Annotation of the results obtained in 2023
In 2023, the members of the research team were finalizing the manuscript of the collective monograph "Blasphemy and Sacrilege in Russian Culture: Discourses, Narratives and Practices", as well as continuing research work on individual research topics. The results of the research work are presented on the project website: https://eusp.org/projects/bogokhulstvo-koschunstvo-i-svyatotatstvo-v-russkoy-kulture-xviii-xxi-vv-diskursy-narrativy-i-praktiki. In 2023 A. A. Panchenko took part in the work on the collective monograph "Blasphemy and Sacrilege in Russian Culture: Discourses, Narratives and Practices" and continued his individual research work. The first thematic direction implied the completion of research on judicial cases of sacrilege of the late 19th - early 20th centuries. The second thematic direction concerned the evolution of religious and mythological representations of swearing in contemporary Russian culture. In the 2000s, Russian society is experiencing a kind of moral panic associated with obscene words and formulae. One notable aspect of this moral panic was the publication of Orthodox polemic texts condemning swearing and explaining its harm and danger for humans. The most notable aspect here is presented by quasi-scientific form of criticism related to the ontology and epistemology of the New Age culture. It proceeds from the alleged physiological harm of swearing, which allegedly affects directly the human genome. The evolution of religious and mythological representations of profanity in contemporary post-secular culture demonstrates the disappearance of traditional notions of blasphemy and sacrilege based on the idea of ritual agency and direct communication between humans and superhuman beings. The latter are replaced by impersonal forces, often represented and discussed in quasi-scientific terms, but at the same time embodying the moral order as such. A. A. Panchenko's study of the contemporary dynamics of local shrine cults leads to similar conclusions. The veneration of local shrines in the agrarian culture from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries should be viewed from an ontological perspective based on the notions of complex ("metamorphic" and "metamaterial") ritual agency; the interaction between humans and non-human agents is represented in terms of conflict and retribution/reconciliation, contract, resource sharing, etc. The socio-demographic shifts of the 1990s - 2010s in the Russian countryside did not lead to the disappearance of local shrine cults, but caused a "reassembly" of the corresponding ritualistics. The "erosion" of concepts and narratives ("vows", stories about the punishment of sacrileges, etc.) associated with ritual agency is accompanied by the evolution of ideas about the miraculous powers emanating from shrines. In 2023, N.V. Petrov focused on three aspects of the research, which allowed him to see the evolution of the discourses of sacrilege, blasphemy and blasphemy from the late 18th century to the 2020s. First, the archival data in the Chelyabinsk Regional Archives allowed investigating sacrilegious plots of the 18th-19th centuries. In the late 18th-early 19th centuries, blasphemy is imputed primarily to adherents of the old faith, and the accusation becomes a reason to identify a non-believer. Blasphemy was imputed primarily to adherents of the old faith, and the accusation became a reason to identify a non-believer; in the middle of the 19th century and onwards, the accusation of blasphemy turned out to be the subject of a dispute was incorporated into local discourses. Secondly, the study of the Soviet atheist campaigns of 1958-1964 was completed: observations in Samara and work in the Samara and Samara archives were continued. The plot of sacrilege inscribed in Khrushchev's atheist campaign turns out to be a representation of one of the semiotic ideologies (V. Keane) of different groups of actors (Samara clergymen, party figures, residents of Kuibyshev, etc.). The sacrilegious plot, embedded in the religious context of the 1950s, carries the main message: "believers must rally around the church", and its debunking turns out to be a driving force factor contributing to its further spread. The discourses of blasphemy, sacrilege and sacrilege in the early and mid-twentieth century are an important part of the dispute between representatives of different semiotic ideologies. The study of 2023 allowed us to come close to understanding the boundaries of the concepts of sacrilege, blasphemy and sacrilege. The parodic play on religious discourse (Radio Day in Ryazan) allows us to see that the performance of ritual produces a special kind of "sanctified" truth, which differs from its logical and empirical forms. This case study shows how the discursive boundaries of blasphemy are expanding, and the range of meanings of this and related concepts are increasingly affecting the civic sphere. Showing how the applicability of the studied concepts expands in the everyday sphere, N.V. Petrov analyzed more than 100000 uses of the lexemes "blasphemy", "sacrilege", "sacrilege" in mass media and social media. The lexicon under study is used primarily in the following types of discourse: 1. Local discourses (desecration / theft of icons, seizure of territory by foreigners, destruction of historical buildings); 2. Secular discourses ("offensive art", dancing / nudity at temples / in the temple, desecration of the Eternal Flame). 