest after one of the largest Nenets uprisings (mandalada) against Soviet repression in 1943 (cf. Vallikivi 2005). Some other families, from the Polar Urals (another retreat area for some of the yedinolichniki), joined the Yamb-To

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in the 1960s and ’70s. Only in 1983, when a typhus epidemic erupted in the Yamb-To community and people were forced to go to the local hospital in Amderma, was the existence of yedinolichniki reported to Naryan-Mar and Moscow. Still, the ‘discovery’ was not made public and the private herders were allowed to live as they had been. The communist party officials in Naryan-Mar were not interested in raising the question of private reindeer herders, claiming instead that there were no yedinolichniki based in the Nenets Okrug (Tolkachev 1990; Golovnev 2000: 139).10 As they did not officially exist, the Yamb-To Nenets escaped the three institutions that had the greatest ideological impact on the lives of other nomads in the Soviet Union: the collective farm system, the army and the boarding school. These were the loci in which most anti-religious efforts were carried out. Being ‘total social institutions’, the kolkhozes and sovkhozes shaped their members’ lives in every possible respect (Humphrey 1999a: 452). Socially speaking, the collective or state farms offered the only valid status for nomadic reindeer herders within the Soviet Union. Accordingly, exclusion from these institutions meant exclusion from society. Together with local authorities, the farms arranged nomadic men’s military service and the sending of children to boarding school. Yet, as their names did not appear in the registration lists of the local village councils, the yedinolichniki were not sought out by the authorities, and thus were able to maintain an identity independent from the state. Though the vast majority of private reindeer herders never attended school, Yegor’s two younger brothers, Ivan and Andrei, did receive some formal education, having been to a school in Ust-Kara in the late 1970s.11 Now nearing their forties, both men recall this period as particularly difficult because only Komi and Russian was spoken in the village. Having acquired some knowledge of Russian and of life in the village, the boys were taken out of school after only one and a half years. Yet, while their experience may have been harsh, village life also proved lastingly attractive; and, not unconnectedly, the two brothers now play a crucial role in the conversion process among their Nenets brethren. The younger brother, Ivan, is energetic and much interested in modern urban life. In 1995, when still in his mid-twenties, he was the first to become a Baptist; his elder brother Andrei, meanwhile, became the first presbyter of the Nenets’ Baptist congregation in 2004. Since the beginning of the 1990s, Ivan has sought contact with the Russian (lutsa, N.) world. When the Okrug administration in Naryan-Mar started to pay attention to the yedinolichniki in the early 1990s, Ivan was the only one who was able to arrange for the Yamb-To to obtain pastures, passports, allowances and school places at the local village boarding school. As a result, he became the leader of the semi-formal economic unit (Obshchina olenevodov-yedinolichnikov ‘Yamb-To’, R.) of private reindeer herders founded in 1994. In addition to his negotiation skills, Ivan also has spiritual qualities which, according to him at least, have long distinguished him from others in the wider group. Even before his conversion, Ivan told me, he had appreciated the importance of spirituality: ‘Since my childhood I wanted to learn, to achieve something and to become a

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spiritual person … a healer or shaman or such like. In my childhood – after the age of six – I was afraid of something, and I started to pray inwardly. Nobody taught me but I already had a fear of God’. When young, Ivan added, he had thought about going to town to get a Bible, a book he had heard about from his grandfather. Instead of a shaman, he became a committed and active Christian. In the role of leader, he seeks to modernize the Nenets tundra-based existence through a number of creative touches. He talks, for example, of the need to introduce washing machines and floating sledges into communal life. Besides bringing new technologies from the city to his ‘brothers in faith’, Ivan also maintains ties with local Russian business people (kommersanty, R.) and has become a trader himself having finally moved from the tundra to Vorkuta. He often travels between tundra and city on business (mostly exchanging new, soft reindeer antlers for food, motor sledges, generators and so forth) and religious activities. Recently, though, some co-believers and missionaries have started to criticize him for his commercial activity. Once, in a reindeer herders’ meeting (then the first and only convert in the community), he explained how the Nenets should deal with the Okrug administration in Naryan-Mar to obtain pasturelands, documents and allowances. He ended his speech, of course, by avowing that the best way for reindeer herders to live in accordance with God’s will was to abstain from drinking alcohol, fighting and stealing each other’s animals. Submitting to God’s will, Ivan has no doubt, ensures a happier, more fulfilling existence in this world as well as the next. His message is plain: if all the reindeer herders accept Jesus as their personal saviour, they will create a better community – one based on trust, friendship and mutual assistance.

Baptist Missionaries and Reindeer Herders

Belonging to the so-called ‘unregistered Baptist community’, and representing a stricter, ‘fundamentalist’ form of Russian Baptism, the Evangelical ChristianBaptists of Vorkuta carry out missionary work among the Yamb-To Nenets.12 In the early 1960s, during Khrushchev’s anti-religious campaigns, the Baptist movement in the Soviet Union split into two branches. All Baptist congregations were ordered to register and to cease all missionary activity immediately. Soviet officials regarded the religious teaching of children and the baptizing of people under thirty as anti-Soviet behaviour. It is, of course, typical of ideologies based on visions of a brighter future for the younger generation to become a prime focus of debate and often discord. Many Baptists accepted and allowed the Soviet authorities to dictate the rules. A significant number refused, however, the compromises they were required to make lying at odds with their interpretation of true apostolic work, as prescribed in the Bible. Subsequently, their religious activities became increasingly clandestine and, having broken the new law, many of the unregistered Baptists were persecuted, arrested and, in some cases, killed (Bourdeaux 1968). These Baptists could be described as Biblical fundamentalists because of their unwavering conviction that the Bible is the only source of truth, and that it offers

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concrete answers to every question this world may pose. Not surprisingly, they advocate that every believer should own a copy of the Bible, and every Yamb-To family certainly has at least one in its possession. Indeed, in addition to the similarly ubiquitous hymnal, these are often the only books in a chum. Those unable to read the Bible listen to pre-recorded cassettes with sermons in Russian, or ask their literate children to translate the sacred texts. Among Baptists, the authority of the Bible is seen to outweigh that of secular state law – and, doubtless, the Baptist stand is particularly appealing to communities, like the Nenets, that have never been at ease with secular powers dictating terms regarding religious activity. This is also a reason why the unregistered Baptists consider themselves more faithful disciples of the Lord than, for instance, members of the Orthodox Church and/or other ‘collaborating’ and ‘sinfully’ registered Baptists. Further, by rigorously treading the path of the original and authentic Christian community of apostolic times, the unregistered Baptists believe that they alone among contemporary Christian movements correctly interpret the Bible. Blending the demands of both historical and modern Christian worlds, they emphasize the need for its members to observe strict moral rules in their everyday lives. On the one hand, such rules prescribe specific modes of behaviour and dress; on the other, they forbid the consumption of alcohol and tobacco, watching television, playing cards, cursing and reading non-Christian literature. It was thanks to Ivan, who initiated contact with them, that the missionaries found their way to the Yamb-To Nenets. Without his assistance, it would have been very difficult for the Baptists to access the herders. The missionaries, who are ordained presbyters (presviteri) and preachers (propovedniki) from Vorkuta (or from other Russian Baptist churches), visit the Nenets of the region several times a year. Ivan has become the principal translator and exegete among the indigenous believers, most of whom remain unable to read and understand the Russian Bible as no translation into Nenets has yet been completed. In March 2004, when about half of the Yamb-To adults had been baptized, the tundra congregation was formed when Andrei was ordained as the Nenets presbyter. A family man, who stays most of the time in the tundra, Andrei is generally considered to better suited to the position of spiritual leader than Ivan, who was single at the time of elections and lives in Vorkuta. Religious activities in the tundra are performed mostly within the family circle or when visiting other households. Sometimes, if camps are not too far from one another, families will gather on Sundays to pray, sing hymns and read the Bible. The hymns in Russian take up almost half of these services. Interestingly, during the services, Nenets children often occupy a position of considerable authority, guiding their parents in how to sing and read correctly.13 And, when missionaries visit the tundra for specially organized services, it is not uncommon for those children that have been educated by Russian-speaking Baptist teachers to recite their own poems. On festive occasions like weddings, the children also paint multicoloured signs with quotations from the Scriptures, and hang these on the canvases inside the chum. In so doing, they imitate the Baptist prayer houses of the city, and transform the chum into a proper prayer house. Such general

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gatherings are difficult to organize because of the nomadic way of life, however. Yet, Pavel is nevertheless convinced that every family can become ‘a Church’, a conviction he bases on the idea (widespread among the Russian Baptists) of the three Churches: the universal Church, the local Church, and the Church of the family. According to him, such an understanding will result in the overcoming of these communities’ largest problem: the reconciliation of Baptist religious requirements and their nomadic way of life.

The Individual and the Collective in Conversion

Non-Christian Nenets feel themselves closely related to their human kin, animals (especially reindeer) and spiritual agents. Nenets personhood is relational and not static but bound to growth and change through encounters with other agents in the world. For example, when a child is born it is not considered a fully human person until it undergoes specific rituals and increasing socialization. Although I do not think that the Nenets and Christian concepts of personhood are pure contrasts of non-Western and Western forms (cf. Carsten 2004), we can still trace the general tendendency, through conversion, of how human persons become more static and bounded as moral subjects.The question then arising is: what significant changes has conversion induced in the Nenets community? First of all, conversion has led to a remarkable alteration of the community’s social forms, its members’ self-representations and identities. Baptism, representing basic Protestant principles, promotes the seemingly paradoxical idea that salvation is an individual project achievable only if the congregation meets as often as possible and acts as a clearly defined community.14 Yet, merely being a Church member does not guarantee salvation. One has to become a ‘true’ believer (veruyushchiy, R.), which can only be achieved through an individual relationship with God. Nenets Baptists describe their conversion (uverovaniye, R.) as a total transformation, according to which individual rebirth is the precondition for gaining ‘eternal heavenly life’. One must leave behind ‘the old life’ in order to start ‘a new life’; in this new life, the believer must reject all ‘pagan’ gods and forge a personal relationship with the Lord. Ivan’s conversion story includes a personal fight with Satan. He narrated his story on a TV documentary entitled Missionary.15 In this story, starting with his drunken arrival in a bus station in Vorkuta, Ivan is literally stripped down in order to awake to a new reality: I felt a great fear. I had never experienced such a fear. In a bus station I saw a woman whose face appeared to me like that of the devil. I called out to God and said: ‘Lord, you see me, save me!’ After that I took of my clothes and started to freeze. The temperature was minus thirty degrees. I undressed completely. The police and an ambulance were called. I was taken by them. I found myself in the psychiatric hospital. Then, I thought, I have to follow the way of Truth.

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While in the hospital, one patient recommended that Ivan visit the local Baptist prayer house (molitvennyi dom) on the outskirts of Vorkuta. Ivan had some previous knowledge of the Baptists from his older brother Kolya who had visited the prayer house several times. As Ivan described matters, in the hospital he became convinced that he had ‘to save himself and his people from drinking, stealing and darkness’. After being released from hospital, he went to the prayer house. As the missionary Pavel put it, he was very surprised when one day a young reindeer herder with long hair and wearing a fur parka appeared in the prayer house. According to Nenets traditional convictions, long hair is worn only by those with some special spiritual – shamanic – gifts. Generally, this is frowned upon by the Russian Baptists, who urge men to keep their hair short on the basis of Paul’s advice to the Corinthians (1. Cor. 11: 14). Accordingly, when Ivan became involved in the Baptist church, he cut off his hair to mark the beginning of his adaptation and learning process. Half a year later, he was baptized. Ivan’s conversion story relies on a motif of a personal quest in which a direct relationship was established between the seeker’s inner self and the God who saw and knew that self. To become a believer therefore implied the conscious construction of a new self. This process gradually led to more intensive selfobjectification (Csordas 1994: 14). According to Foucauldian tradition, one aspect of individualism is self-development in which an intensification of one’s relationship with one’s self takes place. This ‘one’ becomes ‘an object and a field of action (so that one can know, correct, and purify oneself, for example)’ (Kharkhordin 1999: 4). Ivan’s experience provides us with a template: believers are supposed to discover – or, as seen from the outside, construct – their sinful self and conscience. In so doing, they lay the basis for an individual relationship with God. First of all, the process starts with the relabelling of the believer. Some researchers argue that a change of affiliation is the minimum marker of conversion. Robert Hefner claims that ‘an adjustment in self-identification through the at least nominal acceptance of religious actions or beliefs deemed more fitting, useful, or true’ is necessary (1993: 17). I would argue that the conversion of Nenets is as much a collective as an individual act. The individuals form a collective which consists of bounded (and no longer relational) selves, each with one discrete soul opposed to the body. These new individuals are, at the same time, interdependent in the sense that the only way of reinforcing their own individuality passes through the collective performance. Thus, religious selves are created collectively.16 Public self-identification is of great importance to Nenets believers, because it defines whether or not the believer is seen as a part of the community of the ‘saved’, where all are ‘brothers and sisters in faith’. In early August 2002, I attended the baptism of Yegor and his wife Anna. Before the baptism, which involved immersion in a cold lake next to the camp, the Yamb-To Baptists gathered in a chum to which non-members, including the anthropologist, were not permitted entry. As Yegor told me later, his knowledge of the Bible and his behaviour as a Christian were there tested. After Yegor had left the chum, his behaviour during the probation period and overall understanding of central

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biblical values were discussed by the missionaries and congregation. While most people, it is true, graduate from this test of merit, not everyone is successful. Potential converts may be rejected if, for example, ignorant of important doctrines, incapable of conforming to Baptist values by failing to renounce vodka, or by keeping doll-like spirit figures representing chum guardians, ancestors or local gods. As Yegor explained later, he had wanted to be baptized several years earlier but the members of the congregation had then deemed him unready. This time, however, he had abstained from drinking alcohol, smoking cigarettes, playing cards and singing old songs for several months. He was also able to demonstrate sufficient knowledge of doctrine. Consequently, the missionaries and other believers assessed him now ready for his ‘union with Jesus’. In this context, becoming a believer is obviously dependent on others accepting the individual as a reflective self, willing to submit to God’s will. Yegor’s prayer, delivered after his baptism in 2002 (a prayer which must be seen as proceeding directly from one’s heart), provides an example: Lord, today, I ask you that the Holy Spirit will come into my heart. That he will live in my heart so I will reach God. And [that I will] live on earth thus. I also ask for Your blessing. Lead me away from all evil. You are great … And in the name of Jesus Christ, You know how to lead. You yourself hear every word. When I am in trouble, You hear me. Always strengthen … and You can strengthen. You can take care … You can take care of the children. So that children will be dutiful, and that I will be dutiful to my children. Since I cannot read, give me more wisdom. I praise Your name. You see all that I have. Everything will be at Your will. You can give all that I want. Therefore, I praise Your name. In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

After his baptism, the first thing Yegor told me was that he felt his heart was filled with joy. For the born-again individual, this feeling is the sign that the Holy Spirit is actively at work. It is not always easy to recognize God’s presence, however; thus, it is common for believers to pray for Him to live in their hearts. An important cohesive element within the group of believers is that the community’s ordinary members are encouraged to be active and to treat each other as equal regardless of ethnic origin or the number of reindeer they own. There is less concern with achieving equality among Nenets than with achieving equality with Russians. The most vital aspect in the new understanding of an equal community encompassing both Nenets and Russians is the concept of priesthood of all believers, which is a central doctrine of Baptists. All men (though not women)17 are free, and even expected, to interpret and explain passages from the Scriptures during prayer meetings. However, not everybody is willing and sufficiently competent to do so. Both men and women pray in an audible voice for their own as well as others’ concerns. Typically, they pray for recovery from illness, or the loss of reindeer, for the conversion of unsaved relatives, or most commonly for the strengthening of their own and others’ faith. Prayers also give an opportunity to mention the names of all those present and, in

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so doing, to reinforce feelings of group solidarity and communitas. It is also commonplace to include in prayers the names of those who have not been converted, but who happen to be in the vicinity of the prayer meeting (including the anthropologist). Along with other types of collective speech in ritual settings, these practices are clearly intended to bring new people into the fold. In this context, it must be noted that, for Baptist communities, loyalty to the group transcends matters of locality, kinship or ethnicity. Drawing on the work of Maurice Bloch, Edward Schieffelin observes that this kind of ritual activity is invariably coercive: [R]itual language and ritual modes of communication are not effective mainly because they convey information, reveal important cultural truths, or transform anything on the semantic level. Rather, they are compelling because they establish an order of actions and relationships between the participants through restricting and prescribing the forms of speaking (and, I would add, interaction) in which they can engage so that they have no alternative way to act. (Schieffelin 1985: 709)

In other words, while ritual language is often perceived as liberating by the committed believer, it functions particularly well at the level of coercion. Collectivity also means participation in the larger imagined community of Christians. In almost every prayer I heard, believers requested a blessing for all unregistered Baptist communities throughout Russia. Services ended with the enthusiastic and voluble sending of greetings to neighbouring congregations. As already indicated, such events confirm the understanding among Baptists that all questions of socio-religious identity are grounded in the faith rather than the ethnic origin of believers. Thus, primarily, they mark their difference from other, specifically ‘pagan’ (yazycheskiye, R.), herders and the non-Baptist urban population. The basis for the wider community lies solely in the conviction that they know and share the ‘truth’ with the community of the ‘chosen’. The world of Nenets believers thus is globalized: if the Baptists of Nizhniy Novgorod have become ‘brothers’ to the Nenets Baptists, their consanguine, but pagan, brothers are now perceived as existing outside the new ‘family’, as they have yet to become ‘children of God’. The choice of whether or not to become a believer is informed, albeit not explicitly, by people’s previous social bonds in the community. This matter becomes particularly clear when marriages are at stake. Arranged marriages and marriage payments are disapproved of by the missionaries, though both are fairly widespread practices among nomadic Nenets despite the attempts of Soviet officials to eradicate them. The missionary Pavel told me about a young YambTo man who was asked by the missionaries to choose between marrying a pagan girl (with whom an arrangement had been struck by parents on both sides) and baptism. Initially, the man refused to be baptized when a group of his peers underwent the ritual. On the next occasion, however, following long conversations with the missionaries, he agreed to baptism. At that moment, he did not know that his prospective bride had also been baptized just before his own

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baptism, so that they could still marry. Unsurprisingly, Pavel presents this story as a victory for faith over tradition. Though here there is only space to discuss certain changing forms of Yamb-To social life, it is nevertheless clear that social interrelatedness shapes the reindeer herders’ wider decisions on choices of religious affiliation, making conversion a collective enterprise where new bounded selves are produced.

Language Use and Embodied Knowledge

In the Soviet period the Yamb-To Nenets were hardly familiar with the Russian language and were generally illiterate (though matters have changed since the latter half of the 1990s, with the introduction of elementary education). Their conversion experiences, however, have convinced them that Russian needs to be learnt. They have also understood that, now they have access to the language, this improves their ability to communicate in the new circumstances of the postSoviet present. Many of the converts have proven highly adept at mastering the new language. According to Baptist missionaries and Nenets converts, the Bible is inspired by the Holy Spirit and thus represents God’s own infallible Word. It is impossible, therefore, to overestimate the importance of being able to read the Gospels and it is incumbent on each believer to try to do so. Unlike many other Protestant missions in similar situations, rather than trying to learn to speak Nenets themselves, the Vorkuta Baptists prefer to teach the Nenets to speak Russian. They do not find it necessary to have the Gospels translated, as a command of the Russian language is seen as inevitable for this stray group of reindeer herders. As the missionaries possess no command of Nenets whatsoever, and there is, as yet, no translation of the Bible into Nenets,18 missionary work is mostly carried out through the mediation of Russian-speaking Nenets believers like Ivan, the first Nenets convert. The Russian language has become a valuable instrument for missionary work. Seeing global historical processes, including Soviet atheist rule, as part of God’s plan, the Baptists perceive the spread of the Russian language as especially positive. Pavel explained to me: ‘It was not an accident that God brought together such a mass of people into the Soviet Union. Millions started to speak Russian. It is good that the Word of God reaches the Nenets and other small-numbered peoples, because without their knowledge of Russian we could not have brought them the Word of God’. In this example, Pavel refers mainly to the kolkhoz Nenets whom the missionaries also meet in their regular visits to the tundra. As they have been educated at Russian boarding schools for eight to eleven years, and men have served in the army for two or three years, these Nenets speak Russian fluently. Yet despite their knowledge of Russian and the high rate of literacy, few have been willing to convert to Baptist Christianity. After visiting kolkhoz reindeer herders, Pavel once commented: ‘they are more seriously sinful than private herders. They listened to our witnessing, but meanwhile they were joking among themselves. Many heard for the first time about the existence of God, paradise and hell’. Pavel added that the

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largely uneducated and illiterate Nenets, now making rapid progress in learning Russian, are currently in a better position than the kolkhoz Nenets, as the former ‘are like children who are open to the Christian message’. The shift from Nenets to Russian has been accompanied by new patterns of general language use, changes that are intertwined with new modes of communicating with the divine. In particular, the role of the unspoken has been marginalized. With shamanic songs and dialogues with spirits largely disappearing in the mid twentieth century, Nenets everyday religious practices had, prior to the arrival of the Baptists, long been characterized by the relative absence of speech. This has now been replaced by daily prayers to God and (generally lengthy) weekly sermons. In short, the previous taciturnity of the Nenets has been replaced by a more outgoing and voluble approach to religious expression. Yet, if we look closely at Nenets concepts of word and language, this shift may not be so radical as it first appears. Indeed, it may be argued that the adoption of evangelical Christian language use among Nenets neophytes simultaneously represents both continuity with, and rupture from, earlier concepts of word. There is continuity because words in themselves are still understood to be creative and efficacious forces; yet, there is also clearly a rupture as nearly silent rituals (including usually short but powerful sacrificial prayers) have given way to overwhelmingly verbal ritual events. The concept of words among both Nenets and Baptist Christians entail efficacy and agency. The image of the word is very powerful in Nenets oral tradition. Yelena Pushkareva, a Nenets folklorist, has shown that the word (vada, lakhanako etc., N.) is like a living person with its own intentions and intelligence. To convey this idea she talks about ‘a word-person’. This refers to ‘the exalted power of the word [as] the moving force behind all events, an emanation of God’ (Pushkareva 2004: 68). Even if Pushkareva perhaps ‘Christianizes’ the Nenets concept of ‘word’ too much, it is evident that in Nenets folklore the word is similar in many respects to the biblical Logos. Both vada and Logos have the ability to create and transform (ibid.: 70). Human words are effective in their own way. Both in the pre-conversion and the post-conversion period, it has been common to avoid using words lightly, as they are considered to be powerful and dangerous. In this regard, Piers Vitebsky observes that, for the Eveny reindeer herders of Siberia, ‘sharp, unguarded words would take on a force of their own and even kill, like a curse’ (2005: 124). The concept of word among the Nenets is similar. According to traditional codes, spoken words can offend the spirits of the tundra; a wrong use of words or curselike harmful words (vyvku vada ‘bad words’, N.) will bring harm to other people, or to oneself. Nonetheless, there is still an important difference between the concepts of ‘word power’ among Nenets and the Baptists. For Baptists, spoken words are not powerful in and of themselves but rather because they represent and uphold one’s relation to God. As Webb Keane puts it, ’semiotic form may be powerful, but in itself it is not automatically efficacious in any particular way’ (Keane 2007: 70, original emphasis). The power of words is gained through representation. In

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evangelical Christianity, spoken words are taken to reflect the ‘inner state’ of a person.19 In this sense, they are also taken as a direct expression of sincerity, which is a crucial precondition for giving the spoken words efficacy in communication with God. The concept of sincerity has no exact counterpart among the Nenets as in many other non-Christian societies (e.g., Keane 2007; Robbins 2007b; Schieffelin 2007). Being sincere and pleasing to God in words is a great challenge for many. Yegor once told me that ‘the tongue can bless as well as do harm’. Because of that, he often prays that God will help him use his tongue in the right way. He has to speak, as speaking is the foremost medium for salvation and a true believer cannot thus be silent. In the presence of the missionaries, Yegor seemed to feel pressured to speak and say the right things, which – although initially having an exterior source in the form of the Bible and missionaries – must be presented as coming from inside the person. As a Baptist you have to have faith, you have to behave in the ‘right’ way, but of itself that is not enough.20 If you do not speak, you cannot be saved, much as Susan Harding (1987) has shown for American fundamentalist Baptists. In evangelical Christian movements, everything, including good intentions and bad thoughts, must be verbalized and put into a larger system of meanings because there is no place for unexplained transmission. Non-verbal ritual actions go along with speaking only as they have no efficacy in themselves and gain their validity from being part of a spoken, explicit message. The main difference between the previous and current verbal practice of Nenets is in its intensity and quality: the earlier avoidance of talking excessively, especially in ritual contexts, is transformed into an active use of verbal means. Non-verbal communication which is effective in itself is described as common in many local religions in the world (e.g., Whitehouse 1998: 47). When I asked Nenets (both Christian and non-Christian) to explain details of their ‘pagan’ ritual practices, such as the sacrificial killing of reindeer, they usually did not do so; ‘that is the way it has always been done’ being the usual, convenient and economical answer. It seems to have been more important for Nenets to perform their rituals than to attribute them with meaning through exegesis. As Ivan explained to me, it was important to name the addressee of the sacrifice when asking for something. Sacrificial prayers were kept short, usually consisting of three or four sentences in which the head of the family made a plea to the gods to protect his family and herd. Sometimes protection against curses or ‘bad words’ was also requested. By contrast, Baptists stress the importance of the exegesis of rituals. Every time the Eucharist is performed in the tundra or in the city the ritual is preceded by the explanation and quotation of Jesus’s words at the Last Supper from the New Testament. The high level of Christian verbalization is a real challenge to earlier or ‘traditional’ use of language and among the Nenets and their usual self-reserve. In numerous situations, I observed how, when praying or speaking on biblical matters, Nenets believers struggled to cope with this emphasis on verbalism in Baptism. Rather, appearing not to enjoy public speaking or perhaps afraid of saying the wrong thing, some men and almost all Nenets women kept their

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prayers short and formulaic. In the following example, the missionary Pavel addresses the Nenets in a chum about the way believers should act and speak: Pavel: We have to communicate openly, we should not feel embarrassed. Zhenya (a Nenets): It is still difficult.

Pavel: Don’t worry. Time will do it. We need to be … [to] feel free. We are the family of God. The teachings of the Apostles, God’s Word has to be in our families every day. We also have to gather more often and communicate with each other more often. The communication is a sacrifice to God. What else can we give to God? Fish or meat? Nadya, what else can we give to God? [Silence]. Firstly, to follow the teachings; secondly, to hold communion with each other; thirdly, to pray.

I have been told by several Nenets Baptists that they are ‘not yet able to speak properly’. For them, the conversion from a rather taciturn kind of relationship with spirits to Baptism means learning to express themselves in a new language – ‘Baptist Russian’. Nenets is also used in prayers, but in the presence of missionaries the words are always translated into Russian for the missionaries to comment on. Baptist language use becomes the method for reconstructing a world-view and internalizing new values through constant repetition (of prayers, sermons and conversion narratives), reading and discussions. In the end, one acquires new tools and pathways for thinking and living through the instrumental and ritualistic use of language. The basic rule that the words are efficacious (even if they rely on different ideologies) is still there, creating a kind of continuity from the past to the present. Even if neophytes struggle with the new forms of speaking, they accept the possibility of communication with the divine through the right words, as the concept of power embodied in language is well known among Nenets. I argue that the use of religious language is a key element in understanding the process of evangelical conversion. On the one hand, the converts’ language (in preaching, praying and testimonies) reflects their religious self-transformation, while on the other it forms the central axis of the conversion process as it permanently produces self-transformation. Peter Stromberg (1993) has called the latter aspect a ‘constitutive’ use of language which forms the kernel of the transformative conversion process. But the semantic content or referential aspect of language use is also important, especially in the way it creates a point of tangency between biblical language and an individual’s experiences. In a similar vein, Tuija Hovi argues that a convert ‘must transform his or her experience into a story with a plot, which has sufficient similarities with the conversion descriptions of other members of the group’ (2000: 376). This is, however, not only confined to conversion narratives. It also applies in various speaking contexts in both everyday and ritual settings. Christian expressions and metaphors are rendered meaningful by adopting them in talking about life experiences. The missionaries encourage Nenets to speak of their quotidian

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experiences, to find the connections with the passages they have read in the Bible and transmit these in collective discussions and sermons. Thus, the practice of speaking is the main channel by which new ideas are inculcated and preconversion ideas are phased out. In addition, converts face difficulties in getting used to Baptist bodily behaviour. For the Nenets, reserved behaviour is traditionally highly valued. Weeping, crying or other expressions of one’s emotions – common among Russian Baptists – are rarely if ever publicly displayed. However, the way emotions are expressed also changes during the conversion process.21 In Vorkuta, Russian believers greet each other with a kiss when they gather in the prayer house. Men and women typically kiss someone of the same sex on the lips or cheeks, while men and women shake hands. While the Baptists stress that kissing reinforces brotherhood and peace (taking a lead from Rom. 16: 16), non-Christian Nenets regard kissing as immoral and humiliating, something that should never be performed in public. Some told me that it took a long time to get rid of unpleasant feelings when doing so. The missionary Pavel gathered the Nenets converts, men and women separately, and explained the nature of the Bible’s initial brotherly kiss. Resistance lessened thereafter, and fraternal kissing became a common practice among believers. Like language, bodily acts change in the conversion process. Due to repeated ritual acts, new embodied experience is being formed. Rebecca Sachs Norris has aptly noted that conversion is like a learning process where ‘each time a gesture is repeated, the kinesthetic, proprioceptive, and emotional memory of the gesture is evoked, layering, compounding, and shaping present experience’ (2003: 178). Currently, weeping in public (especially by women) is becoming more common. Missionaries regard this as a marker of genuineness, which refers to the true discovery of one’s sinful self. For example, on one occasion, the missionary Pavel commented that the first sign that Klava was approaching God was when she kneeled and ‘large tears flowed down her cheeks’. We can trace all these specific bodily acts back to earlier Christianity and show through genealogies of ideas that they represent a kind of Western or ‘colonial’ way of understanding religion, self and body. As Talal Asad has put it, ‘emotions, which are often recognized by anthropologists as inner, contingent events, could be progressively organized by increasingly apt performance of conventional behaviour’ (1993: 64). These deep-seated somatic responses, as well as earlier concepts of bodily behaviour, set into linguistic and cultural translation are all at work in the conversion process and are constantly being reconstructed. In conversion, it takes time to reorder meanings and emotions, and to make them what is perceived as ‘right’, as true Christian behaviour. Significantly, this kind of behaviour is not found among Baptists everywhere, even if they share the same basic tenets and rituals. Rather, the pattern of highly emotional expressivity is a specific, historically developed Russian form of Baptist behaviour. The Nenets converts see this mode of religiosity when the missionaries come to the tundra, or Nenets themselves attend the prayer house in Vorkuta. This is a mimetic learning of religious emotions and techniques of worship from

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Russian Baptists, accompanied by thorough exegesis and self-transformative speaking. In order to fulfil the ideal of the imitatio Christi, a neophyte must also imitate the behaviour and speech of other believers and, through doing so, show their ultimate submission to God’s will. While it is of course not possible for us to measure the ‘sincerity’ of these acts, we can nevertheless say that the Christian concept of sincerity has been successfully introduced into the Nenets cultural setting. Although an important aspect here is the religio-public acceptance of the person participating in the ritual (Rappaport 1999: 122), at the same time, an evangelical conversion – which is also the conversion to speaking – clearly has the power to change the ‘inner state’ of the individual.

Conclusion

Religious conversion is a complex phenomenon. It would be too simplistic to reduce the origin of conversion to, on the one hand, mere economic or political factors or, on the other, to purely symbolic needs. The first impulses for conversion should be regarded as separate from conversion as a process or an outcome. It is clear that ideas change over time and the original reasons may disappear from both discourse and memory. Initial motives for conversion may often be related to new skills and commodities, social relations or moral implications. Over time, however, the process of speaking a new (religious) language – one in which values such as eternal life and salvation occupy centre stage – is of vital importance. In this gradual process, the eternal and the mundane are reconciled. This does not mean that these processes are unilinear; rather, they should be understood as being informed by visions of past and future. There were significant changes in the religious lives of the Nenets during the last century. Animistic and shamanic ideas and practices were fought relatively unsuccessfully by the Orthodox Church in the nineteenth century. The Soviet regime, which killed, imprisoned or otherwise silenced most shamans, was rather more successful. Attacks on shamans resulted in the dwindling of communal ritual activities and of knowledge about the intentions of spirits and of ways to influence them. Nevertheless, and in spite of the parallel influence of Soviet atheist propaganda and the Russian Orthodox Church, most Nenets continue to believe that their life depends on local spirits, a conviction which is particularly strong among those who herd reindeer, fish and hunt. The spirits cannot be ignored and must be offered sacrifices. At the end of the twentieth century the appearance of Christian missions in the indigenous areas of Arctic Russia inaugurated new and potentially attractive religious ideas and practices to the Nenets peoples. Recent socio-historical conditions were similar throughout the Nenets area; yet, interestingly, only the Yamb-To Nenets initiated contact with the Baptists. They have also been the most eager to convert. One part of the explanation lies in the fact that the Yamb-To reindeer herders remained ‘outside’ Soviet society and therefore also out of reach of atheist propaganda, literacy and the Russian language. According to the theory outlined in the present study, this has made

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them more receptive to external influences. The fact that one family of noncollectivized Nenets already sent their children to school during the 1970s may reflect their wish – or at least that of the family – to know more about the outside world. Perhaps it also reflected a wish not to be seen as uneducated and thus socially inferior by other reindeer herders. One Komi reindeer herder, who knew the Yamb-To Nenets in Soviet times, told me that his people felt pity for the Yamb-To. Conversion, plus the accompanying benefits associated with improved literacy and language skills, is surely an empowering solution to the crisis. Paradoxically, improved literacy levels have not contributed to conversion to Christianity among other reindeer herders. The Russian missionaries have had almost no success among the Nenets or the neighbouring Komi reindeer herders from collective herding units, although they can read and write and their knowledge of Russian is good. As the missionaries themselves explain – and this cannot be overlooked – Soviet-inspired hostility towards the missionaries has profoundly influenced the kolkhoz herders. It is a matter of future interest as to whether or not the collectivized Nenets will continue to resist conversion. Without doubt, the conversion of half of the Yamb-To Nenets shows us the importance of the individual quest and the aspirations of young men who have been living in the group isolated from the outside world for half a century. It is clear that conversion could not have happened without the young Nenets men’s agency, and especially significant is the role of the first convert, Ivan, whose personal qualities and ambitions – for example, becoming a shaman – are extremely important. I would say that, in a way, he combines both mundane interests and religious activity in the same framework. The Nenets converts may see that their new faith is a tool that both helps them to structure the dealings of everyday life and guarantees eternal life after death. Proof of Baptism’s benefits can be seen in the gradual disappearance of alcoholism among believers; other proofs include their learning of the Russian language, the schooling of their children, the improvement of their trade network and their ability to face the general uncertainties of their rapidly growing world. Given such successes, there can be little argument that Baptism has offered the Yamb-To a potent way in which to empower themselves on the individual as well as the community level in the world of modernity they have entered.

Notes

1. This paper is based on five months fieldwork among the European Nenets, carried out between 1999 and 2004 and supported by the Estonian Cultural Endowment and Estonian Science Foundation (grant number 5057). In what follows, words in Nenets and Russian are indicated by the abbreviations N. and R. respectively. 2. Formally the kolkhozes and sovkhozes have been restructured and renamed, but in fact they continue in many respects to function much like Soviet-era collective and state farms. 3. For example, Lunkin (2000: 130) writes about massive conversions to the Full Gospel Church among Koryak on the Kamchatka peninsula and to the Church of Christians of the Evangelical Faith among Nivkhi on Sakhalin Island. See Krindatch (2004: 125) for the overall sociological tendencies in Russia’s post-Soviet religious landscape.

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4. All personal names of informants have been changed to protect their anonymity. 5. The Izhma Komi are the northernmost group of Komi who took over reindeer herding from the Nenets in the eighteenth century. The Komi were converted to Christianity by Stephen of Perm and his successors in the fourteenth and fifteenth century. 6. The figures are taken from the official website of the last census in Russia: www.perepis2002.ru. Retrieved 1 March 2006. 7. These are tepee-like conical tents covered with reindeer skins in winter and tarpaulin in summer. 8. The name ‘Yamb-To’ was only invented in the early 1990s as part of the process of legalization of the group. 9. Yamb-To Nenets have both Nenets and Russian names. They use their Russian names when communicating with the missionaries. 10. Many factors played a role in the Yamb-To Nenets’ escape from collectivization. First, the YambTo Nenets avoided contact with officials and (conflicts with) collective farms as much as possible, especially in the 1940s and 1950s. Second, administrative control of the area was weak and patchy, as the reindeer herders from the Nenets AO (Autonomous Okrug), Komi ASSR and the Yamal-Nenets AO used pastures in each other’s administrative units. The long migration corridors of Komi sovkhoz brigades stretching through the Nenets AO were not controlled because Komi sovkhoz centres were hundreds of kilometres south while the local administrations in the Nenets AO did not bother controlling Komi pastures. The Yamb-To Nenets tended to use land on the Komi sovkhoz that was not used by its own brigades. Still, it is hard to know how widely the existence of the Yamb-To Nenets was known. Most probably, the local village administrations knew about the private reindeer herders, but I have not encountered evidence that the central authorities were aware of them before the 1980s. At least, no actions were taken against them by Naryan-Mar or Moscow until the early 1980s. 11. In 1983, after the eruption of the typhus epidemic in the group, two more children were forcibly taken to the Naryan-Mar boarding school while they were alone in the camp. They spent seven years there without seeing their parents before returning to the tundra. 12. The Baptists of unregistered congregations belong to the International Union of Churches of Evangelical Christians-Baptists (IUCECB), known from 1965 to 2001 as the Council of Churches of the Evangelical Christians-Baptists (CCECB). The unregistered Baptists were referred to in the early 1960s as the Initsiativniki (Action Group). The registered Baptists were united under the AllUnion Council of Evangelical Christians-Baptists (AUCECB) (for details, see Beermann 1968: 74; Bourdeaux 1968; Filatov 2000: 95; Lane 1978: 146–8; Mitrokhin 1997: 412; Sawatsky 1981). The IUCECB is anti-ecumenical and has only limited contacts with other unions of evangelicals, including the AUCECB. I refer to them as ‘unregistered Baptists’ because historically this has been the main marker of difference from the rest of the Baptists in Russia. 13. Here, a parallel may be drawn with the Soviet state of the 1920s and ’30s, when more ‘competent’ youths became the preachers of new communist ideals. 14. Louis Dumont, comparing Christian and Indian concepts of individuality, characterizes this paradox in the following way: ‘What no Indian religion has ever fully attained and which was given from the start in Christianity is the brotherhood of love in and through Christ, and the consequent equality of all, “an equality that exists purely”, Troeltsch insists, “in the presence of God”. Sociologically speaking, the emancipation of the individual through a personal transcendence, and the union of outworldly individuals in a community that treads on earth but has its heart in heaven, may constitute a passable formula for Christianity’ (1985: 99). 15. The documentary Missionary was directed by Oleg Baraev and produced by Ian Berlin (Arkhangelsk ‘Dialog’ 1997). 16. One of the theological reasons for communality comes from Christ’s words, ‘For where two or three come together in my name, there am I with them’ (Matt. 18: 20). 17. This restriction comes from Paul’s teaching in the New Testament: ‘women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the Law says. If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home’ (1. Cor. 14: 33–35). 18. Only in 2004 was the first part of Bible, the Gospel of Luke, translated into Nenets by Maria Barmich, a Nenets linguist. The translation was commissioned by the Institute for Bible Translation (IBT) in Stockholm (see Barmich 2004). In recent years, in addition to the translators

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of the IBT, checkers and consultants from the Wycliffe Bible Translators and Summer Institute of Linguistics have been involved in translating the Bible into Nenets (see ‘Greetings From the “End of the World”’, http://www.ibtnet.org/PDF/2004_fall.pdf. Retrieved 12 June 2006). During the nineteenth century, some parts of the New Testament were translated into Nenets by Archimandrite Veniamin, but these translations were never published (see S. 1895). 19. This entails a new idea of dividing the person into an inner and outer self, a matter which cannot be pursued here in more detail. 20. Baptist missionaries refer here to the New Testament: ‘For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved’ (Rom. 10: 10). 21. The Nenets do have a special genre of individual songs in which one can express one’s feelings, but these intimate songs are performed alone or in the presence of the closest relatives (Niemi 2004), and the performer is often drunk, which is reflected in the name of these songs: yabe syo (‘drunk song’). Baptist Nenets have told me that these songs cannot be sung any more because they are not acceptable to God as they talk about demons and were performed while drinking alcohol.

References Asad, T. 1993. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. –––––. 1996. ‘Comments on Conversion’, in P. van der Veer (ed.) Conversion to Modernities: The Globalization of Christianity. London: Routledge, 263–73. Balzer, M.M. 1993. ‘Dilemmas of the Spirit: Religion and Atheism in the Yakut-Sakha Republic’, in S.P. Ramet (ed.) Religious Policy in the Soviet Union. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 231–51. –––––. 1999. The Tenacity of Ethnicity: A Siberian Saga in Global Perspective. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Barmich, M. (trans.) 2004. Luka’ padvy Maymbabtso Yun. Moscow: Institut perevoda Biblii. Beermann, R. 1968. ‘The Baptists and Soviet society’, Soviet Studies 20(1): 67–80. Bourdeaux, M. 1968. Religious Ferment in Russia: Protestant Opposition to Soviet Religious Policy. London: Macmillan. Carsten, J. 2004. After Kinship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Comaroff, J. and J.L. Comaroff. 1991. Of Revelation and Revolution, Volume 1: Christianity, Colonialism and Consciousness in South Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Csordas, T. 1994. The Sacred Self: A Cultural Phenomenology of Charismatic Healing. Berkeley: University of California Press. Dumont, L. 1985. ‘A Modified View of Our Origins: The Christian Beginnings of Modern Individualism’, in M. Carrithers, S. Collins and S. Lukes (eds) The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 93–122. Filatov, S. 2000. ‘Protestantism in Postsoviet Russia: An Unacknowledged Triumph’, Religion, State and Society 28(1): 93–103. Forsyth, J. 1992. A History of the Peoples of Siberia: Russia’s North Asian Colony, 1581–1990. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Golovnev, A. 2000. ‘Letter from Varandei’, Polar Research 19(1): 135–42. Golovnev, O. and G. Osherenko 1999. Siberian Survival: The Nenets and Their Story. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Harding, S. 1987. ‘Convicted by the Holy Spirit: The Rhetoric of Fundamental Baptist Conversion’, American Ethnologist 14(1): 167–81. Hefner, R. 1993. ‘World Building and the Rationality of Conversion’, in R. Hefner (ed.) Conversion to Christianity: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives on a Great Transformation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 3–44. Hoppál, M. 1999. ‘Shamanism in Siberia Today’, in R. Mastromattei and A. Rigopoulos (eds) Shamanic Cosmos: From India to the North Pole Star. Venice: Venetian Academy of Indian Studies, 107–16.

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Hovi, T. 2000. ‘Textualising Religious Experience’, in L. Honko (ed.) Thick Corpus: Organic Variation and Textuality in Oral Tradition. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 373–400. Humphrey, C. 1999a. Marx Went Away, but Karl Stayed Behind. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. –––––. 1999b. ‘Shamans in the City’, Anthropology Today 15(3): 3–10. Keane, W. 2007. Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kharkhordin, O. 1999. The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices. Berkeley: University of California Press. Khomich, L. 1995. Nentsy. Ocherki traditsionnoy kultury. St Petersburg: Russkiy Dvor. Krindatch, A. 2004. ‘Patterns of Religious Change in Postsoviet Russia: Major Trends from 1998 to 2003’, Religion, State and Society 32(2): 115–36. Lane, C. 1978. Christian Religion in the Soviet Union: A Sociological Study. London: SUNY Press. Lashov, B. 1964. ‘Voprosy osedaniya korennogo naseleniya krainego Severa (na primere Nenetskogo natsionalnogo okruga)’, Izvestiya vsesoyuznogo geograficheskogo obshchestva 5: 408–13. Lunkin, R. 2000. ‘Russia’s Native Peoples: Their Path to Christianity’, Religion, State and Society 28(1): 123–33. Mitrokhin, L. 1997. Baptizm: istoriya i sovremennost. St Petersburg: Izdatelstvo Russkogo khristianskogo gumanitarnogo instituta. Niemi, J. 2004. ‘Individual Songs in Native Western Siberia – Just an Ordinary Folklore Genre?’ in G. Sychenko (ed.) Muzyka i ritual: struktura, semantika, spetsifika. Novosibirsk: Novosibirskaya Gosudarstvennaya Konservatoriya, 29–44. Norris, R. 2003. ‘Converting to What? Embodied Culture and the Adoption of New Beliefs’, in A. Buckser and S. Glazier (eds) The Anthropology of Religious Conversion. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 171–81. Pushkareva, Y. 2003. ‘Kartina mira v folklore i traditsionnykh predstavleniyakh nentsev: sistemnofenomenologicheskiy analiz’. Doctoral dissertation. Moscow: Institut etnologii i antropologii im. N.N. Miklukho-Maklaya. Rossiskaya Akademiya Nauk. –––––. 2004. ‘Images of the Word in Nenets Folklore’, Anthropology and Archeology of Eurasia 42(4): 64–84. Rappaport, R. 1999. Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Robbins, J. 2004. Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. –––––. 2007a. ‘Continuity Thinking and the Problem of Christian Culture’, Current Anthropology 48(1): 5–38. –––––. 2007b. ‘You Can’t Talk behind the Holy Spirit’s Back’, in M. Makihara and B. Schieffelin (eds) Consequences of Contact: Language Ideologies and Sociocultural Transformations in Pacific Societies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 125–39. S. 1895. ‘O deyatelnosti Perevodcheskoy komissii, uchrezhdennoy pri Arkhangelskom Komitete Pravoslavnago Missionerskago Obshchestva (1894–1895 g.)’, Arkhangelskiya eparkhialnyya vedomosti 17: 418–25. Sawatsky, W. 1981. Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II. Kitchener, Scottdale: Herald Press. Schieffelin, B. 2007. ‘Found in Translating’, in M. Makihara and B. Schieffelin (eds) Consequences of Contact: Language Ideologies and Sociocultural Transformations in Pacific Societies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 140–65. Schieffelin, E. 1985. ‘Performance and the Cultural Construction of Reality’, American Ethnologist 12(4): 707–24. Slezkine, Y. 1994. Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Stromberg, P. 1993. Language and Self-Transformation: A Study of the Christian Conversion Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tolkachev, V. 1990. ‘Otshelniki tundry, ili lyudi, kotorykh… net’, Pravda Severa 9 September 1990. Tuisku, T. 1999. Nenetsien ankarat elämisen ehdot tundralla ja kylässä: poronhoidon sopeutumisstrategiat ja delokalisoitumisprosessi Nenetsiassa. Rovaniemi, Finland: Lapin yliopisto.

