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Accepted Paper:
Renewing religious landscape: Moscow Buddhism as a converted religious phenomenon in a global city
Aleksandra Sechko
(HSE University)
Tracking the ways in which Moscow's religious landscape is being renewed by the developing community of Buddhism's followers. Observing the forms of new religious communities - both real-life and imaginary - in the dynamic global city and their relations with the community of local mainstream church
Paper long abstract:
In this paper I’d like to track the ways in which Moscow's religious landscape is being renewed by the developing community of Buddhism's followers, framing this case within the optics of “global”. The new religious movements and alternative spirituality has been recently coming into the focus of urban landscape researchers (De Boeck, Fawaz, Srinivas). Thus, this paper is aiming to observe the emergence and functioning of new religious spaces in the dynamic global city in order to identify its origin, position and form as a part of the local landscape. As for the empirical material of the research, I’m concentrating on the sites and spaces – both physical and imaginary – created by non-ethnic Buddhist converts in Moscow, a global city having no historical ties with the religion. My fieldwork was carried out both in offline- and online-communities of all the Buddhist schools represented in the city, all of which emerged from five to ten years ago. Brad Weiss’s concept of imagination and Anna Tsing’s concept of circulations provide a conceptual background for exploring the specifics of religion’s migration from Japan to Moscow and its nature in the new state. I assume that the landscape of Moscow – physical and imaginary – is being transformed by a new religious community.