3. Politicized discourses ("purity" of the state", church "schism", profanity, desecration of the Koran, "western values"); 4. Extra-systemic discourses. In 2023, S. A. Shtyrkov worked on two areas of the project's subject matter. He considered conflicts and interreligious polemics around revered rural shrines in North Ossetia. In addition, as part of the research on the "Soviet sacred", he began to explore how the ideology and practice of commemorative practices related to the veneration of those who died in the Great Patriotic War changed in the USSR in the 1960s and 1970s. In the area of the veneration of local shrines, which have been the subject of intense confrontation between representatives of different religious groups in the Republic of North Ossetia-Alania, his analysis is based on the assumption that social anthropology's conceptual framework of “shared shrines” and the debate surrounding the causes of conflict over them do not take into account the fact that sometimes shrines acquire their "confessional identity" in the course of the conflict itself, with little or no clearly articulated identity. This plot is examined through the example of the confrontation between different groups around Ossetian rural “dzuarta” shrines. As the religious identities of the participants in the discussion strengthen in the course of this polemic, two different religious groups of devotees of the same shrines are actually formed, each claiming that representatives of the other group are committing inappropriate acts at the shrine, thus desecrating the shrine and offending the religious feelings of their opponents. As part of the study of commemorative practices of the USSR in the 1960s and 1970s, the analysis was based on the concepts of “civil religion” (of national state) and “ritual attitude”. In the 1960s, political elites in the USSR worked to create a new format for the cult of Soviet soldiers killed in the Great Patriotic War. This project, orchestrated by the high party authorities, presupposed a certain freedom of creativity both in the centre and in the field, the possibility of moving away from strictly official rigid ritual and rhetorical forms, and the search for new intonations in public representations of the memory of the war. This process of sacralising the shared war experience included the option of establishing channels for personal, and therefore particularly sincere, communication between the living and the dead. All this had its basis in the cult of sacrificial death, which had been developing since the formation of states and in which all citizens loyal to such states should be involved. During 2023 S. Drozodov continued his study of the rhetoric of accusations of sacrilege, focusing on the motives that the actors of the accusation attribute to the accused. These considerations, combined with the general interest of the research project participants in the study of the secular sacred, led to a refinement of the focus of Drozdov's research, which, in the case of the third year of the project, was devoted to the rhetoric of defense and transgression of the boundaries of the secular sacred in texts and, more broadly, the activities of the anti-cult movement in post-Soviet Russia. Representatives of the latter, as shown in the study, actively use in their rhetoric of accusations against new religious movements the idea of the need to protect secular values, which are threatened by so-called "totalitarian sects". At the same time, the prevalence of texts about the need to protect the secular sacred over narratives in which the accusation is based on religious grounds is not connected to the religious or secular affiliation of the actors producing them. This shift in focus also allowed Drozdov to concentrate on the grounds underlying the accusations of violation of the boundaries of the secular sacred, thus continuing and deepening the results of the previous year's research, which was devoted to the natural actors of punishment for this violation. Thus, from a broader and more general view of this phenomenon, Drozdov moved to a comprehensive and in-depth analysis of one of the most important natural actors of accusation and punishment for such violation in post-Soviet Russia. Overall, the third year of S. T. Drozdov's research work in the project contributed to the accumulation and rethinking of materials from