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Vallikivi, L. 2003. ‘Minority and Mission: Christianisation of the European Nenets’, Pro Ethnologia (Estonian National Museum) 15: 109–30. –––––. 2005. ‘Two Wars in Conflict: Resistance among Nenets Reindeer Herders in the 1940s’, Studies in Folk Culture (Tartu University Press) 5: 14–54. Veniamin (Smirnov, V.N.). 1855. ‘Samoedy Mezenskiye’, Vestnik Imperatorskago Russkago Geograficheskago Obshchestva (St Petersburg) 14(2): 77–136. Vitebsky, P. 1995. ‘From Cosmology to Environmentalism: Shamanism as Local Knowledge in a Global Setting’, in R. Fardon (ed.) Counterworks. London: Routledge, 182–203. –––––. 2005. Reindeer People: Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia. London: Harper Collins. Whitehouse, H. 1998. ‘From Mission to Movement: The Impact of Christianity on Patterns of Political Association in Papua New Guinea’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 5(1): 43–63. Znamenski, A. 1999. Shamanism and Christianity: Native Encounters with Russian Orthodox Missions in Siberia and Alaska, 1820–1917. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Chapter 5

RIGHT SINGING AND CONVERSION TO ORTHODOX CHRISTIANITY IN ESTONIA Jeffers Engelhardt Oh Kristus, Sa valgustasid oma tulemise hiilgusega ja rõõmustasid oma ristiga kõik maailma otsad. Valgusta oma tundmise valgusega nende südameid, kes Sinust õigel viisil laulavad.

Oh Christ, You illumined with the radiance of Your coming and gladdened with Your cross all the ends of the earth. Illumine with the light of Your knowledge the hearts of those who sing of You in the right way. —Canon for Sunday Orthros, first mode, fifth ode irmos from the service books of the Orthodox Church of Estonia

Conversion to Orthodox Christianity has been one of the most unexpected and therefore revealing phenomena of religious and social transformation in Estonia since the Singing Revolution of 1987 to 1991.1 It differs in basic ways from more visible agents of religious and social change like renewal in the mainstream Estonian Evangelical Lutheran Church (which is predominantly ethnic Estonian) and the Estonian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate (which is predominantly ethnic Russian), the influx of foreign capital into Methodist, Baptist, Pentecostal and other Protestant congregations, the presence of evangelical missionaries from North America and Western Europe, and the reimagining of local spiritual practices (maausk and Taara Usk). In Estonia, conversion to Orthodoxy takes place across deeply inscribed, heavily stereotyped social and historical boundaries, highlighting the contingency of the ethnolinguistic and geopolitical ideologies those boundaries register and the durability of religious nationalisms (cf. Wanner, Chapter 9, this volume). At the same time that Orthodoxy has become an increasingly important means of Russianspeakers’ cultural identification, social cohesion and political mobilization in a ‘beached diaspora’ (Laitin 1998), it is Estonians, by and large, who are converting to Orthodoxy, although not within the Estonian Orthodox Church of

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the Moscow Patriarchate. Their conversions are a catalyst for the institutional and spiritual renewal of the Orthodox Church of Estonia, an autonomous, predominantly ethnic Estonian Church under the jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople.2 While the number of converts is not large – perhaps several hundred over the past two decades – these Estonians are critically engaged in postsocialist ‘transition’, transforming global religious imaginaries, notions of Western ‘normalcy’ (cf. Rausing 2004; Boym 2001; Verdery 1999: 116), the purported liberal secularity of state and society, and quotidian senses of Estonian-ness and European-ness through their ongoing conversions. Singing pervades these processes and is one of the principal ways Estonian converts encounter, experience, assimilate and perform Orthodox Christian teaching and tradition. The kind of singing I examine is crucial in conversion because it puts into practice and makes sensible a morality rooted in liturgy, a theologically sound aesthetics, and a particular soteriological doctrine. It also allows singers to take on an active role in ritual, negotiate Orthodoxy’s gendered hierarchies, and cultivate the lay sociability that is a significant part of their religious and ethno-linguistic identities. By focusing here on the place of singing in conversion to Orthodox Christianity in Estonia, I hope to draw fresh attention to the role of the senses, emotion and embodied practices and to the tenacity of nationalisms and geopolitics in processes of conversion in the postsocialist world and beyond. The Estonian Orthodox singing I describe here is not just any singing, it is singing that is ‘right’ (õige) for conversion according to local understandings of Orthodox canons. As in all Orthodox Christianities, Estonian Orthodox musical practices are exclusively vocal, reflecting ritual and theological imperatives codified in the early Church. The traditional proscription of musical instruments in most Orthodoxies is based on the instruments’ artificiality as human creations, their association with worldly, bodily activities like dance and work, and their perceived alienation from language, which renders them incapable of prayer. The human voice, on the other hand, is the ideal source of sound in most Orthodoxies because of its close connection to language and efficacy in prayer, its sanctity as a creation of God, and the way it enhances audition and affective experience. This is the basis of Orthodox Christians’ faith in the ontology of their singing as a truthful and correct mode of worship (see Bohlman 1999). In order to confirm this faith and ensure the efficacy of ritual (see Becker 2004: 34), Orthodox singing must be ‘right’. Right singing is an ideal which both epitomizes and animates the dual essence of Orthodoxy (õigeusk) as ‘right belief’ and ‘right glory’ or ‘right worship’.3 It sutures together belief and practice, eternity and history, heavenly and terrestrial realms – what Lawrence Sullivan speaks of as a ‘mimetic capacity to attune itself to other realities or provoke other realities into resonating in tune with it’ (1997: 9). Right singing is about channelling aesthetic power, adhering to Orthodox canons, fashioning religious authenticity, and establishing moral order. It can be understood as ‘the ideology of how divinity manifests in musical sound’ (Lange 2003: 6).

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At the Cathedral of St Simeon and the Prophetess Hanna in Tallinn, conversion is an integral aspect of right singing, and vice versa. As affect and religious ideology, right singing creates the conditions that enable conversion (see Lange 2003: 7) and offers singers ‘new possibilities for constituting themselves’ (Asad 1996: 265) as Orthodox Christian Estonians. At the same time, conversion is transforming what right singing is and how it sounds in profound ways. Conversion is also transforming worship practices and congregational life at the parish. The current priest and his wife, who leads the choir, converted to Orthodoxy in the early 1990s, while many congregants and most choir members converted during or after the Singing Revolution. If, as Talal Asad believes, these conversions can be interpreted as ‘narratives by which people apprehended and described a radical change in the significance of their lives’ (1996: 266), then how does right singing give voice to conversion in practice and discourse? How do converts experience and express their newfound agency? What do ethnic Estonians’ conversions ‘outside the fold’ (Viswanathan 1998) reveal about religious renewal and the politics of belief in post-Soviet Estonia? Answers to these questions reveal how right singing and conversion to Orthodox Christianity in Estonia are richly layered interactions between East and West that resonate with the transformations of global Christianities in the North and South (cf. Lankauskas, Chapter 6; Vallikivi, Chapter 4; Wanner, Chapter 9, this volume). Right singing and conversion in Estonia sound the new religious imaginaries and global circulations of people, music, capital and knowledge emerging after socialism. Lastly, these processes critically reframe the modern doctrine of secularism (Asad 2003) that is uncritically naturalized in various forms of Estonian ‘transition’ as converts necessarily engage public politics and reshape social formations in their musical practices and other ways of living as Estonian Orthodox Christians. In examining these processes, I turn to histories of Orthodox conversion in Estonia, contexts for right singing at the Cathedral of St Simeon and the Prophetess Hanna, and the individual conversion narratives of Orthodox Estonians.

Conversion to Orthodox Christianity in Estonia

It is important to distinguish conversion in the postsocialist world from conventional notions of conversion as a turning away from one way of being towards another (Rambo 1993) through a change of confession or system of belief. While Orthodox conversion among ethnic Estonians can involve turning away from the de facto national Lutheran Church or other Protestant Churches towards Orthodoxy, or from a ‘godless’ Soviet past towards a ‘normal’ future where God is present, it also involves less conventional kinds of turning and returning. One general example of post-Soviet conversion more broadly conceived is the return to active participation in religious life from the inactivity that was the result of lost religious knowledge, state surveillance, discrimination at school and in the workplace, and lost social benefits in the Soviet era. Another

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example specific to Orthodox conversion in Estonia is the turn away from the Moscow Patriarchate (the sole Soviet-era Orthodox ecclesial authority) towards the autonomous Orthodox Church of Estonia that most ethnic Estonian Orthodox made in 1996. This led to the schism among Orthodox believers that, with few exceptions, reproduces already fraught ethno-linguistic and social distinctions between ethnic Estonians and Russian speakers. Post-Soviet conversion in Estonia, therefore, includes not only turns from one confession or system of belief towards another, but also inter-confessional turns towards communities and institutions deemed more legitimate and returns to active participation in religious life from a time of inactivity. Like the high birth rates and resurgence of public religiosity that accompanied the Singing Revolution, conversion can be an expression of nationalist euphoria, renewed spiritual integrity and faith in the future. On the other hand, conversion can mollify the economic hardships, familial strain, struggle for meaning and anxiety about the future that Estonian ‘transition’ may engender. Historically, Orthodox conversion among ethnic Estonians has been a destabilizing act carried out under imperial and colonial domination and amidst radical social change (Viswanathan 1998: xvi). The wave of conversions that took place among Estonian peasants in Livland in the 1840s (see Kruus 1930; Thaden 1984; Geraci and Khodarkovsky 2001; Werth 2003) created a critical mass of Orthodox Estonians at the same time that it complicated the inchoate imagination of Estonian-ness. As Daniel Ryan (2004) has shown, these conversions were as much about religious conviction as they were part of broader discourses about Estonians’ social status, rights and obligations within the Russian Empire. Later conversions in Estland in the 1880s and 1890s (see Rebane-Loone 1934; Thaden 1981) were enmeshed in tsarist-era politics of confession, conversion and reconversion and were an aspect of Russification which threatened an Estonian national identity being constructed as both Finno-Ugric and Western. Following the advent of the Republic of Estonia in 1920, the Orthodox minority totalled 19 per cent (12 per cent of which was ethnic Estonian) of a population of 1.1 million, 88 per cent of which was ethnic Estonian (Raun 2001: 130–35). In 2003, the Orthodox minority in Estonia was around 14 per cent, the vast majority of which was Russian speaking and belonged to the Estonian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate. This was due to the fact that Estonian demographics were dramatically transformed by the Soviet-era immigration of Russian-speaking industrial labourers. In 2003, roughly 68 per cent of a population of 1.4 million were ethnic Estonian and 29 per cent were Russian speakers. The Orthodox Church of Estonia includes fifty-nine parishes throughout Estonia (many of which are inactive) and has a membership of about 20,000, the vast majority of which is ethnic Estonian. The Estonian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate includes thirty parishes, most of which are in Tallinn and the north-eastern part of Estonia, and has a membership of over 150,000, the vast majority of which is Russian speaking. Today, the persistence of terms like ‘Russian faith’ (vene usk) and ‘Russian Church’ (vene kirik) in everyday Estonian speech reveals how Orthodox

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conversion in Estonia takes place across deeply ingrained social and cultural boundaries. These terms conflate ethno-linguistic and religious identity into a stereotype, maintain such boundaries through their ‘manageable iconicity’ (Herzfeld 1997: 31), and uphold Orthodoxy as foreign and exogenous (cf. Vallikivi, Chapter 4; Wanner, Chapter 9, this volume) despite the large Russianspeaking Orthodox population in Estonia. Notably absent in the terms ‘Russian faith’ and ‘Russian Church’, however, is the notion of ‘right belief’ and ‘right glory’ or ‘right worship’ that legitimates Orthodoxy and its practices of right singing as religious ideology. Given the ethno-linguistic and social meanings of Orthodox Christianity in Estonia, it comes as no surprise that I have never heard an Orthodox Estonian use the terms ‘Russian faith’ and ‘Russian Church’ except ironically or in jest. Orthodox Estonians speak of their faith simply as Orthodoxy (õigeusk) without ethno-linguistic qualification. Ethnic Estonian converts’ turn toward new ways of being and believing at once intensifies and obscures the distinction between Estonian-ness and Russianness that has such visibility and ideological significance in Estonian society, not least in the Orthodox schism and its competing historical and canonical claims. Unlike other post-Soviet Protestant and evangelical conversions in Estonia, Estonian Orthodox conversion does not involve (foreign) missionization. Furthermore, the access to humanitarian aid from abroad some Protestant converts received by being active in congregations during the late 1980s and early 1990s did not factor into Estonian Orthodox conversions at that time. However, Estonian Orthodox conversion has been shaped by the intervention of the Estonian state in the renewal of the Orthodox Church of Estonia. It has also been buoyed by the spiritual, institutional and financial support of Orthodox Churches under the jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, including the Orthodox Church of Finland and the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America. But because of the common perception among ethnic Estonians that Orthodox Christianity is a ‘Russian faith’, conversion to Orthodoxy raises social and ideological issues that conversion to Protestant and evangelical Christianities, which in many ways correspond to the ‘normal,’ ‘Western’ trajectory of Estonian post-Soviet ‘transition,’ do not.

The Cathedral of St Simeon and the Prophetess Hanna in Tallinn

The Cathedral of St Simeon and the Prophetess Hanna is situated among the many new commercial and residential buildings near Tallinn’s Baltic harbour that many Estonians refer to as ‘Euro-buildings’ (euromajad). The church is also situated in a space of circulating travellers, tourists, consumers and capital called Talsinki. The term Talsinki was first used by the Estonian writer Jaan Kaplinski in 1992 to describe the new economic and cultural space emerging at that time between Tallinn and Helsinki. The idea of Talsinki is based upon a common Finno-Ugric linguistic and cultural heritage, co-operation in post-imperial state

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building and Soviet resistance, the fact that those living in northern Estonia had access to Finnish and Western media during Soviet occupation,4 the influx of Finnish capital and assistance following the restoration of Estonian independence in 1991, and the intimate connection of Orthodox Estonians and Finns within the world of the Patriarchate of Constantinople. Despite profound ideological and practical barriers, Tallinn and Helsinki have been connected physically and imaginatively since a ferry service reopened for tourists and travellers in 1965 during the détente between the Kekkonen and Brezhnev regimes. Talsinki is thus a pathway of Estonian (and Finnish) ‘transition’ and a landscape of globalization that creates new possibilities and new asymmetries. The Cathedral of St Simeon and the Prophetess Hanna was built between 1752 and 1755 by sailors in the Russian navy. According to legend, the church stands on the site of a shipwreck from whose rubble Russian sailors built a chapel. In 1827 and 1870, the church was enlarged into the shape of a cross and elaborated with a central onion-shaped cupola, a bell tower and decorative wooden trim in the traditional Russian style. In 1900, part of the church’s Russian congregation moved to the newly completed Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, a monument to Russification surveying Tallinn from the city’s highest hill. Then, with the advent of an autonomous Orthodox Church of Estonia and a nationalizing Estonian state in 1918/19, the parish was turned over to an Estonian congregation served by Anton Laar (1885–1933). During the interwar Republic of Estonia, the congregation grew to include nearly 450 Estonian Orthodox believers and was served for almost two decades by Nikolai Päts (1871–1940), the brother of Estonian head of state Konstantin Päts (1874–1956). In the 1920s and 1930s, congregational life was nurtured through the choral society Helila and a number of dramatic societies as well. There was much debate in the 1920s about the propriety of the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, which was built on a site where Baltic Germans had plans to construct a monument to Martin Luther and posed a symbolic threat to the nearby Estonian parliament building. Instead of acting on proposals to raze the Cathedral, Orthodox Church of Estonia leaders decided in 1936 to transfer the Estonian-language congregation of the St Simeon and the Prophetess Hanna parish to the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, whose Russian-language congregation was transferred to the St Simeon and the Prophetess Hanna parish. Placing an ethnic-Estonian congregation in the quintessentially Russian Alexander Nevsky Cathedral was the kind of nationalist gesture that characterized the Orthodox Church of Estonia during its autonomy in the interwar years. During Soviet occupation, the ritual and spiritual life of the congregation at the Cathedral of St Simeon and the Prophetess Hanna was subject to intensifying suppression. Pavel Kalinkin (1880–1961), a priest at the parish in the mid 1940s, was defrocked in 1948 for remaining faithful to the canonical order of the interwar Orthodox Church of Estonia and failing to recognize the authority of the Patriarchate of Moscow (Sõtšov 2004: 175). As a result of the increasingly militant atheism of the Soviet regime under Krushchev, the church was closed in 1963, its property nationalized, its bell tower and onion-shaped cupola dismantled,

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and its icons and liturgical artefacts moved to the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, where many of them still stand. In the 1970s, the building was converted for use as a sports hall. With the advent of perestroika in 1987, however, a Pentecostal congregation began using the building for worship and ran a soup kitchen there

Figure 5.1. The congregation of the Cathedral of St Simeon and the Prophetess Hanna in 2003 (Photo J. Engelhardt).

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until 1999, when the building was returned to the Orthodox Church of Estonia through post-Soviet ownership reforms and the intervention of the Estonian state. In 2000, Patriarch of Constantinople Bartholomew blessed the restoration of the St Simeon and the Prophetess Hanna building, and Orthodox Estonians began worshipping there anew. Its restoration, completed in time for the church’s 250th anniversary in 2005, serves as a metaphor for the restored Orthodox Church of Estonia and the restored Estonian state. It stands as a physical monument to the myths and ideologies of restoration and to anachronistic moral claims and claims about historical justice (see Bohlman 2000). The congregation of St Simeon and the Prophetess Hanna is the smaller of the two Orthodox Church of Estonia parishes in Tallinn and is home to a younger, more diverse and more cosmopolitan congregation than the Cathedral of the Transfiguration, its larger, less cosmopolitan and more traditional counterpart in Tallinn’s old city. Its members are icon painters, graphic designers, architects, musicians, military officers, former members of the Estonian parliament, students, translators, pensioners and schoolchildren, many of whom have completed pilgrimages and studies in Finland, Greece, France, Cyprus and beyond. Perhaps the majority of those who serve, sing and worship there converted to Orthodoxy during or after the Singing Revolution.5 As well-educated, urban Estonians who have benefitted from postsocialist ‘transition’ almost without exception, these converts are like other young, cosmopolitan converts in Western Europe and North America for whom the aesthetics, perceived authenticity and alternative nature of Orthodox Christianity are profoundly appealing. Like other ethnic Estonians of similar social and economic standing, they have moved ‘away from the Soviet (and Russian) mode of living’ (Rausing 2004: 40) in their consumption practices and organization of time. And while their turn towards Orthodoxy ‘constitutes a significant strategy for anchoring themselves in postsocialism’s bewildering milieu’ (Lankauskas 2002: 321), it does not engender the kind of religious modernism that Gediminas Lankauskas (2002) finds among evangelical Christians in Lithuania, for instance. Estonian Orthodox converts at the parish of St Simeon and the Prophetess Hanna find particular power in what they sense as the ‘archaic’ quality of singing there, its affect, and the originary, authentic Christianity it represents. This is part of a more general transformation of worship practices and congregational life at the church oriented around the ‘Byzantine’ Orthodox world of the Patriarchate of Constantinople. Some of these transformations have taken place within the context of the church’s physical restoration – the acquisition of new ‘Byzantine’ icons from Greece or the downplaying of architectural elements deemed to be ‘too Russian’ (liiga vene moodi), for example. Others are part of ongoing renewal involving such aspects of liturgical tradition and congregational life as the structure of services, the variants of texts used therein, ways of practicing confession and, or course, singing. As a process of revival and search for authenticity, this kind of renewal is no less modern than more overtly modernist conversions and processes of postsocialist renewal involving Western commodities, technologies and ways of

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living (cf. Lange 2003; Lankauskas 2002; Vallikivi 2005). Both converts and Orthodox leaders animate this renewal. As I mentioned above, Patriarch of Constantinople Bartholomew has celebrated liturgies at the cathedral on multiple occasions, and Metropolitan Stefanus, the Cypriot leader of the Orthodox Church of Estonia, has his seat there. Their presence makes the ‘Byzantine’ liturgical practices, theological traditions and musical ideals that guide renewal particularly tangible. The parish has had two priests in the 2000s, Father Meletios Ulm and Father Mattias Palli. Both have spent a significant amount of time in Greece and Finland – each of which is an important centre in the world of the Patriarchate of Constantinople – training for the priesthood. What makes renewal at the parish distinctive and significant, then, are its imaginative dimensions. While its Orthodox Estonians are, at first glance, the intellectuals and cosmopolitans who figure so prominently in conventional discourses of Estonian ‘transition’, they are, in fact, making a world for themselves apart from the geopolitical and moral sphere naturalized in ‘transition’ discourses. Their modern religious imaginary – what Charles Taylor calls ‘the ensemble of imaginings that enable our practices by making sense of them’ (2004: 165) – is global in a way that critically resituates notions of Western ‘normalcy’ within emerging landscapes of religious authority and moral order (see Payne 2003). Their conversions, pilgrimages and new ways of singing return Estonian Orthodoxy to its deepest ‘Byzantine” historical origins, bringing symbolic closure to the thousand-year transmission of Orthodoxy and perhaps bypassing the spectre of ‘Russia’. They are singers, priests and congregants actively engaged in the making of modernity and what Peter Berger calls the ‘desecularization of the world’; the ‘critique of secularity’ (1999: 13) taking place within the ‘conservative or orthodox or traditionalist movements that are on the rise almost everywhere’ (ibid.: 6) which hold that ‘human existence bereft of transcendence is an impoverished and finally untenable condition’ (ibid.: 13). The imaginative dimensions of renewal at the Cathedral of St Simeon and the Prophetess Hanna become tangible through the soundscape within which conversion and right singing happen. So what does right singing sound like? How does right singing usher converts into new ways of being and believing? How are its aesthetics affective and ritually efficacious? What are the social and ideological effects of right singing? As is clear in the conversion narratives that follow, Terje Palli, the choir leader of the parish, is the moving force behind right singing there. She is a witness to the Orthodox life and an agent of renewal whose charismatic presence has been a decisive factor in many conversions. After her own turn towards Orthodoxy, Terje spent the better part of a decade with her husband, Father Mattias Palli, at seminaries and monasteries in Greece and Finland. Her immersion in the sound-worlds of local Orthodoxies that are part of a global ‘Byzantine’ Orthodox imaginary has had a decided influence on the cosmopolitan nature of right singing and the sense of authenticity it engenders. In her work with the choir, Terje introduces ‘Byzantine’ hymns sung in Estonian, iconic ‘Byzantine’ musical elements like the íson drone, and an ascetic, vibratoless, restrained singing technique.

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Everyday liturgical singing in the parish of St Simeon and the Prophetess Hanna is grounded primarily upon an Estonianized practice of the Russian Obikhod, the common chant formulae and body of liturgical hymns that took shape through the work of Aleksey Fyodorovich L’vov (1798–1870) and others at the Imperial Capella in St Petersburg in the mid nineteenth century. This includes the Russian oktoēchos6 used to chant the various troparia, kontakia and stichēra proper to the day, the melodies for the prokeimena and alleluia,7 and the simple responsorial formulae used during litanies. In this way, singing is part of a global phenomenon whereby local Orthodox musical practices emerge in the Finno-Ugric world, North America and East Asia through the background of Russian Orthodox missionization and the imperial encounter (cf. Kan 1999; Stark 2002; Znamenski 1999). Glancing through Terje’s handwritten service notebooks, one finds Estonianized versions of hymns from the Valamo Monastery in Russian Karelia, the Kiev Caves Monastery, the Optina Monastery in the Kaluga region of Russia and the Petseri Monastery near Pskov. Other melodies are designated as being from Greece, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Moscow and Finland, or as being ‘Byzantine’. The sound of worship at the church is markedly different from the sounds of almost all other parishes in the Orthodox Church of Estonia. It is the sound of ongoing processes of conversion and the sociological particularity of the congregation. It is far removed from the local oral traditions, bilingual practices and multi-ethnic congregations found in Setomaa, the rural border region in south-eastern Estonia that, like Karelia, is of great significance in the world of Finno-Ugric Orthodoxy. It is also far removed from the Slavonic liturgies and mainstream Russian Orthodox traditions found in the few Russian-speaking congregations of the Orthodox Church of Estonia. Singers from the parish of St Simeon and the Prophetess Hanna are distancing themselves from the usual Estonian Orthodox singing that includes strongly metered, strophic, Protestantinfluenced hymns created by Estonian priest-musicians at the turn of the twentieth century and Estonianized Russian Orthodox hymns of the St Petersburg and Moscow schools. As converts consistently attest, it is the particular way of singing that makes conversion and worship in this community right.

Narratives of Conversion at the Cathedral of St Simeon and the Prophetess Hanna

The ideal of right singing that guides conversion and worship practices at the Cathedral of St Simeon and the Prophetess Hanna shapes and is shaped by a constellation of beliefs and identities. For many converts, experiencing Orthodox singing as right was equal to the experience of conversion itself, and learning to sing in the choir is how they continue learning to be Orthodox (see Garcia 1998). The three conversion narratives that follow show how singers articulate the ideal of right singing in different ways to express its significance in the ‘living experience’ (Booth 1995: 370) of their turn towards Orthodoxy.

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Anu

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Anu is an artist in her forties who converted to Orthodoxy in 1989. She describes her conversion to Orthodoxy through an interesting analogy: ‘Maybe women are like cats that constantly search for the place that is most pleasing to them and where it is good to be’. Like many Estonians her age, she was disturbed by the fact that she was not baptized as a child and, with children of her own, began going to Lutheran services and Sunday school during the Singing Revolution. For Anu, however, Lutheran musical practices were alien to the words of the hymns and prayers that worshippers were singing. Lutheran singing was too bombastic and instrumental; it was ‘so wrong’ that she ‘simply couldn’t listen to it’. As Anu explained, ‘music is quite important for me, music which is right (õige)’. Anu’s first contact with Orthodoxy came when an icon painter she met at Lutheran Sunday school classes invited her to services at the Cathedral of the Transfiguration in Tallinn. She and her daughter were eventually baptized and attended services there until the late 1990s. As plans were being made to restore the St Simeon and the Prophetess Hanna building in the late 1990s, a number of parishioners from the Cathedral of the Transfiguration began worshipping with Metropolitan Stefanus in order to form a congregation for the restored church. Anu was one of these new congregants, and she immediately sensed how singing in this new community was ‘right’. This different kind of singing was shaped by the experience of global ‘Byzantine’ Orthodoxy that Terje Palli brought with her to the choir. There, Anu absorbed a kind of Orthodox singing that was ‘more archaic’ and ‘monastic’ than the Romantic style of traditional Estonian Orthodox singing she found elsewhere. Anu and several other converts would meet weekly with Terje to learn these new ways of singing. She says that singing at the church is ‘right’ because prayer is at the core of musical practice there, which clarifies the structure of the liturgy and brings worshippers to the ‘right level’. For Anu, it is the discipline that enables her to be fully attentive and participate in services. Anu’s conversion has created certain familial and social tensions, however. Her father, she explained, is ‘terribly anti-religious’ because he is of the generation who was baptized in childhood but became fully indoctrinated in Komsomol and Communist Party ideology in the 1950s and 1960s. Anu characterized her Orthodox identity as the feeling that one of her feet is in the ‘Byzantine’ world and the other is in the world of the European Union. This is especially difficult in Estonia, as opposed to Greece, for instance, because Orthodox Estonians are such a minority. Anu must often explain that she is Orthodox but not Russian Orthodox, and she still senses that Estonians, including her father, assume that those who are religiously active have experienced some sort of trauma or loss that made them turn to religion. For her, however, Orthodoxy and singing at the Cathedral of St Simeon and the Prophetess Hanna are entirely right: ‘Life is so simple to live when the corridor you are to walk down has already been made’.

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Liisi

Liisi is a translator in her early thirties who converted to Orthodoxy in the mid 1990s. Like Anu, Liisi was disturbed that she had not been baptized and became active in the Lutheran Church during the Singing Revolution. She was baptized in 1989 and began attending Lutheran Sunday school classes in Tallinn. She realized, however, that the Lutheran Church was not for her, especially its use of charismatic Protestant music from the United States and Finland. Before being baptized, Liisi described herself as a ‘good Soviet child’ who had little knowledge of what religion and faith were all about. As her understanding deepened, however, she was put off by Lutherans’ tacit denunciation of Marian devotion and monasticism. For seven years Liisi wavered between Orthodoxy and Catholicism before her chrismation and conversion to Orthodoxy at the Cathedral of the Transfiguration. Singing, she explained, was the reason she turned towards Orthodoxy because it is a way of being a ‘church worker’ who serves and prays as an active participant in the liturgy. Like Anu, Liisi came to sing at the parish of St Simeon and the Prophetess Hanna through the initiative of Terje Palli, with whom she shares ‘the same taste’ in Orthodox singing. If Liisi is explaining singing there to someone ‘from the outside’, she emphasizes that it is ‘more ascetic’ than the Romantic style of traditional Estonian Orthodox singing. This ascetic quality is what makes singing ‘right’ (õige) for Liisi and she recognizes that this has much to do with the ‘Byzantine’ influences that shape the ritual practices and congregational life of the parish. She explained how Terje nurtures a way of singing that returns to an ‘earlier epoch’. Because this more ascetic or more ‘Byzantine’ style of singing circumvents the nationalist ideologies that are inflected in later Orthodox music, Liisi believes that singing at the Cathedral of St Simeon and the Prophetess Hanna represents Orthodoxy in its more ‘catholic’ (kogu maapealse) sense. Liisi stressed that she would not have converted were it not for the restoration of the autonomous Orthodox Church of Estonia in the mid 1990s. This is because of the fact that Orthodox churches in Estonia under the jurisdiction of the Patriarchate of Moscow are so deeply connected to Russian politics. She too must often explain to ‘normal’ Estonians that she is not Russian Orthodox and that there are both Russian and Estonian Orthodox churches in Estonia. This contributes to her sense of inhabiting both an Eastern and a Western world as an Orthodox Estonian. The social tensions that Liisi’s Orthodox belief and identity engender are moderated through the ideal of right singing, however. For her, ‘feeling’ is more fundamental to Orthodoxy than theology. As she explained, ‘I left theology behind when I left the Lutheran Church’. The ideal of right singing, then, inspires a right feeling in Liisi and enabled her turn towards Orthodoxy. At the same time, right singing is for her something appropriately not Russian and, through its specific affect and feelingful nature, an alternative to the Lutheran theologizing that marks mainstream Estonian religious life.

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Reimo, Helina, Piret and Maarika

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Reimo and Helina are both in their late forties and parents of four daughters, including Piret and Maarika, both in their teens. Reimo is an Estonian military officer and Helina works for the Orthodox Church of Estonia. The entire family converted to Orthodoxy in 2004. Reimo described his conversion as having a single purpose: ‘I want to serve God through song. That is why I became Orthodox’. Reimo, Helina and their children left Estonia in the 1980s and lived for the better part of a decade in Sweden and the United States because of Reimo’s involvement in ‘building up the army’ during Soviet occupation. At the first opportunity, in 1992, they returned to independent Estonia. Before turning towards Orthodoxy, the family had been active in evangelical and Episcopal congregations both in Estonia and abroad. Reimo’s family background is not a religious one and he became ‘saved’ in 1976 but not baptized. Helina was born in Udmurtia8 to an Orthodox Udmurt father and a Lutheran Estonian mother. During the 1970s in Estonia, Helina took part in what she called the religious ‘awakening’ that spread among young people and she was baptized at age seventeen. The family’s first contact with Orthodoxy came in 2003 through an invitation to come to the Cathedral of St Simeon and the Prophetess Hanna from the same icon painter that befriended Anu. At that time, Reimo, Helina and their daughters were disaffected with the Episcopal Church and ready for change in their religious lives, though Orthodoxy was not something they had ever thought about. Upon visiting the church, however, they knew that Orthodoxy was the ‘natural choice’ and, as Piret explained, that they had found ‘the right (õige) thing and the right place’. The ideal of right singing seemed immediately sensible for Reimo, Helina and their daughters. They began singing in the choir soon after their first visit and Terje Palli made weekly visits to their home to teach them about Orthodoxy and Orthodox singing. Terje’s emphasis on the ‘content’ of hymns and prayers rather than their having ‘beautiful harmony’ or being ‘pretty’ made a deep impression on the family, an impression Helina described as being ‘seriously Christian’. The kind of authenticity that the family found in the right singing at the parish became the impetus for their conversion and subsequent study of Orthodox singing and patristic writings. As Helina explained, ‘we’ve arrived at the source’. For Reimo, right singing is the ‘unison’ which, when found, reveals that ‘everything is blessed’. For Maarika, it is the musical reflection of Orthodoxy as ‘something certain’. For Helina, it is a mystery which serves as a reminder that in Orthodoxy, one is not supposed to understand things but to experience and accept them. By converting, the family has faced a number of personal and social challenges. There continue to be tensions in Reimo’s extended family because of his belief. One of Reimo and Helina’s older daughters is sceptical and has resisted becoming Orthodox. Piret and Maarika both encounter misunderstandings about their ‘Russian faith’ among peers at school. Reimo asserts that being Estonian and at all religious is ‘different’, but he is inspired by the fact that historically there have been ethnic Estonians ‘a hundred times more Estonian’ than he who ‘went to an Orthodox church’. Reimo and Helina are both rather Euro-sceptical.

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They see little difference between the way Estonia was dominated in the Soviet Union and the way they believe it will be dominated in the European Union. In speaking critically of Estonia’s future in the European Union, Reimo expressed measured nostalgia for the freedom to travel one had within the Soviet Union and cautioned against the European Union’s secular, liberal ideologies: ‘I am not a democrat; I am a Christian. The Church is not democratic; it isn’t soviet’.9 In a similar vein, Helina sees a contradiction between being Christian and rushing headlong and ‘with closed eyes’ into the ‘material world’ of the European Union. Christians, she believes, should ‘follow the martyrs’. Both Reimo and Helina feel that relations between Estonia and the European Union reveal Estonia to be ‘more Eastern than Western’ and stress that they would still have converted even if the Orthodox Church of Estonia were not autonomous. Their conversion, in other words, was ‘about theology’, not about reactionary nationalism. The ‘return to the source’ that right singing makes possible, Helina said, ‘is not going against Russia’. Rather, right singing is ‘close to the heart’ for Reimo because it is true to the ‘vernacular and taste’ that is the possession of every nation.

The common themes that emerge in these conversion narratives reveal how the ideal of right singing works in conversion and renewal at the Cathedral of St Simeon and the Prophetess Hanna. Right singing is a kind of sensible authenticity described in terms of its archaic, ascetic, affective and catholic qualities that make conversion happen by making it right. It enables converts to express newfound agency within Orthodoxy’s gendered ecclesial hierarchies and highly structured, sometimes esoteric practices. Right singing is a way in which converts suspend or transform the politics of identity and belief pertinent to Estonian Orthodoxy through ways of worshipping that are both cosmopolitan and appropriately nationalist; and they do this through right singing that reveals the ‘ever greater power’ of nationalist sentiment ‘to produce history’ (Pollock et al. 2000: 579) as well as the ability of cosmopolitanism ‘to ground our sense of mutuality in conditions of mutability, and to learn to live tenaciously in terrains of historic and cultural transition’ (ibid.: 580, italics original). These common themes notwithstanding, right singing is something irreducible and particular to the community of St Simeon and the Prophetess Hanna and the processes of conversion in Anu, Liisi, Reimo, Helina, Piret, Maarika and others’ lives there. It is important, therefore, to avoid reifying these conversions by stating with certainty what right singing is. Rather, I echo Orthodox apophaticism in my belief that these conversions are significant for what they are not. These acts of conversion are unlike the acts of restoration that transform the Cathedral of St Simeon and the Prophetess Hanna both physically and ideologically through its remythologization as a national and nationalist symbol. However palliative, they are clearly not an aspect of Soviet nostalgia (see Boym 2001; Ekman and Linde 2005). By turning to Orthodoxy, these converts are not identifying and believing according to conventional nationalist narratives and discourses of postsocialist ‘transition’. In establishing new authenticities and religious imaginaries, their imitation and transformation of ‘Byzantine’ musical practices articulates the

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power of what Michael Taussig calls the ‘mimetic faculty’, which ‘carries out its honest labor suturing nature to artifice and bringing sensuousness to sense by means of what was once called sympathetic magic, granting the copy the character and power of the original, the representation the power of the represented’ (1993: xviii). These conversions and mimetic practices emphasize in new ways how the efficacy of emerging religious practices and the intervention of charismatic individuals in the lives of converts are of fundamental importance in the making of a postsocialist sacred and social order. Right singing – a ‘physical presence in action’ as ‘the sound of sound’ (ibid.: 80) – thus happens through acts of conversion and imitation beyond the norms and commonplace ideologies of Estonian ‘transition’.

Right Singing at the Cathedral of St Simeon and the Prophetess Hanna

As significant as it is for what it is not, how is right singing meaningful for converts and congregants at the Cathedral of St Simeon and the Prophetess Hanna as a musical and religious sensibility? As sound and practice, what is it? To address these questions, I turn briefly to a particularly compelling example of right singing in the parish. In 2004, Terje Palli introduced a new arrangement of the Third Antiphon from the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom into the Sunday morning liturgy. Her new setting of The Beatitudes (Matt. 5: 3–12) epitomizes the cosmopolitan soundscape of worship at the cathedral and the imaginative dimensions that invest it with efficacy and a sense of authenticity. Issand, mõtle meie peale, omas kuningriigis.

Lord, remember us in Your kingdom.

Õndsad on need, kes vaimus vaesed, sest nende päralt on taevariik.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Õndsad on tasased, sest nemad peavad maad pärima.

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

Õndsad on armulised, sest nemad peavad armu saama.

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.

Õndsad on need, kes kurvad on, sest nemad peavad rõõmustud saama.

Õndsad on need, kel nälg ja janu on õiguse järele, sest nemad peavad täis saama.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled.

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Õndsad on need, kes puhtad südamest, sest nemad peavad Jumalat nägema.

Õndsad on rahunõudjad, sest neid peab Jumala lapsiks hüütama.

Õndsad on need, keda tagakiusatakse Sõiguse pärast, sest nende päralt on taevariik.

Õndsad olete teie, kui inimesed teid minu pärast laimavad ja tagakiusavad, ja kõiksugu kurja teie peale räägivad, kui nemad valetavad.

Rõõmustage ja olge väga rõõmsad, sest teie palk on suur taevas.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the sons of God.

Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are you when men shall revile you and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely for My sake. Rejoice and be exceedingly glad, for great is your reward in heaven.10

Terje first encountered the melody here in the 1990s at the Valamo Monastery in Heinävesi, Finland, where she transcribed it from photocopies used by the monastery’s choir. The melody Terje transcribed and arranged comes from Russian znamenny chant, the body of monophonic chant dating back to the thirteenth century whose name derives from the Russian word for sign (znamya). Znamenny chant predates the introduction of staff notation and ‘polyphonic singing in the Western manner’ (von Gardner 2000: 251) into Russian Orthodox musical practices by several centuries. For this reason, znamenny chant has long figured into the imagination of and struggle for an authentic Russian Orthodoxy, most notably in the singing of Old Believers, the Orthodox Russians who refused to accept the musical and liturgical reforms implemented by Patriarch Nikon in 1652. Before unpacking all that is at stake in Terje’s encounter with archaic Russian and ‘Byzantine’ Orthodox music and the significance this music acquires at the Cathedral of St Simeon and the Prophetess Hanna, I would like to make a few more observations about her arrangement. Terje added to the znamenny melody an íson – the sustained drone that is an iconic aspect of ‘Byzantine’ musical practice and is not unfamiliar to the Valamo tradition. Explaining this to me, she commented that it ‘gives depth’ to the antiphon and then added jokingly ‘besides, what else should the basses do?’ At first, Terje made this arrangement for a Finnish translation of the Slavonic original, and only later adapted it to Estonian. She feels that the Estonian variant has a different spirit (meeleolu) from the Slavonic original due to the fact that additional syllables must be sung at the ends of phrases, disturbing singers’ expiration and the tapering sound that naturally occurs when singing in Slavonic. It is also worth noting that in order to work with the znamenny melody, Terje departed from the official translation found in the Orthodox Church of Estonia service book prepared by her husband. For example,

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where Terje’s arrangement reads ‘Õndsad on need kes kurvad on, sest nemad peavad rõõmustud saama’, the Orthodox Church of Estonia service book reads ‘Õndsad on kurvad, sest neid lohutatakse’.11 So how do Terje’s adaptation of an archaic Russian Orthodox melody, her use of a generically ‘Byzantine’ musical signifier (the íson), and her introduction of this antiphon at the Cathedral of St. Simeon and the Prophetess Hanna make singing right? How does such right singing make conversion and renewal right? Terje’s adaptation does not shed light on the nature of ‘Byzantine’ music, which is a dynamic field of practices and beliefs shaped by any number of revivals and reinventions (see Lind 2003). It does not demythologize the connections between znamenny chant and its ‘Byzantine’ origins, for instance, nor does it reflect the conventional imaginative orientation of Estonian ‘transition’. The language that Anu, Liisi, Reimo, Helina, Piret and Maarika use to describe the efficacy of singing at the Cathedral of St Simeon and the Prophetess Hanna and respond to its difference returns again and again to its ‘archaic’ and ‘Byzantine’ sensibilities. This language is of fundamental importance in understanding how singing in the parish is right and how right singing is part of the sacred and social order emerging there through conversion and renewal. The antiphon Terje adapted and introduced into the liturgy is an example of how worshippers encounter musical difference. This difference becomes symbolic capital and makes the community and its practices right. In this case, the limited ambit of the znamenny melody, its particular modality – which Terje characterizes as having a ‘low seventh’ (väike septim) – and the presence of the íson mark the antiphon with difference relative to the sounds of mainstream Estonian Orthodox singing. Terje’s emphasis on its distinctive ‘low seventh’, for instance, makes an implicit comparison with the triadic harmonies and conventional tonalities that predominate in Estonian Orthodox musical practices. What marks the antiphon with difference, then, is what makes it efficacious and right for those who sing and worship at the cathedral. Its distinctive sound and affect – what Liisi might describe as its ‘feeling’ – thus indexes the distinctive religious and social whole of the congregation of St Simeon and the Prophetess Hanna. That Anu, Liisi, Reimo, Helina, Piret and Maarika speak of this as ‘Byzantine’ and ‘archaic’ reveals the embeddedness of such musical distinction in ongoing processes of renewal and conversion. Imagining znamenny chant and the íson that Terje encountered and adapted as ‘archaic’ – or from ‘an earlier epoch’, as Liisi might say, or as ‘monastic’, as Anu might say – happens for concrete reasons. As part of the musical life of the community, these practices reconstitute the soundscapes along which Orthodoxy was transmitted over the course of a millennium from its ‘Byzantine’ origins, through Russia and into Estonia. The notation from which znamenny chant derives its name has a mythic connection to the notation of ‘Byzantine’ chant. Its ‘archaic’ sound connects to a deep past when Orthodox singing had not yet been transformed by the Western staff notation, triadic harmony and conventional tonality arriving from the Lithuanian, Polish, and Ukrainian borderlands in the mid seventeenth century. The somatic resonance of the íson, on the other hand,

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and its ability to suture sound to silence and history to eternity forges other connections between a ‘Byzantine’ past and a modern Estonian Orthodoxy. Thus, musical renewal at the Cathedral of St Simeon and the Prophetess Hanna is an imaginative return to the origins of Orthodoxy that brings temporal and spatial closure to the transmission of Orthodoxy from its ‘Byzantine’ origins, through Russia and into Estonia. Singers and worshippers, in other words, imagine themselves within a grand trajectory of Orthodox communication that began in the ninth century with the mission of St Cyril and St Methodius and is being completed today. As Helina emphasized in her conversion narrative, ‘we’ve arrived at the source’. But why is the musical difference encountered and experienced at the Cathedral of St Simeon and the Prophetess Hanna apprehended as ‘Byzantine’? Terje, after all, would be the last person to describe her arrangements as ‘Byzantine’. I believe one of the reasons why ‘archaic’, ‘monastic’ music from ‘an earlier epoch’ becomes ‘Byzantine’ is because of the renewed association between the Orthodox Church of Estonia and the Patriarchate of Constantinople that makes new ways of being Estonian and Orthodox possible through the circulation of people, ideas, sounds and capital. Terje’s journeys to Finland and Greece have transformed her understanding of what Orthodox music can be and how it can be sung. The studies and pilgrimages that congregants undertake within a global ‘Byzantine’ Orthodox imaginary shape their senses of Orthodox canonicity and authenticity. The constant presence of the Cypriot Metropolitan Stefanus and visitors from Finland, Greece and the Patriarchate of Constantinople firmly locate the community within that imaginary. Finally, the renewal of the congregation and physical restoration of the church have been accompanied by subtle ‘Byzantine’ transformations in liturgical practice, iconography and self-representation. This is what makes conversion and renewal happen at the parish by making it right. It affords singers new, alternative ways of expressing their Orthodoxy and positioning themselves relative to hegemonic discourses of secularism, ‘transition’ and ‘normalcy’. On the one hand, right singing enables believers to distance themselves from or disclaim the Estonian Orthodox musical practices they find canonically suspect, stylistically inappropriate or ideologically problematic: the Lutheranized music institutionalized during the Republican period or what is described as the overly operatic, sentimental sounds of Estonianized Russian Orthodox musics from the St Petersburg and Moscow schools. On the other hand, the new, cosmopolitan ways of praying and being in the world that right singing creates – what Liisi calls its more ‘catholic’ (kogu maapealse) dimensions – correspond powerfully to the transformative conversions and reimaginings of belief and practice taking place at the Cathedral of St Simeon and the Prophetess Hanna. Right singing is the sound of a cosmopolitan Finno-Ugric Orthodox world rooted in a European past and oriented towards a European future that embraces Orthodox ethics and cosmology while resisting the secularism and excessive materialism posited as ‘normal’ aspects of that future. It orients believers’ practices and imaginations away from the parochial past of Estonian Orthodoxy

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and the spectre of a derivative, imposed, inauthentic ‘Russian faith’ towards an indigenized and reinvented originary Orthodoxy. This is a reflection of how ideologies of renewal are being institutionalized in the Orthodox Church of Estonia today and a register of ongoing interactions between laypeople and Estonian Orthodox elites. Lastly, right singing has a crucial ascetic dimension. Liisi, for instance, described right singing as being ‘more ascetic’ than the Romantic, more difficult ways of singing at other Estonian Orthodox churches that emphasize individual musical abilities and, by extension, the self. For Reimo and Helina, singing is right at the cathedral because Terje emphasizes the ‘content’ of prayers and hymns rather than their ‘beautiful harmony’ or ‘pretty’ character. This, they feel, is ‘seriously Christian’. In the weekly rehearsals she leads, Terje continually models a particular kind of ascetic aesthetics: a restrained, vibratoless vocal timbre kept at a consistent level of quietude, a musico-textual sensitivity that emphasizes the rhythm and form of a text over the discretely musical elements of a hymn or chant formula, a spare, transparent musical texture that values the content of what is sung above the act of singing itself, and an approach to Orthodox singing not as performance but as the prayerful evocation of a sacred prototype. While these aesthetics have been shaped by Terje’s experience of a global ‘Byzantine’ Orthodox imaginary, they are not readily understood and reproduced by all those who sing in the choir. Terje’s Tuesday night rehearsals are thus a time when choir members learn ascetic discipline as they learn to sing in the choir; when converts continue their turn towards a new way of being and believing by working at right singing. This is what Geoffrey Galt Harpham calls the ascetic ‘act of self-denial’ and ‘empowerment’ (1987: xiii) that acquires its efficacy and significance ‘by structuring an opposition between culture and its opposite’ (ibid.: xii). An important part of right singing, in other words, is the necessary and dependent opposition it creates between religious renewal and postsocialist ‘transition culture’ (Kennedy 2002); between ways of being Estonian and Orthodox and ways of imagining postsocialist ‘normalcy’. This is what Richard Valantasis (1998) calls the ‘social function of asceticism’. ‘By positing a goal (or goals) toward which the individual or group is to progress as the highest good, or the more perfect state, or the most absorbed by the sacred’, Valantasis writes, ‘asceticism lays out the attaining of that goal through concrete patterning of behavior’ (ibid.: 551). In bringing a particular sacred and social order into being, right singing relies upon ascetic practices in working towards the difficult goal of spiritual renewal. Singing the antiphon I discuss above with a mind towards prayer and self-emptying, and faithfully evoking a divine prototype, is the kind of ascetic practice that gives meaning to the physical and spiritual transformations happening in the parish of St Simeon and the Prophetess Hanna. For this young congregation of urban, cosmopolitan converts who have come to Orthodoxy recently and amidst dramatic social change, the ‘archaic’, ‘ascetic’ ways of singing that they find within a global ‘Byzantine’ Orthodox imaginary are right for the discipline and sense of authenticity they engender.

