Daily Negotiation of Traditions in a Sugpiaq Village in Alaska (original) (raw)
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2015
The Russian Orthodox mission to Alaska can be understood in terms of liberative mission. The article shows how the missionaries succeeded in allowing Christianity to become indigenized in native Alaskan cultures, rather than attempting to make the indigenous peoples Russian. It did this through an attention to the narratives, religious and otherwise, of the Alaskan peoples and by allowing these narratives to address and be addressed by the Christian narrative. Current anthropological research points to the depth of the roots of this indigenization, and how it helped in the identity formation of the native peoples especially after the sale of Alaska to the United States when their identity was under severe external threat. The Russian Orthodox mission to Alaska provides a good historical case study of how the gospel can be indigenized in a way that empowers people and suggests a tradition available to Orthodox churches today as they seek to become more mission-minded.
Post-Soviet social, political and religious changes in Russia extended to indigenous peoples of Siberia and stimulated the emergence of indigeneity as a political and cultural trend in Siberian ethnically-based regions. Among other factors, the indigenous movement bases its policy on the promotion of ‘indigenous religion’, which is represented as the foundation of indigenous revitalization. Throughout the expanses of Siberia, the multiplicity of local religious beliefs and practices that were repressed and driven underground since the 1930s began to come out onto the public sphere as symbols of indigenous resilience. However, the post-Soviet process of ‘unmaking and making of relations’ (Humphrey 2002) implied multidimensional trajectories. Siberia has become one of the most striking spots of recent changes on the Russian religious map, and is associated with an increasing presence of various Protestant denominations and churches in its vast territories. The rapid influx of foreign missionaries and evangelicals, and the mushrooming of indigenous religious communities became a feature characteristic of the highly competitive Siberian religious landscape. The paper draws on examples from author’s ethnographic research on conversion into Evangelical Christianity amongst the rural Nenets indigenous people of the Polar Urals (North-Western Siberia). Local religious landscape is highly unstable and is determined by anti-conversion activism and intertwined with the indigenous movement. In local public discourse the image of ‘alien sects’ that destruct ‘Nenets indigenous culture’ and Nenets authenticity is prevalent. However, the author argues that newly established Evangelical communities amongst the natives often carry most expressed ethnic awareness and defensiveness. Evangelical conversion becomes a foundation for re-assemblance of Nenets system of identities and for revision of Nenets authenticity. New religiosity is simultaneously perceived as change of and return to the true ‘Nenetsness’, true Nenets ‘traditional lifeway’. In the given ethnographic case, religious conversion provides a foundation for ‘indigenous awakening’ and ideological tools to develop Nenets resistance to the dominant system. Thus, new religious practices are being transformed into a strategy of indigenous empowerment.
2005
The present article is a revised version of a paper presented at the conference State Religion and Folk Belief held in 1998 at the University of Minneapolis, Minnesota. It is in response to the questions formulated by Dr. James D. Tracy about the relationship between state-sanctioned religion and popular belief. Should these two forms of belief be treated as antagonistic, or are they complementary forms of common devotion? If neither of the two extreme views is adequate, then what can be said of the links between the two forms of spiritual response to the challenges of the environment? I would like to comment on this dilemma from the perspective of an anthropologist with 25 years of research experience in the Russian Far North among the indigenous population of Chukotka, Kamchatka and eastern Yakutia. The situation I describe here is peculiar because, in this case, the state religion was introduced into the area from outside by an ethnically and culturally different group, and clash...
The Transition from Shamanism to Russian Orthodoxy in Alaska
The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 1996
CHAPTER 4: ECSTASY: p. (1) "Ecstasy" Defined. (2) Patristic Criteria for a Discernment between Ecstatic Experiences. (3) An Example of Discernment from the Field (Alaska). (4) Conclusions. CHAPTER 5: TRANSFORMATION, I: p. 223 (1) "Shamans" Defined. (2) An Ethnographic Perspective: Shamans-of-old in Southern Alaska. (3) A Social Perspective: Two Examples of Transformation. (4) Conclusions. CHAPTER 6: TRANSFORMATION, II. p. 254 (1) Biography of a Monastic Missionary, St. Herman of Alaska. (2) Sources for the Missionary's Attributes. (3) Definitions: Vocabulary in the Sources. (4) Selected Descriptions of the Attributes. (5) A Line of Tradition. (6) Conclusions. (7) Epilogue.
Adapting Christianity on the Siberian Edge during the Early Soviet Period
Folklore: Electronic Journal of Folklore, 2011
The focus of this article is on different adaptations of Christianity by the northern indigenous peoples of Russia in the early Soviet period. We shall examine the community of Yup'ik Eskimo maritime hunters who experimented with Christian ritual forms in order to overcome the crisis caused by the intrusion of the Soviets. Naukan Yup'ik developed a Christian-influenced ritualistic practice to fight back against growing pressure from the Soviets. We propose that the spiritual developments of this community on the edge of Siberia were tightly related to changing economic, social and political conditions. 7 Dalrevkom is the acronym for the 'Far Eastern Revolutionary Committee' in Russian.
In the post-Soviet period, new opportunities have been created for cross-cultural interaction revealing a global religious marketplace. The Russian Arctic seemed to have become an attractive land for international Protestant missionary activities. Since the mid-1990s, scholars began to register the growing influence of evangelical movements among the indigenous population of Siberia and the Far North. Based on a case study of religious communities in the Polar Ural Mountains and the Yamal peninsula, the article addresses the transformation of postsocialist religious landscape into a “battlefield” of different missionary principles and strategies. The picture was also amplified with the persistence of Soviet atheistic discourse on “destructive foreign religious sects” and local authorities’ policy of putting pressure upon and intimidating Protestant religious associations. The endurance of Soviet anti-religious ideology and the issue of “destructive sects” dominated local public discourse and influenced the ways in which the local authorities reacted to recent religious rearrangements. This article explores the background of the emerging diverse and competitive religiosity in the Arctic and across post-Soviet Russia and describes the main tensions that determined religious activity in the Russian Arctic.