the previous two years, which allowed researcher to describe and analyse the correlation between accusations of sacrilege against the religious and secular sacred. In 2023, Y. Senina continued her study on the violation of boundaries within secular sacred realms, focusing on contemporary art exhibitions in 21st-century Russia and the ensuing discussions. This research theme logically extends from the inquiries of the previous two years, where sacrilegious practices concerning portraits of Soviet leaders were examined. It also aligns with the overall research interest of the project participants in the sacred and sacrilegious in Soviet culture, rooted in the Soviet past. While investigating contemporary art exhibitions in 21st-century Russia that triggered accusations of "blasphemy" and sparked extensive public discourse, Y.Senina delved deeper into the analysis of two exhibitions held at one of the most conservative Russian state art museums—the State Hermitage Museum. The focus was on the 2012 exhibition "The End of Fun" by English artists, the Chapman brothers, and the 2016 exhibition of Belgian artist Jan Fabre, titled "Jan Fabre: Knight of Despair – Warrior of Beauty." Using the conceptual framework proposed by Dutch anthropologist Jojada Verrips, Y. Senina explored how different parties (Hermitage staff, Orthodox believers, prosecutors) conceptualized their outrage and hurt feelings. She also examined how they contested and justified the "blasphemous" nature of the exhibitions. With Verrips' concept, Senina sought to answer the question of why art can be perceived as offensive based on a more corporeal understanding of reactions to contemporary art. This occurs when believers confront images and texts perceived as sacred but significantly and intentionally deviating from established norms. The sharpness of the reaction to what Y. Senina condemns as blasphemy is directly linked to the experience of fundamental ontological violations of the physical integrity of individuals or groups. This study is part of the broader research theme of the project on discourses of blasphemy, desecration, and sensitivity in post-secular cultures of contemporary Russia. During 2023 E.Khonineva's research was focused on how accusations of insulting the feelings of believers and public apologies actualize local concepts of agency, intentionality and morality at the level of legal practice and public polemics. Theoretically, this issue was developed on the basis of the concept of semiotic ideologies in their connection with the concept of the moral subject, as well as on the studies of "folk" theories of intentionality / theories of mind (theory of mind), carried out in the context of linguistic anthropology. E. Khonineva's research implied the consideration of two ethnographic subjects. The first one is connected with the problematics of public apologies in contemporary Dagestan, a practice whose spread problematized the boundaries of collective responsibility in the republican society, as well as the notions of the subject and his agency and the possibility of submission or resistance to the social order associated with the institution of honor and reputation. E.Khonineva proposed an approach to the study of contemporary practices of public apology, focusing on local conceptions of morality and the moral subject, determined by the disciplinary and political contexts, that could be productive for a comparative analysis of repentance rituals in societies with other configurations of disciplinary power and social relations. The study showed how public apologies become an act of demonstrating one's submission to a moral code and one's completeness as a member of a society that adequately possesses a grammar of symbols of submission and respect. The model of the subject, which is described on the materials of public apologies in Dagestan, assumes the isomorphism of the moral appearance of the individual and his belonging to a social group, while the violation of the moral order leads to the rhetorical taking away of nationality, the ability to act on behalf of the collective. Another area of research was related to the discursive construction of religious affect and the image of the transgressor in court documents. The materials of court decisions on criminal cases of "insulting the feelings of believers" (Art. 148 of the Criminal Code) were used to examine the peculiarities of the "translation" of religious emotions and criminal motives into terms of morality, which is carried out by law enforcers in conditions of high uncertainty of legal categories concerning the sphere of human feelings. Although the subject matter of court decisions is mainly blasphemy and sacrilege, the content of the documents is largely focused on condemnation of immoral and antisocial behavior, on the punishment of such members of society who do not demonstrate sufficient respect for the symbolic order of collective life.