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Conclusion

Conversion to Orthodox Christianity in Estonia is a sign that Estonian ‘transition’ is as much about enchantment as it is about secularism. It is a particularly compelling and provocative manifestation of individual, institutional and national renewal. Orthodox conversion reorients processes of ethno-linguistic identification and confounds the facile geopolitics of Estonian ‘transition’ through an agentive, transformative turn towards new ways of being, believing and singing whose social, historical and ideological implications contrast in productive ways with the postsocialist Protestant and evangelical conversions discussed elsewhere in this volume. Indeed, its global scope would seem to point to processes of religious transformation and sacred world-making unfolding beyond the conventional narratives of postsocialist ‘transition’. The right singing of Estonian Orthodox converts is the sound of a local Orthodox canonicity. It makes audible the imaginative dimensions of Estonian Orthodox renewal, the aesthetics and ideologies that make worship efficacious and affective, and the moral order actively being made by Orthodox practitioners. It is how Estonians sound their Orthodoxy in a modern world. Thus, right singing and Orthodox conversion in Estonia bear emphatic witness to the place of ‘strong religion’ (Almond, Appleby and Sivan 2003) within, and perhaps as a necessary part of, the ‘normal’ secularity being fashioned in postsocialist ‘transitions’ (see Taylor 2004: 206; 2007). They remind us of the burgeoning significance of thick Christianities all over the world. Finally, they reveal in new ways the vital, tenacious presence of musical practices in processes of profound religious, social and ideological transformation.

Notes

1. This essay is based on fieldwork in Estonia (2002–2005) supported by a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship and a Charolotte W. Newcombe Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. I am grateful to Terje and Father Mattias Palli for their generous assistance, to all those whose interviews I have used here, and to the congregation of the Cathedral of St Simeon and the Prophetess Hanna in Tallinn. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted. 2. The schism among Orthodox Christians in Estonia is well known. The vast majority of Russianspeaking Orthodox believers belong to the Estonian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate while the vast majority of Orthodox Estonians belong to the Orthodox Church of Estonia. The two Churches have not shared full communion since the mid-1990s, and ongoing legal disputes feature prominently in the Estonian and Russian media. 3. Debate over the Estonian terms õigeusk (‘right belief’), õige(austamise)usk (‘right[worship]belief’), and ortodoks (‘Orthodox’) stems from this dual essence of Orthodoxy (cf. Kaljukosk 1997, 1998; Palli 1996). 4. I use the word ‘occupation’ in this essay to represent the ethnographic voices heard during my fieldwork which think and speak this way. There are, of course, other terms that Estonians use that make different ideological claims and carry different historical meanings – ‘Soviet period’ (nõukogude aeg) or ‘Russian period‘ (vene aeg), for instance. 5. In this context, Orthodox conversion means entry into Orthodoxy through baptism and chrismation (anointing with holy chrism or oil) or, if previously baptized in another Christian denomination, chrismation alone.

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6. Lauluviisid in Estonian – the system of eight tones or recitative formulae ordered in weekly cycles in the Orthodox liturgical calendar. 7. All of these are short liturgical texts proper to the liturgical season, the particular saint commemorated on a given day, and the Orthodox liturgical calendar. 8. Udmurtia is today an autonomous republic in eastern European Russia that is the traditional homeland of the Finno-Ugric Udmurt people. 9. Here Reimo uses ‘soviet’ (meaning ‘council’ in Russian) as opposed to ‘Soviet’ in order to refer to a particular notion of representative democracy. 10. This translation of Matthew 5: 3–12 is from the Revised Standard Version, the standard Englishlanguage translation for Orthodox Christians. 11. The passage from the service book is from the Apostlik-õigeusu lauluraamat. 1. osa. Koguöine teenistus. Liturgia. Tunnid. Pühapäeva oktoih. Lisad (Tallinn: Eesti Apostlik-Õigeusu Kiriku kirjastustoimkond, 2003), p.46.

References

Almond, G., R. Appleby and E. Sivan. 2003. Strong Religion: The Rise of Fundamentalisms around the World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Asad, T. 1996. ‘Comments on Conversion’, in P. van der Veer (ed.) Conversion to Modernities: The Globalization of Christianity. New York: Routledge, 263–74. –––––. 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Becker, J. 2004. Deep Listeners: Music, Emotion, and Trancing. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Berger, P. 1999. ‘The Desecularization of the World: A Global Overview’, in P. Berger (ed.) The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics. Cambridge, MA: Eerdmans Publishing, 1–18. Bohlman, P. 1999. ‘Ontologies of Music’, in N. Cook and M. Everist (eds), Rethinking Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 17–34. –––––. 2000. ‘To Hear the Voices Still Heard: On Synagogue Restoration in Eastern Europe’, in D. Berdahl, M. Bunzl and M. Lampland (eds), Altering States: Ethnographies of Transition in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Booth, W. 1995. ‘The Rhetoric of Fundamentalist Conversion Narratives’, in M. Marty and R. Appleby (eds), Fundamentalisms Comprehended (The Fundamentalisms Project Volume Five). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 367–98. Boym, S. 2001. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. Ekman, J. and J. Linde. 2005. ‘Communist Nostalgia and the Consolidation of Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe’, Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics 21(3): 354–74. Garcia, M. 1998. ‘Conversion religiosa y cambio cultural’, Latin American Music Review 19(2): 203–17. Geraci, R.P. and M. Khodarkovsky (eds). 2001. Of Religion and Empire: Missions, Conversion, and Tolerance in Tsarist Russia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Harpham, G. 1987. The Ascetic Imperative in Culture and Criticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Herzfeld, M. 1997. Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State. New York: Routledge. Kaljukosk, A. 1997. ‘Õige(austamis)usk eestlaste seas’, Usk ja Elu 90/91: 3–7. –––––. 1998. ‘Õige(austamis)usk eestlaste seas’, Usk ja Elu 92: 9–12. Kan, S. 1999. Memory Eternal: Tlingit Culture and Russian Orthodox Christianity through Two Centuries. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Kennedy, M. 2002. Cultural Formations of Postcommunism: Emancipation, Transition, Ideology, and War. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kruus, H. 1930. Talurahva käärimine Lõuna-Eestis XIX sajandi 40-ndail aastail. Tartu: Eesti Kirjanduse Selts.

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Laitin, D. 1998. Identity in Formation: The Russian-Speaking Populations in the Near Abroad. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Lange, B. 2003. Holy Brotherhood: Romani Music in a Hungarian Pentecostal Church. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lankauskas, G. 2002. ‘On “Modern” Christians, Consumption, and the Value of National Identity in Post-Soviet Lithuania’, Ethnos 67(3): 320–44. Lind, T. 2003. ‘The Past is Always Present: An Ethnomusicological Investigation of the Musical Tradition at Mount Athos’, Ph.D. dissertation. Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen. Palli, M. 1996. ‘Apostlik õigeusk – katoolse kiriku traditsioon’, Akadeemia 7(88): 1467–80. Payne, D. 2003. ‘The Clash of Civilisations: The Church of Greece, the European Union, and the Question of Human Rights’, Religion, State and Society 31(3): 262–71. Pollock, S. et al. 2000. ‘Cosmopolitanisms’, Public Culture 12(3): 577–89. Rambo, L. 1993. Understanding Religious Conversion. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Raun, T. 2001. Estonia and the Estonians, 2nd edn. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution. Rausing, S. 2004. History, Memory, and Identity in Post-Soviet Estonia: The End of a Collective Farm. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rebane-Loone, L. 1934. Usuvahetuslik liikumine Läänemaal aa. 1883-1885. Tartu: Mattiesen. Ryan, D. 2004. ‘Rumor, Belief, and Contestation Amid the Conversion Movement to Orthodoxy in Northern Livonia, 1845-1848’, Journal of Folklore 28: 7–24. Sõtšov, A. 2004. Eesti õigeusu piiskopkond Stalini ajal aastail 1945–53. Tartu: Tartu Ülikooli Kirjastuse trükikoda. Stark, L. 2002. Peasants, Pilgrims, and Sacred Promises: Ritual and the Supernatural in Orthodox Karelian Folk Religion. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society. Sullivan, L. 1997. ‘Enchanting Powers: An Introduction’, in L. Sullivan (ed.) Enchanting Powers: Music in the World’s Religions. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1–14. Taussig, M. 1993. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New York: Routledge. Taylor, C. 2004. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. –––––. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Thaden, E. 1984. Russia’s Western Borderlands, 1710–1870. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. –––––. (ed). 1981. Russification in the Baltic Provinces and Finland, 1855–1914. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Valantasis, R. 1998. ‘A Theory of the Social Function of Asceticism’, in V. Wimbush and R. Valantasis (eds), Asceticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 544–52. Vallikivi, L. 2005. Arktika nomaadid šamanismi ja kristluse vahel. Tartu: Tartu Ülikooli Kirjastus. Verdery, K. 1999. The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change. New York: Columbia University Press. Viswanathan, G. 1998. Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. von Gardner, J. 2000. Russian Church Singing, Volume 2: History from the Origins to the Mid Seventeenth Century, trans. V. Morosan. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press. Werth, P. 2003. ‘Orthodoxy as Ascription (and Beyond): Religious Identity on the Edges of the Orthodox Community, 1740–1917’, in V. Kivelson and R. Greene (eds), Orthodox Russia: Belief and Practice Under the Tsars. University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press, 239–52. Znamenski, A. 1999. Shamanism and Christianity: Native Encounters with Russian Orthodox Missions in Siberia and Alaska, 1820–1917. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Interviews Liisi, 11 July 2004, Tallinn. Anu, 28 July 2004, Tallinn. Reimo, Helina, Piret, and Maarika, 8 August 2004, Tallinn.

Chapter 6

THE CIVILITY AND PRAGMATISM OF CHARISMATIC CHRISTIANITY IN LITHUANIA Gediminas Lankauskas To be converted, to be regenerated, to receive grace, to experience religion, to gain assurance are so many phrases which denote the process, gradual or sudden, by which a self hitherto divided, and consciously wrong, inferior and unhappy, becomes unified and consciously right, superior and happy, in consequence of its firmer hold upon religious realities. This at least is what conversion signifies in general terms, whether or not we believe that direct divine operation is needed to bring such a moral change about. —William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

Halfway through our long conversation, Pranas – a follower of a charismatic evangelical Church – heaved a deep sigh, looked me in the eye, and said: ‘This nation is morally chilled like never before… It’s worse than the Soviet times’. His statement echoes many similar pronouncements I heard during my recent fieldwork in postsocialist Lithuania. This ‘modernizing’ republic of the former Soviet Union, I was told repeatedly, was in a state of profound and unprecedented moral disarray. Invoked by Lithuania’s powerful independence movement of the late 1980s, in which the national Catholic Church played a pivotal role, the ideals of Western-style ‘modernity’ held the enticing promise not only of ‘liberal democracy’, the ‘free market’ and ‘civil society’, but also of a moral reordering of the nation.1 The pursuit of the modern came to be seen as an endeavour that would engender more justice, transparency, civility and overall social well-being, something that socialism had failed to deliver. To the dismay of many, instead of producing desired moral betterment, post-Soviet modernization, over the past fifteen years or so, has brought about what is perceived to be an even deeper ethical crisis. The present essay attempts to examine this moral breakdown at the intersection with (re)discovered religious faith in Lithuania after communist rule.

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My immediate focus is on the Word of Faith, one of the most popular nondenominational Churches of charismatic evangelists in this former Soviet republic. Projecting itself as modern and alternative, the neo-Protestant congregation at issue is an important player in Lithuania’s bustling ‘religious market’. In this chapter, I want to reflect on the modernist Word of Faith as a kind of civil society operating in the morally chilled milieu of the nation, to borrow Pranas’s metaphor. I argue that key to the constitution of the civility and morality of this particular society are ethically informed practices of social interaction and mutual support, or what my interlocutors called bendravimas. Predicated on Christian doctrine as a repository of theological moral knowledge, these practices, I further suggest, are generative of the congregation’s charisma and its popular appeal. Before expanding on these arguments theoretically and ethnographically, I step back in time and begin with a sketch of Lithuania’s recent past. The principal organizing themes of this historical overview are socialism, nationalism and Catholicism. All of them are pertinent to the discussion of the Word of Faith as a religious locus where morality and modernity are made in the postsocialist present.2

‘Bad’ Socialism and Civil Society

As the propaganda of the Communist Party relentlessly claimed, capitalism was inherently immoral. Its ethical opposite was more progressive socialism, a stepping stone in humanity’s inevitable evolutionary advancement towards stateless and classless communism. The principles of socialist ethics were outlined in the so-called Moral Code of the Builders of Communism. Originally conceived in Russia shortly after the October Revolution of 1917, these moral guidelines were adopted by many other socialist nations. Figuring prominently in this compendium of proletarian virtue was the image of the mythic ‘Soviet man’– a person strongly committed to the Marxist-Leninist ideals of justice, equality and collectivism. Relying on rational reasoning, this man (or woman) was also an unwavering atheist who saw religion as the proverbial opium of the people, that is, yet another means of oppression used by the privileged clergy and bourgeoisie. The party’s rhetorical abstractions promising a better world populated by comrades of principle and integrity were a far cry from the reality of actually existing socialism. Cynicism and hypocrisy, deception and corruption, political and social apathy, self-interest rather than public responsibility, ‘crass rudeness’ and ‘arrogant pushiness’ (chamiškumas and nachališkumas), were some of the features of daily life in Lithuania under communist rule. The list would be incomplete without a mention of Orwellian double-think that permeated many domains of socialist quotidian existence. Cohering around the uneasy relationship between individual convictions and the socio-political demands of the authoritarian system, double-think was an important survival strategy in an environment of state coercion and conformity. One of my Lithuanian interlocutors, a retired history teacher, put it as follows: ‘[Under socialism] I so wanted to be myself, to stop fooling myself and others … I wanted to live like

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normal people in the normal world. But we all had to pretend, to lie, to contrive. The system forced us to … The party lied to us, we lied back. There was no other way to live. Awful!’3 For Lithuanians and many other East Europeans, the fall of socialism heralded the beginning of a new moral order. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, ‘civil society’ emerged as a powerful ideological referent in the quest for ethical emancipation, promising ‘something morally positive’ (Larmore 1996: 2). Often used interchangeably with such ideals and imaginaries as freedom, democracy, the West, Europe, civilization, ‘normalcy’ and so forth, civil society was seen by many as a kind of antidote to the socio-moral ills of socialism (Klumbytė 2003; Donskis 2004; cf. Sampson 1996; Kligman 1990; Gal and Kligman 2000). After almost five decades of party-managed duplicity and deception on a grand scale, many yearned for what might be called social authenticity or realness of social life, which would allow people to assert and express themselves openly and to live in an environment free of distortions and misrepresentations.4 Many envisioned civil society as a means through which such authenticity and desired ethical parity with ‘the normal (Western) world’ could be achieved.

A Catholic Nation Awakens

In Lithuania, as elsewhere in the socialist bloc, modernist secular ideals were not the only source of coveted moral progress. In the more liberal environment of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost, Catholicism, Lithuania’s principal religion, was also mobilized as a rich resource for building a ‘better’ society. At the time, animated by the rapidly surging nationalist movement known as Sąjūdis, the Catholic Church emerged as a divine protector of Lithuania and a significant agent in its ethical reconstitution. The atheist internationalism of socialism ceded to a pious anti-colonial nationalism determined to destroy Moscow’s imperial might. In the late 1980s, Lithuania’s national Church, a group of intellectual elites, as well as several prominent members of the Communist Party, joined ranks in the struggle for independence from the USSR. United by their common political aspiration to transform Soviet Lithuania into a modern, European nation state, these seemingly odd bedfellows repeatedly invoked the illegal Soviet occupation of 1940, accused the Kremlin of blatant violations of national and religious rights, and spoke of the suppression of civil society under Communist Party rule (Ashbourne 1999; Smith et al. 2002). Such political pronouncements meshed with religious images of suffering, awakening and regeneration. The leaders of Sąjūdis were commonly conceptualized in biblical terms as martyrs and saviours. The then Pope, John Paul II, was celebrated as a guiding light and inspiration. Many referred to Lithuania as ‘the land of Mary’ (Marijos žemė) – a metaphor that implied a bounded and homogeneous national territory inhabited by pious believers. Embraced with fervour and commitment, Catholicism became synonymous with ‘Lithuanianness’ (lietuvybė).

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The most significant political rallies and events, which brought together thousands of participants from the entire nation, took place in the vast square flanking the neo-classical Cathedral in central Vilnius, Lithuania’s most important place of Catholic worship. Nationalist leaders and ordinary Lithuanians, many of whom had just abandoned their party membership, flocked to churches to pray for freedom and ‘a better life’.5 Politicians quoted the patriarchs of the Catholic Church and vice versa (see Senn 1990: 227). The sacralization of the nation was conceptualized both as a moral and meaningful endeavour. As Romualdas Ozolas, a philosopher turned politician, put it in 1991, ‘From our opposition to … the Almighty God we must switch to a position which would allow us to live with the Almighty God. [He] means something to us, just like we mean something to each other’.6 Similar references to religiosity were made by many other political leaders throughout Eastern Europe. Czechoslovakia’s Vaclav Havel, a playwright turned president, invoked the concept of ‘the power of truth’ associated with Johann Huss, a religious reformer in fourteenth-century Bohemia. Tadeusz Mazowiecki, Poland’s Catholic premier, promised to make politics more ‘spiritual’. A similar rapprochement between the Yeltsin government and the Orthodox Church took place in Russia and elsewhere in the former communist bloc (Luxmore and Babiuch 1999; Merdjanova 2001). As modernizing nationalists of Eastern Europe were turning to God, John Paul II was writing a theological response to the momentous historical shift from socialist to capitalist modernity. In his encyclical Centesimus annus, published in May 1991, the pontiff strongly endorsed the new social movements and their objectives of political emancipation. He also viewed them as a powerful force with an important moral mission to right the wrongs of atheist socialism. Deploring dehumanizing consequences of godless communist totalitarianism, the Pope called for a reinterpretation of such categories of modernity as humanism, democracy, freedom, productive labour, economic prosperity and, specifically, capitalism in terms of the moral tenets of the Catholic faith and of Christianity more generally. Once sacralized, modernity, his response implied, could become a source of social emancipation and material well-being (see Luxmore and Babiuch 1999: 308ff). In his ecclesial assessment of the postsocialist transformation, the Pope also argued that the foundation of a ‘good’ society lies in the solidarity and fraternity of its people. Social togetherness can be achieved only through faith and from the ground up, as opposed to being imposed from above by a political order. One of communism’s greatest failures was putting ‘its own praxis above the rights of the person’ (Luxmore and Babiuch 1999: 309, original emphasis). It is hardly surprising that the rhetoric of John Paul II, which attempted to reconcile Christianity with ideals of modernity, resonated well with the politics of nationalism in Eastern Europe, especially where the Catholic Church was the principal religious player. There is nothing particularly new about the synergy of religion and nationalism. History is replete with examples of sacralized nationalist politics.

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Ireland, Spain, Québec, India, the Middle East (think Zionism), among many other examples, come to mind. What has not been adequately examined and understood are the multiple ways in which religiosity becomes complicit in the quest for, and creation of, modern publics and orders (van der Veer and Lehmann 1999). According to the well-worn yet remarkably enduring secularization thesis, with its intellectual roots in the Enlightenment, the waning of religion is intrinsic to processes of modernization (Habermas 1989; Casanova 1994). As the old story goes, these processes entail the emergence of a capitalist economy, liberal democracy and civil society which are conceptualized in secular terms. To quote Talal Asad, ‘for a society to be modern, it has to be secular, and for it to be secular, it has to relegate religion to non-political spaces because that arrangement is essential to modern society’ (1999: 179). That religion persists in modernity is an axiomatic statement with plenty of evidence from differing locales around the world to back it up. What we need to better document and apprehend are concrete ways in which religious faith serves as an important stimulus and organizing locus for making and reproducing the modern. It seems more productive to think of religion not as an antithesis but as a constitutive component of modernization. The ideals and practices subsumed by modernity are often given religious readings and interpretations (see Luxmore and Babiuch 1999; van der Veer and Lehmann 1999; van der Veer 2001).

Religious (Re)discoveries

Hank Johnson (1993: 240) claims that at the time of socialism’s demise in Eastern Europe resistive ‘religio-nationalist subculture’ was especially strong in Lithuania. In this Soviet republic, Catholicism was so effectively mobilized for political ends because throughout socialism, despite persecution and marginalization by the atheist state, it remained part of various dissident movements and persisted in the daily lives of many ordinary Lithuanians. The Church, he claims was ‘the only organized alternative to the communist world view’; it also offered ‘compelling moral prescriptions for worldly action’ (Johnson 1993: 238–9; cf. Vardys 1978; Girnius 1984). An analogous thesis of religious persistence is offered by Tamara Dragadze in her discussion of Soviet Georgia and Azerbaijan, where she contends that the socialist state’s efforts to render the consciousness of its citizens atheist provoked a resistive response which was manifest in what she calls the domestication of religion, ‘shifting the arena from public to private, from outside the home to its interior’ (1993: 150; cf. Hann 2000). She argues that the ‘private’ (domestic) sphere with its social networks of family and friends became the primary site for the maintenance of religiosity – a site where ‘the need for tapping divine/spiritual power … continued unabated in the lives of ordinary people’ (Dragadze 1993: 151). Such claims strike me as exaggerations. To be sure, there is a great deal of evidence attesting to the persistence of religious faith under communist rule in differing parts of the socialist empire and during differing periods of its history

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(e.g., Humphrey 1983; Kligman 1988; Bringa 1995). Socialist modernity, not unlike its capitalist counterpart, does not render religiosity irrelevant. Yet not all religion under Communist Party rule was informed by dissent or resistance, and not all of it was ‘privatized’ in the domestic sphere. Albeit officially separated from the state, the Church often collaborated with it in complex, uneasy ways, as examples from Russia, Romania, and elsewhere indicate.7 Moreover, religious beliefs and practices were not all-pervasive, evenly distributed or static phenomena. Their ideological and moral significance ebbed and flowed, as it were, throughout the socialist era. Religion does not stand still. What we need is a more thorough and nuanced ethnographic documentation of the dynamics of religious faith under socialism. Invoking Mircea Eliade, Hugh Urban (2003: 354) warns us that ‘reductionism is the cardinal sin in the study of religion’. In the case of Soviet Lithuania, the role of religious faith differed from region to region, and in some cases even members of the same family held different views as to the social value, power and ‘usefulness’ of Catholicism (Lankauskas 2003). Overall, the state-sponsored secularization process, which began in 1940 after the invasion of the Soviet Red Army, was a success. Over the years of occupation, rather than being actively resisted, the atheism imposed by the authoritarian regime was tacitly accepted by many – though certainly not all – people. Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s of the Brezhnev era, there were very few, if any, references to religiosity in either the ‘public’ or ‘private’ sphere. This was especially true of urban areas. While to some extent Catholicism was domesticated and privatized, for the most part it was abandoned by many Lithuanians during the socialist years (see Vardys 1978: 212ff).8 As much as it is important to comprehend how religiosity endured under the rule of the socialist state, we also need to know more about when, how, and why it lost its social appeal as a consequence of the party’s persistent ‘atheist work” (ateistinis darbas). These efforts and their secularizing results should not be underestimated. What we need, in other words, are solid ethnographies of atheism (Rogers 2005). In light of the above, it seems more accurate to speak not so much about the ‘deprivatization’ of religion after socialism but about its rediscovery by some and its discovery by others. Only those persons who identified themselves as religious and were practising believers under Soviet rule – a fraction of the population – can be seen today as ‘deprivatizing’ their faith. Most older Lithuanians, those born before the Second World War and raised with some religious instruction, can be said to be rediscovering the Catholic faith. I call these believers ‘biographical Catholics’. For persons representing the younger, Soviet-born generations, religion constitutes a predominantly new terrain. Rather than being born-again Catholic believers, most are what one might call first-born (see examples below). In popular parlance, these ‘new faithful’ are commonly referred to as įtikėjeliai, a subtly ironizing word that alludes to the zeal and headlong enthusiasm with which these believers plunged into religious faith and declared themselves to be devout Catholics. For įtikėjeliai, Catholicism was, for the most part, an unexperienced and unknown religion.9

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What people did know well – or were eloquently reminded of by their politicians and the Church – was that this religion was part of the ‘Lithuanianness’ which was constitutive of ‘us’. As Peterson and Walhof observe, ‘creating, redefining, and standardizing religion has long been a political strategy linked to the making of national identities’ (2002: 1). Catholicism thus provided a cognitive template for national self-conception and for imagining the nation as united and one in its pursuit of the Western modern.

Freedom, New Gods and Catholicism’s ‘Dysfunction’

On 11 March 1990, Lithuania proclaimed itself a sovereign nation state and broke away from the USSR after almost five decades under the Kremlin’s colonial rule. Its relatively peaceful, though not entirely bloodless, departure from the socialist empire, popularly known as the Singing Revolution, set a precedent that led to the subsequent demise of the entire Soviet Union. Its political mission accomplished, national sentiment in the newly independent Lithuania soon began to wane, giving way to differing transnational influences and trends. Consumerism and commodification, as well as the proliferation of differing religious faiths without clear national origins or affiliations, were among the most salient manifestations of postsocialist transnationalism. As Coca-Cola, Carlsberg and Calvin Klein were entering the impoverished but now ‘free’ market of the nation, the religious realm was getting increasingly overtaken by various foreign churches. Promising divine salvation through virtue, charismatic Pentecostals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons and Moonies, among many other religious imports, established themselves as significant rivals of the Catholic Church. Catholicism was no longer the only religion to be discovered. Such transnationalization of faith led to the emergence of the so-called ‘religious market’ – a site of confessional competition where differing churches vie for potential converts.10 In the new ‘marketplace of God’, the Catholic Church began losing its monopoly as its authority and power eroded (Hoppenbrouwers 1999). Embraced by many as an agent of political and socio-moral advancement during the years of Sąjūdis, the national Church was increasingly seen, especially by younger Lithuanians, as backward, ossified, too traditional, anti-modern and the like. During my fieldwork in the late 1990s, and more recently in 2005, I observed that, while not giving up on religiosity, some of my interlocutors ceased to identify themselves as Catholic. A journalist in his thirties, who had discovered religious faith during the Sąjūdis years, stated: ‘To be Catholic today is a kind of dated thing (senstelėjęs reikalas) … But I firmly believe in God. Do you? … You should!’ Still others strove not so much towards a particular God but towards more mystical ‘spirituality’ (dvasingumas), which Judith Kornblatt, drawing on her observations in Russia, defines as a quest for ‘a more generalized moral, aesthetic, or psychological depth’ (1999: 418). Religiosity and spirituality are not necessarily mutually exclusive; that is, a person can be both religious and spiritual. Spirituality though can be godless, it does not always overlap with religiosity.

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Discovering Catholicism for many turned out to be an experience fraught with discontent and disillusionment. The national faith was not always as meaningful or morally effective as many expected it would be. Frustrated, my interlocutors claimed they wanted to believe but did not know how to do so in ‘a proper way’, or how to be ‘a good Catholic’. Many commented self-critically that their beliefs and those of their fellow Catholics were ‘incoherent, shallow, unfulfilling’. Some told me in confidence that attending Sunday mass, kneeling in prayer, or crossing themselves often made them feel ‘awkward’. In their reflections, my informants also questioned the ‘quality’ or ‘force’ of the Catholic Church and wondered why it was so difficult to achieve the desired ethical improvement.11 Clifford Geertz has written about Javanese rituals that ‘failed to function properly’ (1973: 146). Perhaps this insight can be extended to include national religions (re)discovered in the European East after socialism. Lithuanian Catholicism, as construed by many of my interlocutors, seemed to be in so many ways dysfunctional and unsatisfying. It was in this context of Catholic discontent that differing transnational churches began to expand and consolidate.

The Word of Faith and the Modernity of Christianity

The charismatic Word of Faith (Tikėjimo žodis) was established in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, in October 1988 with the support of Scandinavian and American evangelical Pentecostals. Comprised originally of just a handful of ‘Christians’ (krikščionys), this religious community soon became one of the largest, most active and visible churches, attracting followers from every social stratum and age group. The considerable success of this religious import did not go unnoticed. Not surprisingly, the Catholic establishment as well as right-of-centre politicians and intellectuals were the first to voice their uncompromising opposition and hostility towards the congregation. Deeply negative perceptions of the Word of Faith were also articulated in the print and broadcast media which consistently portrayed it as a destructive, pernicious foreign sect (sekta) whose sole intent was to brainwash, ‘encode’ (užkoduoti) and exploit its members spiritually and, above all, financially. A wave of shock and outrage swept through the nation when several members of the Church allegedly committed suicide as a consequence of such manipulative practices (Glodenis 2000). Whenever I mentioned to my Catholic informants and friends that I was interested in the Word of Faith, I would get baffled and concerned looks. ‘What are you doing? They’ll encode you and that’ll be the end of you!’ (užkoduos ir bus tau baigta), a folklorist in her thirties exclaimed. Although it has lost some of its visibility and appeal, today this charismatic movement remains one of the most popular ‘non-traditional’ (netradicinė) religious fellowships, with thirty-three chapters in many cities and towns of Lithuania. According to the Law on Religious Communities and Associations, which was passed by the Lithuanian parliament in 1995, all faiths that have emerged over the past two decades or so are classified as netradicinė or kita

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(‘other’). Such qualifiers not only point to their religious novelty and difference but also allude to their invasive, disruptive and fragmenting nature. ‘Tradition’ by definition implies continuity, temporal depth and organic cohesion. In the state’s stratifying typology, Roman Catholic, Russian Orthodox and Old Believer, Lutheran, Jewish, among others, are the faiths that embody tradition for they are considered to be part of Lithuania’s ‘historical, spiritual and social heritage’; besides, their ‘instruction and rites are not contrary to national laws and morality’ (Kuznecovienė 2003: 185). Such categories stack Lithuania’s many religious congregations in elaborate hierarchies of status and entitlement, a ranking system that has direct implications in terms of the social and economic capital these congregations can acquire and possess. ‘Tradition’ begets not only status and prestige but also more money from the state. In the postsocialist ‘marketplace of God’ some are more privileged than others.12 Labelled as ‘non-traditional’ by the Lithuanian state, the Word of Faith sees itself as a quintessentially modern church where ‘lively, active believing’ (Glodenis 2002: 6) is emphasized. More pointedly, the congregation’s modernity is associated with its relatively liberal theology which coheres around the idea of ready access to the Holy Spirit as an agent of ‘high-speed’ salvation. Its rituals, such as communal praying or marriage rites, are largely unstructured, inclusive, participatory, and they are commonly enacted through free improvisation. In a slick video released in 2003 to commemorate the fifteenth anniversary of the founding of the congregation, one of the pastors referred to the Bible as a ‘modern book’ (moderni knyga). Unlike the Catholic Church, this religious fellowship is decentralized institutionally and lacks national or supranational coordination. To use Susan Harding’s words, it is ‘without a pope, without a Rome, without … hierarchical, and costly denominational bureaucracies… Instead, it [is] managed by loose, fragmentary pastoral networks’ (2000: 273; cf. Robbins 2004). The imagined religious community it creates globally is without obvious hierarchies, metropoles or peripheries. Although connected theologically to similar evangelical congregations elsewhere in the former Soviet Union – as well as in the United States, England and Sweden – the Word of Faith today operates as a largely independent religious group of non-denominational Christian charismatics. Elected by popular vote, the Church’s pastors, some of whom are women, earn their authority and status by demonstrating thorough knowledge of the Scriptures, as well as by showing their rhetorical abilities, high moral integrity, social skills and the like. Pastors usually dress casually, do not use any ritual paraphernalia during worship sessions, and are easily approachable by ordinary congregants. While not entirely irrelevant, such categories as social class, gender and generation are overtaken in significance by the unifying identity of the ‘Christian’ or ‘believer’ (krikščionis, tikintis). In the democratic and modern Word of Faith, everyone participates, belongs, and benefits more or less equally. During my fieldwork, I heard very few references to ethnicity or nationality, or to ‘Lithuanianness’ in particular. As one believer in her thirties put it, ‘our fatherland is where God is’.

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The modernity of the Word of Faith is contained not only in its liberal theology, manner of worship and social organization but also in the congregation’s valorization, both implicitly and explicitly, of consumer goods and practices which are commonly perceived to embody Western modernity and its associated material well-being. The consumerist dimension of this religious group is especially appealing to its younger followers.13 The Word of Faith is not alone in its endeavour to project a modernist image. Among other ‘non-traditionals’, the Baptist Church of Christ’s Mission, the Mormon congregation of Latter Day Saints, the New Apostolic Church and Jehovah’s Witnesses are its important rivals in this regard. With the generous financial support of their (mostly) American brothers and sisters in faith, at the time of my research these religious communities were constructing ‘ultra modern’ venues for worship complete with high-tech administrative offices, computerized classrooms for Bible study, showers and pools for baptism ceremonies (equipped with designer plumbing and lighting fixtures), and so forth. Such modernization was especially evident in Kaunas where the new churches were rapidly emerging in its Brezhnev-era residential suburbs next to vast shopping malls and shiny office buildings. According to one media report, spread out in one such suburb is a neighbourhood inhabited exclusively by Jehovah’s Witnesses. This tight-knit religious community runs a car repair shop and provides other services exclusively to its members. Not to be outdone in this quest for the material modern, the Word of Faith has recently opened a similar multi-function venue of worship for its followers in Vilnius.14

‘Doing and Showing It’: The Charisma of Relating

As much as it strives to be modern, the Word of Faith also seeks to project a selfimage of a pre-eminently moral community, an image it juxtaposes with the majority society, or ‘the nation’ (tauta), seen to be morally bankrupt. The broad umbrella category of ‘the nation’, as conceptualized by my evangelical informants, subsumes the Lithuanian state and its many institutions and bureaucrats, the Catholic Church and other ‘traditional’ religious actors, as well as, more generally, ordinary citizens who failed to find faith and were labelled as ‘non-believers’ (netikintys). Referring to tauta, my interlocutors spoke of the flagrant corruption of Lithuania’s self-seeking politicians, the lawlessness and egotism of the nouveaux riches business elites, bribes and favouritism in public education and healthcare, lack of respect and trust in quotidian interactions among ordinary citizens, and so forth. Images of perceived ethical erosion and regress were usually invoked within broader discussions concerning the struggling postsocialist economy, unemployment, poverty and deepening social differentiation along the lines of class, gender, and age. ‘Money, money… Me, me… that’s all people think and talk about these days’, one cynical believer remarked.15

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I frequently heard that in this climate of postsocialist demoralization Catholics were failing ethically on many counts as well. While some followers of the Word of Faith exchanged stories about the avarice, dishonesty and debauchery of individual Catholic priests, others critiqued its purely theological and, as it were, unpractical solutions, commented with scepticism on its ‘escapist’ preoccupation with the hereafter, and generally questioned the authority of the national Church as a legislator and guardian of Christian ethics.16 By contrast, emphasizing their here-and-now approach, charismatic evangelists viewed their community as being more effective and efficient, so to speak, in moral matters. As one believer put it, ‘we don’t just repeat the Ten Commandments like they [Catholics] do… They lament how bad life is today and point to God… We do things, we show people what is good’. The focus of this section is on such showing and doing as morally informed practices. Consider Jonas and Rūta’s story. Shortly after Jonas, a long-time member of the Word of Faith, lost his job as a security guard at a bank, his wife, Rūta, also a believer, gave birth to their first child. Both unemployed and without savings, they could no longer pay rent on a one-room apartment in a suburban high-rise. Their lease was terminated. The news about the family’s impending homelessness quickly spread in the congregation. Ona, a retired accountant in her sixties, offered the young couple and their baby daughter a spare room in the small apartment she shared with her alcoholic ex-husband, Petras. A proud Communist Party member during the Soviet era, Petras turned to the Catholic Church after the demise of socialism, erected a big cross on his parents’ grave, and even put himself through a baptism ceremony at the age of fifty-seven. But he soon found Catholics to be, as he put it, ‘too stuck up’. Besides, in his pursuit of religiosity Petras discovered that after years of atheism, he ‘no longer knew how to believe’ (nemoku tikėti). Catholicism proved to be unsatisfactory. For several months he attended prayer meetings of the Word of Faith in another attempt to find, in his words, ‘meaning, peace … something good in this life’, but soon became disillusioned with this religious faith as well and took to the bottle. When Ona brought the homeless fellow believers to the apartment, Petras protested, hurled insults at them and threatened violence. Lacking other choices, the young family moved in regardless. Sharing the apartment, however, soon became an ordeal for everyone as Petras grew increasingly intolerant of the ‘despicable sectarians’, as he called them with contempt. During one of his drinking bouts, Petras burst into Jonas and Rūta’s room, a kitchen knife in hand. A scuffle ensued. The following day the couple and their newly-born baby moved out. This story about the young family’s violent confrontation, with what was identified as the ‘satanic atheism’ embodied by Petras, shook up the Word of Faith community. Biblical references were invoked to comprehend and explain what had happened. Addressing the faithful at a prayer meeting, a pastor pointed out that ‘it all makes sense: righteousness provokes sin, darkness and evil into hostile confrontation; one counteracts evil with good’. For the next year or so, the peripatetic young family moved from room to room, offered to them rent-free by other fellow believers. Their plight sparked a virtual

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competition among the congregants eager to help in different ways. Ona’s example of ‘generosity, sacrifice and strength’ set off a kind of chain reaction of moral mobilization in which many members of the Church wanted to take part. Those who could not ‘provide salvation’ materially prayed for Jonas and Rūta, or they would periodically visit them at their temporary lodgings for Bible-reading sessions or simply drop by for a chat. At times, the couple felt overwhelmed by the attention they received and by the donations of secondhand clothing, food and cash. Tears in their eyes, the couple described to me their experience of homelessness as an encounter with the Holy Spirit and divine grace. At the same time, they kept emphasizing the ‘human goodness’ (žmogiškas gerumas) of individual congregants, as well as the togetherness and what they called the ‘beautiful relating’ (gražus bendravimas) that emerged from the networks of care and support built around them. For Jonas and Rūta, experiencing this ‘relating’ within their congregation at the time of their crisis was more valuable, as they pointed out repeatedly, than the actual material help they received. They also wondered how this was possible in such a selfish and dishonest ‘nation’. ‘See, there are still decent people’, Rūta concluded. As I listened to the couple, I could not help but think about charisma. In classical social theory, the sources of charisma are usually associated – in an essentializing and mystifying fashion – with the superhuman, supernatural or otherwise exceptional qualities of the leader in the Weberian sense (Weber 1964). Most studies concerned with charismatic Christian fellowships locate charisma in theological rhetoric used in pastoral and ritual action. Informed by the relationship between a leader and their followers, this action, as the argument goes, is where charisma comes into existence (Harding 2000: 60; cf. Csordas 1997: 136ff; Lindquist 2006: 114–5). I propose a less logocentric and more, one mght say, egalitarian view of charisma, one in which the role of language and the leader’s persona are downplayed. I emphasize moral practice and sociability (cf. Lambek 2000). To be sure, the Word of Faith has leaders that could be seen as charismatic, and theological discourse is of utmost importance in the congregation’s selfconception and constitution. Lengthy sermons with detailed quotations from the Bible, singing along with the congregation’s band of ‘easy Christian rock’, communal prayers ‘in tongues’, and so forth, exemplify ways of embodying language as a charisma-generating agent. ‘The gift of tongues’ in prayer, or glossolalia, is thought of by believers to be an indication of the presence and power of the Holy Spirit which is manifest in rhythmic and repetitious speech or chant. Semantically meaningless, ‘tongues’ is a heavenly language – a gift from God and a way to praise God. A person speaking in tongues is seen as empowered to evangelize and to spread the Lord’s word (see Coleman 2000: 21, 117ff). The importance of ‘the word’ in this church is also signalled in its name. Early on in my research I noticed that some pastors and members of the congregation spoke with a distinct drawl and used intonation patterns that contrasted with those of standard Lithuanian. The Word of Faith followers seemed to possess a kind of charismatic accent, as it were, perhaps as a linguistic way to differentiate themselves from the ‘nation’ and other religious communities.

