Sacred Places, Emerging Spaces: Religious Pluralism in the Post-Soviet Caucasus

Published by Berghahn Books 2018

Sacred Places, Emerging Spaces

Religious Pluralism in the Post-Soviet Caucasus

Edited by: Tsypylma Darieva , Florian Mühlfried and Kevin Tuite

Volume 17 in the series Space and Place

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781785337833

Overview
Contents

About this book

Though long-associated with violence, the Caucasus is a region rich with religious conviviality. Based on fresh ethnographies in Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and the Russian Federation, Sacred Places, Emerging Spaces discusses vanishing and emerging sacred places in the multi-ethnic and multi-religious post-Soviet Caucasus. In exploring the effects of de-secularization, growing institutional control over hybrid sacred sites, and attempts to review social boundaries between the religious and the secular, these essays give way to an emergent Caucasus viewed from the ground up: dynamic, continually remaking itself, within shifting and indefinite frontiers.

Author / Editor information

Tsypylma Darieva is a senior research fellow at the Centre for East European and International Studies (ZOiS) in Berlin and is teaching at Humboldt University Berlin. Her research and teaching interests include anthropology of migration, diaspora and homeland, urbanity, and sacred places in Central Eurasia. She has conducted fieldwork in Azerbaijan, Armenia, Kazakhstan, and Germany. Darieva is the author of Russkij Berlin: Migranten und Medien in Berlin und London (LIT, 2004), co-editor of Cosmopolitan Sociability: Locating Transnational Religious and Diasporic Networks (Routledge, 2011), Urban Spaces after Socialism: Ethnographies of Public Places in Eurasian Cities (Campus, 2011) and of the forthcoming volume Sakralität und Mobilität in Südosteuropa und im Kaukasus.

Florian Mühlfried is a social anthropologist in the Caucasus Studies Program at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena. Previously, he was a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology and a visiting professor at UNICAMP, Brazil. He has published the monograph Being a State and States of Being in Highland Georgia (Berghahn, 2014), a book on feasting in Georgia (ibidem, 2006), and edited the volume Mistrust: Ethnographic Approximations (Transcript, 2018).

Kevin Tuite is Professor of Anthropology at the Université de Montréal. He also directed the Caucasus Studies Program at the FSU-Jena from 2011 to 2014. His publications include Language, Culture and Society: Key Topics in Linguistic Anthropology (co-edited with Christine Jourdan) (Cambridge, 2006).

Tsypylma Darieva is a senior research fellow at the Centre for East European and International Studies (ZOiS) in Berlin and is teaching at Humboldt University Berlin. Her research and teaching interests include anthropology of migration, diaspora and homeland, urbanity, and sacred places in Central Eurasia. She has conducted fieldwork in Azerbaijan, Armenia, Kazakhstan, and Germany. Darieva is the author of Russkij Berlin: Migranten und Medien in Berlin und London (LIT, 2004), co-editor of Cosmopolitan Sociability: Locating Transnational Religious and Diasporic Networks (Routledge, 2011), Urban Spaces after Socialism: Ethnographies of Public Places in Eurasian Cities (Campus, 2011) and of the forthcoming volume Sakralität und Mobilität in Südosteuropa und im Kaukasus.

Reviews

“The book makes an important t and welcome contribution to our knowledge of the richness of religious activities in the Caucasus and their entanglements with church and state.” • JRAI

“There are a number of interesting subjects discussed in the contributions to this broadly based volume that usefully point to some fields of research around sacred places which could well do with further examination.” • JASO

“Sacred Places, Emerging Spaces is a remarkable book that advances our understanding of the hybridity of the sacred and its interactions with the state in contexts where these relations are still extremely fluid.” • Europe-Asia Studies

“…the most striking feature of this volume is the role played by nonhuman actors, the shrines themselves... [It is] a dynamic ethnographic picture of a crucial moment of desecularization in a neglected area of the world.” • Reading Religion

“…a necessary book for researchers of religion in the Caucasus and beyond that for researching folk religiosity more generally. It is suitable for students as an introduction and is warmly recommended for all who are interested in the Caucasus.” • Religion & Gesellschaft in Ost und West

“This volume shares in a rich resurgence of writing on religious activity across the former Soviet Union and particularly in areas of the Caucasus, offering sharp insight into arguably one of the most popular religious traditions, shrine pilgrimage, about which we know surprisingly little. The editors have gathered the highly qualified scholars for the task, including a number of specialists from the Caucasus proper.” • Bruce Grant, New York University

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Illustrations Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Acknowledgements Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Introduction Tsypylma Darieva, Florian Mühlfried and Kevin Tuite Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Chapter 1. Between ‘Great’ and ‘Little’ Traditions? Situating Shia Saints in Contemporary Baku Tsypylma Darieva Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	19
Chapter 2. Women as Bread-Bakers and Ritual-Makers: Gender, Visibility and Sacred Space in Upper Svaneti Nino Tserediani, Kevin Tuite and Paata Bukhrashvili Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	46
Chapter 3. The Chain of Seven Pilgrimages in Kotaik, Armenia: Between Folk and Official Christianity Levon Abrahamian, Zaruhi Hambardzumyan, Gayane Shagoyan and Gohar Stepanyan Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	70
Chapter 4. Sacred Sites in the Western Caucasus and the Black Sea Region: Typology, Hybridization, Functioning Igor V. Kuznetsov Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	97
Chapter 5. The Power of the Shrine and Creative Performances in Ingiloy Sacred Rituals Nino Aivazishvili-Gehne Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	113
Chapter 6. Accompanying the Souls of the Dead: The Transformation of Sacral Time and Encounters Hege Toje Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	133
Chapter 7. Not Sharing the Sacra Florian Mühlfried Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	150
Chapter 8. Informal Shrines and Social Transformations: The Murids as New Religious Mediators among Yezidis in Armenia Hamlet Melkumyan Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	177
Chapter 9. Sharing the Not-Sacred: Rabati and Displays of Multiculturalism Silvia Serrano Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	203
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	227

Language: English
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 246
Keywords: Anthropology (General); Anthropology of Religion; Sociology

eBook

Published: February 19, 2018
ISBN: 9781785337833