 

Publications

---

Annotation of the results obtained in 2021
The aim of this project is to describe and analyze specifics, genealogy, and dynamics of discourses and narratives about blasphemy, profanity, and sacrilege in Russian culture. In chronological terms, the project covers the period from the early 18th century to the present day. The intention of the research team is to shift the focus of study from issues of religious and social norms, the dichotomy of religious and secular, as well as the problems of legal and ideological interpretation of the categories of blasphemy, profanity, and sacrilege to the practices of everyday human interaction, narratives that represent / form them (folklore, literary, journalistic, etc.) and other discursive forms. In this perspective, blasphemy and profanity will be considered from a dynamic point of view, i. e. as forms of communication and social interaction between people, various super- or non-human agents and social institutions viewed as independent actors. In 2021, Alexander Panchenko elaborated a general model for anthropological study of blasphemy in terms of ritual agency Viewed as communication or social interaction, blasphemy and desecration can be discussed as processes that involve various intentional but not only human agents. In present day cognitive science of religion and ontological anthropology, we are invited to study religious ideas and practices in terms of agency attributed to both human and non-, semi-, or superhuman participants of ritual process. In this perspective, ideas of blasphemy and desecration could be interpreted as related to particular understanding of ritual agency prevailing in a given society or community or historical period. In pre-modern Christian cultures, blasphemy and sacriledge seem to be generally understood as transgression of ritual norms and rules established by non-human agents. This obviously might be dangerous to a blasphemer, his / her kin or community in terms of divine punishment and loss of ritual efficacy. However, narratives of blasphemy in medieval and agrarian vernacular Christianity rather tell us about reestablishment of rules and norms that make rituals even more efficient and communication between humans and non-human beings more predictable. That means to me that the idea of blasphemy in these contexts is related to a kind of animistic moral economy of ongoing negotiations between living and dead humans, spirits, holy figures, sacred objects, and so on. Modern secular states create their own symbols, rituals, and ideas of agency, identity, and belonging. In my opinion, secular ritual culture still cannot avoid dealing with super- or non-human agents, albeit related to new sensibilities and semiotic ideologies. Political leaders (especially in totalitarian and authoritarian states), secular martyrs, political allegories and collective images (like Motherland or Unknown Soldier) might be also viewed as ritual agents that could be offended by blasphemers. Here, however, blasphemy and profanity are probably believed to be endangering social order and sense of belonging, and they could lead to a moral panic rather than reestablishment of ritual rules. An example that could be particular relevant here, is present day Russian politics of memory related to World War II. The agents that either implicitly or explicitly are believed to be offended in the cases of desecration of war memorials or “historical truth” are either “dead ancestors” (victims of the war), or still living “veterans”, or the State itself, or the Russian / Soviet people in general. Although a bit vague, these personages of collective imagination or ontology are probably believed to guarantee or secure existing social order which in turn is genealogically related to the victory in the war. This order is understood and represented in terms of belonging and kinship rather than prosperity and well-being of a given religious community or congregation. In this perspective, the rise of present day cases related to religious offence seem to be significantly influenced by the nature of secular ritual agency. Blasphemy is understood here not as a part of negotiations between human and non-human agents but rather as a controversy between different identities, and understandings of social order. Christ or the Prophet or other worshipped religious agents could be offended rather as members of social or moral or kin communities, and desecrated sacred objects are believed to mediate sense of social or moral belonging rather than counter-intuitive charisma. That does not mean, however, that blasphemy and desecration are totally disconnected from the idea of miracle or divine punishment. The latter, though, seems to be less dangerous than expected destruction of social order which is believed to be mostly valuable and reliable. Empirical research by Alexander Panchenko focused on categories of sacrifice and sacriledge in Russian agrarian culture. He published a research article that dealt with a number of cases from modern Russian agrarian culture revealing certain rules and norms of moral economies that connect concepts of the sacred, violence, and sacrifice in particular ritual and narrative contexts. Legends about substitute sacrifices and the origin of local sacred places, as well as religious cults of laymen (usually children) who died accidentally and untimely are contextualized in local cosmologies that provide modes for mutual socialization of human beings and non- or superhuman agents. Here, the theme of sacrifice is related to resource exchange providing stable, predictable, and reciprocal relations with various otherworldly beings. In this context, Judeo-Christian ‘sacrifice