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Without wishing to downplay the importance of oratory, I suggest that charisma may also be located in believers’ concrete practices deemed to be ‘good’. To put it otherwise, charisma can be attributed to this-worldly actions of ethically engaged individuals. It may be generated and reproduced not only through what is said, but also through what is done by interacting participants. In other words, charismatic enchantment may inhere not only in rhetoric, ritual, or expansive personalities, but also in the dynamics of ethical social relations. Such relations could be seen as a locus of the superhuman, supernatural, and otherwise exceptional. Edward Shils observed that charisma is charismatic because it presumes, at a deeper level, ‘connection with “fundamental”, “vital” … order-determining power’ (1975: 127). A pre-eminently social and relational category, morality is premised on the ideal of order, conceived in the broadest sense (Parkin 1985; Wuthnow 1987). In certain contexts, the moral and the charismatic, then, might be seen as overlapping and mutually constitutive. Both are about creating and maintaining order at times of disarray. In the ethnographic example above, this order is embodied in the congregation’s sociability sustained through altruistic giving, amity and trust. None would be possible without relational bendravimas (cf. the example below). As Signe Howell (1997: 9) points out, ‘our sense of morality is … what constitutes our sociality, the very basis of relating’. Members of the Word of Faith often talked about the incorporating morality of their Church not only as a communal resource of self-empowerment but also as a means of self-conception. ‘We are good people’, as one member simply put it. My interlocutors saw their charismatic fellowship as a source of moral identity that differentiated them from the postsocialist ‘nation’ (tauta) and its ethical breakdown. Ona’s alcoholic ex-husband, Petras, introduced in the foregoing vignette, can be seen as a personification of tauta and its associated moral breakdown. In her recent study of Baptist and Pentecostal evangelists in post-Soviet Ukraine, Catherine Wanner (2003) argues that conversion discourses and practices constitute a critique of immorality inherited from socialism. Few of my interlocutors invoked socialism, implicitly or explicitly, in their commentary. If they did so, it was usually in surprisingly positive and nostalgic ways. What many critiqued – in a vocal and righteously indignant manner – was not the recent socialist past but the perceived ‘satanic’ moral decay of the postsocialist present (cf. Ries 2002). Rather than being conceptualized in terms of continuity with the Soviet era, the deepening demoralization of the modernizing nation was habitually seen as a novel and unprecedented phenomenon (recall Pranas’s words cited in the opening paragraph; and compare Valerija’s remarks in the example below). Several of my interviewees pointed out that socialism was, in fact, not as ethically deficient as it was commonly conceptualized to be. Perhaps morality is one domain in the study of contemporary Eastern Europe where the category of ‘postsocialism’ is no longer particularly useful analytically (Humphrey 2002a: 12–15). The principal temporal reference in discourses concerning the immoral was predominantly the present, commonly perceived as being unlike socialism.

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The Civility and Praxis of the Holy Spirit

Although stigmatized by ‘the nation’ and its many representatives as a pernicious foreign sect (Petras called them ‘despicable sectarians’), the Word of Faith was often recognized as a congregation with rich and viable networks of support, which it made available to its members in times of need. During my fieldwork, I heard many stories of the community coming together for concrete, this-worldly self-help. It was usually various crises in individual members’ lives, such as illness, loss of a family member, unemployment, and so forth, that moved the believers to action (see below). ‘It is not a real church, it is a social service (socialinė tarnyba)’, one of my Catholic informants observed. Taking off from this comment, I now want to push the discussion further and to reflect on the charismatic Word of Faith as a kind of civil society. The literature concerned with civil society is voluminous, and definitions of the concept are many. Philosopher Charles Taylor, for instance, understands it as ‘a web of autonomous associations independent of the state, which binds citizens together in matters of common concern’ (cited in Kligman 1990: 420). One of modernity’s key representations, civil society has been theorized by political scientists, sociologists and philosophers as a normative and moral concept that speaks to desires of social order and coherence (Tester 1992). Citing its ethnocentric, totalizing and hence analytically unhelpful nature, anthropologists ignored civil society for a long time. This position has changed over the past decade or so, resulting in a raft of ethnographic studies which explore different understandings, locations and enactments of this society in various contexts within and beyond the West. Not surprisingly, Eastern Europe – a region where civil society is part of the ‘magic’ of the ongoing transformation, to paraphrase Steven Sampson (1996) – has recently received considerable attention in this regard. Non-governmental organizations, charitable groups and initiatives, as well as ethnic, feminist, gay and other social movements have been studied as differing manifestations of ‘actually existing’ civil society (Hann and Dunn 1996; Verdery 1996; Gal and Kligman 2000; Fagan 2006). However, there are few ethnographies that explore it more explicitly in relation to religious belief and practice (cf. van der Zweerde 1999). The Word of Faith offers a productive ethnographic site in which to do so. Consider another example. In his early forties and employed part-time as an electrical contractor, Rimas lived with his widowed, ailing mother in a small apartment on the ninth floor of a crumbling Brezhnev-era high-rise. As we sat on a bruised sofa in the sparsely furnished living room, which also doubled as Rimas’s bedroom and office, his mother, Valerija, walked in with a colourful pot of steaming tea and put it down on the table next to a well-worn copy of the Bible. It was my first interview with Rimas, a long-time member of the Word of Faith. I had met Rimas several times before at the prayer meetings of the congregation and had seen him perform – he played bass guitar – in its band during the service. A few of his fellow believers insisted that I should approach

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him for a chat and perhaps become friends with him. Rimas was a wonderful person, I was told, and had things to tell. He was one of those ‘saved’ (išgelbėtas) by the Holy Spirit. After serving with Soviet troops in Afghanistan in the early 1980s, Rimas returned to Vilnius where he completed his engineering degree and got married. But his marriage fell apart shortly afterward, and he became involved in an illegal car importing business that landed him in jail where he attempted suicide. After his father’s sudden death in a car accident and a brutal mugging just steps from his home that left his face badly disfigured, Rimas turned to alcohol. ‘The nation (tauta) was free, without the Soviets, and I lay in a drunken torpor on the filthy kitchen floor’, Rimas reminisced about the first years of independence. No programme of treatment seemed to help. In 1993, on a sunny spring day just before Easter, as Rimas was begging for money in central Vilnius, he was approached by members of the Word of Faith. ‘They said they were Christians, evangelizing (evangelizuojantys) … Initially I didn’t understand a thing about their religion… but they were so different, human (žmoniški) … One of them – a stranger! – even held my hand. They gave me booklets to read and asked me to come to their church’, Rimas recalled. When he told his mother about his encounter with the charismatics, she was convinced that, if he joined this ‘sect’, it would ruin him completely. Deeply concerned, she added that Lithuanians should be Catholic, like herself, and should stop chasing religions that are ‘neither this nor that’ (nei šis, nei tas). One evening, after several drinks, Rimas mustered some courage and staggered into the congregation’s prayer meeting. When the preaching pastor noticed the inebriated intruder weaving down the aisle of the auditorium, he interrupted his sermon, pointed at Rimas and exclaimed: ‘Brothers and sisters, this man must be saved!’ ‘Hallelujah!’ the audience responded. A long, ardent prayer followed. Over the next several months, Rimas read the Bible from cover to cover – twice – highlighting many passages with a florescent green marker pen, an accomplishment he displayed to me with great pride. He also became a regular at the Church’s twice-weekly services. When he told his fellow congregants that he had some musical training, they suggested that he join the congregation band. ‘I was still drinking then … Not much though, on the sly … but the Holy Spirit was definitely with me already’, Rimas told me. When during one meeting the pastor announced that Rimas had been hospitalized with severe liver failure, and that his mother lay bed-ridden at home with a badly sprained ankle, the congregation moved to action. Almost daily, he and his mother were visited by members of the religious community who brought them food, medications, bedding, flowers, chocolates, Christian reading materials and audio tapes with sermons from ‘God’s Word Collection’ (Dievo Žodžio kolekcija) produced by the congregation. Old and young were equally involved.17 Fellow believers helped Valerija with household chores, cooked, cleaned, read and interpreted passages from the Bible for her and once even staged a performance at her bedside, which featured a series of biblical stories enacted by

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nine performers with live music and light effects. She had no doubt, as she told me, that she was witnessing God, that the Holy Spirit was at work. ‘Where could one see this today? People are like rabid dogs everywhere … And here – such human warmth (žmogiška šiluma)!’ What was even more miraculous, in her words, was that Rimas gave up alcohol entirely at the time – proof beyond doubt that his conversion was completed and that now he was ‘saved’. Rimas’s case is illuminating in several respects. It offers insights into the evangelical practice of witnessing as the principal means of conversion to charismatic Christianity. Witnessing can be broadly defined as ‘an attempt to encourage a person to abandon his or her “frame” … of personal meaning and to adopt the evangelical frame instead’ (Bramadat 2000: 126). Unlike more formal and monologic preaching by an ordained speaker, witnessing is commonly structured as an extended dialogue between ‘saved’ witnesses and their ‘unsaved’ interlocutors (Harding 2000). While spreading God’s word and the gospel using oratory is of paramount importance in evangelization, the significance of effective interpersonal interaction and communication with potential converts is also heavily emphasized. In his recent volume on the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship at McMaster University in Canada, Paul Bramadat writes that participants of this congregation were given very specific guidelines for effective missionizing, such as ‘using the casual touch, having a good joke ready … expressing love, following up, discussing sin experientially, being relaxed … polite, confident, positive … being led by the spirit’ (2000: 127), among others.18 Known as ‘friendship evangelism’ or ‘dialogue theology’, such personalized conversion techniques were intended both to help establish a contact with God and to create a sense of this-worldly communion and togetherness. The Word of Faith, and similar charismatic evangelical churches throughout the former socialist bloc, were highly effective in identifying and meeting the tremendous ‘demand’ for such ‘togetherness’, or bendravimas, in a milieu where ‘people [tauta, or “nation”] are like rabid dogs’. When asked about the success of his Pentecostal church in Kyrgyzstan, a senior pastor there responded: ‘The apostles write that in order to be successful you need obshcheniye [the Russian word for bendravimas], prayer, and understanding. We are in constant obshcheniye and we constantly pray. It is all very simple’ (cited in Pelkmans 2006: 38).19 The morality of bendravimas and the charisma it generates are among the salient features of such congregations. At the same time, these religious groups offer tangible material assistance to their members that weak postsocialist governments, albeit trumpeting the ideals of the modern welfare state, fail to provide for the needy. Given the ineffectiveness of state apparatuses and considering the situation of material and ethical scarcity, the new evangelical churches stand out as enticing alternatives. They operate as morally sovereign and materially self-sufficient civil societies. Rather than being based on principles of liberal individualism and contractual social arrangements, as more conventional understandings of civil society would have it (see Hann and Dunn 1996: 3–7), they are constituted through voluntary and altruistic exchange.

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As discussed above, members of the Word of Faith situate themselves not solely vis-à-vis the state but, more broadly, vis-à-vis the postsocialist Lithuanian ‘nation’. This further complicates easy definitions of civil society that commonly place it in a dichotomous opposition to the state. Civil society may have many different referents in relation to which it defines itself.20 The story of Rimas and Valerija speaks to the dwindling value of nationalist sentiment and its associated Catholicism in today’s Lithuania. In our conversations, Rimas brought up the Catholic Church only when I asked him about his religious beliefs during the socialist era. He responded that he knew virtually nothing about Catholicism when growing up in Soviet Lithuania. When the atheist communist state began to crumble, he attended many masses at Catholic churches in Vilnius but failed to find any appeal in the national religion. He is one of the many disaffected faithful who abandoned Catholicism soon after discovering it – a first-born and short-lived Catholic (cf. Petras in the preceding example). Rimas consistently, and somewhat jokingly, identified himself as ‘a [charismatic] Christian since 1993’. He also pointed out that he was ‘still a Lithuanian of course’ but ‘a Christian first and foremost’. While the two dimension of Rima’s social self were not mutually exclusive, they were not mutually constitutive either. His modern Christianity took precedence over his traditional ‘Lithuanianness’. His mother, Valerija, who received a great deal of religious instruction at school and at home before 1940 – she could be called a ‘biographical Catholic’ (see above) – rediscovered Catholicism at the time of the Sąjūdis movement and remained firmly committed to it until her encounter with the Word of Faith. She told me that after her experience with the ‘Christians’ who had saved her son and showed her the Holy Spirit in action, Catholicism had ‘bounced off her’ (atšoko). Although Valerija did not quite approve of the congregation’s worship practices, which she found ‘too free and modern’ (per daug laisvai, moderniškai), she soon became a follower and a tithe-paying member. She noted that she felt deeply indebted to the congregation and wanted to reciprocate in whatever way she could.

By Way of Conclusion

I have discussed the Word of Faith as a specifically modern church. Yet as is evident its modernity is highly paradoxical: it is produced and sustained in what is commonly conceptualized as its very antithesis, that is, religious belief. Modernization and its components are classically theorized as virtually synonymous with secularization, or the waning of religion. The modern and the civil are typically discussed in opposition to, or at least outside, the religious realm. Pointing to the close connections between modernity, civility and religiosity, the Word of Faith unsettles such neat paradigms. It suggests that the modern and the civil need not be located in the secular. I have attempted to demonstrate that, although religiosity mediates between faith and ethics in this ‘non-traditional’ Christian congregation, it is through

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human agency that its morality (and civility) are made and reproduced. To paraphrase William James’s words which appear in the epigraph of this chapter, moral change effected through religious conversion in this charismatic Church is both about divine and human operation. Evangelical doctrine and its authority provide a broad framework for moral knowledge, deliberation and judgement, but it is the concrete practices of fellow believers as embodied exemplars of ‘human goodness’ – rather than the specific content of theological precepts – that move the faithful to seek the moral. Religion may provide guidance in moral practice, but it is people who bring morality into being through everyday social interaction (cf. Lambek 2000; Sagi and Statman 1995). I have also argued that the pursuit of the moral engenders charisma, confers identity, and creates a civil society where ethical bendravimas and concrete material assistance are key. These features constitute the socio-moral and economic capital of the modernist Word of Faith – a capital that enables its adherents to differentiate themselves from the postsocialist Lithuanian ‘nation’ and its many actors, the Catholic Church among them. It is the fellowship’s ethical distinction combined with its religious pragmatism that make it so appealing and successful in the current ‘marketplace of God’, where the demand for ‘moral goods’ is at a steady high. Finally and more abstractly, in today’s Eastern Europe, modernization does not equal secularization, nor does it ensure social ‘normalcy’ and straightforward moral progress, as many thought it inevitably would at the time of socialism’s retreat. Instead, in postsocialist Eastern Europe the quest for the modern West and its associated ideals has produced multiple environments of ethical breakdown, and has devalued nationalism as a resource of political engagement and identification. At the same time, paradoxically, modernity and its attendant transnational processes have opened up spaces in which to critique those environments and to create new selves.

Notes

1. Throughout this essay, I use the concept of ‘modernization’ and its many conceptional cognates – such as ‘modern(ity)’, ‘the West’, ‘Europe’, ‘market’, ‘democracy’, ‘civil society’, ‘civilization’ and ‘(im)moral(ity)’, among others – as categories of local understanding and interpretation, whose meanings are contingent historically, socially and culturally. In order to avoid typographic clutter, in the remainder of the text these words and their various derivatives appear without quotation marks. 2. This paper is based on research undertaken in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius and in Kaunas, the second-largest city, from July 1998 to September 1999 and more recently in 2003, 2004 and 2005. As my principal research tools I used interviews and participant observation at the congregation’s prayer meetings and other social gatherings, ranging from Bible discussions over tea to alcoholfree weddings (see Lankauskas 2002). I also talked to many people outside the Church, who identified themselves as Catholics, agnostics or as ‘spiritual’ persons. The print and broadcast media, as well as web-based resources, were also used as data sources. 3. For a discussion of various facets of Soviet ‘moral culture’, see Kon (1996); a more philosophical treatment of Marxism, ‘actually existing socialism’ and morality is offered by Sayers (1990). See also Lukes (1985).

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4. Compare Humphrey’s (2002b: 52–6) discussion of obman or deceit in Russia. 5. In February 1990, even before Lithuania officially declared its independence from the Soviet Union, the Lithuanian parliament passed the Law on the Restoration of Houses of Prayer. The Act of Restitution of the Catholic Church Status was adopted in June of the same year: see Kuznecovienė (2003: 179–82). 6. Lietuvos aidas, 12 September 1991, p. 2. 7. See Ellis (1998), and Kligman (1988). Recently in Lithuania, the so-called Lustration Commission (Liustracijos komisija) revealed that several dozen members of the Catholic clergy actively collaborated with the KGB during Soviet occupation. In Poland, a prominent priest and scholar, Michal Czaikowski, has admitted supplying the secret services with intelligence concerning activities of political dissidents and Catholic priests. His collaboration lasted for twenty-four years. See R. Jurgelaitis, ‘Kunigų sutanos slepia praeities nuodėmes [The Robes of Priests Hide Sins of the Past]’, Kauno diena [The Day of Kaunas]. Retrieved 18 July 2006 from www.kauno.diena.lt. 8. For discussions of similar religious decline in socialist East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Albania and elsewhere, see Hann (2000) and Merdjanova (2001). 9. Similar trends of religious (re)discovery in Russia are reported by Kornblatt (1999), and in Slovenia by Alessandra Miklavcic (personal communication). 10. For a discussion of the analytic usefulness of the market metaphor in the study of religion, see Pelkmans (2006); cf. Verdery (1999), Borenstein (1999) and Lewis (2000). Throughout contemporary Eastern Europe, the postsocialist ‘market’ of religions coexists with an equally vibrant ‘market of magic’ with its multiple beliefs and practices, many of which are concerned with healing. See Lindquist (2006) for a recent ethnography of magic in today’s Russia. Healers and magi should not be overlooked as they are important ‘market competitors’ of the various churches and religious denominations, be they old or new. 11. See also Lankauskas (2002, 2003); cf. Warner (2003, 2007) and Caldwell (2005) for accounts of similar ‘dissatisfaction’ with the Orthodox faith and its associated practices in Ukraine and Russia, respectively. 12. See M. Paleckis, ‘Naujajame įstatyme – saugikliai nuo sektų [In the New Law, Protection from Sects]’, Respublika, 25 October 2002, p. 6. 13. I have discussed this feature of the Word of Faith in greater detail elsewhere: see Lankauskas (2002). 14. See R. Jurgelaitis, ‘Houses of Worship of Non-Traditional Religious Communities are Thriving in Kaunas’, Kauno diena. Retrieved 8 March 2004 from www.kauno.diena.lt. See the Word of Faith web site at www.btz.lt for images of the new worship facility. 15. Journalists, artists, intellectuals, some politicians and members of the Catholic clergy were also among vocal critics of the perceived moral decay and overall anomie. In March 2002, the City Hall of Vilnius launched a campaign with a slogan Būk žmogus! (‘Be Human!’) whose objective was to ‘encourage people to behave in a cultured way [and] to build a pleasant … city’. Lithuania’s print, broadcast and electronic media are replete with appeals for an urgent moral reconstitution of the nation. Religiosity, ‘spirituality’ and secular humanist ideals are rhetorically invoked as resources for moral improvement. Few practical solutions are offered. On ‘moral degradation’, see, e.g., the special issue of the weekly current-affairs magazine Veidas [Face], No.50, 15 December 2005; see also K. Šiaulys, ‘Ar įvyks Lietuvoje dorovinė revoliucija? [Will the Virtuous Revolution Take Place in Lithuania?]’; www.delfi.lt, 7 October 2005; A. Paulauskas, ‘Yra 10 Dievo įsakymų, trūksta etikos kodeksų [We Have God’s Ten Commandments but Lack Codes of Ethics]’, ELTA News Agency, 18 February 2005; G. Dzūkaitė, ‘D. Katkus: chamiškumas kyla iš kvailo vienadienio intereso [D. Katkus: Chamiškumas Stems from Foolish Ephemeral Interest]’, Lietuvos rytas. Retrieved 25 March 2006 from www.lrytas.lt. 16. ‘Spiritual problems’ and moral breakdown of the Catholic Church have been recently discussed by V.V. Landsbergis, ‘Ar tikrai Dievas gyvena bažnyčioj? [Does God Really Live in the Church?]’. Retrieved 13 July 2006 from: www.delfi.lt. 17. See Wanner (2003: 281–4) for strikingly similar accounts of communal self-help among Ukrainian Baptist converts; on the pragmatism and ‘utility of religion’ in today’s urban Russia, see Caldwell (2005: 25–30).

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18. Incidentally, between 1992 and 1996, members of this student church went on four witnessing missions to Lithuania, one of which is described by Bramadat (2000). His ethnography is one of the few accounts of evangelical conversion practices in a postsocialist context. 19. For a discussion of the disintegration of obshcheniye in today’s rural Russia, see Paxson (2005: 92–94). 20. See Dunn (1996) for an examination of strategies used by American Mormons to build and reproduce civil society in opposition to the state and to mainstream society beyond the congregation.

References

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Hann, C. 2000. ‘Problems with the (De)privatization of Religion’, Anthropology Today 16(6): 14–20. Hann, C. and E. Dunn (eds). 1996. Civil Society: Challenging Western Models. London: Routledge. Harding, S. 2000. The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hoppenbrouwers, F. 1999. ‘Romancing Freedom: Church and Society in the Baltic States since the End of Communism’, Religion, State and Society 27(2): 162–73. Howell, S. 1997. ‘Introduction’, in S. Howell (ed.) Ethnography of Moralities. London: Routledge, 1–21. Humphrey, C. 1983. Karl Marx Collective: Economy, Society and Religion in a Siberian Collective Farm. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. –––––. 2002a. ‘Introduction: Does the Category of “Postsocialism” Still Make Sense?’ in C. Hann (ed.) Postsocialism: Ideals, Ideologies and Practices in Eurasia. London: Routledge, 12–15. –––––. 2002b. The Unmaking of Soviet Life: Everyday Economies after Socialism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. James, W. 2002[1902]. The Varieties of Religious Experience. London: Routledge. Johnston, H. 1993. ‘Religio-Nationalist Subcultures under the Communists: Comparisons from the Baltics, Transcaucasia and Ukraine’, Sociology of Religion 54(3): 237–55. Kligman, G. 1988. The Wedding of the Dead: Ritual, Poetics, and Popular Culture in Transylvania. Berkeley: University of California Press. –––––. 1990. ‘Reclaiming the Public: A Reflection on Recreating Civil Society in Romania’, Eastern European Politics and Societies 4(3): 393–438. Klumbytė, N. 2003. ‘Ethnographic Note on Nation: Narratives and Symbols of the Early PostSocialist Nationalism in Lithuania’, Dialectical Anthropology 27: 279–95. Kon, I. 1996. ‘Moral Culture’, in D. Shalin (ed.) Russian Culture at the Crossroads: Paradoxes of Postcommunist Consciousness. Boulder, CO: Westview, 185–208. Kornblatt, J. 1999. ‘“Christianity, Antisemitism, Nationalism”: Russian Orthodoxy in a Reborn Orthodox Russia’, in A. Barker (ed), Consuming Russia: Popular Culture, Sex, and Society. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 414–36. Kuznecovienė, J. 2003. ‘Church and State in Lithuania’, in S. Ferrari and W. Durham (eds), Law and Religion in Post-Communist Europe. Leuven: Peeters, 177–95. Lambek, M. 2000. ‘The Anthropology of Religion and the Quarrel between Poetry and Philosophy’, Current Anthropology 41(3): 309–20. Lankauskas, G. 2002. ‘On “Modern” Christians, Consumption, and the Value of National Identity in Post-Soviet Lithuania’, Ethnos 67(3): 295–319. –––––. 2003. ‘Ambivalent Transitions from East to West: Modernity and National Identity at the PostSoviet Lithuanian Wedding’, Ph.D. dissertation. Toronto: Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto. Larmore, C. 1996. The Morals of Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lewis, D. 2000. After Atheism: Religion and Ethnicity in Russia and Central Asia. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Lindquist, G. 2006. Conjuring Hope: Healing and Magic in Contemporary Russia. New York: Berghahn Books. Lukes, S. 1985. Marxism and Morality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Luxmoore, J. and J. Babiuch. 1999. ‘The Catholic Church and Communism, 1789–1989’, Religion, State and Society 27(3/4): 301–13. Merdjanova, I. 2001. ‘Religious Liberty, New Religious Movements and Traditional Christian Churches in Eastern Europe’, Religion, State and Society 29(4): 265–304. Parkin, D. (ed.) 1985. The Anthropology of Evil. Oxford: Blackwell. Paxson, M. 2005. Solovyovo: The Story of Memory in a Russian Village. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, and Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Pelkmans, M. 2006. ‘Asymmetries on the “Religious Market” in Kyrgyzstan’, in C. Hann et al. The Postsocialist Religious Question. Münster: LIT Verlag, 29–46. Peterson, D. and D. Walhof. 2002. ‘Rethinking Religion’, in D. Peterson and D. Walhof (eds), The Invention of Religion: Rethinking Belief in Politics and History. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1–18.

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Ries, N. 2002. ‘“Honest Bandits” and “Warped People”: Russian Narratives about Money, Corruption, and Moral Decay’, in C. Greenhouse, E. Mertz, and K. Warren (eds), Ethnography in Unstable Places: Everyday Lives in Contexts of Dramatic Political Change. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 276–315. Robbins, J. 2004. Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rogers, D. 2005. ‘Introductory Essay: The Anthropology of Religion after Socialism’, Religion, State and Society 33(1): 5–18. Sagi, A. and D. Statman 1995. Religion and Morality. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Sampson, S. 1996. ‘The Social Life of Projects: Importing Civil Society to Albania’, in C. Hann (ed.) Civil Society: Challenging Western Models. London: Routledge, 121–42. Sayers, S. 1990. ‘Marxism and Actually Existing Socialism’, in D. McLennan and S. Sayers (eds), Socialism and Morality. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 42–64. Senn, A. 1990. Lithuania Awakening. Berkeley: University of California Press. Shils, E. 1975. Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Smith, D., A. Pabriks, A. Purs and T. Lane. 2002. The Baltic States: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania. New York: Routledge. Tester, K. 1992. Civil Society. London: Routledge. Urban, H. 2003. ‘Sacred Capital: Pierre Bourdieu and the Study of Religion’, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 15: 354–89. van der Veer, P. 2001. Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. van der Veer, P. and H. Lehmann (eds). 1999. Nation and Religion: Perspectives of Europe and Asia. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. van der Zweerde, E. 1999 ‘“Civil Society” and “Orthodox Christianity” in Russia: A Double TestCase’, Religion, State and Society 27(1): 23–45. Vardys, S. 1978. The Catholic Church, Dissent and Nationality in Soviet Lithuania. Boulder, CO: East European Quarterly. Verdery, K. 1996. What was Socialism and What Comes Next? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. –––––. 1999. The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change. New York: Columbia University Press. Wanner, C. 2003. ‘Advocating New Moralities: Conversion to Evangelicalism in Ukraine’, Religion, State and Society 31(3): 273–87. –––––. 2007. Communities of the Converted: Ukrainians and Global Evangelism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Weber, M. 1964. The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. New York: Free Press. Wuthnow, R. 1987. Meaning and Moral Order: Explorations in Cultural Analysis. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Chapter 7

NETWORKS OF FAITH IN KAZAKHSTAN William Clark In the fourteen years since independence in 1991, the evangelical community of Kazakhstan has experienced remarkable growth in general with a significant minority of that growth occurring among Muslim background Kazakhs and Uighurs. Protestant Christianity, which along with Islam and Orthodox Christianity was marginalized during the Soviet period, has become part of the social landscape of the country. The Protestant Forum of April 2001 was a watershed event in the history of the evangelical movement in Kazakhstan as it put on a public face before invited members of various government agencies and representatives of the other historic faiths of the region. Significantly, several Kazakh pastors were prominent speakers at the event which indicated the success evangelical Christianity has had among former Muslims. Much of the Church’s growth has been among recently arrived rural migrants in Almaty. With the collapse of the Soviet welfare state the social stratification of both rural and urban communities has become more pronounced resulting in large numbers living in dire conditions. Through several case studies I look at the details surrounding the conversions of individuals and families in Almaty, some of whom were living in impoverished conditions. The social dislocation of the city has pushed people to look for new social and moral communities. Noting similarities with Rodney Stark’s (1996) analysis of Christian conversion among the Jewish and pagan population of the Roman Empire, conversion in Almaty is mostly taking place in home meetings among small groups of sympathetic believers who are prepared to become personally involved in the lives of these new migrants as well as the long-term residents of the city. As the new believers experienced the warmth of community, they frequently invited those in their social networks to join the group as well. A significant minority have been willing to return for subsequent visits. There have been entire networks of extended families converting to Christianity around the same time period and this has accounted for much of the early growth of the Protestant Church in Kazakhstan. In interviews with new believers I found that dreams and visions

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were a recurrent theme of their conversion narratives. In the weekly home groups these dreams were shared and thus became part of the larger conversion story of individuals and their networks. Dreams are seen as direct messages from God and play a role in the conversion process as well as forming a part of new believers’ rationale for conversion (cf. Vaté, Chapter 3, this volume). These new groups have had to decide how to deal with the rising cultural tension between them and those in their families and neighbourhoods who have opposed their faith in Jesus and membership in home groups or Churches. Some communities of new believers have developed contextual strategies for celebrating both national and Muslim holidays, linking their faith-based groups to larger national movements. Other groups have chosen to not engage in Islamic cultural practices and, instead, follow Western models. The immediate background to the Protestant Forum of 2001 was the increasingly bold activity of radical Islamic groups based in Afghanistan. The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan was receiving funding from the Taliban and armed groups were entering neighbouring Kyrgyzstan each summer (Naumkin 2005). The Kazakh government acted on the perceived threat of radical Islamic action by proposing a series of legal changes that would have had a serious impact on all religious gatherings in Kazakhstan, severely restricting all Protestant gatherings because they did not fall under the four historic faiths of Islam, Orthodoxy, Buddhism and Judaism. The Protestant community rallied around two national organizations, each with links to other international Christian bodies. The Association of Religious Organizations of Kazakhstan (AROK), currently headed by an ethnic Russian, represents many of the pre-1991 denominations, such as the Russian Baptists and the Russian Pentecostals. The Kazakhstan Evangelical Alliance (KEA), headed by an ethnic Kazakh, meanwhile represents many of the churches established in the post-1991 period. The Forum was held on the tenth anniversary of Kazakh independence and seems a good place to begin an exploration of the growth of Protestantism in Kazakhstan and in particular the birth and steady growth of Churches counting former Muslims as believers.

Conversion among Economic Migrants

Since independence in 1991, families in rural Kazakhstan have faced increasing unemployment and lack of opportunity, with the consequence that Kazakh and Uighur migrants have poured into the capital, Almaty, from across the country looking for housing, job opportunities and education. Jakob Rigi (2005) has described the disillusionment of young people who do not have access to the welfare, education and employment options of the Soviet era. Some of these Muslim migrants have been attracted to the newly emerging Protestant Churches, many of which meet in homes as well as larger venues for a weekly service. They offer an alternative network of relationships that serve as a refuge against an increasingly harsh social environment.

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In November 1996, my family and I arrived in Almaty from north-west China, where I had just completed two years field work for a dissertation on Uighur family strategies (Clark 1999). Through the expatriate network in Almaty, we located and rented an apartment from Amina and Ahmet-jan, a Uighur couple. They mentioned that they had recently become Protestant Christians and they became our introduction into the social world of former-Muslim background followers of Jesus. Gradually, we came to know this couple well and, through them, their extended family, some of whom were recent migrants from villages outside Almaty. Over the course of three to four years, over twenty people, of different generations, in their family network identified themselves as Protestant Christians, including six siblings in their thirties and forties. They formed part of a local Protestant Church in Almaty that had started three years earlier, the majority of whose members were Kazakh. During the next several months my wife and I were invited to participate in an evening home group that met weekly at the house of one of the members. The gatherings included large public meetings on Sundays and evening home meetings, often called cell groups. In the cell group we met a fascinating group of people, mostly from two large extended family networks. Each network had relatives who were long-term urban residents of Almaty, and rural cousins who had migrated to the city for economic reasons. It was through the weekly cell group that we met Aygul and her children, a recently arrived family of rural migrants. Her situation seems representative of a large number of migrant families who have moved to the city in desperate circumstances and have found help through the emerging social networks of former-Muslim Protestants. Here is some of her story.

Aygul’s Story

Aygul married Salaam when she was nineteen, and they soon had children. For Uighur villagers in the region between Almaty and the Chinese border, daughters married into other villages while sons stayed at home and brought in their wives. Aygul’s husband was the middle of three brothers who came from a well-off family in the next village. Life was quite stable for them in the Soviet period. Pay cheques came twice monthly, and the government kept the price for most goods within reach. Salaam had lived all his life in the shadow of his wealthy father who, unfortunately, died at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Previously, Salaam’s father had built them a home and paid many of their expenses. Aygul said her husband became confused and disoriented with the collapse of the USSR and the subsequent loss of his job, and he began to drink heavily. He had been a driver for the village committee, but government agencies had started laying off their drivers. They had four children at this point, and their financial stability was disappearing rapidly. Aygul took control of her family and began to make a series of decisions, independent of Salaam, that she felt would put her family back on the right track. She borrowed large sums of money at a high rate of interest from the elite in their village, and began doing long distance trading in Russia. At this

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time many Uighurs and Kazakhs were shifting from state enterprises to the small business culture of the open-air bazaars, both in rural villages and in Almaty. Aygul made three trips to Russia to buy and sell goods but never succeeded in making a profit. Because she borrowed money from people in her village, her debt became well known. Her husband and his two brothers’ families were quite embarrassed by her debt and refused to help her. Even though Salaam and Aygul were legally married, this did not matter to the local money lenders as they do not regard couples as an economic unit. Salaam continued to live in his family home and drank heavily. At this point Aygul decided to leave the village because of her debts. Her creditors would hound her until she paid something, so she took her children and joined the large stream of villagers moving to Almaty. In a classic migration pattern, she began to stay with relatives and friends until she could afford her own place to live. When we first met her she had been asked to leave the last set of relatives who would house her. Amman, one of Salaam’s distant relatives, heard of Aygul’s difficulties and went out of his way to help her. Amman and his wife were also in serious debt, but he had recently found a steady job and was working hard to pay off his debts. He had become a Christian believer through a small home meeting, and decided to share with Aygul the new life that he had found. He took her to the home group of mostly former Muslims where Aygul felt accepted despite the shame of her debt and increasing poverty. She found a group that did not despise her because of her debts. She said her preconceived idea was that Christianity was the religion of the Russians, and so not an option for her. Like many others from a Muslim background, she used phrases like ‘the Russian God’ and was afraid of losing her ethnic heritage and ‘becoming a Russian’. However, the difficulty of the past three years had opened Aygul to the possibility of associating with the cell group and then, later, converting. Going to weekly gatherings, where she found sympathetic friends who were willing to help her in practical ways, became the anchor in her life. The conversion ritual of the cell group Aygul joined was a hallmark of the evangelical sub-culture in Almaty and involved urging newcomers to ‘accept Jesus into your heart’ through ‘praying the sinner’s prayer’. Mark Harris (2002), in an article directed to the missionary community, doubts the helpfulness of the conversion ritual and contends it does more harm than good. His internal critique is designed to push missionaries and their local friends to consider how to actually help people grow spiritually over the long term through looking at conversion as the starting point of a new way of life. Delaying the conversion ritual until people have had time to think through the issues is a good place to start. In the cell group in Almaty, however, people were pressed upon to go through the conversion ritual on their first visit, after which the group left them alone to adjust to the group at their own pace. A sizable number of visitors to the cell groups, however, encounter the pressure of the conversion ritual on the first visit and never return. It would seem more reasonable to let them simply be part of the cell group and allow the mystery of conversion to take place when they are ready. Philip Jenkins (2002: 39)

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has highlighted this same distinction between joining a Church and the internal process of conversion. They are linked but separate decisions. Over interviews that spanned several years, Aygul has explained that her embrace of Christianity happened slowly after her conversion ritual. Belonging to a group and forming attachments with the members was clearly more important at first than actually believing. What was vital for her was to have a community where she could find help when she needed it. Soon afterwards, she found a room in a dormitory-style building where she moved in with her four children. Once there, she found steady work as a domestic helper and began to slowly repay her debts and was able to eventually purchase her room and an accompanying one as well. Aygul later hosted a weekly home group herself where several of her Muslim neighbours first came into contact with Christianity, later becoming followers themselves. Aygul became attached to the people in the cell group first because, in her own words, they reached out to her and helped when her own kinship network had had enough of her. She later replicated the model by hosting her own home group which in turn attracted new migrants like herself.

Cultural Tensions in Conversion

Kazakhs and Uighurs have encountered Christianity through both Russian and local Turkic languages. The pre-eminence of the Russian language was apparent in all state institutions, from nurseries to the army. Almaty, the Soviet republic’s capital, had only one Kazakh-language secondary school at the time of independence in 1991. The Russification of urban society, and, to a lesser degree, rural villages, helped create a society with Slavic and Muslim peoples interacting side by side. From nursery through the school system, and then the army (for young men) and the work force (for young women), Russian was the accepted language. At the time of independence, many Kazakh and Uighur families spoke Russian as their first language. Aygul and her husband, though they lived in a rural area, assumed they were helping their children prepare for the future by speaking Russian at home rather than Uighur. Many rural parents like them aspired to a good future for their children and saw it partly in terms of speaking Russian. Like many Uighur and Kazakh families, they were in the process of not successfully passing on their native language. Aygul, who had gone to a Uighur village school herself, mentioned that when Aynur, her daughter, was in the first grade of her rural school she came home in tears because the teacher told her she was not Russian. The children went to the state-run nursery at eighteen months and learnt to speak Russian before Uighur. This early socialization in Russian is, I think, one of the biggest factors in the Russification of the Turkic peoples of Kazakhstan. Now that there is no state money for public pre-school teachers, this cultural assimilation process is being slowed down, particularly for the poor. In Chundja, the administrative centre of the Uighur district (raion), there were twenty-six state supported nurseries in 1991; in 2005 there was only one. One of the main planks

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of Russification has been removed from both urban and rural society. Aynur, as well as many other children like her, have since learned to speak local Turkic languages fluently. For many Turkic urbanites, whose first language is Russian, a participation in Kazakh- or Uighur-language Christian worship is an overwhelmingly ethnic experience. Many of the new converts reported experiencing a renaissance of their own ethnicity as they explored the language and culture in ways that are new to them through cell groups and Sunday gatherings. There are local-language songs during worship with strong national themes. A popular song, ‘Kazakhstan’, asks for God’s blessing of the nation. As a contrast there is a recently written Uighur worship song entitled ‘Vatan’, or ‘homeland’, a semantically powerful word for Uighurs who do not have an independent state. The song encourages worshippers to think of heaven as their true home. The two songs highlight a key difference between Kazakh and Uighur believers: the lack of a nation-building project among Uighurs. During the Soviet era, the Uighur community was accommodated by the government to a high degree (Kamalov 2004; Dave 2007). In contrast to the one Kazakh-language secondary school in the capital Almaty, there were at least three Uighur-language secondary schools around the city.1 Uighur-language media were available through television, radio and print. Uighur neighbourhoods were encouraged by the government to organize along traditional-leadership patterns. Much of this type of cultural infrastructure support has diminished in the independence era. Salem Church, the largest Kazakh-language Church in the city, has seen hundreds of Russified urban Kazakhs learn to speak the national language as part of their Christian discipleship. A renewed sense of ethnic – and, in the case of Kazakhs, national – identity has become part of the totality of conversion to Christianity. Part of this ethno-linguistic renewal has been the continuation of cultural practices that are Muslim in origin. The sunet toy, or circumcision ceremony, is a rite of passage central to Kazakh Muslims. During the Soviet era, the ceremony was a quiet, home-based affair, but now it has become a major social event held in public meeting places and involving a large network of reciprocal gift-giving relationships. My wife and I were guests at one such gathering held in a Protestant church. There were many Kazakh relatives of the young couple whose child was being circumcised and who were at their first gathering of Kazakh Protestant believers. The ceremonies over the evening were a blend of ‘Russian’ toasting, the traditional Kazakh circumcision ritual, and contemporary baby-dedication rituals from Western Churches. When former-Muslim believers maintain cultural continuity in the major rite of passage ceremonies like circumcision it decreases the sense of strangeness for those who encounter former-Muslim Christians for the first time. Rodney Stark (1996) comments on a similar phenomenon in the early Christian era when he highlights the closeness of Jewish and Christian practices. He writes, ‘People are more willing to adopt a new religion to the extent that it retains cultural continuity with conventional religion(s) with which they are already familiar’ (ibid.: 55). When Kazakh relatives see rituals they are familiar with at a

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Protestant circumcision party, they are more likely to listen to people’s conversion narratives. The ceremonies surrounding death are another cultural realm facing the new believers. Among middle-aged and older relatives of believers, the most consistent objection to conversion to Christianity remains, ‘what about the death rituals at my funeral?’ There is a palpable fear that if these older relatives identify with the Christian home group the larger community will not give them a traditional Muslim funeral and refuse them burial in the local cemetery. To help allay this fear Christian believers across denominational lines have continued to develop relationship among each other with the intention of helping each other’s families during the traditional Muslim death rituals. Gulbadam, a grandmother who assists in the leadership of this networking group, recently helped organize a trip of a dozen converts to a village near Almaty where the father of one of the home-group leaders had recently died. The group brought cash and food, and helped out with the cycle of events. They took active part in the rituals that were led by the Muslim leaders of the community. The emerging Protestant Church has been a means of upward mobility for many Kazakh and Uighur converts. Business-development seminars are among the projects run by faith-based as well as secular NGOs. These seminars teach business principles and include coaching on how to write up a business plan. The most promising plans are selected for micro-credit loans on which interest significantly below market rates is charged. Bibigul was one of the women to go through this training. She has developed a catering business which has allowed her to employ her daughter and a Russian driver, buy an apartment, and financially support her aging parents as well as a wide range of social projects for the poor. In turn, her faith and lifestyle have had a remarkable effect on her extended family. She currently leads a house group for women in her living room every week (once a month they have a joint gathering where men are welcome). These women help each other in many practical ways: they share their resources with one another; in crisis times they visit the sick and bring food and comfort, and they include in their visits elderly Russian women. These women often live alone and have fallen through the social safety net. The women and men who successfully pay back their loans are recruited to take part in the training of the next generation of prospective business people. The money that is repaid becomes part of the capital for the next round of loans. For those struggling to maintain hope in the midst of Kazakhstan’s emerging capitalist economy, the empowerment of women like Bibigul is a good sign.

Dreams and the Possibility of Conversion

On listening to many different conversion narratives, it became clear to me that dreams and visions have played a significant role for people when deciding to identify with the emerging Protestant groups. David Lewis (2000) has recently discussed the widespread phenomenon of dreams and visions across the former

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Soviet Union. He writes, ‘Experiences such as dreams and visions are catalysts prompting a choice, but in themselves they do not automatically make a person “religious”’ (ibid.: 72). Central Asian Muslims have a long established tradition of receiving significant dreams and visions from God (Huda) and acting upon them. These spiritual experiences are often unsought but can challenge existing ways of looking at reality, often prompting decisive action. As we will see, dreams are often brought to the weekly home group for help in interpretation. The group hermeneutic that emerges from these discussions can play a factor in the decisions of faith of the individuals involved. While researching death ceremonies for an earlier project, several informants mentioned the particular nature of seeing a dead relative in a dream. These types of dreams are taken very seriously because they are seen as communicating the specific needs of the deceased relative to the dreamer, and to which their family must respond properly. It is common that the recipient of the dream calls for an imam from the local mosque to come and read a sura from the Qu’ran in the context of a funeral event (nazir). Along with the reading bread is fried, the fragrance of which is what satisfies the spirit of the departed. Often only family members are present for these ceremonies. What is crucial is that the family responds to the dream with prompt action. In conversion narratives, however, people who receive dreams and visions have greater latitude to interpret their revelations. One of the women who came to the cell group we attended was Bibigul (mentioned above). She was the third wife of Hasan, a businessman, and he came with her. Currently, many couples are forming informal unions with a simple Muslim wedding (nica) in their homes, led by a mullah from the local mosque, and neither bothering to obtain divorce certificates nor register their new marriages. Hasan had a legal wife in his natal village and a second wife in another. On Bibigul’s first visit, she was asked if she wanted to go through the conversion ritual that night.‘Do you want to receive Isa [Jesus]?’ she was asked. ‘Yes’, she replied. In her words: Isa, if you are real – really who they say you are – give me a sign. Are you the God of the Russians? Uighurs? Both? Then, an hour later, when I was still awake, the Lord gave me a vision. He showed me a moving video of my life highlighting all my sins. I asked for forgiveness for each one as they came up. When we were done I saw a glass of water slowly turn white. I knew it symbolized my sins being forgiven. Then I knew that He really is there and who they said He was.

Later that winter she came late to the weekly gathering with two black eyes and soaking wet from the rain. Hasan had recently beaten her while drunk; luckily she had been able to escape without being seriously injured. The group embraced Bibigul that night and their bonding together marked an important point in her identification with the other believers. This experience happened several months after her conversion and follow-up vision with the group. She left Hasan that night for good and became a consistent member of the group for several years.

