The Old Faith and the Russian Land

by Rogers, Douglas

• ISBN13: 9780801475207
• ISBN10: 0801475201
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-11-01
• Publisher: Cornell Univ Pr

Summary

The Old Faith and the Russian Land is a historical ethnography that charts the ebbs and flows of ethical practice in a small Russian town over three centuries. The town of Sepych was settled in the late seventeenth century by religious dissenters who fled to the forests of the Urals to escape a world they believed to be in the clutches of the Antichrist. Factions of Old Believers, as these dissenters later came to be known, have maintained a presence in the town ever since. The townspeople of Sepych have also been serfs, free peasants, collective farmers, and, now, shareholders in a post-Soviet cooperative. Douglas Rogers traces connections between the town and some of the major transformations of Russian history, showing how townspeople have responded to a long series of attempts to change them and their communities: tsarist-era efforts to regulate family life and stamp out Old Belief on the Stroganov estates, Soviet collectivization drives and antireligious campaigns, and the marketization, religious revival, and ongoing political transformations of post-Soviet times. Book jacket.

Author Biography

Douglas Rogers is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Yale University.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. ix
Preface	p. xi
Acknowledgments	p. xiii
Note on Translation, Transliteration, and Names	p. xvii
Introduction: Ethics, Russia, History	p. 1
An Ethical Repertoire
In Search of Salvation on the Stroganov Estates	p. 35
Faith, Family, and Land after Emancipation	p. 71
The Generations and Ethics of Socialism
Youth: Exemplars of Rural Socialism	p. 107
Elders: Christian Ascetics in the Soviet Countryside	p. 147
Struggles to Shape an Emergent Ethical Regime
New Risks and Inequalities in the Household Sector	p. 193
Which Khoziain? Whose Moral Community?	p. 222
Society, Culture, and the Churching of Sepych	p. 246
Separating Post-Soviet Worlds? Priestly Baptisms and Priestless Funerals	p. 269
Epilogue	p. 302
Bibliography	p. 307
Index	p. 329
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