narratives’ that originated in ancient Mediterranean ritual cultures could be only in part adapted by local religious practices, social structures and norms. During 2021, N.V. Petrov focused on three topics. First is about the analyze the early Soviet rumors about the upcoming Bartholomew’s night and determine their place in the reaction to significant socio-political transformations of the beginning of the 20th century. After the revolution, the Bolsheviks who came to power began to use this metaphor in threats to political opponents, and about a decade later, among the accusations of counter-revolutionary actions. The auditory reaction to such public texts and speeches was expressed in mass panic in connection with the expected reprisals against various social / ethnic / confessional groups and even in attempts to escape from these dangers. Rumors were widespread geographically and organically fit into the general context of early Soviet eschatological moods, when the post-revolutionary demolition of the usual order actualized ideas about recent times. The second is based on an analysis of the "Zoe's Standing" case. The story of the petrified hymen-dancer, known in Russia at least since the late 19th century, was updated in 1956. "Zoe's Standing" of 1956 presents the most stable textualization of this story, supported in the 1960s-1990s by a popular narrative scheme about punishing blasphemers for desecrating icons and holy places. The textual and narrative design, popularity and replication of this theme in folklore are influenced by religious folklore narratives, the sinner receives a specific name: Zoya. In the 1990s and 2000s "Zoya's Standing in Kuibyshev" is fixed in Orthodox and media discourse, detailed, acquires the status of an Orthodox legend, connected with the miracles of St. Nicholas, and becomes a "folklore brand" of Samara, based on "real historical events". The third theme relates to the study of the rhetoric of offended feelings in contemporary Russia. Desecration of Eternal Flame memorials has been documented in various Russian cities (about 50 cases in 2021). The hooligans are children or minors. The flame is regularly used for "direct purposes": barbecue grills, drying clothes, burning wreaths, even boiling water and lighting cigarettes from the Eternal Flame. Law enforcement agencies consider such cases as "vandalism" (Article 214 of the Criminal Code), "Destruction or damage of military burials" (Article 234.4 of the Criminal Code) or "Destruction, damage or desecration of burial places or grave markers" (Article 244 of the Criminal Code). The behavior of legal authorities is built according to the classical scheme of discussion with the opportunity to convince an opponent or win the sympathy of the majority. This behavior pursues the goal of justifying and justifying "their truth" and "their world," primarily to preserve themselves as an integrated group. The authors of the concept of justification for social action, Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, note that " when radical criticism challenges the very principle on a situation is based, the dispute transforms itself into a competition between two different reality tests”. Following J. Wertsch's conception, the "debate" between law enforcement and people who commit unconventional acts with perpetual fire can be seen as a struggle between two mnemonic communities. One group fails to remember or ignores the narrative schema, the other consistently asserts it. Two presentations were given in 2021: at a Seminar on the anthropology of religion at the European University of St. Petersburg "Holy Helper, come dance with me!": the story of the petrified girl in Khrushchev era and now" (13.10.2021); "Eternal Flame in contemporary Russia: the rhetoric of offended feelings" at the Aleksanteri Conference 2021 "Eurasia and Global Migration" (28.10.2021). Prepared for publication the article "Bartholomew's Night in the Soviet Union: Metamorphosis of a Metaphor. In the past year, Sergey Shtyrkov studied different groups of ethnic activists in one of the republics of the Russian North Caucasus region, namely North Ossetia-Alania. Ethnic activism at this stage is often viewed by various social groups as a protest religious movement. This interpretation is influenced by anti- and post-colonial discourse and an ideological agenda linking issues of religious identity and political loyalty. At the center of these disputes are ideas about the ethnic religion of the Ossetian people, whether it is the local version of Orthodox Christianity or the original Ossetian religion of pre-Christian genesis that has survived to this day in the form of ethnic traditions. Proponents of the latter concept argue that the spread of Orthodoxy among the Ossetians should be seen as the result of spiritual colonization by external political forces - primarily Russia. Orthodox leaders and many ordinary believers in North Ossetia strongly protest against this interpretation of the role of Orthodoxy in the republic. Under these conditions they perceive any public statement about Ossetian ethnic traditions by non-Orthodox ethnic activists as a direct aggression against Orthodoxy. In this context, any comment on Ossetian religious identity is interpreted as a direct or indirect statement about what underlies and should determine Ossetians' loyalty to Russia. Research by Stepan Drozdov dealt with the category blasphemy as seen by the St. Petersburg followers of the Orthodox Church of the Sovereign Mother of God. In the course of his year-long fieldwork in the community, as well as his study of the doctrinal texts of the Church, he came to the conclusion that the main form of blasphemy for his