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Hasan also had dreams of his own before that fateful rainy evening. Hasan developed friendships with members of the weekly cell group. He seemed to enjoy the gatherings but would not have described himself as a believer. During the period he was together with Bibigul he was hospitalized with a bad back. While in hospital he had the following dream: he saw a white haired older woman who said to him: ‘Burn your old clothes and buy new ones, and then come to the meeting house. I will make you into a new man’. At first, Hasan had interpreted the dream on a material level and felt he should look for a new set of clothes. When he shared the dream with the cell group, however, they had other interpretations relating to his need for conversion. He did not agree and stopped attending the group after his fight with Bibigul. Significantly, he returned to his village and was reconciled to his first (legal) wife. Several years later they moved to Almaty, started a successful business, and re-established contact with a group of former-Muslim converts. Mijit and his wife Miriam were both university graduates and taught literature at one of the local secondary schools. For several months Mijit helped me as a language tutor, and I would occasionally visit him and his wife in their one-room home in a teachers’ dormitory. Mijit had had a conversion experience but still considered himself a Muslim. Miriam had never been part of any Christian gathering. Over tea one day she related a dream she had had recently. In her dream Miriam saw a man dressed in white who she took for an angel and he asked her to which Prophet did she belong. She replied that she needed to ask her husband and would respond later. While still in her dream she went and had a chat with Mijit and they agreed they belonged to the Prophet Jesus not the Prophet Muhammad. The next night the angel appeared again and asked the same question. She said, ‘Don’t be angry, but we belong to the Prophet Jesus’. She said the angel in her dream was not angry at all. The dream was an important part of her own conversion process to an identity that is connected to being a follower of Jesus. But it is significant that the categories ‘Christian’ and ‘Muslim’ are not that distinct in the lives of people like Mijit and Miriam. As in the dream, they feel a greater kinship with Jesus and the Injil (New Testament) than they do with Muhammad and the Qu’ran. In their minds, though, this does not make them ‘Christians’ for they see no need to transfer ethnic and cultural loyalties to Russian or Western cultures. Robert Hefner (1993: 25) links the conversion event to the life-long process of personal identity formation, though he helpfully acknowledges that the factors in how people orient their sense of self can be contradictory. He writes, ‘One’s ethnic allegiances, for example, may at some point conflict with those of nation, race, gender, religion, political affiliation, or any other of the host of allegiances available for self-identification in a plural society’ (ibid.: 25). Believers like Mijit and Miriam feel strongly the tension between their Muslim cultural heritage and new faith. Especially difficult is the charge that they have ‘sold out’. After Bibigul let her parents know that she was attending Christian home meetings, they were upset and used all their powers of persuasion to try and stop her. Her mother’s frequent refrain was that she had brought shame on the family name.

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In spring 2000 I was visiting a neighbour when a young couple arrived from the countryside. After introductions, Tohti, the husband, recounted a recent dream and its effect on his life. In his village he has an older neighbour who had been talking with him about some Christian literature he picked up in Almaty. Tohti described how angry he had become upon hearing that his neighbour was reading material about Jesus. The two of them had a long enough history of conflict before the night of the dream for the neighbour to consider him ‘an enemy’. Several weeks before I met Tohti, he dreamed he saw a bright light and heard a father-like figure with white hair speaking to him. He interpreted the dream as a message from God and his response was to believe in Isa (Jesus) and be reconciled with his neighbour. He humbled himself before his older neighbour and asked for forgiveness. He said that the joy he had felt the morning following his conversion was greater than the joy of his wedding day. He had previously been dismissed from his government job for drinking but has since been reinstated. The accounts above, of people from a Muslim background receiving dreams and visions from God, reinforce one of the culturally accepted ways in which God speaks. Presenting their dreams to the larger group for validation and interpretation serves to engage others in a sense of mystery and awe that God cares enough to want to communicate. Receiving a revelation of this type is one of the ways where the information about Jesus learned through one’s social network suddenly becomes personal. Dreams and visions function as a type of sign from God where a choice or response from the receiver, and maybe others in the group, is a natural outcome.

Contextualizing the Christian Message

Efforts in contextualizing the Christian message have been a central element of Protestant activity in Kazakhstan since the 1990s. There is a movement of Central Asian Russian Scripture (CARS) Churches, and along with cell groups they have made a new translation of the Russian Bible, something they have done with two goals in mind: to render the language close to contemporary usage, and use Muslim terms for significant phrases that are offensive to Muslims. As Dr Fred Phelps, the director of the translation project states: ‘Central Asian Russian (CAR) differs from standard Russian in that it avoids ecclesiastical terminology (often associated with the Russian Orthodox Church) and employs terminology that Central Asian Muslims themselves use when speaking about religion in Russian. The result is that literature in CAR is received by Central Asians as “for us” and not “for the Europeans”’.2 For example, CARS uses names like ‘Isa’ for Jesus, ‘Musa’ for Moses and ‘Ibrahim’ for Abraham. Some Slavic Christians have been very upset by this translation and have concluded that CARS is making a syncretistic compromise with Islam. Some Muslims, moreover, have denounced such Bible translation activities as purposefully deceptive, aimed at converting naive Muslims (cf. Pelkmans 2007). What is important for the purpose of this chapter, however, is the potential that this movement is seen as having by potential and actual converts.

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Gulmira, a Kazakh mother of two, described her feelings when she first heard Christianity explained in Russian: ‘When I first heard the terms “Jesus”, “Christian” and the “Bible” in Russian, they made me shudder with the sense of Russianness and foreignness. Later, after many months, I was finally able to get over the sense of strangeness’. She later found a Kazakh-speaking fellowship that was more to her tastes. However, once there were dynamic equivalent terms in Russian, Gulmira felt more comfortable and able to talk about Jesus and Christian doctrine in terms that did not alienate her Russian-speaking Kazakh friends. For the considerable number of Central Asians who have chosen to identify with Isa, his teachings and his people, they are still more comfortable with a Muslim cultural (though not religious) identity rather than a Christian one. The secularization of society during the Soviet period, and currently in China, has maintained Uighur and Kazakh cultural forms while denying any religious power or authority to them. Across the border in China the socialist logic of promoting cultural holidays while aiming to strip them off religious connotations, as used to be the case in Soviet Central Asia as well, is still in place. The main Muslim holiday of Korban Heyt is an official three-day government holiday in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region of north-west China. Communist Party officials are allowed to take part in Islamic ritual practices associated with the holiday because they have been classified as cultural rather than religious activities. There is a Protestant church building in a residential district of Almaty that has developed a unique response to the question of developing culturally relevant churches. It was founded by American missionaries in 1994 and has grown into three distinct congregations who meet in the building over the course of a Sunday. In the morning there is a Russian-language service that uses traditional Slavic terms for God, Jesus and the Bible. This congregation is mostly Slavic though there is a minority of Muslim people who have grown up in Almaty and are most comfortable in Russian-speaking environments that make no concession to the Kazakh language or cultural Islam. In the afternoon a Kazakh-language fellowship gathers which uses the recently translated Kazakh-language Bible (kili kitap). Many of the songs used during services have been written by Kazakh or Uighur believers and have a distinctive Central Asian flavour. This congregation is made up of a majority of whose first language is Kazakh, many of whom came from villages outside Almaty. In the evening a third distinct congregation gathers in the building for a service in Central Asian Russian. A Uighur pastor leads this third group and the congregation is almost entirely comprised of people from a Muslim background who speak Russian as their first language but are not comfortable using Russian theological terms. Seeing how these distinct congregations related to Nawruz, the traditional Persian (Zoroastrian) New Year on 21 March, was revealing. The Kazakhstan government has adopted Nawruz as a national holiday. Cultural activities have developed around Nawruz that can continue for up to a month. In 2005, for example, the main square of Almaty was filled with thousands celebrating the holiday with live music, folk dancing, speeches and fireworks later in the evening. There were very few Slavic people there that day. The Russian-speaking

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congregation did not celebrate the day while the other two have made it a major event on the yearly liturgical calendar with extensive preparations. Local former-Muslim believers around the country celebrate this day along with the rest of the nation. In fact, the day has been adopted as one of the main events of the Church liturgical calendar. The traditional New Year themes of ‘out with the old, in with the new’, often symbolized by extensive home cleaning and reciprocal visitation, are themes believers highlight. Nawruz has become the dynamic equivalent of Easter, which is celebrated by these believers following the Islamic lunar calendar rather than the Orthodox or Western calendar. Good Friday is celebrated on Korban Heyt, the major Muslim festival commemorating Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son. The New Year events are often a time to invite relatives and close friends to parties hosted by one’s fellowship where there are dramas, speeches and lots of traditional food. Nawruz has not, however, become an event for either Slavic people as a whole or the Orthodox Church in particular. One Russian simply dismissed the idea by saying ‘It is not our holiday’. Believers from a Muslim background, however, make a point to identify with the Kazakh nation’s emerging ethos as it establishes new holidays and customs and transforms old ones in the nation-building process. Another group of churches that are using the CARS version of the Bible are the Assemblies of God. They represent one of the largest Pentecostal church groups in the Almaty region and have been pioneers in the area of drug and alcohol rehabilitation and business development. This group of thirteen churches has over a thousand believers who regularly gather for services. These churches all have their origin in a year-long drug and alcohol rehabilitation programme, which was introduced to Kazakhstan in the early 1990s by an Australian graduate of the programme. It is a desperate measure to sign up for a year-long residency programme and many addicts do so only after an intervention from their family. During this year the residents have a chance to learn another culture (evangelical Protestant) and break their dependency on drugs. The year-long treatment is, by design, a very intensive experience with the goal of bringing residents into a relationship with God. The staff set the tone in the first month of detoxification when residents are encouraged to call out to God for help to break their addiction. The first month is followed by a carefully planned study and work schedule that encourages development of what Stark calls ‘religious behaviour’ which includes a conversion story, fervency in religious services, and hard work during the practical part of the day. As residents bond with the staff and their fellows, some voluntarily go through a conversion ritual and conformity to the outward practices of the programme often results. Some of the residents catch up with the ideology later. The programme does not isolate residents from their families but consistently involves close relatives in regular weekly events as a preparation for reintegrating the residents back into their family and society at large. Reportedly, during the process many family members also become believers and join one of the city’s Assembly of God churches.3 The programme is divided between character building lessons in the morning which include Bible study, and vocational programmes in the afternoon. Carpentry,

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car mechanics, housing-trade skills, English-language training, and computer classes are some of the courses offered. Group sports activities are scheduled for after dinner. Some of the best athletes in the programme have become coaches in the larger community. Alim is quite proud of the good reputation they have built in the neighbourhood around the treatment centre. The Centre has founded a school for the children of residents which takes in children from the broader community as well. Millennium University, a full- and part-time school for graduates of the year programme and their families, is the latest initiative. The initial class of thirty students in 2005/6 is evenly divided between believers from Slavic and Muslim backgrounds. Its stated goal is to help equip leaders for the Church and society. The leadership of the Centre has intentionally developed good relations with both local and regional government authorities. At the graduation ceremonies that are held yearly for the Rehabilitation Centre, government officials are present including those from the Religious Affairs department.

Conclusion

In reflecting on Rodney Stark’s (1996) material, the potential for growth among the Assembly of God churches looks good because of the services they offer to the community. Unfortunately, drug and alcohol problems continue to be a part of life in the Almaty region. If this network of churches replenishes its network every year through a new intake of residents and their families, the potential for them to expand their influence into new social networks will continue to grow. Their leaders have also significantly chosen to respect many aspects of their member’s Muslim cultural heritage which is reflected in contextualized practices of major rites of passage. Meanwhile, Christianity had spread very rapidly through the social networks of the Uighur family I mentioned at the beginning of the chapter. But after some time conversions lessened in number because the churches that the family chose to identify with have advocated an almost complete break with Islamic cultural practices. By not going to the toys (weddings and circumcision parties) and nazirs (funeral feasts), these former-Muslim believers are effectively saying they do not want to participate in Uighur or Kazakh community life. Their groups are not large enough to continue to attract outsiders and so they have languished because they do not have enough cultural connections to offer newcomers. As in the case of Siberia (see Vaté, Chapter 3, this volume), believers are having to decide what parts of their cultural heritage they want to bring to their new faith. In contrast, the Kazakh and Uighur groups that continue to honour and respect their own cultural traditions have continued to grow in spite of occasional conflict with family members. In some cases these Messianic groups have reinterpreted cultural holidays like the Nawruz as their Easter equivalent. Uighurs and Kazakhs are no different from other peoples of the former Soviet Union in experiencing the social dislocation and upheaval brought on by the dissolution of their country. There has been an increase in openness to the spiritual world and in the political freedom to explore new options. Dreams and visions and the human choices that

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follow them have played a significant part in the conversion narratives of many new believers. Their economic and personal difficulties and spiritual hunger have led them to consider and then embrace evangelical Christianity in its various cultural forms.

Notes

1. The preferential treatment of Uighurs should be understood in relation to Soviet foreign policy. Ethnic groups with contacts across the border were generally mistrusted, yet given preferential treatment when the Soviet regime deemed this would strengthen its strategic position on foreign territory (cf. Martin 2001; Pelkmans 2006: 24). 2. Source: F. Phelps. 2004. ‘CARS Project’. Retrieved on March 30, 2005 from: www.slovcars.org. 3. In an interview, Alim, one of the pastors in his early thirties, described how diverse these churches were. There is a Kazakh-language fellowship, 95 per cent of the members of which are Kazakh, and a Uighur-language fellowship of which 95 per cent of those attending are Uighur. A Kazakh man leads a CARS fellowship split evenly between people from Slavic and Muslim backgrounds. Another of these churches has a Russian pastor whose flock is made up of Slavs (70 per cent) and people from a Muslim background (30 per cent). Almost all these Russian-speaking fellowships use the CARS translation of the Bible.

References

Clark, W. 1999. ‘Convergence or Divergence: Uighur Family Change in Urumqi’, Ph.D. dissertation. Seattle: University of Washington. Dave, B. 2007 Kazakhstan: Ethnicity, Language and Power. London: Routledge Harris, M. 2002. ‘Understanding Conversion: How our Understanding of Conversion Can Help or Hinder Our Evangelistic Efforts’, Evangelical Missions Quarterly 38(4): 492–99 Hefner, R. 1993. ‘Introduction: World Building and the Rationality of Conversion’, in R. Hefner (ed.) Conversion to Christianity: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives on a Great Transformation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 3–44. Jenkins, P. 2002. The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kamalov, A. 2004. ‘Uighur Community in 1990s Central Asia: A Decade of Change’, in T. Atabaki and S. Mehendale (eds), Central Asia and the Caucasus: Transnationalism and Diaspora. London: Routledge, 148–68. Lewis, D. 2000. After Atheism: Religion and Ethnicity in Russia and Central Asia. New York: St Martin’s Press. Martin, T. 2001. The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalities in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Naumkin, V. 2005. Radical Islam in Central Asia: Between Pen and Rifle. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Pelkmans, M. 2006. Defending the Border: Identity, Religion, and Modernity in the Republic of Georgia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ––––. 2007. ‘“Culture” as a Tool and an Obstacle: Missionary Encounters in Post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13(4): 881–99. Rigi, J. 2003. ‘The Conditions of Post-Soviet Dispossessed Youth and Work in Almaty, Kazakhstan’, Critique of Anthropology 23(1): 35–49. Ro’i, Y. 2000. Islam in the Soviet Union: From the Second World War to Perestroika. New York: Columbia University Press. Stark, R.1996. The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Chapter 8

TEMPORARY CONVERSIONS: ENCOUNTERS WITH PENTECOSTALISM IN MUSLIM KYRGYZSTAN Mathijs Pelkmans On a February Sunday morning in the provincial capital Jalal-Abad in southern Kyrgyzstan, approximately 150 members of the Pentecostal ‘Church of Jesus Christ’ gathered for a service in a rundown building recently purchased by the congregation.1 The service started, as usual, with forty-five minutes of singing and music. Unfortunately, the microphones did not work because of a problem with the electricity supply, causing difficulties for the pastor in his attempt to create the optimum atmosphere. When the power supply was restored some fifteen minutes later, the pastor announced with delight that once again satanic forces had been defeated. Later on, in his sermon, pastor Kadyrjan reflected on some of his recent experiences.2 A week earlier he had been invited to the house of an ailing Kyrgyz3 girl in the nearby mining town of Kok-Jangak. Kadyrjan described how he had entered the house and had immediately felt ‘the ice-cold atmosphere’ which indicated the presence of evil. He explained: There were pieces of paper with Arabic phrases everywhere: above the door, on the wall, next to her bed. Such a piece of paper floated even in her water jug. The girl had received medicine and had been treated by a köz-aichyk [clairvoyant] and a moldo [mullah], but nothing had helped … She feared that if she closed her eyes she would die instantly. Then I told her about Jesus. She didn’t understand at first. But when I started to pray, she started to understand, and protested that she was a Muslim. Nevertheless, she agreed to talk about [faith] and she started to feel better. Later I took her out of the house into the sun and she really felt better. When I left she asked me if I could visit her again. I promised her that I definitely would! Praise the Lord!

There were more references to the hazards of okkultizm (‘occult practices’) that morning, along with reminders of how to lead a good Christian life. They all converged on the central message that evil was omnipresent and that these

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multifarious forms of darkness could only be conquered through faith and the invocation of God through prayer. Pastor Kadyrjan would stress the power of prayer whenever I met him. One of his favourite examples was that since 1999 – when he established his church in Jalal-Abad – he had witnessed a partial transformation of the city.4 According to Kadyrjan, the ‘spirit of death’ (dukh smerta) that used to cover the town had partly dissolved, resulting in inhabitants becoming more energetic and innovative. He attributed the (perceived) decline of crime, the appearance of proper shops (rather than market stalls) in the city and improved hygiene in the streets to the collective prayers of his Church. Kadyrjan also regularly mentioned the mining town Kok-Jangak, the place where he had visited the sick girl. Over the previous four years he had made efforts to establish a congregation in KokJangak but each attempt, he explained, had been sabotaged. His most recent endeavours had seemed successful when sixty people attended services for several months, but by early 2004 the majority of these attendants had stopped coming. Instead of being disillusioned, Kadyrjan was convinced that these difficulties contained an important sign: ‘It means that [Kok-Jangak] is under the spell of Satan, and, if that is so, it must mean that Kok-Jangak is somehow a strategic place’. In Kadyrjan’s view, the establishment of a vibrant Church in Kok-Jangak would deliver a serious blow to Satan’s powers, and thereby ease the advance of Christianity in other locations as well. For the time being, Kadyrjan and his assistant in Kok-Jangak had intensified collective praying on top of a hill overlooking the town in an effort to change the atmosphere in Kok-Jangak. Kadyrjan’s ruminations are the basis for the empirical enquiries addressed in this chapter. Indeed, how can the Church’s success in Jalal-Abad and its failure in Kok-Jangak be explained? Moreover, what are we to make of the fact that many of the Kyrgyz converts to Pentecostalism converted only temporarily? The invisible forces invoked by Kadyrjan should not be readily discarded, as they resonated with locally experienced realities. As I will show, part of the Church’s success could be explained by its ability to draw upon local registers of spirituality. Moreover, the messages the CJC promoted, resembling the gospels of ‘prosperity’ and ‘health and wealth’ discussed by Coleman (2000), had a particularly seductive quality in a part of the world where residents faced intense economic deprivation and could no longer rely on the state for basic healthcare, social benefits or pensions, as had been the case during the Soviet period. However, a narrow focus on Pentecostal cosmologies cannot explain why the CJC had been successful in Jalal-Abad but had failed in Kok-Jangak. To understand the chequered advance of Pentecostal Christianity, then, we need to move beyond a focus on the attraction of messages (ideas, ideals, ideologies, cosmologies) and emphasize that these messages need to be acted out in real life in order to become relevant. In other words, this chapter will focus on the relationship between advanced ideas and the social fabric within which they obtain their experienced reality, in order to gain insight in the complex dynamics of (temporary) conversion to Pentecostal Christianity. Ultimately, I suggest, in order for Pentecostal Churches to sustain their success, their ‘power of prayer’

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has to convince people that it is delivering tangible results. Moreover, these perceived powers need to outweigh the negative social consequences of conversion to Pentecostalism in a Muslim context. As I will show, both aspects proved more problematic in Kok-Jangak than in Jalal-Abad. This essay, then, sheds light on the complex dialectic between the ideas advanced by Pentecostal Churches and the social realities of Pentecostal conversion. The focus on temporary conversions, moreover, serves to challenge the tendency, discernable in many contemporary anthropological studies, to see conversion ultimately as a unidirectional process. Recent debates have centred on the question of whether conversion trajectories should be seen as a breach or passage, whether individual conversions are ever complete, and whether we should stress continuity or discontinuity in Christian conversion (Coleman 2003; Austin-Broos 2003; Robbins 2007). However, all these approaches take for granted that conversion progresses in one direction only. I argue that this is due to a failure to take into consideration the broader social fields within which conversion unfolds, a failure which resonates with what Bruce Kapferer (2005) has termed the ‘retreat of the social’ in anthropology. By drawing attention to the larger social field or ‘conversion context’ (see Vaté, Chapter 3, this volume), and by acknowledging that the ‘ultimate’ end result of conversion trajectories is far from certain, it is possible to arrive at a fuller understanding of the ideological and social realities of conversion experiences.

The Church of Jesus Christ in Kyrgyzstan

Evangelical Churches – particularly Pentecostal ones – made significant inroads into Kyrgyzstani society after the end of socialism. According to official data (Mamaiusupov 2003), the number of Protestant congregations now dwarfs the number of Orthodox Christian churches which traditionally catered to the large Russian minority.5 The difference is particularly pronounced in Kyrgyzstan’s capital Bishkek, where three Orthodox churches compete with forty to sixty Protestant churches. Though the majority of Russians may still identify with Orthodox Christianity, in terms of active membership Protestant Churches have gained a remarkable lead. Moreover, the success of Protestant Churches in Kyrgyzstan has not remained limited to people from Christian backgrounds (like Russians and Ukrainians) or to other ethnic minority groups (such as Koreans and Tatars); they increasingly attract an ethnic Kyrgyz following as well. Up to 1990 there were virtually no Kyrgyz Christians,6 but ten years later Baptist and especially Pentecostal Churches boasted a significant Kyrgyz membership. Recent estimates of the number of Kyrgyz converts to Christianity vary widely, from 10,000 to 100,000 (Iarkov 2002: 84; Murzakhalilov 2004). The advance of Protestant Christian Churches in Kyrgyzstan has astonished observers, even motivating some analysts to speak of ‘the Christianization of the North, which competes with Islamization in the South’ (Tabyshalieva 2000: 33; Murzakhalilov 2004). It is, however, premature to make such bold generalizations. Although the

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growth of Protestant Churches is significant given the short time span in which it has occurred, it is uncertain whether it will further grow in scope or die out in the years to come. It is, however, a process that is influencing the contemporary religious and social landscape in Kyrgyzstan. The Church of Jesus Christ (CJC) stands out among the new Christian groups: it is at once the largest, the fastest growing and the most controversial Church in Kyrgyzstan. The CJC was established in 1991 by a small group of Russian Pentecostals who were dissatisfied with the ‘legalistic’ attitude of the older Pentecostal Church which had been active during the Soviet period. According to Vasili Kuzin, the co-founder and senior pastor of the CJC, the Church grew rapidly from its very start. In 1994 they had 500 to 600 members, but by 2003 Church membership had reached 10,000 (this number does not include irregular attendants). Moreover, whereas in the first half of the 1990s the Church attracted many Christians from other denominations and was almost completely Russian, in 2004 approximately 4,500 of the 12,000 members were Kyrgyz. The Church is well embedded in transnational networks. In addition to its forty-five congregations within Kyrgyzstan, the CJC has seven congregations in Germany, three in the U.S. and two in Russia. The Church also has links with international Christian networks such as Calvary International, the Russian Union of Christians of Evangelical Faith and Derek Prince International.7 But at the same time, the Church differs from many others in that it is not a ‘missionary church’ but led by Kyrgyzstani citizens. The CJC was, in this sense, similar to new Pentecostal Churches elsewhere, characterized by an ‘increasingly complex web of transnational networks, where flows of people, money and images circulate with growing speed and intensity, defying all attempts to pin them down to any particular source or destination’ (Corten and Marshall-Fratani 2001: 1). This combination of transnational involvement and local organization has allowed the Church to adjust flexibly to problems that were important at the local level, while also being able to muster international support when necessary. The rapid growth of (neo-)Pentecostal Churches worldwide has often been associated with the attractions of the ‘Gospel of Prosperity’ (Coleman 2000: 27–40). Likewise, part of the attraction of the CJC is its advancement of a kind of ‘enchanted modernity’ that not only offers salvation but also insists that prosperity, health and success can be attained by faithful prayer. It does so by offering entrance into tightly organized community life. In Bishkek, the CJC developed into a fully fledged institution which occupies a huge building (a former theatre) in the centre of the city. It has its own television studio and press, the latter publishing a continuous stream of books and brochures written (mostly) by pastor Kuzin. The church has a canteen and provides English language, computer, drama, and dance classes to Church members. Many members take part in such groups, while all are expected to participate in ‘home church’ (domashniaia tserkov’) meetings which gather at least once a week. These ‘home churches’ can be seen as the pillars of Church discipline. Home church leaders are responsible for making sure that members contribute the tithe, while from these groups members are recruited for participation in one of the ministries or

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for positions higher up in Church hierarchy. Moreover, home church meetings are the principal sites where Church members discuss their successes in combating addiction and poverty, and testify about the ways in which God is changing their life, thus reinforcing the Church’s ideology in an intimate setting. The Church’s rapid growth, its hierarchical structures and emphasis on the gifts of the Spirit have each contributed to controversies surrounding it. Those who are antagonistic readily accuse the CJC of bribing people to attend church (even though members are required to pay the tithe), or claim that the leaders transform Church members into ‘zombies’ who are no longer able to think for themselves.8 Government officials started efforts to crack down on the CJC through the closure of several churches in 2003 and by filing a massive tax bill which was believed to be aimed at crushing it.9 The Church is also controversial among some foreign Christian missionaries. In personal conversations, they blamed the CJC for ‘false teaching’, of having started a ‘personality cult’ around its leader, and they described the Church’s rapid growth as ‘a kilometre wide but only a millimetre thin’, referring to what they saw as a lack of spiritual growth among its membership. In 2004, the CJC had forty-five officially registered daughter churches on Kyrgyz territory. By and large the ‘planting’ of these churches followed a pattern reflecting Christian expansion in Kyrgyzstan more generally (see also Pelkmans 2007a). In the early 1990s, the Church’s activities were restricted to the capital Bishkek and its immediate ‘Russified’ surroundings. Around 1995, daughter churches were established in provincial capitals and some district centres in the north of the country. In the late 1990s, the CJC expanded its activities into the Ferghana valley in southern Kyrgyzstan. This meant a move from a region which has a strong Russian presence and is locally seen as secularized, to a region which is seen as more Islamic. These geographical shifts paralleled changes in the ethnic make-up of the Church. While during the early 1990s the CJC had attracted most of its members from among the Russian minority, later in the decade it was increasingly having success among ethnic Kyrgyz. The particularities of this geographical expansion were clearly visible in the southern province of Jalal-Abad, where I conducted fieldwork in 2003 and 2004. Pastor Kadyrjan of the Church of Jesus Christ in Jalal-Abad city (the provincial capital) was proud of his accomplishments. Five years ago, in 1999, he had gone out ‘on faith’ to Jalal-Abad, meaning that he received no funding from his home congregation in Bishkek. He told me that he felt confident of being able to set up a new branch of the Church in Jalal-Abad, because his Kyrgyz background would enable him to make easy contact with the Kyrgyz population (at the time he was one of the few Kyrgyz pastors, although he only spoke Russian). After Kadyrjan and his family had settled in Jalal-Abad, he and his wife Ainura actively started praying in the bazaars in town. Kadyrjan mentioned that people at first did not understand their intentions. He and his wife were repeatedly mistaken for ‘people who prayed professionally’ and who could be paid for their services. But after a difficult first year, by 2004 Kadyrjan’s congregation had grown to 250 regular attendants. Moreover, he had overseen the planting of seven new branches of the Church in small towns throughout the province. Three of these churches boasted

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over fifty members while the others had twenty to fifty regular attendants.10 Perhaps even more striking was that the vast majority of these attendants (both in Jalal-Abad and in the other provincial towns) were Kyrgyz, and that thus, it seemed, the church was making inroads among the majority population. These apparent successes, however, obscured some of the more interesting patterns of conversion. Kadyrjan claimed, for example, that besides the 250 people who were currently members of his Jalal-Abad congregation, 500 to 600 others had converted and attended services as well as the home groups. A number of these converts had moved to other Churches, but probably the largest part had lost interest, grown disillusioned with the Church, or for other reasons ceased to be involved. Kadyrjan himself understood this to be a consequence of a larger supernatural battle between good and evil. Significantly, the frequency of ‘temporary conversions’ was even larger in small-scale communities like Kok-Jangak. The rapid growth of the CJC, as well as the large numbers of people who had left the Church after joining, raises questions concerning the attractions of, and disillusionment with, Pentecostal Christianity. To illuminate these, I will present a rather lengthy description and discussion of one conversion account. This account exemplifies the attractions of Pentecostalism, as well as the tensions between this form of Christianity and the realities of social life in southern Kyrgyzstan.

A Narrative of (Temporary) Conversion

Aikan is a Kyrgyz woman in her late twenties and a single mother of three children. In 2004 she held an administrative job in Kok-Jangak for which she received a meager wage of 800 Som (€16) per month. Two things in particular attracted her to the CJC: ‘that they healed my child and that they stressed that men should take care of their families’. Aikan had been an active member of the Church between 2000 and 2003, both during the time that she had lived in JalalAbad and after she moved back to her native Kok-Jangak. However, when I first met her in April 2004 she had just received a warning from the leader of her congregation urging her to ‘return to the Church’. The way Aikan talked about her experiences reflected her ‘in-between-ness’, simultaneously involved in and detached from both the Church and the rest of the community, without being antagonistic to either side. Aikan’s first contact with the CJC was in 2000, not long after she and her second husband Almaz moved from the mining town of Kok-Jangak to JalalAbad city. She told me that they had moved in order to get away from their respective families, who were unhappy with their marriage (his family disliked the fact that Aikan had been previously married; her family criticized Almaz’s inability to earn a decent living). But moving away from their families did not seem to end their problems. The relationship between the two grew increasingly tense when Almaz failed to find a job in Jalal-Abad. Aikan commented on this period: ‘It was almost as if I was the husband and he was the wife. I commanded the house, I earned the money. And on top of that I also had to take care of him!’

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Barely managing to make a living, the situation got particularly difficult when Aikan’s oldest son (from her first marriage) fell ill. Aikan took him to the hospital, but they sent her home saying that they could not help her. So then I went to a bakshy [spiritual healer].11 He wrote something on a piece of paper and he made knots in a thread which he then burnt. But whatever he did, it didn’t help. When I talked with a friend about it, she told me I should go to pastor Kadyrjan. [After arriving at his home, Kadyrjan] asked if I believed in the living God. I said: ‘Well, if there is one I will believe’. So he asked me, ‘Do you want your son to get better?’ And I said, ‘Sure!’ Then he started to pray. I just [cynically] thought: ‘Right, the doctors couldn’t help him, and now this guy will heal Maksat?’ I didn’t believe it when we left, but three days later [the illness] was gone.

This experience marked the start of her involvement with the CJC. I asked Aikan if she had experienced any doubts when she became involved with the church: ‘No, not at all! With me it was rather the other way around. I was proud to be a believer, to go to this church.… I didn’t doubt anything. I simply – well, I quickly adopted that belief’. Not only in this instance but also on other occasions Aikan described her conversion as straightforward and relatively unproblematic. Only when I pushed her did she reflect on something which had initially seemed both strange and attractive to her: speaking in tongues. ‘The first time I heard it I was very surprised, and then I also wanted to learn to do it. Well, I didn’t really learn it, it just happened. It was when I received baptism [of the Holy Spirit]. At that moment I had a fever and a toothache, but when I was baptized, both [ailments] disappeared’. As said, there were two things that particularly attracted Aikan to the church. The first was that her son had been cured by the pastor’s prayers. The second reason related to her discontent with her marriage, and in particular to her wish that her husband would take more responsibility. I liked it when they said that at home the husband needs to command, that the husband should be the one who works, and that women should be able to ask their husbands for household money … When my husband forbade me to go, I told him: ‘What they say over there is good. They say that at home the husband should be in command, whereas with us it is usually me who scolds [rugaet] you’. So then he agreed that I would attend church, and a few months later he also started to go. After that we both had well-paying jobs and we had a lot of money.

It is perhaps ironic that Aikan embraced the Church’s patriarchal views in her effort to achieve equality of responsibility. She was not the only person who expressed these ideas, however, and they seem therefore telling of the difficult position experienced by women in southern Kyrgyzstan and that the patriarchal views of the church were seen as empowering women. A similar pattern has been noticed in other studies of Pentecostalism, which show that by urging men to go from being ‘king of the street’ to being ‘master of the household’ conversion to Pentecostalism tends to ‘domesticate’ males (Robbins 2004: 133; Chestnut 1997:

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113). Moreover, the ideas espoused by the Church also had a tactical importance, because Aikan could employ them to make her husband more sympathetic to the Church (perhaps because they flattered his ideas of masculinity), while insisting on his responsibilities as a provider. However, in December 2001, roughly a year after she had become involved with the CJC, Aikan’s husband disappeared and moved to Bishkek. Because the couple had been living in an apartment of her husband’s relatives in Jalal-Abad, Aikan and her children no longer had a place to live. In this crisis situation pastor Kadyrjan supported her by giving Aikan $40 toward buying a $100 apartment in the centre of Kok-Jangak.12 During her three years of involvement with the CJC, Aikan had ample negative encounters with ‘non-believers’. People used to ask, for example, if they had orgies on special Sundays (replaying Soviet propaganda about the Baptists)13 and how much she was paid to show up at the church. Reactions were also often negative on evangelization trips, with people calling her ‘a traitor’ and blaming her for having ‘sold her religion’. But when she lived in Jalal-Abad it did not matter all that much. As a counterbalance to negative reactions, there was the Church and a relatively large community of ‘believers’14 on whom she could lean. However, this balance was disrupted after she moved back to Kok-Jangak. For one, the negative confrontations became more direct, and they were no longer restricted to encounters during evangelization activities. Muslim men who tried to win her back to Islam visited Aikan several times in her apartment. Although she insisted that she did not care about such visits, and gave detailed reports of how she had replied to their accusations, she still mentioned that one of the hardest things about living in Kok-Jangak was that everyone knew her as a Christian. On top of the negative reactions Aikan had to face, it turned out that an increasing number of people in her immediate surroundings turned their backs on the CJC. Home church meetings had taken place in Aikan’s apartment, and used to be well-visited, but more and more people ‘became afraid and stayed away. The moldo [mullah] had visited them, or their parents did not agree’. Likewise her brother, who had converted not long after Aikan, visited her one day and said: ‘Aikan, it turns out that it is a Russian God and not our God. Ugh! I won’t go there anymore’. Other former converts argued with her, saying that ‘if God is alive, then Kok-Jangak wouldn’t have fallen apart and people wouldn’t live in such poverty’. Aikan’s reply to such comments had been that ‘only the old things are being taken apart. After this everything will be built up again – and better than before’. The question was, however, whether she still believed these things herself. On several occasions Aikan told me about the successes of her prayers. Among the things she mentioned was that she had been praying for a daughter and saw her prayers rewarded when her third child turned out to be a girl. After she moved back to Kok-Jangak and got by on poor-paying temporary jobs, she began praying fervently for a real job. ‘I prayed for finding a job that could be combined with taking care of my children. And then I was given [an administrative function]. I didn’t really search for it; they just came to me and offered me the job’. However, she spoke of both fulfilled wishes without emotion, which indicated that she did not perceive them as miracles (anymore?)

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Given the harsh realities of life this was not so surprising. The wage she earned was barely sufficient to buy enough flour, potatoes and cabbage for herself and her children. And under these circumstances, a third child (even if a daughter) hardly seemed a blessing. Moreover, her prayers did not deliver her most intense wish. Aikan had prayed often and intensely for her husband to return. Finally, after two years, he visited her house: ‘He stayed here for fifteen minutes, and then left again, saying he had to go back to Bishkek the very same night. He simply told me that he wouldn’t come back and that, if I wanted help with the children, I should bring our daughter to Bishkek’. Aikan elaborated on the disappointment she felt when this happened: I used to be an obedient girl, but that my husband finally came to then leave me again was like a slap in my face [udar]. You know how difficult it is to raise children. You need to feed them, clothe them, and all the time I am worrying. I am still interested, that is not the thing. Simply, how can I tell you? I am simply tired of this life. I find it interesting when they talk about God … As long as they sit in my house [during home church meetings], I listen intensely and then I think ‘I should probably do as before’. But it doesn’t work out. And I can’t get myself together. Sometimes I sit by myself and I think, ‘What has God given me?’ OK, he gave me an apartment, he gave me work, but I prayed for my husband for so long. And what happened? He came and said, ‘No, I won’t live with you’. So where did my prayers go to then?

Aikan’s disillusionment was perhaps further intensified by what she experienced as lessening support from the people in her Church. The Church leader in KokJangak still urged her to return, but pastor Kadyrjan had already given up on her case. ‘She lives in sin’, he told me. According to Kadyrjan this evil was in her family, in which the ‘spirit of divorce’ (dukh razvod) was still hovering. He went on to say that this was a typical problem for many Kyrgyz. His response seemed to indicate that he thought that Aikan’s problems were, at best, a result of a lack of faith. The CJC was a forward-directed movement, taking on board those who could keep up speed but hardly paying attention to those who, in their terms, were ‘backsliding’. Aikan was probably not completely aware of the negative way her Church leaders talked about her. She always talked about Kadyrjan in positive terms, though once she confided in me: ‘I don’t like this life. I have angered everyone: God, the people in the Church, even my relatives’.

Attractions and Disappointments

Both the attractions Aikan experienced when she first became involved with the CJC and her subsequent disappointment contain important clues to understanding the interplay between Pentecostal Christianity and the social environment in which it operated. In this section I highlight three themes that surfaced in Aikan’s story: community, healing and disruption. The first theme refers to the

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community of believers and its moral messages; the second focuses on the promise of healing and the successes and failures of prayer; and the third looks at the reactions members of the CJC faced. These themes enable me to contextualize Aikan’s story and provide further insight into what conversion to Pentecostalism meant in this particular postsocialist Muslim context.

Community: Members of the Church of Jesus Christ

In Jalal-Abad, stereotypes abounded concerning the type of people that converted to Christianity in general and to Pentecostalism in particular. Popular views characterized them as utterly poor, out of their mind (sumasshedshie), and alcoholics or drug addicts. Such stereotypes were used locally to provide explanations of the success of Pentecostal Christianity, and simultaneously to keep the ‘threat’ at bay. Moreover, these stereotypes were used to give credence to rumours that people were paid to attend services, that missionaries were ‘buying souls’ and that the involved Churches were dangerous ‘totalitarian sects’.15 The Church leaders themselves did not seem to be particularly worried about such stereotypes, as to them the make-up of their Church proved that ‘Jesus died for everyone’, and that, just as in the New Testament, the weakest people were the ones who are called first. Moreover, they told anecdotes (in private and during sermons) to explain the lack of conversion among the elite. Pastor Kadyrjan, for example, told me that high-ranking police officers and government officials had expressed interest, but were unwilling to give up all the sins (drinking vodka, taking bribes and deceiving others) that were necessary for carrying out their jobs. Although stereotypes are often misguided explanations of social phenomena, this does not exclude that, when stripped of their moral content, they refer to actual social patterns. These patterns do not, of course, explain conversion, but are indicative of how the social environment informs conversion and how, in turn, conversion implies a critique of society. As such, an exploration of the make-up of Pentecostal Churches enhances not only an understanding of the social factors conducive to conversion, but can also serve to contextualize the experiential dimension of conversion to Pentecostalism. The statistical data I present in this section are based on responses to a written survey carried out between February and April 2004 among 120 members of the Church of Jesus Christ in Jalal-Abad city. The vast majority of church members were Kyrgyz.16 Women were in the majority by far, making up 75 per cent of total membership. Concerning age, it was striking that the members of the CJC were almost evenly spread between fifteen and fifty years of age, while as many as 12 per cent were over fifty.17 Level of education was equally wide-ranging: only a small minority (5 per cent) indicated not having completed basic school education; the majority (63 per cent) had finished secondary education, while a significant percentage (32 per cent) had obtained a degree from a university or a teaching school. The educational and ethnic background of converts provided a qualification to the locally popular idea that only social outcasts and the ‘powerless’ join Pentecostal Churches. However, data on residence and civil status showed that

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membership of the CJC was tightly related to social cohesion. Of the surveyed Church members, 71 per cent were migrants to Jalal-Abad city, the majority having migrated there after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In addition, another 13 per cent lived in nearby villages and attended services in the city. Only 16 per cent were born in Jalal-Abad itself. In other words, conversion was most likely to occur among rural Kyrgyz who had recently migrated to Jalal-Abad city, a pattern that may be explained as follows. Migrants – as newcomers – were likely to be poorly integrated into the social fabric of the city and thus more inclined to join a movement that provided close-knit social ties. Moreover, promises of health and prosperity may have been especially attractive to those who had to establish their own niche in a post-Soviet urban setting. Seen from the reverse perspective, migrants were removed from their original social surrounding and thus less pressured to conform to social (and religious) expectations. Table 6.1. Ethnic affiliation and civil status, female church members (18 years and older)

Kyrgyz Russian / Ukrainian Tatar Uzbek Other Total

N 69 9 8 2 3 91

Single 16 1 1 0 1 19

Married 18 2 4 2 0 26

Divorced 16 6 1 0 1 24

Widowed 10 0 1 0 0 12

Remarried 9 0 1 0 1 11

Table 6.2. Ethnic affiliation and civil status, male church members (18 years and older) Kyrgyz Russian / Ukrainian Tatar Uzbek Total

N 19 4 5 2 30

Single 8 3 1 0 12

Married 7 1 2 1 11

Divorced 2 0 0 0 2

Widowed 0 0 0 0 0

Remarried 2 0 2 1 5

Another striking pattern emerges when looking at the civil status of respondents (figures 6.1 and 6.2). The data shows a strong over-representation of divorced, widowed and remarried women. Together, they made up over 50 per cent of all female church members. This pattern was less pronounced among males: only a small minority was divorced, and approximately 23 per cent of male church members were divorced, widowed and remarried. A partial explanation of the discrepancy is that men tended to remain better integrated in kin networks after a divorce, as residential patterns after marriage are primarily patrilocal. Moreover, they have better chances of remarrying than women. Women are thus more likely to end up living alone after divorce, which, in combination with the hardship of being a single mother, makes them more open to a new community and alternative ideologies.

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The patterns observed in Jalal-Abad broadly correspond to observations made of Pentecostal Churches elsewhere. Robbins notes that the majority of converts to Pentecostal Christianity ‘have been rural migrants to cities, people at the lower end of the social class scale, or rural stay-at-homes displaced from the centre of their own worlds by social change’ (Robbins 2004: 123, after Martin 1990: 190–1). To displaced people, Pentecostal Churches, with their high intensity community life and emphasis on morality, offer both social security and purpose in an insecure world. This argument was partly confirmed in the stories of converts. They stressed the friendliness of people in the Church and the mutual support that ‘believers’ provided each other.18 Moreover, the Church gave them a sense of moral superiority over the non-believing population. One woman stated: ‘There is a big difference in friendship with believers and with non-believers. Non-believing men immediately want to get you in their beds and women just want to drink alcohol [together], while believers only encourage you to do the right thing’. The messages of Pentecostalism challenge the ‘corrupt’ world in which they operate. Thus, part of the attraction of Pentecostal Churches in Kyrgyzstan is that they ban alcohol and drug consumption, and aim to restore patriarchal family structures. Moreover, by explaining poverty and illness in terms of a corrupt world under the spell of Satan, they provide very concrete answers to problems related to the social and economic dislocations of Soviet and Muslim space, a point which leads us to the next section.

Healing: The Promises and Fruits of Prayer

Numerous converts told me that they first became interested in the CJC after they had heard of the healing powers ascribed to pastor Kadyrjan. As in the case of Aikan, who came into contact with the CJC during her search for medical aid, many approached the CJC with the hope of being cured of illnesses or addictions. And like Aikan, they had previously visited local spiritual healers without obtaining the desired effect. As one informant said, ‘I thought that they [Kadyrjan and his wife] were kind of shamans (shamandar), especially when I heard them speak in tongues’ during a service. Healing was also an important element in conversion experiences. Maksat, a middleaged mechanic, told me ‘I believed as soon as I saw my prayers fulfilled’. A former alcoholic mentioned that one night she went into the street and cried out ‘Jesus, if you are the living God, please help me’. After that she collapsed and woke up in the house of a Church member, having lost the desire to drink alcohol. Healing through prayer was a central element in the services of the CJC, filling its newspaper Tvoi Put’ (‘Your Way’), and was a recurring theme in the book series published by the church, seen in titles like Power in the Name Jesus Christ, Breaking the Chains of Slavery and Lord, Help Us to Pray.19 While the emphasis on prayer was a common feature in all the Church’s branches, there were important differences between the themes highlighted in the services in Bishkek and those in Jalal-Abad. Whereas senior pastor Kuzin in Bishkek would regularly invoke the dangers of immorality in the city and talk about alcoholism and drugs, I never heard him preach about the ‘evil’ residing in local forms of spiritual healing. By contrast,

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in Jalal-Abad, references to spiritual healing were very common, such as the example at the beginning of this chapter in which pastor Kadyrjan told of his experiences with ‘occultism’ in Kok-Jangak. The difference with Bishkek indicated the ability of the CJC to adjust its messages to the particular context in which it was operating and that, in the view of Church leaders, ‘occult practices’ were more common in southern Kyrgyzstan than in the Bishkek. It is important to note that Kadyrjan did not dismiss local healing practices as ineffective superstition (as communist and secular ideologies did), but rather incorporated these practices in his ideas of spiritual warfare, something which took on new qualities in Kok-Jangak. The local Church leader, Gulia, tried to identify the evil spirits present in the town. In her analysis the main types of evilness were ‘witchcraft’ or ‘sorcery’ (koldovstvo), the ‘spirit of destruction’ (dukh razrushenie) and the ‘spirit of poverty’ (dukh nishcheta). But she was open to suggestions that would improve her analysis. She explained that she asked all visiting ‘believers’ about their opinion concerning the evil spirits that needed to be confronted and defeated. Thus, although the discursive techniques that accompanied conversion entailed a critique of Kyrgyzstani society, turning to the power of Jesus did not necessarily imply a radical transformation of converts’ convictions. Indeed, there were remarkable similarities between the world-view promoted by the Church of Jesus Christ and indigenous notions about spirits, as well as between Christian faith healing and traditional Muslim healing.20 As some authors have noted, the distinctive quality of Pentecostalism is its preservation of people’s convictions concerning the reality and power of the spiritual worlds from which they have broken (Robbins 2004: 128; Meyer 1996: 211). This goes some way to explaining why Pentecostal discourse made sense to local ‘believers’ and why conversions, like Aikan’s, could be relatively fast. It does not explain, however, why those involved felt that Jesus was a more powerful means of reaching their goals than other forms of healing. A cynical (or secular) answer to this question would be that the CJC was more efficient in promoting its success stories than ‘traditional’ healers. Indeed, the Church actively encouraged interpreting positive events as gifts of God and as examples demonstrating the effectiveness of prayer. In services and home church meetings new converts learned – often literally – to interpret their experiences in terms of Pentecostal ideology. It is important to emphasize, however, that the credibility of this teaching was ultimately dependent on the success of prayer. Although Church leaders stressed that if prayers remain unanswered it was due to a lack of faith or lack of devotion in prayer, this type of explanation only worked to a certain extent. Ultimately, the failure to deliver tangible results could lead to disillusionment. This was a particular problem in Kok-Jangak. The poor conditions in the town, the lack of work and the lack of potential husbands (more men than women had migrated to Russia for work) meant that prayers for stable jobs, success in small businesses or finding a husband were not very likely to be successful, as Aikan’s story illustrates. Moreover, since belief in the success of prayer was, to a large extent, dependent on recognition by other Church members, disruptions in the community of believers challenged the credibility of the power of prayer.

