The old faith and the Russian land : a historical ethnography of ethics in the Urals / Douglas Rogers.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Rogers, Douglas, 1972-

Series:

Culture and society after socialism.

Cornell paperbacks.

Culture and society after socialism

Cornell paperbacks

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Ethics--Russia (Federation)--Sepych (Permskaia oblast)--History.

Ethics.

Old Believers--Russia (Federation)--Sepych (Permskaia oblast)--History.

Old Believers.

Ethnology--Russia (Federation)--Sepych (Permskaia oblast).

Ethnology.

Sepych (Permskai︠a︡ oblastʹ, Russia)--Moral conditions.

Sepych (Permskai︠a︡ oblastʹ, Russia).

Physical Description:

1 online resource (358 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Other Title:

Historical ethnography of ethics in the Urals

Place of Publication:

Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2009.

Language Note:

English

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. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork and extensive archival and manuscript sources, Rogers argues that religious, political, and economic practice are overlapping arenas in which the people of Sepych have striven to be ethical-in relation to labor and money, food and drink, prayers and rituals, religious books and manuscripts, and the surrounding material landscape. He tracks the ways in which ethical sensibilities-about work and prayer, hierarchy and inequality, gender and generation-have shifted and recombined over time. Rogers concludes that certain expectations about how to be an ethical person have continued to orient townspeople in Sepych over the course of nearly three centuries for specific, identifiable, and often unexpected reasons. Throughout, he demonstrates what a historical and ethnographic study of ethics might look like and uses this approach to ask new questions of Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet history.

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface

Acknowledgments

Note on Translation, Transliteration, and Names

Introduction: Ethics, Russia, History

Part I. An Ethical Repertoire

1. In Search of Salvation on the Stroganov Estates

2. Faith, Family, and Land after Emancipation

Part II. The Generations and Ethics of Socialism

3. Youth: Exemplars of Rural Socialism

4. Elders: Christian Ascetics in the Soviet Countryside

Part III. Struggles to Shape an Emergent Ethical Regime

5. New Risks and Inequalities in the Household Sector

6. Which Khoziain? Whose Moral Community?

7. Society, Culture, and the Churching of Sepych

8. Separating Post-Soviet Worlds? Priestly Baptisms and Priestless Funerals

Epilogue

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780801475207

0801475201

9780801459191

0801459192

OCLC:

966938673