informants was conscious and unconscious distortion of the "true" doctrine of the Mother of God by various historical and contemporary actors. The idea of conscious distortion of the doctrine is important, because through the idea of a genealogical connection between contemporary followers of John Bereslavsky and the undistorted "correct" tradition, it helps his informants to situate their religious movement, which emerged at the end of the 20th century, in a much longer historical perspective. In addition, he discovered that the idea of sacrilege as part of the hidden struggle of the institutional Church against the "true" faith turns out to be one of the most important criteria for his informants to honor any religious tradition of the past as the genealogical precursor of the modern Orthodox Church of the Sovereign Mother of God. In 2021, Ekaterina Khonineva's research was conducted in two directions. The first direction is represented by the study of contemporary semiotic ideologies of iconoclasm in their relation to the secular and religious semiotic saturation of the aesthetic sphere. The main focus of this study was the social context of the reception of the reforms of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) and the liturgical reform (1969) in the Catholic Church in contemporary Russia and the acutely negative reaction to these changes by a conservative group of Catholic Traditionalists, who define these reforms as blasphemous. The "high," baroque, traditional Catholic aesthetics, according to Traditionalists, is a predicate of religious authority, in other words, it is not "just a form," an empty shell, but an integral part of the sacred message transmitted by the Church. Those who advocate the democratization of the Church aesthetics and "facing to the people" through the use of a language close to mass culture become, in the imagination of Traditionalists, new iconoclasts and Protestants. They see their own efforts to revive and strengthen the position of orthodox Catholic aesthetics in all spheres, from the liturgical to the everyday life, as a legacy of the Counter-Reformation. Another direction outlined in the first year of the project is related to the study of the linguistic ideologies of sacrilege and desecration and the moral life of language in contemporary Russian public discourse. Specific subjects in this field of research were the speech genres of insults and apologies. For this purpose, a corpus of data on media cases of public insults, the reaction of the general public, and public apologies was initiated, work on which will continue in the second year of the project with the use of methodological tools from the field of linguistic anthropology and critical discourse analysis. Julia Senina studied violation of the boundaries of the “Soviet sacred” in the second half of the 1950s - early 1960s. As part of the study, she worked at the State Archives of the Russian Federation. In the course of the work carried out, she analyzed eleven cases from the fund 8131 of the supervisory proceedings of the USSR Prosecutor General's Office of inventory 31 on cases of anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda. From September 19 to October 2, she conducted research at the National Archives of Khakassia, where she got acquainted with 24 cases from the section "Justice. Supervision of legality. Security and Protection of Rights". Preliminary results of the research are presented on the web-page of the Center for Anthropology of Religion, European University at St. Petersburg (see: https://eusp.org/car/projects)

 

Publications

---

Annotation of the results obtained in 2022
The aim of this project is to describe and analyze specifics, genealogy, and dynamics of discourses and narratives about blasphemy, profanity, and sacrilege in Russian culture. In chronological terms, the project covers the period from the early 18th century to the present day. The intention of the research team is to shift the focus of study from issues of religious and social norms, the dichotomy of religious and secular, as well as the problems of legal and ideological interpretation of the categories of blasphemy, profanity, and sacrilege to the practices of everyday human interaction, narratives that represent / form them (folklore, literary, journalistic, etc.) and other discursive forms. In this perspective, blasphemy and profanity will be considered from a dynamic point of view, i. e. as forms of communication and social interaction between people, various super- or non-human agents and social institutions viewed as independent actors. In 2022, Alexander Panchenko continued to work on the analysis and development of theoretical approaches to the study of transgression of the sacred in different cultural, historical, and social contexts. His empirical research included work on 19th- and 20th-century judicial and investigative cases concerning blasphemy and sacrilege. The results show that a surge of court cases on blasphemy took place at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, which, by and large, can be explained by social and ideological processes in the post-reform Russia village. At the same time, the relevant materials represent an important source for the study of peasant perceptions of ritual agency, as well as attitudes towards sacred images. Of particular interest in this context is the specificity of specific actual and verbal forms of "iconoclasm". The conducted research allows us to speak about the specific role of “maternal” swearing in the relevant practices and discourses associated with peasant blasphemy and iconoclasm. In this context, research work has been carried out on the religious, ritual and