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Reactions: Moving into New Frontiers

Although conversion to Pentecostalism may be seen as an emancipatory strategy for those involved, the act of conversion complicates relations with wider society. In Kok-Jangak, the act of conversion was bound to draw explicit negative reactions from Muslim neighbours, kin and local leaders; in Jalal-Abad city many converts also reported tensions in their social surroundings. In the survey detailed above (see figures 6.1 and 6.2), more than 60 per cent of Kyrgyz respondents mentioned negative reactions to their conversion including heated arguments, prohibitions (by parents) on visiting the church again, and (temporarily) deteriorating relations with relatives. Another 10 per cent characterized reactions as very negative, and mentioned that responses included violence, expulsion and prolonged attempts at bringing them back to Islam. The attempts of the CJC to establish a viable Church in Kok-Jangak were particularly instructive in this respect. Since 2000, the CJC had been active in Kok-Jangak. The first attempt to establish a church failed because of tensions between Russian Pentecostals living in Kok-Jangak as well as their disagreement with Kadyrjan’s insistence on the role of the tithe and his promotion of the Kyrgyz language in the church. In early 2003, a new team of Kyrgyz missionaries became active and established a new church, which at a certain point had as many as sixty members, the majority of whom were Kyrgyz. At the same time, Islamic activity was increasing, with Muslim leaders starting to react to the growing success of Pentecostal Christianity. For example, the local imam and several town-officials co-operated in a successful effort to kick the Pentecostals out of the buildings they had rented. Church leader Gulia told me that she had made repeated attempts to gain access to a new building, either by renting or purchasing. But each time the owner withdrew from the deal when finding out about Gulia’s religious affiliation and the intended use of the building. Moreover, local moldos (mullahs) and visiting davachis (in this context, ‘Muslim missionaries’) visited Church attendees and their relatives to convince them of their ‘mistakes’, after which the number of people attending services dropped to around twenty people. Several of those who turned away from the Church after their ‘conversion’ commented that they had found out that ‘after all, Jesus is a Russian God’. In Jalal-Abad city similar negative encounters did not necessarily have a negative impact on the CJC’s prospects. Rather, such encounters confirmed the ideas of Church members about the ‘corrupt’ nature of Kyrgyz society and as such increased the cohesiveness of the Church. Moreover, negative reactions provided valuable material for testimonies, thus adding to the heroism of ‘true believers’. In Kok-Jangak, however, there were far fewer possibilities for retreat. Whereas Church members in Jalal-Abad were predominantly migrants who could move relatively anonymously in the city, those in Kok-Jangak were in contact with their relatives on a daily basis and depended more heavily on the social networks that had formed over their lifetime. As such, it seemed likely that any further progress of the CJC hinged not only on overcoming the resistance of Muslim leaders and the town elite, for it was equally dependent on the emergence

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of a social-economic environment that would lend credence to the ‘power of prayer’, and on the stability of the group of ‘believers’ which could serve as a viable alternative community.

The Social Realities of (Temporary) Conversion

By analysing the relationship between the ideas of the CJC and the social fabric within which they obtained their experienced reality this chapter has sought to understand the complex dynamics of (temporary) conversion to Pentecostal Christianity. These dynamics were influenced by the ideology and structure of the CJC, the motivations and actions of its members, and the responses from (predominantly) Muslim relatives, neighbours and community leaders. This set of conditions led not only to the creation of Christian niches in a predominantly Muslim environment, but also to the appearance of new dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, which in turn influenced conversion trajectories. The CJC’s rapid growth in Jalal-Abad city and its failures in Kok-Jangak provided important indications for the kind of environment that is conducive to the ‘gospel of prosperity’. The attraction of Pentecostalism was linked to the destabilization of Muslim and socialist contexts, but its prolonged impact depended on the possibility of demonstrating the fruits of prayer through the achievements of its members, and was thus interrelated with the socio-economic dynamics of the locality in which it operated. Whereas (limited) economic recovery in Jalal-Abad enabled the Church to highlight tangible successes of prayer, the continuing economic decline in Kok-Jangak inhibited demonstrating the same effectiveness. Moreover, the smaller scale of Kok-Jangak and higher density of social relations between inhabitants meant that the negative implications of conversion were more readily felt. In other words, the idea that the messages of Pentecostalism thrive on social, economic and political collapse risks ignoring that Pentecostalism needs an environment that offers (at least limited) social and economic opportunities to its members. The stories and data presented in this chapter also offer important suggestions relevant to debates about the ‘nature’ of conversion. Joel Robbins (2007) has recently attacked what he termed anthropology’s obsession with ‘continuitythinking’ in studies of Christian conversion. This obsession, he argues, has led to a failure to grasp experienced ‘discontinuity’ in conversion. The obsession with ‘continuity’ is strikingly present in some resent attempts to ‘soften’ understandings of conversion. Rambo, for example, argues that conversion rarely involves a complete transformation and that conversion trajectories attest that ‘most human beings change incrementally over time’ (2003: 214); Coleman (2003: 15–27), for his part, suggests that conversion is a project that is never finished, while Austin-Broos (2003) wishes to replace an understanding of conversion as ‘breach’ with one that sees it as ‘passage’. Perhaps these suggestions are relevant to situations in which conversion is relatively uncontroversial, but certainly not when religion itself has become highly

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politicized. At the same time, the frequent occurrence of temporary conversion (at least in Kyrgyzstan), highlights that simply replacing ‘continuity’ with ‘discontinuity’ is not going to solve the issue either. In fact, both kinds of conceptualization reveal an individualist bias and assumptions of unidirectional change, and also fail to consider the social context in which conversion unfolds. As I showed throughout, conversion trajectories derive much of their shape from interpersonal encounters – both within their new religious community and the larger social environment in which they live. It is useful to briefly revisit Aikan’s experiences to illustrate the multi-levelled nature of continuity and discontinuity. Aikan’s conversion trajectory seemed to indicate a ‘sincere’ conversion that was nevertheless terminated, as summarized in her comment that with her ‘it was rather the other way around’. This ‘other way around’ meant that a relatively straightforward entrance to, and intensive involvement in, the Church of Jesus Christ, was followed by postponed doubt and eventual withdrawal. Intriguingly, her ‘straightforward’ conversion was, at least in part, made possible by the fact that the CJC drew on locally relevant religious registers, thus suggesting the ‘invocation of the old in the new’ (Meyer 1996) on the level of personal experience. But although this might be interpreted as indicating a ‘fuzzified’ conversion (Austin-Broos 2003), Aikan’s encounters in the wider social matrix preclude such a conclusion. Boundary crossing between Islam and Christianity – whatever the motivations and understandings of those involved – was bound to have a far-reaching impact on converts’ lives. Even if converts themselves had only ‘halfway’ changed their convictions, this did not necessarily mean that they could also socially balance themselves ‘halfway’ between Muslim and Christian communities. Like Aikan, all converts (certainly those in Kok-Jangak) were confronted with the repercussions of their decision, which compelled them to make further steps. These further actions led in some cases to intensified involvement in the Church and further exclusion from one’s previous social surroundings. In other cases it led to an outright rejection of Pentecostalism. In fact, if we wish to salvage the analytical usefulness of ‘(dis-)continuity’ thinking, we need to be sensitive to the numerous moments and levels at which ‘(dis-)continuity’ occurs and interrelates. Thus, temporary conversions to Pentecostalism were enabled by the continuity (or semblance) of Pentecostal and ‘indigenous’ ideas of spirituality, which led to a radical (or discontinuous) experience of personal conversion, meanwhile causing tensions or ruptures in established social networks, which in Aikan’s case forestalled her personal conversion and led to withdrawal from her new-found belief (but in other cases the experienced tensions led to a more ‘complete’ conversion). Intriguingly, of all the conceptualizations of conversion, Nock’s classical definition of seventy-five years ago – conversion as ‘a definite crossing of religious frontiers, in which an old spiritual home was left for a new one once and for all’ (1933: 7) – is the most straightforward definition of conversion as ‘discontinuity’. It is obviously problematic in its suggestion of completeness (‘definite crossing’) and certainty (‘once and for all’), but it may be worthwhile

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drawing renewed attention to conversion as a ‘crossing of religious frontiers’. If we want to understand how personal religious transformations are entwined with the social settings in which they occur, we need a focus on boundaries and on the forces that define their rigidity and porosity, highlighting how sociality impacts on the cultural, social, symbolic and temporal features of conversion acts. In this particular postsocialist Muslim environment it was far less likely that conversion would ‘incrementally progress over time’, as Rambo (2003: 214) characterizes the ‘normal’ pattern of individual religious change. If conversion was a ‘journey’ or ‘passage’ at all, it was a rough one, bumping into and across social and cultural boundaries. As such it also contributed to shaping new complex frontiers between Christian and Muslim realms.

Notes

1. The Church’s name in Russian is Tserkov’ Isusa Khrista. The Church of Jesus Christ should not be confused with the Mormon Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, with which it has no relation whatsoever. 2. Except for public figures, I have replaced the names of informants by pseudonyms. 3. The use of the terms ‘Kyrgyz’, as well as ‘Russian’, ‘Uzbek’, and ‘Tatar’, reflects local definitions. This means that they indicate official ethno-national categorization as inscribed in passports and other documents. By contrast, ‘Kyrgyzstani’ refers to citizens of Kyrgyzstan, irrespective of ethnic affiliation. 4. It may be a bit of an exaggeration to call Jalal-Abad a ‘city’ as it only has just over 90,000 inhabitants, but I will use the term to emphasize its difference in size from Kok-Jangak, a ‘town’ with only a tenth of Jalal-Abad’s population. Moreover, Jalal-Abad is the fourth-largest ‘city’ in Kyrgyzstan. 5. Russians and Ukrainians made up 24 per cent of the population of the Kyrgyz SSR in the late 1980s. By 2001 this had dropped to 12.6 per cent (Ibraimov et al. 2001: 91). 6. Before the Soviet period only a few Protestant missionaries were active among the Kyrgyz (see also the introduction to this volume). Their activities had no lasting effect, except that nowadays they are venerated in evangelical circles for their pioneering work (Reimer 1992). Other Christian players in the area, notably the Russian Orthodox clergy, never actively engaged in missionary activity among the Kyrgyz, in effect accepting (and reinforcing) an ethno-religious division between Orthodox Russians and Muslim Central Asians. 7. See, amongst others, http://www.ccmcentralasia.org/ and http://www.dpmuk.org/Publisher/ Article.aspx?id=41555. 8. Such sentiments did not thrive only in Kyrgyzstan. See Baran (2006) for an excellent analysis of the anticult movement in 1990s Russia. 9. Source of information: Forum 18 News Service, 17 June 2003 and 20 August 2004; http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=398 and http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php? article_id=83 10. Only two of these ‘church-plants’ were registered with the authorities. The other five had not undergone the lengthy procedures of registration, nor did they have a full-time pastor. 11. The term bakhsy is often translated as ‘shaman’. Many of my informants, however, used it to describe any spiritual healer, whether drawing on Islamic healing practices, employing shamanic elements or demonstrating affinities with forms of ‘modern’ magic so well described by Galina Lindquist (2005). 12. Aikan returned to Kok-Jangak because of the extraordinarily low prices of apartments in there compared to Jalal-Abad. These low prices were caused by large-scale emigration from the town after the coal mine was downsized and eventually closed. 13. See for example Beermann (1968: 68–9) and Lane (1978).

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14. The quotation marks around the word ‘believers’ indicate the term’s controversial implications in a predominantly Muslim environment. 15. See McBrien and Pelkmans (2008) for an extensive analysis of ‘secular’ reactions to the occurrence of conversion. 16. Kyrgyz made up 73 per cent of respondents. Uzbeks formed the most under-represented group: 3 per cent of church members versus 30 per cent of the population. Tatars were the best represented group: 11 per cent of church members versus 3 to 4 per cent of the population. This overrepresentation seems related to the low cohesion of Tatar communities in the region and their ambiguous position between Russians and Central Asians. 17. The following cohorts were distinguished: ages 15-19 (14 per cent); 20-29 (30 per cent); 30-39 (22 per cent); 40-49 (22 per cent); 50+ (12 per cent). 18. See Wanner (2003) for similar observations in her discussion of Pentecostal Churches in Ukraine. 19. A complete list of the titles (in Russian) can be retrieved from http://www.uucyckg.com/ru/book.html. 20. Elsewhere (Pelkmans 2007b) I discuss the similarities and differences between Pentecostal and ‘indigenous’ forms of spiritual healing in more detail.

References

Austin-Broos, D. 2003. ‘The Anthropology of Conversion: An Introduction’, in A. Buckser and S. Glazier (eds), The Anthropology of Religious Conversion. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1–12. Baran, E. ‘Negotiating the Limits of Religious Pluralism in Post-Soviet Russia: The Anticult Movement in the Russian Orthodox Church, 1990–2004’, Russian Review 65: 637–56. Beermann, R. 1968. ‘The Baptists and Soviet Society’, Soviet Studies 20(1): 67–80. Chestnut, A. 1997. Born Again in Brazil: The Pentecostal Boom and the Pathogens of Poverty. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Coleman, S. 2000. The Globalisation of Charismatic Christianity: Spreading the Gospel of Prosperity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ––––. 2003. ‘Continuous Conversion? The Rhetoric, Practice, and Rhetorical Practice of Charismatic Protestant Conversion’, in A. Buckser and S. Glazier (eds), The Anthropology of Religious Conversion. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 15–27. Corten, A. and R. Mashall-Fratani. 2001. ‘Introduction’, in A. Corten and R. Marshall-Fratani (eds), Between Babel and Pentecost: Transnational Pentecostalism in Africa and Latin America. London: Hurst, 1–21. Iarkov, A. 2002. Ocherk Istorii Religii v Kyrgyzstane. Bishkek: Tsentr OBSE v Bishkeke. Ibraimov, O. et al. (eds). 2001. Kyrgyzstan: Entsiklopediia. Bishkek: Tsentr Gosudarstvennogo Iazyka i Entsiklopedii. Iarkov, A. 2002. Ocherk Istorii Religii v Kyrgyzstane. Bishkek: Tsentr OBSE v Bishkeke. Kapferer, B. (ed.) 2005. The Retreat of the Social: The Rise and Rise of Reductionism. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Lane, C. 1978. Christian Religion in the Soviet Union: A Sociological Study. New York: SUNY Press. Lindquist, G. 2005. Conjuring Hope: Healing and Magic in Contemporary Russia. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Mamaiusupov, O. 2003. Voprosy (problemy) religii na perekhodnom periode. Bishkek. Martin, D. 1990. Tongues of Fire: The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America. Oxford: Blackwell. McBrien, J. and M. Pelkmans. 2008 ‘Turning Marx on His Head: Missionaries, “Extremists”, and Archaic Secularists in Post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan’, Critique of Anthropology. 28(1): 87–103. Mamaiusupov, O. 2003. Voprosy (problemy) religii na perekhodnom periode. Bishkek. Martin, D. 1990. Tongues of Fire: The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America. Oxford: Blackwell. Meyer, B. 1996. ‘Modernity and Enchantment: The Image of the Devil in Popular African Christianity’, in P. van der Veer (ed.) Conversion to Modernities: The Globalization of Christianity. New York: Routledge, 199–230.

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Murzakhalilov, K. 2004. ‘Proselytism in Kyrgyzstan’, Central Asia and the Caucasus: Journal of Social and Political Studies 25(1): 83–87. Nock, A. D. 1933. Conversion. London: Oxford University Press. Peel, J. 1977. ‘Conversion and Tradition in Two African Societies: Ijebu and Buganda’, Past and Present 77: 108–41. Pelkmans, M. 2007a. ‘“Culture” as a Tool and an Obstacle: Missionary Encounters in Post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13(4): 881–99. ––––. 2007b.‘Establishing Credibility: Secular Legacies and New Spiritual Realities in Post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan’. Paper presented at the conference ‘Cool Passion: The Political Theology of Conviction’, 23–25 May, University of Amsterdam. Pelkmans, M., V. Vaté and C. Falge. 2005. ‘Christian Conversion in a Changing World: Confronting Issues of Inequality, Modernity, and Morality’, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology Report 2004–2005, 23–34. Rambo, L. 2003. ‘Anthropology and the Study of Conversion’, in A. Buckser and S. Glazier (eds), The Anthropology of Religious Conversion. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 211–22. Reimer, J. 1992. Seine letzte Worte waren ein Lied. Lage: Logos Verlag. Robbins, J. 2004. ‘The Globalization of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity’, Annual Review of Anthropology 33: 117–43. ––––. 2007. ‘Continuity Thinking and the Problem of Christian Culture: Belief, Time, and the Anthropology of Christianity’, Current Anthropology 48(1): 5–38. Tabyshalieva, A. 2000. ‘The Kyrgyz and the Spiritual Dimensions of Daily Life’, in R. Sagdeev and S. Eisenhower (eds), Islam and Central Asia: An Enduring Legacy or an Evolving Threat? Washington, DC: Center for Political and Strategic Studies. Wanner, C. 2003. ‘Advocating New Moralities: Conversion to Evangelicalism in Ukraine’, Religion, State and Society 31(3): 273–87.

Chapter 9

CONVERSION AND THE MOBILE SELF: EVANGELICALISM AS ‘TRAVELLING CULTURE’ Catherine Wanner Many scholars studying political and cultural change in the final years of Soviet rule focused on the rise of nationalism, including religious nationalisms, and the practices of states engaged in nation building.1 In Ukraine, a commitment to religious pluralism was incorporated into the very idea of the Ukrainian nation, minimally to accommodate the cohabitation of the various Orthodox churches and the Ukrainian Greek-rite Catholic Church, all of whom claim to be national institutions. In addition, the state granted a variety of rights and privileges to minority religious communities. This created an entirely new role for religion and religious communities in the politics of identity as they evolved in Ukraine after the fall of the Soviet Union. Ukraine was called the ‘Bible Belt’ of the former Soviet Union because more Protestants lived in Ukraine than in any other republic. When the USSR collapsed in 1991, over half of the 1.5 million officially registered Soviet Baptists lived in Ukraine, making it home to one of the largest Baptist communities in the world. In addition, approximately 350,000 Pentecostal Soviet citizens were also officially registered with state authorities as residing in Ukraine. Soviet-era Baptist and Pentecostal communities espoused a literalistic reading of an inerrant Bible, a general suspicion of worldliness that resulted in strict codes of personal morality, and a belief in the imminent return of Jesus Christ. More recently, a phenomenal number of charismatic and neo-Pentecostal churches have been created in Ukraine. These churches offer a charismatic means of expressive, even ecstatic, worship to the observance of Pentecostal doctrine and a relaxation of ascetic prescriptions for individual behaviour. Reflecting the changes in state and popular attitudes towards organized religion, there has been a spectacular rise in the number of religious groups. There were approximately 4,500 registered religious communities in Ukraine in 1990. A decade later there were nearly 20,000, one quarter of which were Protestant (Johnstone and Mandryk 2001: 644–5). By 2005, the total number of Protestant communities registered in Ukraine rivalled the combined number of Orthodox

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communities (Marone 2005: 24). Furthermore, because of the relatively tolerant political and legal environment that has evolved in Ukraine, evangelical organizations envision Ukraine as a centre of evangelical seminary training and publishing serving Protestants throughout the former Soviet Union. Currently, hundreds of Ukrainian missionaries travel annually to Russia and to other regions of the former Soviet Union to evangelize. These staggering changes have largely taken root thanks to the sweeping political and legal change that has allowed Western missionary organizations to build an infrastructure in Ukraine and offer extensive assistance to evangelical communities to help them grow. In less than two decades, Ukraine has moved from being a recipient of missionaries to becoming a supplier of them. In this essay I explore how mobility in all its guises – desired, actual and social – dovetails with the ‘travelling cultures’, a concept I borrow from James Clifford (1997), that evangelical communities are particularly adept at offering and serves to inspire conversion. The collapse of socialism can be seen as a rupturing force in a nation’s history and in an individual’s life. When postsocialist religious seekers choose to turn away from historically national denominations and join faith-based communities perceived as non-traditional and ‘foreign’ there are important implications. Such conversions challenge the historic norm in this region of the world of a symbiotic connection among religion, nation and state, which trades on the idea that particular cultures and religious affiliations are anchored in specific places. In contrast, evangelical communities embrace mobility and enjoin converts to communities that operate on local and transnational levels. They foster practices, values and identities embedded in ‘travelling cultures’ that bypass the nation and deterritorialize identity and culture. Travelling cultures are spawned by movement but they do not result in diasporas. Rather, they produce transnational deterritorialized forms of sociality that impart new knowledges and experiences by conveying cultural patterns that move along routes of exchange. Although Clifford focuses on such forms of movement as immigration, trade and tourism, I highlight the role of missionizing here. The global communities that evangelical organizations are creating cater to the mobile self by offering ‘travelling cultures’ and multiple layers of belonging – local, national, and global - and this in part explains their success after the collapse of socialism.

The Ecology of Conversion

Specific historical periods are characterized by circumstances that promote or thwart religious seeking. This is what I call an ecology of conversion, an environment in which individuals are predisposed to religious exploration. Whether one speaks of the Revolutions of 1905 or 1917, or the collapse of the USSR in 1991, each of these periods of political reform, widespread social change and extensive moral questioning also led to the repositioning of the Orthodox Church, the dominant faith in this region. Each period also ushered in

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extensive legal reform that positively affected minority religious communities. Given the historic partnership of the Orthodox Church and the state in this part of the world, these social and political crises powerfully affected religious communities and were to some degree predicated on alienation from established religious authorities. In each instance, demands for political reform yielded extensive legal reform concerning the status of minority religious organizations. Legal reform and the search for alternative moral communities led to a proliferation of new religious communities as often as it led to disillusionment with organized religion and the spread of secular worldviews.2 At these key historic junctures of political change, an ecology of conversion emerged whereby individuals cast aside their religious heritage and chose to identify with another faith that carried decisively different political and national implications. Orthodoxy in Ukraine, as elsewhere in the former Soviet Union, is widely considered the foundation of national traditions, aesthetic forms and other elements of a unique socio-cultural matrix.3 Beginning in the late 1980s, a simultaneous religious and national resurgence occurred because leaders of the political opposition positioned religion as a key component of Ukrainian nationality. Evoking a nation’s right to self-determination and an individual’s right to freedom of conscience became twin pillars of opposition to Soviet rule. With less fear of state retribution, some clergy and religious institutions used their moral authority to lend support to nationalist movements. After the collapse of socialism, the possibility of practising religion overtly propelled the emerging religious renaissance in Ukraine into a resurgence. The fusion of religion and nationality took on new relevance when it could be mobilized to advance the goals of oppositional forces which aimed to dismantle the Soviet system and later to further the goals of the Orange Revolution. There are many factors that distinguish Ukraine’s religious traditions from its neighbouring countries and serve to create an ecology conducive to conversion: the origins of Orthodoxy in Kyivan Rus’; the cohabitation of Orthodox and Greek-Catholic religious traditions, both of which are embraced as unique and indigenous national institutions; and Ukraine’s geopolitical location as a ‘borderland’ among empires which over time strengthened the multiethnic and multi-confessional cultural attributes of the Ukrainian population. Perhaps most important of all, religious participation and the number of religious institutions have historically been higher in Ukraine than they have been in surrounding countries (Wanner 2004: 736). The three Orthodox churches – the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, Kyiv Patriarchate; the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church; and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, Moscow Patriarchate – each offer a different political vision based on the links each one offers, either to Ukraine, to Ukraine and the diaspora, or to Russia respectively. When a single Church cannot dominate and influence political policy, de facto there are greater freedoms for other faiths to exist and for individuals to worship as they choose.4 As each of the national churches compete among themselves for dominance, a new space is opened up for nontraditional faiths and new religious movements to establish roots in Ukraine. The

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history of active religious participation and confessional diversity in Ukraine has combined to create a political and cultural climate that is more favourable to a spectrum of denominations, especially when compared to Russia and Belarus. The suspension of most legal restrictions on foreign religious organizations’ activities in Ukraine and the forms of assistance (financial, material, technical and so on) that they are allowed to offer has greatly strengthened the presence of non-traditional religious communities. The resulting religious pluralism, especially when combined with increased mobility and a commitment to Orthodoxy which is often more cultural than religious, has made individuals particularly open to a variety of faiths and Ukraine one of the most active and competitive religious marketplaces in Europe, if not the world.5 Religion has become an institutional mechanism facilitating the formation of communities that attempt to challenge – or secure – the growing uneven distribution of capital in all its forms: financial, social and cultural. Religion has returned to play a key part in the twin political projects of protesting new forms of economic inequality or perpetuating them, of fostering prospects for social mobility or maintaining the status quo. In the current ecology of conversion, religion plays a salient role in political, communal and individual life by challenging or establishing political legitimacy for the emerging economic order in moral terms. No longer seen as the ‘opium of the people’, religion in Ukraine is now considered a moral bulwark, regaining its historic role as the key institution defining and defending Ukrainian culture, and by extension, the Ukrainian people.

Conversion to Evangelicalism

Conversion is a complex process leading to a shift in religious orientation that gives life new meaning by changing the way an individual perceives reality and the intellectual and social tools he or she has to respond to it (Rambo 1993). Conversion can be a swift means to redefine concepts of self and other through cultural appropriation of new values and practices. This new collective identity and group membership is publicly manifest in modifications of behaviour which symbolize inner spiritual change. By becoming an evangelical in post-Soviet Ukrainian society, one redefines fundamental cultural categories, such as familiar and foreign, space and time, power and agency, and gender and class. The conversion experience realigns an errant past with a more desirable future by reordering an individual’s past into a meaningful sequence of events. One rewrites autobiography into pre- and post-conversion periods, giving in to the frequent temptations to see signs of the impending conversion in one’s deep past retrospectively and thereby affirming the righteousness of the Christian life one has adopted. Among others, I have argued that evangelical faiths derive a good bit of their appeal by promising radical change and by offering the possibility of moral renewal (Wanner 2003). Conversion allows an individual to break with values and practices that are no longer considered appropriate and reject the cultural values

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held by the greater society, reflecting once again the importance of a certain ecology to foster conversion. Just as the Ukrainian nation was ‘born again’ in 1991, conversion offers the believer an experience of rupture and renewal, holding out the promise of restoration in the short term and salvation in the long term. Conversion to any of the evangelical faiths constitutes a total lifestyle change, with belief and behaviour, and family and community, ideally merging into one. Communal life is characterized by a doctrine of ‘priesthood of the believer’ and features extensive lay participation. For men and women alike, congregational life often offers possibilities for assuming positions of responsibility, status and prestige which may or may not elude them in the secular world. The family is understood to be the core of a believer’s life and the dynamics of family life are superimposed on the congregational, national and global levels. This explains the evangelical support for biblically grounded prohibitions against divorce, sexual license, birth control and abortion, all measures designed to strengthen the family, along with extensive congregational programmes designed for children. The family metaphor is to this day reinforced by discursive practices. Believers refer to each other as ‘brothers and sisters’, drawing on the assumption that fellow Church members have similar levels of conviction and this binds them together in a family-like community. These pivotal changes in belief and behaviour are expected to accompany conversion. Conviction triggers this transformation and community membership sustains it. In other words, the rupture brought on by a particular conversion event or experience ushers in new practices that turn a moment of radical change into an ongoing ‘conversion career’.6 Although there is little disapproval of people who have begun to practise religion, virtually all Protestant faiths remain to a degree popularly stigmatized. Abandoning one’s ‘natural’ and national faith for evangelicalism is widely considered ‘not right’. When an individual converts to evangelicalism and departs from hereditary and national understandings of an Orthodox identity, however they understand and practise them, conflicts almost always arise between the convert and kin and neighbours. Rejecting common cultural practices, such as drinking, smoking and dancing, alienates converts from their kin. As Ruth Marshall-Fratani has written, ‘Friends, family and neighbours become “dangerous strangers”, and strangers, new friends. The social grounds for creating bonds – blood, common pasts, neighbourhood ties, language – are foresworn for the new bond of the brother or sister in Christ’ (2001: 86). For many converts, evangelicalism begins to overshadow, but not necessarily reject, the importance previously invested in other forms of identity, such as nationality. One of the sources of confessional conflict in Ukraine today is that the Orthodox Church considers Orthodoxy an attribute of Ukrainian nationality; that is to say, a Ukrainian is by definition Orthodox. A significant exception is made for Ukrainian Greek-rite Catholics, who for historic reasons belong to a different albeit related national denomination. An Orthodox identity is geographically defined, automatically inherited and eternal. In the eyes of Orthodox clergy, there is no need for missionizing because all Ukrainians have a religious identity, whether or not they choose to act on it. This understanding of religiosity is

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dramatically different from the ‘born-again’ conscious experience of adult conversion upon which an evangelical identity is predicated. For evangelicals, anyone who has not been ‘saved’ through repentance and conversion inspires proselytizing. Evangelicals actualize their faith by acting on the moral obligation to save the unsaved, to help church the unchurched. When home is sanctified by icons and nationality is understood in religious terms, conversion to evangelicalism is a wilful rejection of established patterns of lifestyle and identity. Yet the popular perception of the dichotomous choice between a national or foreign faith is largely a false one. As Ranger writes of the widespread coexistence of various religious groups in Africa, ‘we should see mission churches as much less alien and independent churches as much less African’ (1987: 31). The same could be said of religious life in Ukraine. Although the national churches position themselves as grounded in Ukraine, they all have links to institutions and hierarchies located abroad, be it the Vatican or the Moscow Patriarchate, and themselves react by adapting to the religious pluralism surrounding them.7 Although the choice to convert to an evangelical faith in Ukraine today exerts appeal because it opens up access to new zones of contact and new prospects for mobility, many of the imported doctrines and practices are rapidly adapted to local cultural mores and quickly take on a Ukrainian cast.8 In this way, all religious communities are forced to negotiate the local or national contexts in which they wish to situate themselves even if they offer links to individuals, communities and institutions beyond Ukraine’s borders. Visiting preachers, missionaries and dignitaries from abroad simultaneously underline the global dimensions of religion today and serve to locate Ukraine within it. In numerous interviews conducted with converts to evangelicalism in Ukraine, most responded to open-ended questions concerning self-identification by saying that they were either ‘believers’ or ‘Christians’. Nationality, residence, profession, or other social roles were cited secondarily. The defining attribute of their identity was that they were ‘believers’. They use the term ‘believers’ according to its original meaning, namely to indicate quite simply conviction, faith that rests on a trust in God. Reference to a particular denomination or a specific body of doctrine, as we would expect a religious identity to be defined in most Western societies, is largely absent.9 After decades of an official state policy of atheism, the key issue is whether one has faith or not, whether or not one has decided to repeatedly create an internalized condition of believing. Thus, the dimensions of religious identity ultimately collapse into two categories of people, believers and non-believers, which facilitates departure from an inherited faith tradition.10 The response of Ludmyla, a forty-five year old librarian from Kharkiv to the question of identity was rather typical: ‘I am first and foremost a Christian, saved by the blood of Jesus Christ and by the grace of God. I endeavour to live by the word of God. I am also a beloved mother of three children and a wife’. When asked why she does not call herself a Baptist, she explains: ‘We try to call ourselves “believers” or “Christians” because the word “Baptist” is frightening to many people. But when someone asks what the official name of my faith is, I say “Evangelical Christian-Baptist”. The name is only secondary. The most

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important thing is to live by the word of God’. Ludmyla never practised religion until 1979 when she was twenty-three years old and already a mother. As is often the case, her conversion was precipitated by a crisis that left her powerless to control her fate. Her son fell terribly ill and lost consciousness. After several days in the hospital, he showed no signs of improvement and the doctor, who she notes was an elegant Jewish man, told her: ‘Only God can save your son’. ‘I was so surprised’, she said, ‘that such an educated person would speak of God. I went home and cried for a long time. As best I could, I turned to God, and said, “God, if you exist, please save my child!” In several days the crisis was over. It was the grace of God. After that I wanted to read the Bible’. At this point in her life, she was religiously inclined and began to attend an Orthodox Church in spite of the fact that in 1979 there were still some risks involved in overtly practising religion. However, her attitude towards the Orthodox Church gradually changed: ‘I didn’t really like that people came one after another to kiss icons. Then you had to buy a candle. I didn’t regret spending the money. I had money. But I didn’t like that you had to do it. It’s one thing if you want to, but this was totally different. And I really needed someone to explain the word of God to me and they don’t have that there. My soul just wasn’t satisfied’. As a Russian-speaking Ukrainian, when seeking faith she went to an Orthodox church. She found it familiar, yet strange, her own, but somehow inaccessible. Once the familial allegiances to Orthodoxy and its practices had been broken by the implementation of Soviet secularizing policies, Ludmyla was open to a variety of other spiritual possibilities. She asked one of her mother’s Baptist neighbours to take her to a Baptist church the next time he came into the city. Soon thereafter she began to attend the oldest Baptist Church in Kharkiv, a community that dates its foundation to 1892.

Conversion and the Mobile Self

As we saw with Ludmyla, conversion is frequently a response to crisis. It can become a coping strategy that enables an individual to overcome difficulties by reordering a relationship to higher, more powerful forces, and by creating relationships within a new community. The collapse of socialism triggered crises for many that included displacement. Svetlana explains how Church membership has affected her sense of identity and how it has begun to repair a shattered sense of home and homeland. Now a refugee in Kharkiv, she is an Armenian who fled her home in Baku, Azerbaijan in 1988 as a result of ethnic tensions and political instability. When she first left Baku, she settled in Yerevan and in 1998 relocated once again to Kharkiv. She claims: ‘I am a person without a homeland. My heart doesn’t lie anywhere. If I had the possibility, I would emigrate again. I’m not proud of that, but if there was such a possibility, why not?’ In other words, at this point in Svetlana’s life, a sense of belonging is not in any way tied to place or to a particular national way of life. Although she could choose to see herself as part of the Armenian diaspora, she does not. Rather, she embraces Church membership as a quick and effective way to re-establish a sense of stability, community and

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access to a forum with possibilities for self-realization. As such, conversion and the communal membership it yields are ordering devices, restoring meaning, continuity and logic to lives that have been disrupted by traumatic events. Conversion becomes a means to realign what is with what ought to be. Svetlana remembers her earliest exposure to religion as coming from her neighbours in Baku who were Russian Molokans. ‘They were real believers, and we were just Christians’. Again, she ignores all denominational differences and their related national implications and explains the difference between ‘believers’ and ‘Christians’ by noting that ‘My family believed in God, or at least that’s what they called it. Every Sunday we went to an Orthodox church and lit candles. We didn’t know any prayers but my mother would always bring home a prayer sheet and we would put it under our pillows’. She contrasts this pro forma religious practice with the caring relationships she observed among the Molokan. ‘On Saturday and Sunday they didn’t work. They went to church. They knew their faith well and helped each other. There were no elderly or children who were ignored’. Svetlana understood the warmth of their interpersonal relationships as a manifestation of faith and this impressed her. While she was living in Yerevan and working as a hairdresser, one of her favourite clients took her to a Baptist church. Again, as with the Molokan, she was impressed by how kind people were to one another, how they seemed to know one another, and how warmly they welcomed her. At the time, she had almost no friends. Few had fled from Baku to Yerevan. Most left for Russia, America or simply stayed behind in Baku. In 1994, in rather quick succession, she repented, was christened, and became an official member of the Church in Yerevan, participating in many of its activities, including prayer groups, visiting the sick and attending several services a week. After her daughter’s family moved to Ukraine, Svetlana and her husband decided to relocate too. Thanks to a letter from her pastor attesting to her membership in good standing in Yerevan, she was able to transfer her membership to a church near her new home in Ukraine. Birgit Meyer (2004) claims that the success of evangelical communities in Africa can be attributed to their dual recognition of the experience of marginalization and of being forgotten, all the while situating believers in a meaningful way within ‘the wider world’. Conversion delivers membership in a local community of ‘brothers and sisters’ and assures believers a place in a transnational organization. Meyer writes: ‘The mass appeal of PCCs [Pentecostal Charismatic Churches] can be explained, at least in part, against this backdrop. Adopting a strategy of extraversion, which deliberately develops external links and promises connection with the world, PCCs nevertheless have to address a politics of identity and belonging, in which fixed markers govern processes of inclusion and exclusion, both in Africa and in the diaspora’ (ibid.: 468). Not only for Africans but also for other diasporic peoples, such as Armenians and Ukrainians, membership in a community that is at once local and global is appealing. In this way, Svetlana belongs to another type of ‘imagined community’. Most likely, wherever she moves, she will always be able to find other believers and be accepted into their community regardless of where she is from and where she might move to next.

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David Martin (2002) claims that religious communities cater to the ‘mobile self’ by enhancing the ‘portability of charismatic identity’, which makes Pentecostalism a postmodern religion par excellence. For believers such as Svetlana, the ‘portability’ of a religious identity has played a crucial role in softening the negative effects of relocation and hence it has become more meaningful. It is especially conducive to mobile groups and individuals. Evangelicalism thrives in multiple locations and on multiple levels because it is embedded in ‘travelling cultures’ that sustain it. Patterns of recognizable cultural norms and practices greet Svetlana regardless of the national borders within which the community she joins is located. Thanks to her conversion and the communal membership it yielded, her ‘routes’ of displacement spawn ‘roots’ along the way (Clifford 1997). Participation in church communities can provide ‘roots’ in the form of a sense of continuity through the repetition of rituals, prayers and other daily activities in spite of radical disruption brought on by forced relocation. By discarding past practices and beliefs, the convert can face new circumstances with new resources and a new identity. Starting over again in Kharkiv has not been easy, Svetlana says. ‘I believe in God’, she explains, ‘and I have given over to him all my struggles and I know that he will never leave me. He will always help…. I never complain and I never ask people for help. I only ask God knowing that he will help me through other people’. She gave an example of how she believes her faith and prayer has helped her resettle: When we arrived here, we had to pay to get a place to live. We didn’t have any money. I asked one of the sisters [a female member of the Church] to lend me some money. She also didn’t have much money but she evidently spoke to the members of the Church because the next time I came to church, the pastor received me and gave me the money as an interest-free loan. To this day, I give back a little each month, about ten hryvnia. But I never asked for it and I will never ask for money.

In the face of a crumbling state social service sector, to the extent that they can, church communities attempt to provide a safety net of sorts for members. In this effort, they are often assisted by co-religionists abroad who send shipments of humanitarian aid to Ukraine and rely on particular congregations to distribute it to the needy. Svetlana and her family, for example, get their clothes this way. The abstract ‘wider world’ to which she is enjoined therefore appears benevolent, a valued counterweight to the harshness of daily life as a refugee after socialism. Although Svetlana has experienced tremendous disruption in her life over the past decade, many of her daily practices and her church membership have remained a constant. Particularly for the displaced, church membership provides a ready made community that offers regular and frequent face-to-face encounters, activities for children and, as we see in Svetlana’s case, a pronounced commitment and ability to assist those in need (Lancaster 1988; Martin 1990; Burdick 1993; Johnson 2007). Although she has been deracinated, her nationality rendered a burden and her homeland inaccessible, she has found community

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membership in Kharkiv, which confers an identity as a moral person, provides an ongoing sense of belonging, and assures that she will not suffer alone. In an era of increased and often unwanted mobility, the stability and adaptability of a religious identity based on this kind of omni-sited community membership exerts mounting appeal. Although the embrace of a national identity can mean living in exile or in the diaspora, there are no believers in exile. Individual believers mediate the negative effects of social change and the disruption of mobility by recasting their identity through conversion to relocate the foci of daily life to a local community. Simultaneously these communities reach beyond state or territorial borders and enjoin the individual to a global community of believers. Conversion opens doors to an immediate, local community and to an abstract, global one, assuring all members that they are ‘saved’.

Missionizing and Movement

Forced relocation is not the only form of mobility operative in postsocialist societies. Evangelical organizations bring missionaries to Ukraine and encourage Ukrainians to missionize elsewhere. As believers circulate in search of converting others to actualize their faith, the isolation brought on by the Iron Curtain is rapidly replaced by the interconnections international agencies, transnational religious communities and individual believers offer to religious communities. Believers are encouraged to consider themselves missionaries, fulfilling the moral mandate of believers to help save the unsaved by encouraging them to repent and convert. With the fall of the Soviet Union, it became possible for a wide spectrum of foreign missionary and other religious organizations to participate in the religious resurgence occurring throughout the region. Their role is complex and multidirectional in furthering conversion to a religious lifestyle among the religiously curious and mobile. By 2001 there were 1681 long-term foreign missionaries supported by seventy-seven different missionary organizations from twenty-two different countries working in Ukraine (Johnstone and Mandryk 2001: 750). The overwhelming majority of them were American, but missionary organizations from Canada, South Africa and Germany each also support between ten and twenty missionaries in Ukraine. Initially, foreign missionary organizations sent clergy and lay leaders to assist in garnering converts and providing leadership for emerging congregational communities. They also provided vital financial assistance for establishing the infrastructure needed to maintain growing evangelical communities. There are now seven evangelical seminaries in Kyiv alone; a Christian university in Donetsk, the former capital of the ‘cradle of the proletariat’ region; and a significant evangelical theological centre in Odesa, in the south of the country, also home to the largest Christian publishing house in Ukraine and the sponsor of a major initiative to chronicle on CD-Rom archival documents of the evangelical experience under Soviet rule.

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SEND, one of the largest American missionary organizations in Ukraine, claims its ministry strategy is ‘simply to help the Ukrainian Church with the tools and people to reach their own country for Jesus Christ, and to launch a missionary movement from Ukraine into the former Soviet nations. Whenever SEND enters a country where there is a small church presence, we seek to partner with the local church’.11 In other words, missionary organizations, in word and often in practice, recognize the importance of linguistic and cultural competence for effective missionizing and therefore prioritize the development of local leadership to lead churches, seminaries and Bible institutes, and local missionaries to evangelize other locals. The assistance of international agencies is largely infrastructural in nature, driven by the goal of establishing and localizing the institutions created as soon as possible to overcome the very cultural barriers that often impede conversion when proselytizing is done by foreigners.12 The interconnectedness to the West and to global Christian communities that foreign missionary assistance offers Ukraine also ties it to the former Soviet Union. Within the former Soviet Union, other power differentials are operative that are conducive to making Ukraine a base for theological training for the entire former Soviet bloc. Nearly all Ukrainians understand Russian and about one-third of the forty-eight million Ukrainians are native Russian-speakers. With a population that possesses imperial cultural capital, Ukraine is an ideal location to train missionaries and clergy destined to serve in other parts of the former Soviet Union. Thus, as evangelical initiatives tie Ukraine into a global community of believers, those same initiatives also reinforce Ukraine’s ties to its Soviet past and to former Soviet citizens. For example, during Baptist and Pentecostal services time is allotted for visitors from other congregations or those who have travelled to other congregations to individually stand and offer greetings. Anthony Giddens (1990) refers to this overall phenomenon of bringing people from disparate places together as the creation of ‘distanciated relations’. He claims that this is a unique and relatively recent dynamic of social life and a key characteristic of globalization. Giddens understands the reorganization of time and space as largely hinging on the stretching of social life to span great distances. He writes, ‘larger and larger numbers of people live in circumstances in which disembedded institutions, linking local practices with globalized social relations, organize major aspects of day-to-day life’ (ibid.: 79). Religious communities are indeed laden with social relations that span great distances and are increasingly the sites where the local and global interlock in a powerful way to shape the consciousness, everyday practices, and identities of individual believers. Evangelicalism, with its moral mandate for all believers to missionize, sends Ukrainians out into the wider world and brings believers from all over the globe to local Ukrainian communities. It is a catalyst for movement and a key force cultivating the ‘distanciated relations’ and ‘travelling cultures’ that characterize a believer’s life after conversion. In this way, the portability of an evangelical identity caters to the desires for mobility as much as it does to the predicaments of those forced to be mobile.

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Moving Up: A Church for People of All Nations

The largest evangelical Church in Europe today is located in Kyiv. In many ways, it illustrates how the themes of conversion and mobility intersect at the congregational level and particularly how prosperity theology, a doctrine preached here, offers prospects of social mobility to believers. Known as The Embassy of the Blessed Kingdom of God for All Nations, or Embassy of God to its 25,000 members, the Church was created in 1994 and draws on a Pentecostalcharismatic tradition of expressive worship. As of 2008, the Embassy of God had opened thirty-eight daughter congregations, eighteen of which were abroad. As the activities of this Church demonstrate, the interconnections among believers embedded in religious institutions are multidirectional and are often quite vibrant among regions that have otherwise had little previous historical interaction and little current political collaboration. The Embassy of God was founded by Sunday Adelaja, a Nigerian, who came to Soviet Belarussia to study journalism in 1986. After the collapse of the USSR, he created the Word of Faith Church in Belarus and, after encountering severe difficulties with the authorities there, relocated to Kyiv in 1993 where he began a Bible study group with seven others. The following year he founded a Church with fifty members. His goal was to convert one hundred people a month, and after one year the Church had over 1000 members.13 In 2002 the name of the Church was changed to its current one as its membership continued to soar. In 2004 The Embassy of God purchased a large parcel of land in central Kyiv with plans to build a Ukrainian Spiritual Cultural Centre, which will seat 50,000 people. It is not just the enormous size, the rapid growth and the leadership of this Church that is distinctive. This Church is also remaking the historic patterns of missionary dynamics and integrating Ukraine and Ukrainians in the world in a different, albeit meaningful way. When a Nigerian establishes a Church in Ukraine that sends Ukrainian believers to the U.S. and to Europe to save the unsaved and church the unchurched, it is no longer a case of core exerting influence on the periphery. Rather, the interconnections and the cultural flow of ideas, objects and people are also significant among non-Western regions and from the so-called Second and Third Worlds to the First. Furthermore, with cultural and linguistic fluency, the colonized missionizes the colonizer, as hundreds of Ukrainians have been doing in Russia for over a decade now. The Embassy of God is a highly innovative example of a religious community going global, and yet its roots are in Ukraine. One of the more interesting aspects of this Church is the dual way it negotiates nationality. The word ‘embassy’ in the name of the Church has obvious political and state connotations and is meant to suggest that all believers are missionizing ambassadors of God. The symbol of the Embassy of God is a globe with Africa, where the church founder is from, positioned in the centre. The globe has a golden crown and cross on top. Just below the crown is a light emanating from Ukraine and shining throughout Europe and the Middle East. There is nothing particularly Nigerian about the services the Embassy of God offers, although the

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doctrine espoused by its leader draws on trends in theology that are well developed in Africa, such as an emphasis on faith healing, civic involvement and the evangelization of Muslims.14 The main church is actually a rented sports arena, the only location capable of accommodating the crowds Pastor Adelaja draws. The sports hall is converted into a church by adding a sweeping stage and preaching platform at the front, flanked on all sides by dozens of state flags. When the music and movement begins during services, parishioners come to the front, and with swaying flags in hand, create a colourful, animated effect. The Ukrainian flag is always the first flag chosen. After the Ukrainian flag, usually the American, Israeli or German flag comes next, followed by the Russian flag and an assortment of others. Usually within minutes, the large area to each side of the preaching platform and the wide side aisles are filled with national flags swirling in the arms of enthusiastic worshippers. In this way, national differences and state borders are recognized and celebrated even as they are as they are subsumed under a higher religious authority, as it is recognized by followers from around the world gathered in the Embassy of God. The mission statement of the Embassy of God claims that it is committed to the ‘salvation and restoration of the individual’ through faith healing and the rehabilitation of individual moral agency by realigning the disjuncture between ‘what is’ and ‘what ought to be’ in an individual believer’s life. In a break with evangelical tradition in Soviet Ukraine, this Church connects the sources of individual problems to greater social problems and insists on the believer’s moral obligation to be civically engaged in resolving political and social issues, making the Church a motor for social change. The Embassy of God’s most famous member is the twice-elected mayor of Kyiv, Leonid Chernovet’skyi, one of the first politicians in Ukraine to openly ally himself with a non-traditional Protestant denomination. Chernovet’skyi credits God with ‘saving him from a moral fall’. As a highly successful politician, businessman and co-owner with his wife of one of Ukraine’s largest banks, he is an icon of the ‘health and wealth’ Gospel message of prosperity theology advocated by the Embassy of God. Rather than taking an antagonistic view of money as a corrupting force, this doctrine views personal wealth and success as evidence of a blessing from God bestowed upon those that lead a truly Christian life. The sermons at the Embassy of God stress the importance of a ‘morally controlled materialism’ and are designed to foster feelings of empowerment and encourage entrepreneurial and political engagement. Chernovet’skyi explains how and why he converted:15 I was around forty-six when I came to the Word of Faith Church and now I’m fiftythree. Before then I searched for God for many years, went to Orthodox churches, prayed to different icons while I was imagining God, lit candles. But, to speak honestly, I never had the feeling of communicating with God. I wanted to hear the Word of God, but no one there said anything about this in any of those churches….

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My actual turning to God is connected with my political ambitions, when in 1995 or 1996, I already don’t remember exactly, in a really exhausting campaign, I tried to become a deputy of the Supreme Soviet. It wasn’t working because, according to the election law of the time, at least fifty-one per cent of the population had to vote. But in the Darnitsa district, where one of the largest radio-electronic factories in all of Ukraine shut down, no one wanted to vote. Twice I tried with different PR campaigns to get people to vote but they didn’t believe in anything. They only spoke to me about sausage and other daily problems and they weren’t at all interested in politics. And, I have to say, I was very far from thinking about how to protect people. That’s why, through one of my former partners, I met Pastor Sunday who, in the presence of a huge number of people, prayed for me. I stipulated that my joining the Church was dependent on a large number of people who would campaign for me – and I was really afraid of this because I didn’t trust churches. And a miracle! Around one thousand of my future voters prayed for me and I saw in their eyes the fire of faith and happiness.

Unashamed of the raw exchange of membership-for-votes deal he has made and admits to here, Chernovet’skyi joins a large legion of politicians the world over who have long recognized that religion is politics by other means. Churches offer a highly efficient platform from which to spread a political message, especially when it is endorsed by the moral authority of the clergy, and build a popular base of support. Continuing to stress the instrumental value of conversion and Church membership, he explains how his conversion contributed to a new sense of morality and how this influences his politics: In my opinion, the basis for the current crisis in Ukraine is the destruction of the spiritual core of the nation, the destruction of the markers of morality and justice in society. As a politician and believer, I am deeply convinced that the choice of a democratic government and the choice of a market-based economy are directly connected with Christian ideology, which is conducive to simple people living comfortably and politicians acting morally. Not long ago I began to think seriously about creating a new political party for Ukraine – a Christian liberal party based on Christian values, the principles of economic liberalism and Western European democracy.16 The ideas and programmatic goals of this party will support evermore people with moral values, independent of whatever faith they practise…. I am certain that God wants all people to be free and materially provided for – but the most important thing is moral provision. I would build on this model: God wants to see all people morally prosperous, and then they will be materially prosperous. (original emphasis)

In this way, Chernovet’skyi blends a religious basis for morality with economic goals and political reform leading to social mobility for the individual and prosperity for the nation – all in the name of fulfilling God’s plan for Ukraine. Chernovet’skyi is an illustration of the potential harvest prosperity theology may yield. By advocating such an ideologically infused theology, he neatly equates his

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staggering wealth with moral purity and enduring conviction. He found God, began to live a moral life as an observant Christian, and from that pivotal moment all blessings have flowed. He, and prosperity theology in general, offers little guidance, solace or explanation to other ‘good Christians’ who live a moral life and yet are denied material comfort and financial stability. Specifically as concerns Ukraine, he offers little in the way of guidance as to how a believer should navigate the harsh and corrupt world of money, where each business interest often adheres to its own understanding of right and wrong over the law (Wanner 2006). Attempting to do business inevitably presents moral quandaries involving lying, cheating and other behaviours that are supposedly not becoming of believers. Prosperity theology suggests that if each believer resists corruption and deceit and goes against the current by adhering to a biblically based morality, the believer will be rewarded in this life with social mobility and in the next with salvation. Judging by the cheering crowds at the Embassy of God, these simple guidelines for coping with the complexities of political and economic life are welcome and understood as viable prescriptions for reform. The Embassy of God also caters to desires of social mobility by offering members alternative structural supports to help them earn a living and advance career ambitions. For example, individual prayer groups are organized according to profession, whereby a group of musicians, computer programmers, journalists and so on meet weekly to study the Bible, discuss career and business-related problems and provide each other with opportunities to strengthen one’s networks, an essential resource in entrepreneurial life. The Embassy of God has also organized the Christian Business Leadership Fellowship to advocate ‘Christian principles’ as a basis for doing business by promoting a moral code of biblically prescribed business practices. This boundary work of delineating the acceptable from the unacceptable potentially softens the moral challenges of doing business in Ukraine. It also establishes alternative means for evaluating self-worth independent of material success and social hierarchies, which becomes especially important in the event of failure. Should social mobility and the ‘health and wealth’ that is supposed to accompany sincere conviction prove elusive, conversion always holds out the promise of moral mobility, of engaging in the ongoing process of moral self-empowerment. Thanks to conversion, the believer knows that, worldly success aside, salvation awaits. David Martin (2002) argues, much like Chernovet’skyi, that churches create a ‘free space’ and a ‘cultural logic’ that has a strong, albeit latent, potential for social and moral mobility. Martin writes: ‘The framework of moral controls set by the strict rules of the believing congregation and the need to render individual accounts to God and to the brethren together enable the believer to internalize a self-control which can survive the buffeting of the corrupt world in which he or she has to earn a living, often outside corporate structures altogether’ (ibid.: 80). Religion responds to perceived identity threats, marginalization and poverty with feelings of empowerment, belonging and allegiance that allow believers to move between the local and the global. Practices widely recognized as familiar remain, although they are crafted to mesh with local preferences. This exemplifies both

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the ‘travelling’ aspect and the localized component of evangelical communal life, giving it a power capable of creating unique moods and motivations. Regardless of the specificities of location, this aspect of evangelical ‘travelling culture’, as exemplified by the Embassy of God, can be harnessed to bring about perceived and actual social mobility.

Conclusion

The role of organized religion as a legitimator of the status quo has deep historical roots in this region of the world. Yet, the religious pluralism that has been institutionalized in Ukraine has led to a flourishing of religious activity. The churches play a key role in articulating the type of commitments one should have to others and what the reciprocal obligations and expectations should be between a state and its citizenry, thereby laying the foundation for a remake of the social contract after socialism. Even as the national churches engage in this project, the salience of residence in a fixed territory is eroding as a factor shaping identity, and by extension the connection between certain practices and values as rooted in a particular place is weakening too. Against such a backdrop, religious knowledge, and the various practices that embody it, constitute ‘travelling cultures.’ The kind of supraethnic religious doctrine that evangelical faiths offer is independent of a particular people, place or institution and as a result can be adapted to new contexts and new cultural environments.17 This basic dynamic holds whether one speaks of a religious organization from Littleton, Colorado establishing a base in Ukraine or a Ukrainian church establishing a base in Sacramento, California. In this way, in spite of the nationalist revival throughout the region, the nation state is not necessarily the primary or even logical unit of social and political analysis when studying change in the former Soviet Union. Many studies of conversion to evangelicalism have stressed the vital role of poverty and deprivation in prompting individuals to seek solutions to social suffering in religion (Anderson 1979; Lancaster 1988; Burdick 1993). Of course the collapse of Soviet socialism produced similar conditions and this too has motivated religious seekers. Another factor that has received far less scholarly attention, as I have argued here, is mobility in its many forms. As individuals move around, so do evangelical travelling cultures. The beliefs, practices and communal memberships that conversion offers is particularly conducive to mitigating the negative effects of increased individual mobility as well as reaffirming new desires for social mobility that growing contact and communication foster. Joel Robbins (2007) has argued that ‘continuity thinking’ embedded in anthropological theories and intellectual traditions has prompted anthropologists to under appreciate the ‘radical change’ conversion delivers and hence has contributed to a negligible presence of Christianity in ethnographic writings. I have tried to illustrate how conversion to evangelicalism does indeed produce

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‘radical change’ on the individual level, as evidenced by the conversion narratives presented, and on the social level with the creation of such indigenous, global religious institutions as the Embassy of God that act on agendas to deliver the Kingdom of God on earth by provoking ever more radical change in society. The ‘radical change’ of conversion ushers in a series of ongoing changes, often through new zones of contact opened up by missionary-motivated movement. Conversion restores order by realigning (an often flawed) past with a desired image of the future and by offering stability in the face of social upheaval. In this way, ‘radical change’ serves the purpose of renewal through transformation. It promises to be the mechanism that will deliver other forms of desired mobility moving to close the gap between what is and what ought to be in a believer’s life. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, religious institutions, and evangelical communities in particular, have proven themselves to be among the most adept at shaping new identities and moralities by creating unique motivations for change that are realized through the act of converting. Allegiances form to global communities and their travelling cultures because they cater to the mobile self by remaining accessible whoever a believer might become and wherever a believer might go.

Notes

1. Research for this article was conducted between 2000 and 2005 and was supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Collaborative Research Fellowship, a Social Science Research Council International Migration Fellowship, and a grant from the National Research Council Twinning Program. I would like to thank the members of the Kennan Institute’s Multicultural Legacies Workshop, which was organized by Blair Ruble and Dominique Arel. In this workshop I developed an earlier version of this article that was published as ‘Explaining the Appeal of Evangelicalism’ in D. Arel and B. Ruble (eds), Rebounding Identities: The Politics of Identity in Russia and Ukraine (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). I also wish to acknowledge the participants of the Max Planck Institute’s workshop on ‘Conversion in Postsocialist Societies’ for stimulating discussions that enriched this article. I have also benefitted from ongoing conversations with Olha Filipova, Valentyna Pavlenko and Svitlana Shlipchenko. 2. For a contrast of how legal reform in Ukraine has shaped the religious landscape differently than it has in Russia, see Wanner (2004). The adoption of certain laws either allows or thwarts the creation of new social institutions that, in turn, foster cultural differences in values and practices between Ukrainians and other former Soviet citizens. In other words, legal reform is the catalyst that has triggered sweeping changes in multiple domains. 3. Pelkmans (2006) analyzes how the Orthodox Church in Georgia benefits from its close association with the Georgian nation and how this has had an impact on a borderland region where Muslim communities have historically predominated. Islam places them outside the spiritual, cultural and civic concepts of national membership. 4. See Tataryn (2001) and Mitrokin (2001) for a full analysis of the political ramifications of the divergent statuses the Orthodox churches have come to assume in Ukraine and Russia. 5. José Casanova (1998) speculates that Ukraine is likely to go the way of America, that is to say, that the religious landscape will become highly pluralistic and this pluralism will generate competition among denominations for adherents, which will yield active communities, and ultimately high levels of religious participation. 6. An interdisciplinary research program on Global Pentecostalism at the VU University, Amsterdam uses the concept of ‘conversion career’ to depict the lifelong conversion experience Pentecostalism offers and its promises for ongoing change. See: http://pentecost.religionresearch.org. Retrieved: 26 June 2008.

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7. Serhii Plokhy (2003: 59) has argued convincingly that the fierce repression of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and its eventual outlawing in 1946 was primarily motivated by Stalin’s concerns that the Vatican might exert influence over post-Second World War reconstruction in Eastern European countries with significant Catholic minorities. The accusations of Nazi collaboration, of assisting the underground nationalist movement, and of overall sympathy to the nationalist project were, of course, additional factors that did not earn the Church favour in the Kremlin. 8. For an in-depth analysis of how Western religious organizations and evangelical doctrine have been adapted to the ecology of conversion after the collapse of the USSR, see Wanner (2007). 9. Malcolm Ruel analyses how the understanding of belief has evolved over time among Christians. He argues that the use of the term ‘believer’, as I am indicating Ukrainians employ it, is indeed the earliest meaning of Christian belief. This understanding of belief and of being a believer, he argues, has evolved in a highly individualistic way to where ‘Belief as doctrine has almost become the honest opinion of anyone who declares himself to be a Christian’ (2002: 109). 10. There are other reasons for the overall preference for a general term such as ‘believer’ or ‘Christian’. Especially during the Soviet period, many communities had home churches or met in a church of a related denomination. Although there were meaningful doctrinal differences among categories of believers – such as Baptists, Evangelical Christians and Pentecostals – there was extensive intermarriage among members and considerable denominational switching, often driven more by circumstances than by choice, further diluting the meaning of the denominational differences among evangelical faiths in the region (Savinskii 2001; Sawatsky 1981; Fletcher 1985). 11. Quoted from the SEND website: www.send.org/ukraine/lives.htm. Retrieved 26 June 2008. 12. This strategy proved tremendously successful in Latin America. Initially, North Americans missionized there with little success. After the Second World War, the loci of proselytizing shifted to locals evangelizing other locals. The result of this shift has been dramatic. Especially in Guatemala and Brazil, evangelicals are mounting a formidable challenge to the historic dominance of Catholicism in the region (Poewe 1994). 13. Sunday Adelaja also incurred the wrath of Ukrainian authorities. Efforts to deport him from Ukraine, however, were definitively blocked by thirty-one members of the Ukrainian Supreme Soviet who intervened on this behalf. They petitioned the State Committee for Religious Affairs in protest against the way Adelaja was treated by the Ministry of Interior Affairs. Leonid Chernovet’skyi, former president Leonid Kravchyk, and former prime minister Yevhen Zviahil’skyi signed these petitions. Adelaja’s growing and increasingly vocal following also took to the streets in protest. In 2004 Pastor Sunday Adelaja was granted permanent resident status. 14. The overall trends in Pentecostalism have affected churches in Ukraine and Nigeria in a similar way. Older Pentecostal churches in Ukraine and Nigeria emphasized a doctrine of antimaterialism, and were anti-state and anti-media. They appealed primarily to disadvantaged individuals and social groups. Newer churches in both countries prominently reinsert themselves into the ‘world’ and offer a doctrine of ‘morally controlled materialism’ as revealed in the gospel of prosperity. Not surprisingly, such themes exert far broader appeal among the more affluent and have expanded the socio-economic profiles of church membership in both countries. 15. All quotes from L.M. Chernovet’skyi are cited from an interview published in the Embassy of God’s own magazine. This particular issue doubled as a ten-year anniversary commemorative publication. V. Chernets, ‘L.M. Chernovet’skyi: Blagodaria Bogy…’ Posol 1(2004), 6–7. 16. Chernovet’skyi did indeed create such a party and in the spectacular elections of 2004 he was its presidential candidate. In the run-off elections between Viktor Yushchenko and Viktor Yanukovych, Chernovet’skyi threw his support – and by extension that of his voters and a large part of the membership of the Embassy of God – to Viktor Yushchenko, the eventual winner in the Orange Revolution election. 17. Gediminas Lankauskas’s (2002) study of evangelical communities in Lithuania illustrates this point with his focus on the choice of beverage at wedding ceremonies: traditional Lithuanian spirits, with their concurrent rituals, or the Western imported Coca-Cola of tea total evangelicals. In spite of widespread nationalist sentiment, grounded in part in Catholicism, many young people are choosing to embrace a religious ideology, such as evangelicalism, that promotes values and practices seen as ‘modern’ and which are predicated on a rejection of the traditional.

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Anderson, R. 1979. Vision of the Disinherited. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Burdick, J. 1993. Looking for God in Brazil: The Progressive Catholic Church in Urban Brazil’s Religious Arena. Berkeley: University of California Press. Casanova, J. 1998. ‘Between Nation and Civil Society: Ethnolinguistic and Religious Pluralism in Independent Ukraine’, in R. Hefner (ed.) Democratic Civility: The History and Cross-Cultural Possibility of a Modern Political Ideal. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 203–28. Clifford, J. 1997. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Finke, R. and R. Stark. 2000. Acts of Faith: Exploring the Human Side of Religion. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fletcher, W.C. 1985. Soviet Charismatics: The Pentecostals in the USSR. New York: Peter Lang. Giddens, A. 1990. The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Johnson, P.C. 2007. Diaspora Conversions: Black Carib Religion and the Recovery of Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press. Johnstone, P. and J. Mandryk (eds). 2001. Operation World. Waynesboro, GA: Paternoster Publishing. Lancaster, R. 1988. Thanks to God and the Revolution: Popular Religion and Class Consciousness in the New Nicaragua. New York: Columbia University Press. Landkauskas, G. 2002. ‘On “Modern” Christians, Consumption, and the Value of National Identity in Post-Soviet Lithuania’, Ethnos 67(3): 320–44. Marone, J. 2005. ‘Protestants in Power’, Ukrainian Observer 57(6): 24–7. Marshall-Fratani, R. 2001 ‘Mediating the Global and Local in Nigerian Pentecostalism’, in A. Corten and R. Marshall-Fratani (eds), Between Babel and Pentecost: Transnational Pentecostalism in Africa and Latin America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 80–105. Martin, D. 1990. Tongues of Fire: The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America. Oxford: Blackwell. ––––. 2002. Pentecostalism: The World Their Parish. Oxford: Blackwell. Meyer, B. 2004. ‘Christianity in Africa: From African Independent to Pentecostal-Charismatic Churches’, Annual Review of Anthropology 33: 447–74. Mitrokin, N. 2001. ‘Aspects of the Religious Situation in Ukraine’, Religion, State and Society 29(3): 173–96. Pelkmans, M. 2006. Defending the Border: Identity, Religion, and Modernity in the Republic of Georgia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Plokhy, S. 2003 ‘In the Shadow of Yalta: International Politics and the Soviet Liquidation of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church’, in F. Sysyn and S. Plokhy (eds), Religion and Nation in Modern Ukraine. Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies. Poewe, K. (ed.) 1994. Charismatic Christianity as Global Culture. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Rambo, L.R. 1993. Understanding Religious Conversion. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Ranger, T. 1987. ‘Religion, Development and African Christian Identity’, in K. Holst Petersen (ed.), Religion, Development and African Identity. Uppsala: Scandanavian Institute of African Studies. Robbins, J. 2007. ‘Continuity Thinking and the Problem of Christian Culture: Belief, Time and the Anthropology of Christianity’ Current Anthropology 48(1): 5–38. Ruel, M. 2002. ‘Christians as Believers’, in M. Lambek (ed.) A Reader in the Anthropology of Religion. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 99-113. Savinskii, S.N. 2001. Istoriia Evangel’skikh Khristian – Baptistov Ukrainy, Rossii, Belorussii (1917–1967). St Petersburg: Biblia dlia Vsekh. Sawatsky, W. 1981. Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II. Scottdale, PA: Herald Press. Tataryn, M. 2001. ‘Russia and Ukraine: Two Models of Religious Liberty and Two Models for Orthodoxy’, Religion, State and Society 29(3): 155–72.

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Wanner, C. 2003 ‘Advocating New Moralities: Conversion to Evangelicalism in Ukraine’, Religion, State and Society 31(3): 273–87. ––––. 2004. ‘Missionaries of Faith and Culture: Evangelical Encounters in Ukraine’, Slavic Review 63(4): 732–55. ––––. 2006. ‘Money, Morality and New Forms of Exchange in Postsocialist Ukraine’, Ethnos 70(4): 515–37. ––––. 2007. Communities of the Converted: Ukrainians and Global Evangelism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Chapter 10

POSTSOCIALISM, POSTCOLONIALISM, PENTECOSTALISM J.D.Y. Peel We live in a world of expanded limits and in an age that we are no longer certain how to categorize. Our use of terms like ‘postsocialism’ and ‘postcolonialism’ (like several other ‘posts’) indicates our reluctance to give a positive definition to the character of our age, and suggests that we may have finally thrown off a notion that has been basic to Western social theory since the Enlightenment, namely that the salient features of every age can be best made intelligible in terms of its place in an evolutionary sequence of stages leading to a determinate climax. Now at last it seems to be goodbye to all that – or at least seems so to those who prefer to pluralize the age as one of ‘modernities’. It is outside the West that the most definite conceptions are now entertained of what modernity is, along with the aspiration to progress in that direction. The concept of ‘late capitalism’ – a last echo of the Marxist variant of social-evolutionary thought, absurd because it implies a time schedule which only makes sense within the terms of a historicism which is ostensibly disclaimed – has given way to ‘neo-liberalism’, a less tendentious way of characterizing our age. While neo-liberalism’s primary reference is economic, to the hegemony of the free market, it is also usefully suggestive of other freedoms, particularly (in this context) of religion in formerly socialist states, where a plurality of competing faiths has largely replaced states’ attempts to control, monopolize or eliminate the expression of religious belief. With the removal of many of the previous barriers to the circulation of religious messages, the activities of transnational religious organizations have burgeoned. State socialism fancied itself as post-religious; postsocialism has seen the revival of religion. In that respect the Soviet bloc, whose historic aim had been to blaze an entirely different trail for the social evolution of humanity, has rejoined most of the rest of the contemporary world, though in a very different situation from the one in which it left it. The opening up of the former Soviet bloc to new religious influences has occurred at a time when, owing to religious developments elsewhere in the world,

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transnational flows of religious influence have become much more polycentric and multi-directional than we have hitherto thought of them. Catherine Wanner presents a particularly striking instance of this: When a Nigerian opens a church in Ukraine that sends Ukrainian believers to the U.S., Germany and elsewhere to save the unsaved and church the unchurched, it is no longer a case of core exerting influence on the periphery. Rather the interconnections and the cultural flow of ideas, objects and people are also significant among non-Western regions and from the so-called Second and Third Worlds to the First.

What she describes as occurring in Kyiv is an entirely novel conjuncture of religious currents, of the postsocialist and the postcolonial. A fuller account of the Nigerian background will open the way to a fuller appreciation of the paradoxical way in which the postcolonial has here come to the postsocialist world. The founder of the Ukrainian Pentecostal Church known as the Embassy of God is a Nigerian, Pastor Sunday Adelaja, who came to the Soviet Union as a student (like many Nigerians before him) in 1989. His name tells us he is not just a Yoruba, but an Ijebu. The Ijebu are one of the most distinctive of the Yoruba sub-groups, living in a cluster of towns once organized in an ancient kingdom in the close hinterland of Lagos, Nigeria’s largest city and former capital. They were conquered by the British in 1892 in order to break their stranglehold on the trade route that ran from Lagos to the interior; but after the conquest (having previously excluded missionaries) many Ijebu embraced the world religions – both Islam and Christianity – with alacrity (Peel 1977; Ayandele 1992). Now it so happens that there was an earlier Pastor Adelaja, a trader who migrated in the 1920s to Kano in northern Nigeria. He was active in a prayer circle called Faith Tabernacle and later played a key role in the establishment of Nigeria’s first independent Pentecostal church, the Christ Apostolic Church (Peel 1968: 87, 111). It is almost certain that his father was one of those who became a Christian – very likely an Anglican – in the great wave of Ijebu conversion after the conquest of 1892. Pastor Adelaja of Kyiv may or may not be the grandson of Pastor Adelaja of Kano, for Adelaja is not an uncommon name. But if we imagine he was, we have a hypothetical patriline of four generations which encapsulates the whole history of Ijebu Christianity as it developed over the colonial and postcolonial periods: the early convert to evangelical Anglicanism in the wake of the British conquest; his son who left Ijebu as a trader to northern Nigeria and joined one of the new independent Aladura (or ‘praying’) churches, a man whose life-span fell entirely within the colonial period; a putative grandson, whose life must have spanned the rise of nationalism and the early decades of independence; and fourth in line, Sunday Adelaja himself. This fourth Adelaja came to adulthood in a grim period of Nigeria’s history, one of corrupt military rule and chronic economic mismanagement. It was also marked by new levels of religious enthusiasm – for ‘born-again’ or neoPentecostal Christianity and for newly reformist and politically engaged forms of

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Islam – and by the growing public saliency of religion, extending to episodes of violent conflict (Falola 1998; Marshall 2006). The sequence that runs from the missionary evangelicalism to which Adelaja I converted, through Adelaja II’s adoption of an independent Christianity which turned Pentecostal in the 1930s, to culminate in the globally-oriented born-again Christianity of Adelaja IV represents, not just a consistent religious trajectory, but a series of mediated responses to the colonial and postcolonial experiences of Nigeria. The lift-off of neo-Pentecostal Christianity in Nigeria, as in many other countries, is linked to the deepening crisis of the postcolonial state from the mid 1970s onwards, though it is not to be reduced to it. Historically, most mission has gone from the ‘advanced’, richer and more central society to the ‘backward’, poorer and more peripheral one, so what is the import of mission going the other way? The Adelaja sequence shows that Yoruba Pentecostalism, despite its American ancestry, still stands in an orthogenetic local tradition in Nigeria now going back more than a century. How then can Pentecostalism, seemingly more than any other new religion, manage to graft itself so successfully into a society such as that of Ukraine, with an ancient Christian tradition to which it seems radically exotic, or into diverse other local cultures in the former Soviet Union? Far-reaching questions are raised here about both society and religion. What is it about the postsocialist situation – really a range of situations, as the diverse studies in this book have shown – that creates needs and opportunities to which Pentecostalism has so widely been such a cogent response? What is it about Pentecostalism that has enabled it to offer this solution, and so become such a remarkable bridge between peoples in such diverse social contexts?

Katherine Verdery (2002: 15–21) has already made a strong case for bringing the study of postsocialist and postcolonial societies together, essentially on the empirical basis that there has now come about ‘the full incorporation of both the former colonies and the former socialist bloc into a global capitalist economy’ (ibid.: 18). While that perception is cogent enough, it is still worth reminding ourselves that the ‘globalization’ which is everywhere spoken of today is neither so novel nor so essentially economic as this might be taken to imply. Socialism, an ideology of economic organization before it became anything else, was initially a response to the emergence of capitalism as a systematic material reality in the late eighteenth century. Whereas the socialist Internationals were a response to the global outreach of capitalism from the late nineteenth century, the most prominent religious Internationals of our own day – Catholic, Muslim and Pentecostal – are based on universalist faiths that do not just rest on specific theological assumptions, but are inspired by historical traditions reaching back to the empires of classical antiquity. (Let us not forget that the Soviet Third International was in a sense the legatee of Holy Russia’s claim to be the Third Rome). The European colonial empires of the twentieth century were not able to stop socialist ideas entering the late colonial world as part of anti-colonial ideology and becoming a major theme of African and Asian nationalism. Yet

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despite this influence from the Second to the Third World, it is still essential – particularly in the light of later religious convergences – to begin by drawing out the differences between the African colonial world and the Soviet Eurasian world, as regards the relations between socialism, nationalism and religion. In the USSR there was a full-blooded state socialism and, among its many constituent communities, a number of ancient and coherent nations. Marxism had always seen the proletariat as the universal class which transcended the boundaries of nation (though it could regard certain nationalisms as situationally progressive and give them conditional and pragmatic support).1 The policy of ‘socialism in one country’, adopted in the 1920s, entailed a certain reinterpretation of the internationalist ideal, in that the destinies of the universal class were now seen as contingently aligned with those of the Russian state, but other nationalisms were still regarded as potentially dangerous and reactionary. Stalin’s nationalities policy – the limited recognition of nations as entities within the overarching Soviet state, the folklorification of national cultural forms, and so on – was intended to neutralize nationalism, and for a long time seemed to have succeeded in doing so. But the Soviet Union’s collapse rapidly led to a renewed assertion of national identities, often with religion as an integral part of their expression. African states, by contrast, were in nearly all cases externally imposed by the colonial powers, and rarely had any significant link with any pre-existing indigenous ‘nation’ (of which few can be said to have existed). African ‘nationalism’ was a movement led by educated colonial subjects to take control of these states from the metropolitan ruling cadres, but it was undertaken in the name of the mass of colonial subjects, whom the nationalist elite’s claim to represent rested more on shared racial, than on cultural, identity. It was by a kind of courtesy that these states, upon their independence in the 1960s, were referred to as ‘nation states’ or ‘new nations’, as if political independence was itself enough to create nationhood. In fact the nationalist leaders who came to power at independence were intensely aware of just how weak their nations were, how prone to faction and fission based on ethnic and regional loyalties. So in Africa, socialism, far from being threatened by nationalism – in some form it was professed by most nationalist leaders - was seen as part of the answer to the weakness of the nation. This was so in two respects. Firstly, it gave legitimacy to the single-party states which became widespread in Africa in the decade or so after independence as the best means for forging the nation in a collective march towards political and economic development. In this, Eastern Europe seemed to offer an attractive model, and the USSR exploited this in its bid for African allies for its own Weltpolitik. The other appeal of socialism, more particularly ‘African socialism’, was that it enabled the African past, with its communal values, lack of private property in land and supposed classlessness, to be seen as a springboard to the future. Few things are more consoling than to believe that an aspired-to future – a developed nation – is somehow prefigured in the past. But in reality the weak nations of Africa exhibited a weak, largely rhetorical form of socialism. Paradoxically it was more about building up a new post-independence class based on political access than about demolishing old classes based on control of the means of production (Bayart 1993, Cooper 2002).

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The key comparative question to be asked is: how did religion stand in relation to the two other great ideologies, socialism and nationalism, as between the two regions? Marxist-Leninist dogma objected to religion on two distinct grounds: firstly, that it was offensive to scientific reason and so a source of backwardness; and secondly, because it served to legitimize the position of the ruling class. So in the Soviet Union religion was at the worst suppressed, though on occasion or in certain circumstances it had to be tolerated or could be used by the regime to its own ends, mainly because of its linkage with particular ethnic or national interests. Things were very different in colonial Africa There was little general antipathy to religion on the first of these grounds: firstly, because spiritual forces were generally regarded (by elites as well as by the masses) as governing the real conditions of existence and so compelled respect (Ellis and ter Haar 2004); and secondly, because Christianity – I shall here leave Islam out of consideration – was so strongly linked with modern education that it was more plausibly regarded as a force for progress rather than for reaction. It was only during nationalist mobilization, continuing into the period of postcolonial ‘socialism’, that many elites (despite the fact that most of them had had a mission education) came to feel distinctly ambivalent about Christianity, because it was seen as having legitimated colonialism. Yet it was rare for this feeling to be extended to independent African churches, still less to a generalized antagonism to religion as such.

These generalizations are best made concrete through a consideration of three countries that constitute varying degrees of exception to them, on account of their having tried most seriously to emulate the Soviet socialist model: Benin, Mozambique and Ethiopia. I shall consider them in sequence from the least to the most like the situation of Soviet Russia. Benin (the former French colony of Dahomey) stands closest to the African norm, in that it had no European settlers and gained independence in 1960 without a violent anti-colonial struggle. It was a society which had both a traditional religion of great tenacity – the source of Haitian voodoo – and the most educated elite of French West Africa, through the efforts of Catholic missions. A decade of extreme political instability, arising from acute ethno-regional factionalism played out against a deepening economic crisis, resulted in a coup in 1972 which brought to power Colonel Mathieu Kérékou. In 1974 – significantly at the place where the last king of Dahomey had surrendered to the French, for this was about nationalism before it was about socialism – Kérékou declared Marxism-Leninism to be the ideology of the state. Yet the superficiality of Benin’s socialism – in popular humour it was mordantly known as Laxisme-Béninisme – expressed the absence of the social structures and historical experiences which are needed to give weight to a revolutionary agenda. Its coercive, incorporative statism was always more apparent than real, with the Roman Catholic Church, easily the largest and most powerful institution of civil society, the obvious prime target. While the takeover of Church schools was understandable for a regime that saw itself as committed to ‘scientific socialism’, it is some measure of how shallow and desperate this project soon became that it adopted Vodun as the state religion: a

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gesture of nationalism because a cultural rebuff to the Church. Yet the Church kept its grassroots support, and as the regime staggered to its end in the late 1980s, its social strength made it the only force which could chair the National Conference which paved the way for a return to multi-party politics in 1991. Kérékou lost the election, despite announcing that he had become a born-again Christian, but was re-elected in 1996, one of the great survivors of African politics (Strandsbjerg 2000). Since the 1990s, under a democracy renewed ‘at a chameleon’s pace’ (Banégas 2003), there has been a diverse resurgence of religions, from the neotraditionalism of the irrepressible vodun cults to a Pentecostal boom, flooding in from Ghana and Nigeria along the coastal corridor with a message of modernity, rupture from the past, empowerment and openness to the world, especially to the ‘anglosphere’ (Mayrargue 2001). One Pentecostal quoted by Claffey drew a contrast between ‘a suffering Christianity as Francophone and Catholic... [and] his own, which he [saw] as American and Protestant with a strong emphasis on health, wealth and success’ (2007: 251). In Mozambique, colonialism began much earlier and lasted nearly twenty years longer than in most of Africa. Though the Portuguese first established coastal footholds in the sixteenth century, and created settler estates up the Zambezi valley in the seventeenth, the colony did not assume its modern form till the end of the nineteenth. Portugal being one of the poorest countries of Western Europe, its colonialism was correspondingly archaic and undercapitalized, relying heavily on forced labour and the supply of contract labour to South Africa. In accord with Salazar’s right-wing dictatorship (1926–1974), the Catholic Church was a key ideological mainstay in all Portugal’s colonies and held a privileged position in the field of African education. As a result the nationalist leadership (much of it drawn from Protestant mission schools) was markedly anti-clerical. Further radicalized by Portuguese political intransigence, FRELIMO turned to armed struggle. Independence only came in 1975, after disaffection among the Portuguese military had spread to Lisbon and led to the overthrow of the Salazar regime. In 1977, amid the economic wreckage from years of war, FRELIMO adopted Marxism-Leninism, and measures against religion as superstitious and counter-revolutionary followed: churches closed, activities banned, missionaries excluded, property confiscated (Morier-Genoud 1996). There ensued more than a decade of civil war against regional and other opponents, backed by white South Africa; but before it ended in 1992, FRELIMO had abandoned socialism for the World Bank’s prescriptions. The establishment of a free market in religions had occurred some years earlier, resulting in a phenomenal growth in Pentecostalism, in particular. In this, southern Mozambique was much subject to influences from South Africa; the refugee camps were fertile terrain for the propagation of charismatic religion; and the lusophone connection prepared the way for the entry of dynamic groups of Brazilian origin, notably the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, reputedly the largest Pentecostal church in the world (Freston 2005).2 Our third case, Ethiopia, comes closest to the Soviet paradigm. Here was an ancient sacred monarchy closely bonded with an Orthodox Church that was the

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cornerstone of national identity. These institutions rested upon a material base more characteristic of Eurasia than of the rest of sub-Saharan Africa: namely a plough-based agriculture and a ‘feudal’ class structure, where landlords held estates under service–tenure from the emperor and took rents from peasants (Goody 1971). In the nineteenth century the core Christian kingdom not only beat off European colonialism, but engaged in imperial expansion itself, bringing under its sway a vast area to the east and south, ethnically very diverse and overwhelmingly non-Christian in religion. The revolution of 1974 was the work of a radicalized intelligentsia (extending into the army) that, disgusted with the failure of Emperor Haile Selassie’s attempt at a form of conservative modernization, saw a Marxist-Leninist command state as the only solution to the country’s backwardness. Its own mistakes (particularly in the agrarian sector), natural catastrophe, and the draining effect of war against Eritrean secessionism kept the regime – known as the Derg or revolutionary council – in fairly permanent crisis, despite Soviet aid and backing. When this faltered in 1989, the socialist experiment was abandoned and the Derg collapsed in 1991, a pendant to the final debacle of state socialism in the USSR. The vicissitudes of religion in the trajectory of Ethiopian socialism have been brilliantly analysed by Donald Donham (1999), from the perspective of one of the southern, peripheral regions of Ethiopia, Maale.3 Though the Orthodox Church reached Maale as part of the structure of imperial overrule in the 1890s, its local impact was minimal, and Christianity made slow progress until the Sudan Interior Mission (SIM) started to make significant numbers of converts in the 1950s. The great irony was that, while the SIM had originated in Canada as a fundamentalist ‘faith’ mission strongly opposed to the liberal Protestantism of the day – and to that extent was anti-modern – in Maale it became the very epitome of local modernization (and as such opposed to the Orthodox Church, which seemed both reactionary and a tool of alien control). As a result, when the revolution spread from the Ethiopian heartland, the young converts of the SIM were naturally its first allies in Maale. But a few years later, when the Derg was forced into defensive turmoil by Somalia’s invasion of the Ogaden, it sought to consolidate national morale and its own legitimacy by reversing its policy of hostility to the Church (in a manner strongly reminiscent of Stalin’s rehabilitation of the Russian Orthodox Church during the straits of the Second World War). Then, in line with the replacement of the USA by the USSR as Ethiopia’s major foreign ally and arms supplier, a further shift in the regime’s religious alignment took place: Protestant churches of North American origin (so recently local supporters of the revolution!) found themselves stigmatized as anti-revolutionary, fellow-travellers of imperialism and capitalism, foreigners who ‘rejected the nation and the revolution’ (ibid.: 144–5). It is interesting that they were also labelled as Pentecostals or ‘pentes’, even though none of the major missions such as the SIM or the Lutherans was Pentecostal, and there were as yet very few Pentecostal missionaries. Only in 1967 was Ethiopia’s first Pentecostal Church founded, among students in Addis Ababa, though the imperial government refused to recognize it. But the Derg rightly divined its

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ominous potential, a straw in the wind which would blow strongly after Ethiopia was liberalized in the 1990s. There are now estimated to be several million Pentecostals in Ethiopia.4 So the soft socialism which usually accompanied African nationalism turned in a handful of cases into a much harder kind when hopes for national development faltered in the 1970s. The weaknesses of the Soviet model were not yet apparent, and the geopolitics of the cold war created opportunities. But there was another predisposing condition, which points the way to appreciating how religion fitted into both the rise, and the demise, of these socialist regimes. The more a regime is founded on an integral bond between the nation state and a single church or religion, the more likely it will be that, if that regime is challenged or overthrown, it will be replaced by an alternative of the left which mirrors its integralist character, but with an inverted, anti-religious content. So, strongly Catholic or Orthodox national regimes, like Spain or Russia, were much more likely to generate anti-clerical attitudes and vigorous communist movements than Protestant regimes were, whether the latter had state churches of near-universal membership along Scandinavian lines or a high degree of religious pluralism like Great Britain and (to an even greater extent) the United States. Something of the same correlation also occurs in Africa, when we contrast exBritish colonies, none of which – not even the most left-wing ones, like Tanzania or Ghana under Nkrumah – took its socialism to the extreme of MarxismLeninism, with the three countries we have considered. For British colonies tended to have more missions operating in them, missionaries of more diverse national origins and a higher proportion (if not a majority) of Protestants – all making for a more plural religious scene – than French or Portuguese colonies did, and a fortiori than a country like Ethiopia. Moreover, this pluralism, besides being unpropitious for the emergence of an anti-religious socialism, was also the best climate in which Pentecostalism might take root and flourish. Late fruit of the evangelical revival, Pentecostalism first arose in the most plural of all religious contexts, the United States, and soon after in the more peripheral regions of Protestant northern Europe. Unsurprisingly, it found its first African foothold in English-speaking milieus like South Africa and British West Africa (Nigeria and Ghana) in the first two or three decades of the twentieth century.5 But in countries outside the anglosphere like Benin, Mozambique and Ethiopia – to say nothing of the countries of the former Soviet bloc – a turn to Pentecostalism after Marxism-Leninism represented a radical change of cultural direction.