moral contexts of swearing in the Russian culture. Nikita Petrov continued his study of Soviet atheist campaigns (1958-1964, 1970-1990) to examine the formation and consolidation of various representations of desecration in mass culture, literature, and the media. One hundred cases of desecration of the Eternal Flame in contemporary Russia are analyzed. In a conflict situation the anger and resentment of the group, formalized by the legislator, are linked to the formation of reactions that group members must demonstrate for the benefit of the group. These reactions control both the actional and the discursive fields, so that some actions and words have become obligatory and others have become unacceptable. The event itself from the personal becomes general and formal, and the Eternal Flame loses its original significance. Over the past ten years Russian criminal law has been updated with numerous new definitions that criminalize unauthorized manipulation of the sacred and secular sacred things. In the context of criminal cases involving blasphemy and desecration of sacred objects, beginning with the Pussy Riot case, the cases of the "desecration" of the Eternal Flame allow us to see, first, how the arguments and language that the media and law enforcement use in legal discussions regarding the secular sacred are shaped. Second, how the shift from the symbolic to the material occurs in relation to symbols of memory in contemporary Russian society. An additional topic of research was the spontaneous ritualism around the monument to Popov in Ryazan, which emerges as one of the forms of discursive and active modes of reproduction of "atheistic" truth, which is associated with derivatives of parodic discourse (parodia sacra) and was considered within the concept of religion by Michael Lambeck. Sergei Shtyrkov worked on two topics as part of a study of inter-religious conflicts involving one or more parties claiming that their religious feelings had been insulted. One theme concerned an episode in the public debate on religion that occurred in a region of Russia, North Ossetia-Alania, where the activities of the local diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church in restoring ancient churches were sharply criticised by its ideological opponents, the Ossetian religious nativists. This case can be seen as a good illustration of how "insulting religious (and at the same time ethnic) feelings" works, where the act of transgression is generated by the creative consciousness of those insulted, rather than by the actions of the alleged perpetrators. Moreover, these offended feelings can generate ethno-religious identities that remain poorly articulated outside of these dramatic events. In this context, those who publicly demonstrate their particular sensitivity to these insults can thereby assert their particular commitment to defending the interests of an ethnic and/or religious group and become quite successful opinion leaders. Another theme dealt with how ethnic activism in North Ossetia-Alania is viewed by various social groups as a protest religious movement. This interpretation is influenced by anti-colonial discourse and an ideological agenda linking issues of religious identity and political loyalty. At the centre of these debates are the notions about the ethnic religion of the Ossetian people, whether it is the local version of Orthodox Christianity or the primordial Ossetian religion of pre-Christian genesis that has survived to this day in the form of Ossetian ethnic traditions. Proponents of the latter concept claim that the spread of Orthodoxy among Ossetians should be seen as a result of spiritual colonization by external political forces. Orthodox leaders and many ordinary believers in North Ossetia strongly protest against this interpretation of the role of Orthodoxy in the republic. Under these circumstances they perceive any anti-colonial public gesture aimed at challenging the completeness of their ethnic identity. Protesting against the fact that they are denied their right to remain full-fledged Ossetians as Orthodox believers is presented by them as an insult to their religious feelings. Stepan Drozdov continued his study of the perceptions of the followers of the Orthodox Church of the Sovereign Mother of God about distortion of doctrine as a form of sacrilege and a way of describing the religious “other”. The results and general conclusions of this work were presented as part of the report «”Sectarians and Churchmen”: the confrontation of distorted and undistorted faith as part of the ideas of historical continuity in the Orthodox Church of the Sovereign Mother of God» at the 15th All-Russian Scientific Conference “VDNKh” (EU SPb, St. Petersburg, March 25-26, 2022). As for the natural actors who carry out punishment in connection with the described charges, the preliminary results of their agency were presented in the report «"Deorum injuriae": the limits of agency of natural actors of punishment for sacrilege» at the International Conference “Blasphemy, Sacrilege, Desecration: Discourses, Narratives and Practices” (YSU, Yerevan, October 24-25, 2022). Also, a seminar «Actors of retribution for sacrilege and “extenuating circumstances” for the accused» was organized for the participants of the XXII International School on Folklore Studies and Cultural Anthropology (Velikiy Novgorod, October 8-13, 2022), where the developed conceptual framework was tested by the participants on a number of cases. In addition, the source base of the sacrilege narratives, which previously consisted of field materials collected at the OCSMG and media publications, was significantly expanded during the expedition to rural shrines in the