The sociological explanation of religious change consists largely of showing the fit between the demands of a novel social situation and the potential of a religious tradition. Or, if this sounds too functionalist, it is about why and how answers to the predicaments that people newly find themselves in are drawn from particular traditions. Before we ask why Pentecostalism has been so widely taken as the answer to the predicaments of the present age, it is worth emphasizing the link between the extraordinary diversity of the situations to which Pentecostalism has

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answered and (what has made this possible) the extremely protean quality of Pentecostalism itself. Simply on the basis of examples from the papers presented in this volume (and at the preceding Halle conference), Pentecostalism and closely related forms of evangelical Christianity have made significant headway in at least four quite different kinds of settings in the former Soviet bloc: firstly, among Roma or Gypsies in Eastern Europe; secondly, among some peoples of the northern peripheral regions, such as the Nenets and Chukchi; thirdly, on a small scale, among some Muslim peoples of Central Asia, such as Uighurs and Kyrgyz; and fourthly, the Embassy of God in the heart of Ukraine. There could hardly be more variety here – in prior religion, cultural context, rural or urban location, mode of life, political placement. So what accounts for the extraordinary range of Pentecostalism’s appeal? We might see grounds for the adoption (or rejection) of a new religion or church in terms of two very general criteria of religious value.6 The first is that potential converts must feel that its message expresses the reality of things: what we may call its truth value. The second is that they must regard the identity conferred by joining the new religion to be compatible with what they feel or want themselves to be, in relation to other identities, especially communal, ethnic or national ones: what we may call its identity value. In stable religious situations truth and identity values are likely to be in accord, and in periods of steady adaptive change, truth values may be adjusted without identity values being undermined. In times of crisis, the truth value of a religion is perhaps most likely to be first called into question, and if conversions to a ‘truer’ religion result, it may create tensions with existing identities. This was often the case with early Christian converts in Africa who thereby became estranged from their communities, resulting in an agenda for the Africanization of Christianity. On the other hand, it was often those whose identity attachments had been undermined – by being sold into slavery, for example – who were most responsive to the preaching of Christian ‘truth’. As long as communities (and the identities they sustained) remained viable, prosperous, unchallenged by defeat or natural disaster, they were likely to remain content with the ‘truth’ that they had. Pentecostalism now goes back a century; and the wide variety of forms it now exhibits is ample proof of the adaptability of its basic themes.7 Its core truth has always been its vision of the self as reborn and empowered through the Holy Spirit, as described in the charter biblical narrative of Acts 2. Bible and Spirit are indeed the two cornerstones of the movement, and many of its current tensions and options can be seen in terms of the emphasis distributed between impulses that flow from either of them. Pentecostalism’s first constituency in America was drawn from poor, recently rural people, both white and black, experiencing the dislocations of urban life in a fast-developing capitalist economy. The ‘fundamentalism’ of its use of the Bible as a source of validation came out of a long tradition of popular evangelicalism. But its great innovation was to complement the ascetic disciplines of Protestant morality with a lively sense of the corporeal gifts of the Spirit. These ranged from the ecstasy of speaking in tongues (which was the main thing immediately distinctive of the new

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movement), to divine healing, prophecy, the casting out of evil spirits, efficacious prayer and the possibility of miracles. In effect this new orientation represented a fusion of two distinct strands within American religion: the perennial thisworldliness of African belief mediated through African-American practice, and the new acceptance within Protestantism at large of wealth, health and happiness as legitimate rewards of faith. Finally (and somewhat paradoxically in the light of the last point), a kick of urgency was given to the new teachings by a fresh wave of millennial expectancy. This repertory of themes proved highly flexible in application, enabling Pentecostalism both to connect with the aspirations of diverse audiences and to move with the times. Its two sides, the scriptural and the pneumatic, enabled members to strike a variable balance between discipline and ecstasy, mobility and adjustment, as their particular circumstances required. Because the gifts of the Spirit might be variably construed in terms of intrinsic or expressive rewards and of external or instrumental ones, Pentecostalism could connect both with the selfimprovement techniques of popular psychology and with rituals to exorcise evil spirits that block one’s progress. Though ‘an option for and of the poor’8 – which still remains a fair characterization of the bulk of its adherents across the world – Pentecostalism has never encouraged class ressentiment; nor has it worked to reconcile the poor to their poverty, but rather to empower them within it so that they might move up out of it. So, sidestepping Marxism’s strategy of class-action, it has facilitated social mobility, initially of individuals, but also (especially where adopted by ethnic minorities or in peripheral regions) collective self-enhancement. Pentecostalism soon started to move up in the world. By 1950, it was no longer solely a religion of the poor and marginal: it had risen with the growth in population and wealth of its American heartland in the South and West, and some churches were acquiring fine buildings and facilities. Of the various doctrinal developments of the following decades, none was more telling than the so-called ‘faith gospel’, also known as the ‘gospel of prosperity’, which was reciprocally related to this growth: it both appealed to members’ material aspirations and generated large revenues for Church expansion. To the small, egalitarian congregations of earlier days were added a number of mega-churches run by high-profile and wealthy charismatic preachers, prominent among whom were a handful of celebrity televangelists, for Pentecostalism had responded with alacrity to the new opportunities offered by the electronic media. The movement became more consciously identified with ‘American values’, and it entered into a phase of energetic transnational outreach and exchange: in Africa and Latin America, Pentecostal missionaries now far outnumbered those of mainstream denominations. Yet this was never a univocal or one-way process, never just a matter of ‘exporting the American Gospel’ (Brouwer, Gifford and Rose 1996), since Pentecostalism lends itself so readily to selective appropriation. In Africa, the 1970s saw a massive take-off of neo-Pentecostalism, initially in anglophone countries like Nigeria and Zimbabwe (Ojo 2006; Maxwell 2006; Marshall 2006), where it could build on an existing Pentecostal tradition going back many decades. Yet even though this depended on African initiatives, it adopted a markedly more international (which means in effect American) style. The economic

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and political backdrop of this – the crisis of the postcolonial state – was, of course, what had also led to the Marxist-Leninist turn in Benin, Mozambique and Ethiopia. Now that state socialism, as a form of political and economic organization, is exhausted, some variant of neo-liberalism is the only main course on the menu. Whereas Marxism-Leninism, like its integralist predecessors, aspired to a total social system and tried to generate its own cultural underpinnings – and when it came to religion, fell down badly – neo-liberalism can afford to be more eclectic. As a main course, it can be combined with cultural side dishes à la chinoise, islamique, russe or whatever, but it has to be said that few religions match its flavour better than Pentecostalism. As a product of the most demanding religious marketplace in the world, Pentecostalism is better able than most other religions to express the experiential ‘truth’ of the conditions in which people and communities in today’s world have to seek development. And this is also a practical truth, since Pentecostal churches, by their lifestyle teachings and social support systems, also do much to equip their members to survive – and in some cases to prosper – in the neo-liberal environment. Pentecostalism is also persuasive in another way that expresses the spirit of modernity. Compared with the two other great transnational movements of our day, Pentecostalism has nothing of Catholicism’s hierarchical structure, or of the central places of Islam and Catholicism, or a unifying ritual like the Muslim haj. Its unmistakable unity-in-diversity is realized through a dense, many-stranded, non-centred global network of exchanges, employing a distinct but ever-shifting stock of themes and motifs. This permits its participants both to feel their fellowship as part of a movement across which there is much sharing and borrowing, and to draw on this stock and to innovate as they respond to the demands being made in their part of the network. The unbounded and noncentred unity of global Pentecostalism strongly evokes the character of the Internet. Like the Internet, Pentecostalism bears many signs of its American origins, and America is where the mesh of exchanges within the whole system is at its densest. But despite its influence, America is not formally privileged as its centre: Pentecostals may look to it as the epitome of modernity, but not as others look to Rome or Mecca. Accepting the truth of Pentecostalism brings a new identity with it: indeed one might say that its truth and identity values fuse in the figure of the person who is born again through the Holy Spirit. This self-defining experience serves to mark off the born-again, in two dimensions: from their own past and from other individuals who are not reborn. Clearly, any act of individual conversion implies some degree of dissatisfaction with the personal past, as well as a readiness both to break from it and to associate with a new group of people: an act of both severance and attachment. In Pentecostalism’s early days, the wider identity implications of this were limited, in two respects. Firstly, the born-again came from the same Protestant American milieu as the unregenerate, and – in so far as they had a wider message – it was largely to re-call them to ‘traditional’ values they had neglected. Secondly, Pentecostalism was the product of a highly individualistic society, and its regeneration was not imagined as extending to society as a whole, merely to the

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aggregate of other born-again individuals. (In one widely-held Pentecostal belief the born-again are to be ‘raptured’ into heaven at the Apocalypse, leaving the mass of the unregenerate to their fate.) But when Pentecostalism went abroad, these two conditions were often not met, so the issue of how it would sit with other identities became more salient. In postcolonial and in postsocialist societies, it typically came as a religion bearing American attributes, with the promise of modernity and global mobility. At the same time, despite its appeal as a powerful vector of individualism (especially among the young), it was also often looked to as a vehicle of collective regeneration. So in Nigeria in recent years it has become commonplace for Pentecostal leaders to offer renewal, deliverance and prosperity to the nation, as if in reproach at the failure of the nationalist state to deliver the fruits of development (Marshall 2006; Ojo 2006). Now where a community is the focus of renewal, such that the Holy Spirit is anticipated to work its signs not just on the human body but also on the bodypolitic, the issue of the balance between rupture and continuity presents itself in a particularly acute form. For this implies that the community, by the very fact of its being worth renewal, is seen as a site of positive value. But since Pentecostal conversion rests on the conviction that the prevailing state of affairs is profoundly corrupt, there is inevitably a problem about how to reconcile the rupture that this implies with the continuing value that attaches to the communal identity of its potential converts. A resolution is not always easy to achieve, and the shifting and variable outcomes have led to some interpretive schizophrenia, at least in the literature on West African Pentecostalism. Some observers, following the common self-representations of Pentecostals, have perceived a radical rupture, ‘a complete break with the past’ (Meyer 1998), of which the demonization of ancestors and local spirits, and the provision of rituals of deliverance from them, are a conspicuous sign; while others have seen in the emphasis on healing and prosperity the strength of values drawn from ‘primal’ or traditional religion (Anim 2004; Gifford 2004). The concrete reality is always a mix, and it is a mix whose formula can only be worked out in situ. It is in the protean genius of Pentecostalism that it has so often enabled this to be done, that it can turn rupture into redemption. Several of the postsocialist cases illustrate ways in which the tensions between rupture and continuity might work themselves out.9 At one pole is the Embassy of God in Kyiv, an American-style mega-church like several other Nigerian ‘ministries’, that has succeeded in implanting itself as a genuinely Ukrainian movement: a singular achievement when one considers that such a church in London – of which there are several10 – would have been strongly tied to an AfroCaribbean constituency. Ukraine’s own tradition of religious pluralism was helpfully permissive, but the critical factor in the Embassy of God’s success was the way in which it linked its truth for individuals – its message of redemption from alcohol, drugs and other personal problems – with a cogent claim to share the identity of the new, democratic Ukraine, and to be a positive force in the rebuilding of its civil society. At the other pole stand the cases where Pentecostalism (or evangelical Baptism, which is close to it) has been taken up, not at the heart of a large historic

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nation but among marginalized ethnic minorities. Take the case of the Nenets. Here the tension between truth and identity presents itself more starkly, yet is resolved with a striking paradox. With the survival of much of the old shamanic worldview and the influence of Russian Orthodoxy largely erased by decades of official atheism, both face the challenge of reframing their identities after the collapse of the Soviet order. Laur Vallikivi describes the faith of Nenets Baptists (many of whom are ‘born-again’) in terms which recall the discourse of African Pentecostalism: ‘total transformation’, the old spirits pushed into a ‘demonic periphery’, the ‘negation of the past’, and so on. Yet he also characterizes their use of language in prayer as ‘represent[ing] at the same time continuity and rupture’ and ‘creating a clear continuance with the past’, in their conviction of the power of the Word in relations with the spiritual world.11 At the same time, the new faith serves both to integrate the Nenets into the wider society by its adoption of the Bible in Russian and to preserve their identity within it by a faith that stands in contrast to Russian Orthodoxy. One way in which rupture may be reconciled with continuity is through their placement at complementary levels, respectively individual and collective, as Ludek Broz shows in his account of evangelical Christians in the Altai Republic of south-west Siberia. Here, because the core truth value of evangelicalism lies in its promise of individual self-renewal, of liberation from an old life of sin and addictions like alcoholism, the theme of rupture from the past is most strongly evident in what Broz calls ‘personal narratives of discontinuity’. But while a new and foreign religion is well suited to being a vehicle of such personal liberation, the charge of alienness – which its rivals throw at it – is embarrassing; so it makes sense that evangelicals have responded by being warmly enthusiastic in their support for Altai language, music and customs. This is a claim to belong, through the assertion of continuity with the local cultural past. Here the evangelicals faced a problem similar to one that challenged the inculturation of Christianity in Africa. Though there was no indigenous Altai concept of ‘religion’, local identity was deeply bound in with practices that evangelical Christians could not but regard as ‘heathen’, such as some of the rituals involved in Chaga, the celebration of the New Year. As often in Africa the solution was to draw a novel distinction between what was ‘religion’ and what was ‘culture’, so that the latter could be embraced as part of Christian practice.12 Thus the demands of truth and identity might be reconciled in a specific blend of rupture and continuity. Of course, Pentecostalism does not always manage to achieve this elusive reconciliation, as Johannes Ries’s (2007) study of Pentecostalism among Transylvanian Gypsies shows. Of the two main components of the Gypsy population, the relatively privileged Corturari, who retain much more of Roma culture, have been impervious to the appeal of Pentecostalism, while it is the impoverished but culturally more assimilated Tsigani who have started to turn to it. Rupture would cost the Corturari too much by way of ethnic identity loss; by contrast, the cultural value attached to Tsigani identity has been so far eroded that Pentecostalism can offer the converts an altogether new kind of solidarity, as

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members of a trans-ethnic ‘family of God’. Elsewhere, other movements than Pentecostalism have met the yearnings of the postsocialist world, though it is notable how often they echo Pentecostal messages and have Pentecostal groups as their main competitors.

The range and flexibility of Pentecostalism have enabled it to put down roots in very diverse social contexts. The two very broad categories of context that I have considered here, the postsocialist and the postcolonial, though each of them is now the designation of a distinct academic sub-field, are themselves internally very heterogeneous as well as overlapping. In relation to the new religions which now flood across them, their main overarching feature is that they have both had to come to terms with the exigencies of the neo-liberal order. Behind that lies the failure of the state, whether (in the case of the former Soviet bloc) of longestablished socialist states; or (in the case of the African Marxist-Leninist countries) of postcolonial socialist regimes that barely lasted two decades; or of the majority of African former colonies, including the anglophone ones, which had adopted softer ‘African socialism’. When the crisis of the postcolonial state first hit Africa in the 1970s, there were two very different responses: a turn to Marxism in a handful of cases, and a dramatic surge of Pentecostalism on the other. Of course these cannot be seen as strictly analogous or alternative options, though it is significant that as responses they could not be combined. But when Marxism-Leninism’s failure became evident at the end of the 1980s, Pentecostalism was widely seen to be some kind of answer. But an answer to what, and what kind of answer? Religions just do not have viable answers to the problems of political and economic organization posed in today’s world, though some Muslims think they do, in the form of shariah law, Islamic economics and so forth (see Tripp 2006). But Pentecostalism is happy to leave this task to the engineers of neo-liberalism, and to complement it by fashioning subjectivities that enable individuals to make practical sense of the experiences of living in a world so organized. If the operational requirements of neo-liberalism are lessons that tend to flow from North to South or West to East (via agencies like the World Bank), the modes of experiential adaptation to it – of which, I have argued, Pentecostalism is one – now often move in other directions: South to North (or from the old Third to the old Second World), as from Nigeria to Ukraine; or South to South, as from Brazil to Southern Africa. This is not surprising, since experiential solutions have to take account not just of the objective external conditions but of the cultural personalities of those on whom the adaptation is imposed. In creating these transcontinental bridges, Pentecostalism has the great asset that, behind the Americanness of its expression, its ease with the electronic media, its modernity and its individualism, it is also the bearer of a much older religious ethos, concerned with healing, visionary guidance, the various ways in which the spirit may imprint on the flesh. This is what has enabled it so often to ‘click’ with newly-urbanized former peasants, or tribal populations caught in the peripheries of modern states, or transnational migrants in search of a better life, to achieve, in some cases,

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paradoxical combinations of the old and new or unexpected fusions of rupture and continuity.

Notes

1. See, for example, Marx’s letter to Engels of 23 May 1851, in which he condemns the Poles as a ‘doomed nation, to be used as a means until Russia itself is swept by the agrarian revolution’, but praises the capacity of Russian rule – despite ‘all its nastiness … all its Slavonic filth’ – to homogenize its diverse incorporated cultures (Avineri 1969: 447). A similar robust readiness to treat the morally odious as historically progressive marks his assessment of British rule in India: ‘actuated only by the vilest interests … [but] the unconscious tool of history’ (ibid.: 94). 2. I have learned much from the work of my Ph.D. student Julie Archambault, whose project on youth, culture and consumption in Mozambique is under way. 3. The story evokes several parallels with the experiences of the peripheral non-Russian peoples within the Soviet Union, such as the Nenets and Chukchi considered in Chapters 3 and 4 (this volume). 4. See: J. Haustein (2007) ‘Pentecostal and Charismatic churches in Ethiopia’, and ‘A brief history of Pentecostalism in Ethiopia’. Retrieved on 11 December 2008 from: http://www.glopent.net/ Members/jhaustein/ethiopia/pentecostal-and-charismatic-movements-in-ethiopia and http:// www.glopent.net/Members/jhaustein/ethiopia/brief-history-of-pentecostalism-in-ethiopia. 5. For an excellent overview of Pentecostalism’s rise in Africa, see Meyer (2004). 6. For this formulation I am indebted to the brilliant work of Crone and Cook (1977), especially Chapter 12. 7. On the relations between early Pentecostalism and its American background, see Wacker (2001). Maxwell (2006) is valuable on the early spread of Pentecostalism. Every student of Pentecostalism in the wider world is greatly indebted to the work of David Martin (1990, 2002), especially the earlier work, which ranges much more widely than Latin America. Useful too are Cox (1995) and Anderson (2004). A good recent anthropological study of the ‘prosperity gospel’ is Coleman (2000). 8. A phrase I think I have borrowed from David Martin, but neither he nor I can place its exact source. 9. The balance between rupture and continuity has recently become the focus of considerable debate within anthropology: see Robbins (2007), and the ensuing comments. 10. Notably Pastor Matthew Asimolowo’s Kingsway International Christian Centre, on which see Harris (2006: 218–38). 11. This is echoed in Mathijs Pelkmans’ judgement about Kyrgyz: ‘remarkable similarities between the world-view promoted by the [Pentecostal] Church of Jesus Christ and indigenous notions about spirits, as well as between Christian faith-healing and traditional Muslim healing’. 12. For Yoruba parallels, see Peel (2000: 288–304).

References

Anderson, A. 2004. An Introduction to Pentecostalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Anim, E. 2003. ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire? An Analysis of Prosperity Teaching in the Charismatic Ministries in Ghana’, Ph.D. dissertation. All Nations Christian College and The Open University. Avineri, S. 1969. Karl Marx on Colonialism and Modernization. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Ayandele, E.A. 1992. The Ijebu of Yorubaland 1850–1950: Politics, Economy and Society. Ibadan: Heinemann Educational Books. Banégas, R. 2003. La démocratie à pas de caméléon: Transition et imaginaires politiques au Bénin. Paris: Karthala. Bayart, J.-F. 1993. The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly. London: Longman.

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Brouwer, S., P. Gifford and S. Rose. 1996. Exporting the American Gospel: Global Christian Fundamentalism. New York: Routledge. Claffey, P. 2007. Christian Churches in Dahomey-Benin: A Study of their Socio-Political Role. Leiden: Brill. Coleman, S. 2000. The Globalisation of Charismatic Christianity: Spreading the Gospel of Prosperity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cooper, F. 2002. Africa since 1940: The Past of the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cox, H. 1995. Fire from Heaven: The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in the Twenty-first Century. New York: Da Capo Press. Crone, P. and M. Cook, 1977. Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Donham, D. 1999. Marxist Modern: An Ethnographic History of the Ethiopian Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ellis, S. and G. ter Haar. 2004. Worlds of Power: Religious Thought and Political Practice in Africa. London: Hurst. Falola, T. 1998. Violence in Nigeria: The Crisis of Religious Politics and Secular Ideologies. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. Freston, P. 2005. ‘The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God: A Brazilian Church Finds Success in Southern Africa’, Journal of Religion in Africa 35(1): 33–65. Gifford, P. 2004. Ghana’s New Christianity: Pentecostalism in a Globalising African Economy. London: Hurst. Goody, J. 1971. Technology, Tradition and the State in Africa. London: Oxford University Press. Harris, H. 2006. Yoruba in Diaspora: An African Church in London. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Marshall, R. 2006. ‘The Politics of Pentecostalism in Nigeria, 1975–2000’, D.Phil. dissertation. Oxford: University of Oxford. Martin, D. 1990. Tongues of Fire: The Explosion of Pentecostalism in Latin America. Oxford: Blackwell. ––––. 2002. Pentecostalism: The World Their Parish. Oxford: Blackwell. Maxwell, D. 2006. African Gifts of the Spirit: Pentecostalism and the Rise of a Zimbabwean Transnational Religious Movement. London: James Currey. Mayrargue, C. 2001. ‘The Expansion of Pentecostalism in Benin: Rationales and Transnational Dynamics’, in A. Corten and R. Marshall-Fratani (eds), Between Babel and Pentecost: Transnational Pentecostalism in Africa and Latin America. London: Hurst, 274–92. Meyer, B. 1998. ‘Make a Complete Break with the Past: Memory and Postcolonial Modernity in Ghanaian Pentecostalism’, in R. Werbner (ed.) Memory and the Postcolony. London: Zed, 182–208. ––––. 2004. ‘Christianity in Africa: From African Independent to Pentecostal-Charismatic Churches’, Annual Review of Anthropology 33: 447–74. Morier-Genoud, E. 1996. ‘Of God and Caesar: The Relation between Christian Churches and the State in Post-colonial Mozambique’, Le Fait Missionaire 3. http://www2.unil.ch/lefaitmissionnaire/ pdf_des_publi/lfm03-moriergenoud.pdf . Ojo, M. 2006. The End-Time Army: Charismatic Movements in Modern Nigeria. Trenton, NJ: Africa Research and Publications. Peel, J.D.Y. 1968. Aladura: A Religious Movement among the Yoruba. London: Oxford University Press. ––––. 1977. ‘Conversion and Tradition in Two African Societies: Ijebu and Buganda’, Past and Present 77: 108–41. ––––. 2000. Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Ries, J. 2007. ‘“I Must Love Them with all My Heart”: Pentecostal Mission and the Romani Other’, Anthropology of East Europe Review 2. Robbins, J. 2007. ‘Continuity Thinking and the Problem of Christian Culture: Belief, Time and the Anthropology of Christianity’, Current Anthropology 48(1): 5–38.

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Strandsbjerg, C. 2000. ‘Kérékou, God and the Ancestors: Religion and the Conception of Political Power in Benin’, African Affairs 99: 395–414. Tripp, C. 2006. Islam and the Moral Economy: The Challenge of Capitalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Verdery, K. 2002. ‘Whither Postsocialism?’ in C. Hann (ed.) Postsocialism: Ideals, Ideologies and Practices in Eurasia. London: Routledge, 15–21. Wacker, G. 2001. Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Ludek Broz is a post-doctoral Research fellow at the Siberian Studies Centre of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. He received Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge (2008). His main geographical areas of interest are Siberia and Inner Asia, especially the Altai Republic where he conducted his doctoral research in 2004-5. His theoretical interests include the interface between current science studies and the anthropology of religion, as well as contemporary kinship theory.

William Clark holds a Ph.D. from the University of Washington (1999). His dissertation analysed changes in family life among Uighurs in Western China. Since then he has been based in Almaty, Kazakhstan working as an anthropologist for Intimak, a local NGO. His work has appeared in Asian Ethnicity (2001) and Central Asian Survey (2004).

Jeffers Engelhardt, Assistant Professor at the Department of Music, Amherst College, is an ethnomusicologist whose research interests include music and religion (particularly Orthodox Christianity), music, human rights, and cultural rights, and the musics of postsocialist Eurasia and the Finno-Ugric world. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (2005). He is currently at work on a book-length ethnography of musical practices and Orthodox Christianity in Estonia and has published articles and reviews in Ethnomusicology, Journal of Baltic Studies, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, and Yearbook for Traditional Music. Gediminas Lankauskas is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Regina. He holds a BA from Vilnius University in Lithuania, a Master’s from Trent University, and a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. He was also a PostDoctoral Fellow at Concordia University in Montréal. His research interests include modernity, identity, consumption, as well as morality, religiosity, and social memory in Eastern Europe after socialism. His publications have appeared,in Ethnos, The Senses & Society, Anthropologie et sociétés, Lithuanian Ethnology, and Focaal: European Journal of Anthropology, among others.

J.D.Y. Peel has been Professor of Anthropology and Sociology with reference to Africa at the School of Oriental and African Studies since 1989. His main

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writings are Aladura: A Religious Movement among the Yoruba (1968), Herbert Spencer: The Evolution of a Sociologist (1971), Ijeshas and Nigerians (1983), and Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba (2000). He has twice received the Herskovits Award for African Studies and has been a Fellow of the British Academy since 1991.

Mathijs Pelkmans is Lecturer in Anthropology at the London School of Economics. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Amsterdam and worked as a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology from 2003 to 2006. Over the past ten years he has carried out extensive fieldwork in Georgia and Kyrgyzstan. He is the author of Defending the Border: Religion, politics, and modernity in the Georgian borderlands (2006) and has published on MuslimChristian relations, territorial borders, political turmoil, and postsocialist change.

Laur Vallikivi is Researcher at the University of Tartu (Estonia) and a Ph.D. candidate at Cambridge University. He has conducted extensive anthropological research since 1999 in Arctic Russia about issues pertaining to collectivization, reindeer herding, and missionary encounters. His MA thesis, ‘Arctic Nomads between Shamanism and Christianity: The Conversion of Yamb-To Nenets to Baptism’, won the student competition of the Estonian Academy of Sciences, and was subsequently published by Tartu University Press.

Virginie Vaté is a researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS, France) and member of the GSRL (Groupe Sociétés, Religions, Laïcités). From 2004 to 2007 she was a post-doctoral Research fellow at the Siberian Studies Centre of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. She has spent a total of three years in Chukotka, paying particular attention to the lives of reindeer herders. She completed her Ph.D. in anthropology in 2003 at University of Nanterre (Paris), on the issue of gender, ‘nature’ and rituals. Since 2004, her research focuses mostly on the issue of competing religious practices and conversion to Christianity.

Catherine Wanner is Associate Professor of History and Anthropology at the Pennsylvania State University. She holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University in cultural anthropology. To date, her research has focused on such issues as nationalism, religion, and Diaspora studies, specifically in Ukraine and more generally in the former Soviet Union. She is the author of Burden of Dreams: History and Identity in Post-Soviet Ukraine (1998) and Communities of the Converted: Ukrainians and Global Evangelism (2007) and co-editor of Religion, Morality and Community in Post-Soviet Societies (2008).

INDEX

Ak Jaŋ, 17–18, 25–33 history of, 23–24 literature on, 35n2 alcohol, 9, 81n21, 141 abstaining from, 67, 71, 122, 142n2, 154 ban on, 68 alcoholism, 9, 31, 50, 65, 117, 119, 141, 152, 154 and conversion, 31, 50, 79, 81n21, 121–22, 154, 194–95 rehabilitation, 140 Almaty, 129–35, 137–42 Altai, 6, 10, 17–32, 195 ancestors, 20, 194 deference toward, 51 figures representing, 71 spiritual practices of, 30, 49 ways of, 42, 49, 51, 53 anti–religious: campaigns, 60, 67 discourse, 60 policies, 5, 39, 66 propaganda, 27, 39 stance 95, 190 Asad, Talal, 6, 61, 77, 87, 111 atheism, 26, 90, 112, 117, 168, 195 atheist: discourse, 60, 78 policy, 48, 112 rule, 2, 73, 110–11, 123 worldview, 6, 111 authenticity, 97 religious, 68, 86, 92, 100, 102 search for, 92 sense of, 93, 98–9, 103 social, 109

Baptism (denomination), 67, 69, 75–76, 79, 195 baptism (the event), 64, 70–73, 116, 149 infant, 63 Orthodox Christian, 29, 63, 104n5 Baptist missionaries, 8, 39, 53, 60–64, 67–69, 73, 81n20

Baptists, 8, 53, 60, 63, 67–81, 180n10 Nenets, 66, 69–70, 72, 76, 195 registered, 68, 80n12, 163 Russian, 8, 68–70, 77–78, 130 Soviet propaganda about, 150 unregistered, 67–68, 80n12 Bible, 21, 53, 55, 67–68, 70, 73, 75, 77, 118, 120, 140, 163, 191, 195 belt, 10, 163 as a book, 9, 67–68, 115 reading of, 52–53, 68, 77, 118, 120, 169 school, 3, 10, 173 study, 22, 116, 124n2, 140, 174, 177 translation of, 68, 73, 80n18, 138–40 born–again Christian, 31, 71, 167, 169, 184–85, 188, 193–95 boundaries: of community, 31, 65 crossing of, 11, 13, 158 religious, 159 social and cultural, 85, 89 work, 177 Broz, Ludek, 6, 10, 13, 17–37, 195 Buddhism, 17–19, 24–27, 29–30, 32–33, 130 burials, 48, 135. See funeral Burkhanist movement, 23, 25, 35n12 See also Ak Jaŋ

capitalism, 2, 5, 8, 183, 185, 189 dynamic, 2 economy, 111, 135, 185, 192 encroachment, 9 era, 1 immorality of, 108 modernity, 110, 112 Casanova, José, 111, 179n5 Catholic Church, 107, 109–10, 113–17, 123–28, 163, 187–88 Catholicism, 9, 96, 108–9, 111, 114, 117, 123, 180n12, 181n17, 193 chaga celebrations, 19–22; 25–27, 34n4, 195

204

Index

charisma, 108, 116, 118–19, 122, 124 charismatic Christianity, 4, 107–8, 113, 115, 117–18, 122–23 charismatic churches, 15, 107, 124, 163, 170, 197n4 Chukchi, 7, 39–57, 191, 197n3 language, 49 practices, 39–40, 43, 46, 49, 51–54 rituals, 42, 44, 46, 48, 51–53, 55 tradition, 48 Chukotka, 7, 39–45, 53, 55 Church of Jesus Christ, 143–58, 159n1, 197n11 civil society, 107–9, 111, 120, 122–24, 126n20, 187, 194 Clark, William, 10, 129–42 class, 115–16, 154, 166, 186, 192 class enemies, 65 ruling class, 187 structure, 189 clergy, 108, 172–73, 176 Catholic, 125n7, 125n15 Orthodox, 26, 63, 159n7, 165, 167, 173 Coleman, Simon, 12, 118, 144–46, 157, 197n7 collective farm, 59, 65–66, 80n10 See also kolkhoz and sovkhoz collectivization, 40, 59–60, 65, 79, 80n10 non-collectivized, 79 Comaroff, Jean and John, 2–4, 11, 61 communist: education, 26 experiment, 3 ideology, 1, 6, 26–27, 80n13, 95, 111, 155 legacies, 23, 36n24 movement, 190 officials, 66, 139 party 6, 109, 117 rule, 107–8, 110–11 continuity, 18–19, 26, 33, 74, 76, 119, 145, 171 cultural, 35n24, 39, 134 and discontinuity, 17, 33, 35n24, 43–44, 46, 49, 54, 60–61, 158, 194–95, 197 discourse of, 31, 33 interrupted, 5 restoring, 170 continuity–thinking, 157–58, 179 and tradition 115 conversion: concept of, 12; 18, 61, 180n6 context of, 39–40, 54–55, 145 definitions of, 11–12, 32, 39, 158 narratives, 31–33, 42, 51, 76, 87, 93–94, 98, 102, 130, 135–36, 142, 148, 179 non–converts, 18, 30, 32–33, 39, 43, 48, 51, 53–54 stories, 69, 70, 130, 140, 154 See also born-again Christian

conversion to religion, 17–18, 27, 32–33 cross, 29, 90, 117, 175

deprivatization of religion, 112 discontinuity See continuity and discontinuity domestication of religion, 13n12, 111–12 dreams, 10, 49–51 in conversion narratives, 129–30, 135–38, 142 of modernity, 2, 9

education, 2, 66, 73, 116, 130, 152, 187–88 religious, 35n19, 187 Soviet, 40, 60 Embassy of God, 174–75, 177–79, 180n15, 180n16, 184, 191, 194 Engelhardt, Jeffers, 13, 86–106 Estonian Evangelical Lutheran Church, 85, 87, 96 Estonian Orthodox Church See Orthodox Church of Estonia Estonians, 11, 13, 85–104 ethnic: affiliation, 153, 159n3 background, 60, 152 differences, 11 heritage, 132 identity, 18, 134, 191, 195 label, 18 loyalties, 137, 186 minority, 145, 147, 192, 195 origin, 71, 72 tensions, 169 ethnicity, 6, 12, 20–21, 72, 115, 134 ethnicization of religion, 6 evangelical Christianity, 17, 24–25, 39, 55, 75, 129, 191 adoption of, 22 conversion to, 25, 28–29, 31–32, 39, 89 discourse of, 18 embracing, 142 rise of, 23 evangelical church, 1, 39, 107, 122, 145, 174 evangelical communities, 129, 164, 170, 172, 178–79, 181n17 evangelical missionaries, 7, 23, 32, 48, 85 evangelizing, 3, 41, 62, 118, 121–22, 150, 164, 173, 175, 180n12 See also witnessing faith healing, 154–55, 175, 197n11 See also prayer fieldwork, 18, 34n3, 34n8, 46, 48, 55n1, 79n1, 104n1, 147 See also research folklore, 7, 22, 74

Index folklorist, 74, 114 folklorization, 6, 23, 186 frontiers, religious, 12–13, 156, 158–59 funeral, 44, 48, 54, 135–36, 141

Geertz, Clifford, 8, 114 gender, 115–16, 137, 166 gendered hierarchies, 86, 98 Geraci, Robert, 3–4, 88 glossolalia, 118 See speaking in tongues God, 3, 21, 32 acts of, 3, 42, 43, 49, 50, 53, 73, 86, 87, 147, 155 communication with, 2, 44, 50–51, 64, 69, 74, 138 176–77 the living, 32, 64, 149–50, 154 marketplace of, 113, 115, 124 messages from, 50, 130, 136, 138, 175 presence of, 71, 80n14, 118 Russian, 6, 132, 136, 150, 156 word of, 76, 168–69, 176 god figures, 63 godless, 87, 110, 113 gods, 69, 71, 75, 113 Gorno–Altaisk, 18–20, 35n15 Greek Catholic Church, 163, 180 Harding, Susan, 10, 75, 115, 118, 122 healthcare, 2, 116, 144 Hefner, Robert, 2, 8, 12, 32, 41, 59, 70, 137 Holy Spirit, 49, 62, 71, 73, 115, 118, 120–23, 149, 191, 193–94 hope, 2, 9, 135, 154 hopeful explanations, 7 hopeful prayers, 43 hospital, 50, 66, 69–70, 121, 137, 149, 169 Humphrey, Caroline, 35n16, 62, 66, 112, 119, 125n4

icon, 91, 92, 168–69 painters, 92, 95, 97 praying to, 176 iconicity, 89 iconography, 102 identity, 40, 45, 49, 64, 66, 119, 124, 166, 169, 178 Altaian, 20, 21, 23 Christian, 61, 115, 137 civic, 8 communal, 191, 194 concept of, 5, 6, 13n3 deterritorialized, 8, 164 evangelical, 168, 174

205

loss, 195 Muslim, 7, 139 national, 18, 24, 33, 88, 134, 172, 189 Orthodox, 95, 96, 167 racial, 186 religious, 6, 8, 63, 72, 89, 167–68, 171–72 value, 191, 193, 195 illness, 44, 50, 71, 120, 149, 154 imam, 136, 156 immorality, 7, 119, 154 See also morality Islam, 2, 8, 9, 17, 24, 129–30, 150, 156, 184–85, 193, 196 and Christianity, 138, 158 cultural, 139 parallel, 13n2 ‘Uzbek’, 153, 159n3, 160n16 Islamic practices, 130, 139–41, 159n11

jalama offerings, 20, 27–28, 32, 36n24 Jesus: acceptance of, 31, 67, 132, 136 belief in, 46, 130, 138 follower of, 10, 32, 131, 137 the living God, 154 power of, 155 reading about, 138 as the Russian God, 6, 156 terms for 138–39 talking about, 139 union with, 71

Kazakh, 3–4, 6–7, 129–42 in Altai, 18, 21, 24, 34n5 kinship, 20, 72, 133 kolkhoz, 35n15, 60, 65–66, 79n2 See also collective farm and sovkhoz kolkhoz Nenets, 73–74, 79 See also Nenets Komi, 65, 80n5 ASSR, 80n10 Izhma Komi, 63, 80n5 language, 66 reindeer herders, 60, 79 sovkhoz, 80n10 Kyrgyzstan, 1, 3–4, 10, 23, 34n8, 48, 117, 130, 143–61, 191, 197n11

Lankauskas, Gediminas, 9, 87, 93, 107–28, 181n17 Lithuania, 9, 92, 107–28, 181n17 liturgy, 86, 93–96, 99, 101 Lutherans, 97, 115, 189 See also Estonian Evangelical Lutheran Church

206

Index

Marxist thought, 124n3, 183, 186, 192, 196 Marxist–Leninist thought, 108, 187–90, 193, 196 Mennonites, 3–4 Meyer, Birgit, 8, 10, 22, 33, 155, 158, 170, 194, 197n4 migrants: rural–urban, 129–31, 133, 153–54, 156 transnational, 155, 169, 184, 197 migration, 3, 80n10, 132, 153, 155, 159n12, 164 mission, 185, 189 churches, 10, 168 field, 14n8 Mennonite, 3–4 Orthodox, 4, 23, 35n19, 36n24, 102 schools, 188 work, 10 missionaries: foreign, 14n8, 34n8, 89, 147, 172–73 Baptist, 8, 39, 60, 62–64, 67, 73, 81n20 evangelical, 7, 23, 32, 48, 85, 172; Orthodox, 23, 30, 63 Pentecostal, 39, 41, 189, 192 Protestant, 39, 41, 62, 159n6 missionary: activity, 1–4, 30, 63, 67, 159n6 encounters, 1–2, 10, 23, 63 organizations, 164, 172–73 strategy, 3, 63, 180n12 modernist: conversion, 92 ideals, 109 image, 116 project, 5, 11 modernity, 5, 107, 120, 123, 124, 183, 188 and forms of Christianity, 9, 114–16, 196 and conversion, 8 dreams of, 2, 9 enchanted, 8, 9, 110–11, 146 fading, 8–9 ideals of, 110, 111 making of, 93, 108 promise of, 194 socialist, 112 spirit of, 193 symbols of, 9 Western, 116 modernization, 5, 8–9, 111, 116, 123–24 concept of, 124n1 Soviet, 4, 107 morality, 11, 23, 86, 108, 115, 119, 122, 124, 154, 163, 176–77, 179 and modernity, 108 Protestant, 191 and socialism, 124n3 See also immorality music, 87, 95, 122, 139, 143, 175

Altaian, 22, 195 Byzantine, 101 Luteranized, 102 monastic, 102 Orthodox, 96, 100, 102 Protestant, 96 musicians, 23, 92, 94, 177

nationalism, 86, 98, 108, 124, 185–88, 190 pious, 109 and religion, 110, 186; rise of, 163, 184 religious, 85, 163 Nenets, 8–9, 40, 59–81, 191, 195, 197n3 New Testament, 53, 62, 75, 80n17, 81n18, 137, 152 See also Bible nostalgia, 98, 119

Old Testament, 23, 26, 52–53 See also Bible opium of the people, 108, 166 Orthodox Church See Russian Orthodox Church, Orthodox Church of Estonia, Ukrainian Orthodox Church Orthodox Church of Estonia, 86, 88–90, 92–94, 96–98, 100–103, 104n2

pagan, 7, 23, 35n23, 42, 72, 129 gods, 69 practices, 43, 75 paganism, 17, 25, 26, 35n22, 43 -shamanism, 32 pastor: Adelaja, 175–76, 180n13, 184 Kazakh, 129 local, 10 Pentecostal, 48, 50, 122. 143–55, 159n10, 170–71 Russian, 142n3 Tuvinian, 24 Uighur, 139 of the Word of Faith, 115, 117–18, 121 patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople, 92–93 Nikon, 35n9, 100 Patriarchate of Constantinople, 86, 89–90, 92–93, 102 of Kyiv, 165 of Moscow, 85–86, 88, 96, 104, 165, 168 Peel, J.D.Y., 183–99 Pelkmans, Mathijs, 1–16, 23, 48–49, 122, 125n10, 138, 142n1, 143–61, 179n3, 197n11 Pentecostalism, 42–43, 143, 154–55, 157–58, 171, 183, 185, 188, 190–96

Index appeal of, 170, 180n14, 191–92, 194–95 attraction of, 144, 146, 148, 154, 157 conversion to, 13, 39, 42, 44, 51, 144–45, 150, 152, 156, 158 growth of, 188, 192, 196 studies of, 149 perestroika, 91, 109 postcolonialism, 8, 183–85, 187, 193–94, 196 postsocialism, 92, 119, 183 prayer, 42–43, 50, 62, 71–72, 76, 86, 95, 97, 103, 118, 121–22, 149–50, 154, 170–71, 195 efficacious, 86, 155, 192 failed, 151–52 faithful, 146 group, 170, 177, 184 house of, 68, 70, 77 meetings, 71–72, 117, 120–21, 124n2 power of, 144, 154–55, 157 sacrificial, 74, 75 sinner’s, 132, priest: Catholic, 117, 125n7 musicians, 94 Orthodox, 42, 87, 90, 93 priesthood, 72, 93, 167 proselytism, 53, 168, 173, 180n12 prosperity theology, 174–75, 177 Protestant: Churches, 30, 41, 87, 129–31, 135, 145–46, 189 congregations, 108, 145 denominations, 40–41, 53–54; 175 Forum, 129–30 missionaries, 39, 41, 62, 73, 159n6 morality, 191

reindeer, 8, 41, 44–48, 52, 60, 64–65, 69, 71, 75, 78 herding, 40–44, 56n10, 59, 65, 80n5 herding rituals, 41–42, 44–45, 52–53 relationship with, 42, 44–48, 52 religious market, 12, 108, 113, 166, 193 See also God, marketplace of repression, 5, 60, 65 of religion, 5, 13n2, 180n7 research, 27, 34, 55n1, 79n1, 124n2, 179n1 See also fieldwork revival, 24, 92, 101; Ak Jaŋ, 29, 30, 31 cultural, 18, 22, 33, 49 evangelical, 190 national, 22–23, 34, 34n6, 179 religious, 2, 55, 62, 183 ritual, 2, 21, 44–46, 52, 86, 119, 193 acts, 77, 118 of baptism, 63, 72, 78 chaga, 20–22, 27 circumcision, 134

207

context, 44, 47, 75 conversion, 132–33, 136, 140 of Eucharist, 75 language, 72 objects, 45, 47 offerings, 28 practices, 40, 45, 46, 51, 53, 61, 75, 96, 139 reindeer herding, 41–42, 44–45, 52–53 settings, 61, 72, 76 slaughter, 45 Robbins, Joel, 10, 11, 33, 39, 44, 61, 75, 115, 145, 150, 154–55, 157, 171 Russian Baptists, 8, 67–70, 77, 78, 130 Russian Orthodox Church, 1, 3, 9, 35n8, 63, 78, 138, 189 Russian Orthodoxy, 7, 24, 39, 100, 195 Russification, 24, 88, 90, 133, 134

sacred: chaga, 34n4 ground, 29 order, 99, 101, 103 and profane, 43–44 sites, 63 spring, 28 texts, 68 sacrifice, 28–30, 74–76, 78, 118, 140 Satan, 69, 144, 154 satanic: atheism, 117 forces, 143 moral decay, 119 Scriptures, 68, 71, 115 CAR Scripture, 138 sect, 22, 26, 30, 35n10, 114, 120–21, 152 sectarian, 3, 21, 30, 35n10, 117, 120 secular, 68, 135, 125n15, 135, 165, 167 authorities, 4, 8, 68 establishment, 8 ideology, 98, 155 and modernity, 8, 109, 111, 123 secularism, 1, 2, 8, 87, 102, 104 secularity, 86, 93, 104 secularization, 111–12, 123–24, 139 desecularization, 93 shamanic: -animist, 43 gifts, 70 neo-, 62 pagan-, 32, 35n22 practices, 1, 7, 62–63 worldview, 62, 195 shamanism, 17, 23, 32, 35nn22–23, 62–63, 74, 78 See also paganism shamans, 63, 65, 67, 78–79, 154, 159n11 singing: right, 11, 85–104 techniques, 22, 23, 93 throat, 22

208

Index

Singing Revolution, 86–88, 92, 95–96, 113 sovkhoz, 45, 65–66, 79n2, 80n10 See also kolkhoz speaking in tongues, 118, 149, 154, 191 spirit: of death, 144 of destruction 155 of divorce, 151 figures, 71 of poverty, 155 See also Holy Spirit spirits, 28 attacks of, 54 of the dead, 54, 136 spiritual healing, 149, 154–55, 159n11, 160n20 syncretism, 32, 39, 53, 61, 138

Tallinn, 87–90, 92, 95–96 theology, 96, 98, 115–16 African trends in, 175 dialogue, 12 prosperity, 174–75, 177 tradition, 2, 22, 33, 73, 115, 185, 194 Altaian, 17, 24, 26, 33, 35n24 break away from, 42 Buddhist, 26 Chukchi, 48 evangelical, 175, 191 faith, 168 liturgical, 92 Orthodox Christian, 86 Pentecostal, 174, 192 religious, 6, 190 traditional religion, 1, 4, 187, 194 transition, 4, 7, 11, 86–90, 92, 98, 101–02, 104 discourse of, 93, 98–99, 104 to feudalism, 9 transnational: connections, 20 influences, 113, 184 migrants, 197 networks, 9, 146 religious organisations, 114, 146, 170, 172, 183, 193 forms of sociality, 164

Uighurs, 129, 132, 133 believers, 134–35, 139 in China, 139 families, 131, 133, 141 language, 133–34, 142 migrants, 130 worship song, 134, 142n1 Ukraine, 1, 7, 10, 14n8, 119, 125n11, 160n18, 163–82, 184–85, 191, 194, 196 Ukrainian: Greek–rite Catholic Church, 163, 167, 180n7 missionaries, 10, 39, 63, 164, 172–74 nation, 163, 167 Orthodox Church, 165 Ulagan, 18, 30, 35n5 church in 31, 35n18 region, 18, 27 village of, 18–19, 27, 29

Vallikivi, Laur, 1, 8, 11, 40, 59–83, 87, 89, 93, 195 Van der Veer, Peter, 2, 9, 13n3, 13n5, 32–33, 111 Vaté, Virginie, 1, 5, 7, 10, 39–57, 62, 130, 141, 145 Verdery, Katherine, 9, 13n3, 86, 120, 125n10, 185 Vitebsky, Piers, 62, 74 Vorkuta: Baptists of, 67n 77 migration to, 67 missionaries in, 62, 68 Nenets in, 64

Wanner, Catherine, 1, 7–8, 10, 14n8, 85, 87, 89, 119, 125n17, 160n18, 163–82, 184 witnessing, 73, 122, 126n18 See also evangelizing Word of Faith, 9, 108, 114–24, 125nn13–14, 174, 176 Yamb-to Nenets, 40, 59–83 See also Nenets

Znamenski, Andrei, 35n12, 40, 63, 94