Novgorod region. The collected narratives about supernatural and natural punishment for sacrilege were used, among others, in the preparation of the article «“Non diis curae”: rhetoric and practices of natural punishment for sacrilege», which contains preliminary conclusions of the study of actors of sacrilege punishment and their rhetoric, also offerring an initial version of a conceptual framework for studying cases where, without waiting for divine intervention, agents of the other world take retribution into their own hands. Julia Senina continued to work on the topic “violating the boundaries of the Soviet sacred: the second half of the 1950s - early 1960s.” In her research, she focused on cases of damage to images of Soviet leaders, in particular, on the mass damage to portraits of I. Stalin after the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. At the beginning of the formation of the Soviet state, the Bolsheviks sought to invent a new Soviet visuality. Within a year of coming to power, they created convincing emblems and symbols, new or recreated, replacing the Julian calendar with the Gregorian. In addition, they used political posters, monumental sculpture, books, newspapers and magazines, and films to communicate their ideas to a wide audience. A special place in visual propaganda was occupied by portraits of leaders, endowed with sacred significance for the state and the dominant ideology. Iconoclastic acts in relation to the portraits of Soviet leaders were based on the idea of a connection between the image of the leader and himself, personifying the communist ideology. Therefore, such cases were punished not as hooliganism, but as a criminal offense against the regime - anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda. In the second stage of the project, Ekaterina Khonineva has been working on the study of the mediatized genre of public apologies for actions identified as blasphemous. In the Russian context in recent years, published videos and photos on social networks have become the main subject of religious and moral polemics, appealing both to the wording "insulting the feelings of believers," which spread due to the Article 148 of the Criminal Code of The Russian Federation, and to various categories of the everyday "moral" imagination. However, if in the most well-known cases of polemics on blasphemy in contemporary Western societies the interaction between the "offended" and the "offended" is presented as a long ideological confrontation, accompanied by an escalation of affect, repeated provocations, and consistent elaboration of arguments of opponents, in the Russian case such incidents, which receive more or less publicity, have a different communicative structure. A specific feature of this structure is the genre of public apologies, complementary to recognized blasphemous acts and in many cases directly following accusations of the offensiveness of certain actions. In this project, the study of public apologies in the context of accusations of blasphemy and sacrilege in contemporary Russia was conducted from the perspective of the variability of pictures of the moral order that may stand behind the need for public apologies in a particular cultural context, and the type of moral subject that it mediates Such formulation of the question determined the research trajectory of the second year of the project. Given the recent history of the practice of public apologies in contemporary Russia, the first ethnographic subject examined was the Caucasian case (on the example of the Republic of Dagestan), because it is in the Caucasus that the practice of public apologies was originally spread. The analysis of the practice itself, as well as the polemics surrounding it in Dagestan, demonstrates that the transgression of the boundaries of the sacred here represents only one of the acknowledged variants of the moral norms transgression, which raises the provocative question of the specificity of sacrilege and the discursive and practical connection or interrelation of the sacred and the moral. Moreover, in the case of Dagestan, the responsibility for the moral damage inflicted turns out to be collective (of the kin or the community), which determines the collective nature of public apologies as well. The specifics of public apologies in Dagestan provide an ethnographic contrast to the analysis of the case of accusations of "insulting the feelings of believers" (2021-2022) in the European part of Russia. Moral responsibility for the imputed transgression of norms here appeared to be individual and refers only to the subject of the action, defined by the accusing party as blasphemous. Of particular interest here is the construction of intentionality and sincerity in the formalized genres of accusations and public apologies by the accused, which, on the one hand, in terms of content are similar to the same communicative genres examined in the Dagestan material, and, on the other hand, are constructed by other, more formalized communicative means. While working on the project in 2022, the research team prepared more than 10 scientific publications, the results of research were presented in 21 lectures by the project participants at Russian and foreign conferences. The main outcome of the research work in 2022 is the thematic issue of the journal "Ethnographic Review" “The Icon and the Axe: Blasphemy, Blasphemy and Sacrilege in Modern Russia", including 6 articles prepared by the project participants. The progress of the research work is presented on the project website: https://eusp.org/projects/bogokhulstvo-koschunstvo-i-svyatotatstvo-v-russkoy-kulture-xviii-xxi-vv-diskursy-narrativy-i-praktiki

 

Publications

---