Paper short abstract:

In the Altai Republic, Buddhism, Orthodox and Evangelical Christianities, shamanism and Burkhanism are associated with local, national or transnational political ideologies. How the issues coping with these denominations were revised following the sending of native conscripts to the Ukrainian front?

Paper long abstract:

The Altai mountain range has been characterised by the historian A. Znamenski as the "Palestine of Asia" (1999), due to the great variety of religious currents that have always been concentrated there. In the present-day Republic of Altai (Southern Siberia in the Russian Federation), all religious movements have the particularity of being associated with local, national or transnational political ideologies. Thus, while Orthodox Christianity mirrors Russian federal politics, Buddhism promoted by the local indigenous intelligentsia is seen as a means of integrating the Republic of Altai into the larger family of Buddhist states. Evangelical Christian denominations inscribe their followers within the global Christian brotherhood, and shamanism and Burkhanism (a pre-Soviet messianic millenarianism), both revived, convey a representation of the Altai tinged with Russian ethno-nationalism, scientism and New Age, and undermined by contemporary ecological concerns. My presentation will show how these different denominations appeared in post-Soviet Russia, the issues associated with them, and how these were revised following the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the sending of Indigenous conscripts to the front.

Paper short abstract:

The "Community of Free Ruses" formed around Maria Kamenskaya understands religion as an integrated fraudulent project of legal enslavement of humanity. Any global cataclysms are interpreted by them as attempts by religious elites to stop the process of Slavs' realisation of their legal rights.

Paper long abstract:

Since the early 2010s, a legalist millennialist movement of so-called citizens of the USSR who consider the modern Russian state a legal fiction has been gaining popularity in Russia. Looking as a leftist political project, this movement is largely based on the ontological and epistemological tenets of New Age spirituality. This involves treating most official institutions as organisations specifically designed to suppress the will and consciousness of the individual. A particular role in this criticism is played by the protest against religion, understood as an integrated fraudulent project of ideological and legal enslavement of humanity.

The paper examines the activities of the "Community of Free Ruses", formed around a “USSR citizen” Maria Kamenskaya. The movement is both a network of local organizations and an online community, united by the activities of a telegram and YouTube channels. Its members create their own dogmatics, language and system of rituals, which, in their opinion, are simultaneously based on the ultra-modern science and on the ancient system of knowledge which their distant Slavic ancestors allegedly possessed. The purpose of all this activity is to enable the members of the movement to carry out legally valid actions that destroy the secret system of laws and legal stipulations that prevent people from realising their rights to limitless resources.

In these conditions any global cataclysms - epidemics and wars - are interpreted by the "Ruses" as desperate attempts by religious elites to stop the unstoppable process of the Slavs' "awakening" from the nightmare of their legal disempowerment.

Paper short abstract:

The paper presents an analysis of the geopolitical imagery of Lithuanian contemporary Pagans and its relation to the national and international context of the past decade.

Paper long abstract:

Romuva, the most visible contemporary Pagan community of Lithuania, describes itself as an Ancient Baltic religion, supports the unity of the Baltic peoples, and keeps close connections with Latvian counterparts. In 2021 both communities signed a statement on the Sacred land of the Balts. Based on the idea developed by Romuvian priest Jonas Vaiškūnas, the statement claims the two religious communities are legitimate inheritors of the Sacred land of the Baltic tribes and requires nations currently living in the historical Baltic lands covering Belorussia, parts of Russia, Ukraine and Poland to respect the Baltic material and spiritual heritage in their territories.

The paper explores the role of the concept of the ‘Balts’, the relationships with Latvian Pagans and the development of geopolitical imagery of Romuva, and its relation to the current national and international context. As their counterparts in other Eastern and Central Eastern countries, Lithuanian contemporary Pagans have always been mostly a right-wing nationalistic religious community, and Romuva has described itself as a Baltic religion at least since its official registration in 1992. However, the idea of the Sacred land of the Balts points to some shifts in the Romuvian geopolitical imagery that reflects recent processes in Eastern Europe of the past decade.

Paper short abstract:

The paper presents the mutual relations between religion and politics on the example of conflict about the Ślęża mountain in south-western Poland, where Catholics and contemporary Pagans undertake religious practices in the public sphere to manifest their rights to this place.

Paper long abstract:

The most significant current of contemporary Paganism in Poland is called Rodzimowierstwo. Rodzimowierstwo means Native Faith and refers to the pre-Christian religion of the Slavs. The followers argue that it is a Polish ethnic religion that survived in folk culture for over a thousand years of Chrystianity, which, in turn, is considered a foreign religion, imposed by force, and destroying native culture. In this context, it is also emphasized that contemporary Polish Pagans cannot freely use places which, in the light of archaeological research, were pre-Christian centers of Slavic worship, because most of them are currently occupied, in a sense, by the Catholic Church.

Based on my field research that I have been conducting since 2018, I would like to analyse in detail how such a situation looks on Ślęża mountain in south-western Poland. Using this example, I am going to show how various types of religious practices are manifested in the public sphere as a way of verbalizing and justifying the right to specific places of worship, but also as an attempt to put a given religion in a broader geopolitical context. On Ślęża mountain, both Catholics and contemporary Pagans are trying to make their religion more visible, public, powerful, and thus, in a sense, more political. In this way, both of them create vernacular religious ideologies that are supposed to make their religion recognized as "native" and "proper" for the Polish nation.

Paper short abstract:

The presentation focuses on the specific narratives that those inclined to conspirituality (conspiracies in the context of alternative spirituality) construct or take over from others to identify and explain the anticipated threats or, conversely, to prevent them.

Paper long abstract:

Conspirituality is a relatively new term for an intertwining of conspiratorial and supernatural explanations, specifically in the context of alternative spirituality. Although a diverse phenomenon, those engaged in this sphere combine political-spiritual philosophies in which 1) the world is ruled by power groups that manipulate "ordinary" people, 2) "humanity is undergoing a paradigm shift in consciousness" (Ward & Voas, 2011). The presentation will examine how supernatural and conspiratory beliefs can complement each other in creating a personal and group worldview or philosophy of life. It is based on ongoing anthropological research in Slovakia (Jerotijević & Hagovská 2020, 2019). The periods of the COVID-19 pandemic and the current war in Ukraine or the previous migration crisis have provided various alternative, often conspiratorial, explanations of reality that have mainly responded to people's actual or perceived threats. The perception of threat is one of the topics that anthropology has been dealing with for a long time (e.g., Douglas, 1992). Information indicating a threat, whether acute or potential, attracts more attention and spreads better in the population (Boyer & Parren, 2015; Fessler et al., 2014). The feeling of threat and lack of control can lead to an increased need to understand what is happening (Paloutzian 2005). Research has repeatedly shown that feelings of danger increase religiosity (e.g., Henrich et al., 2019) and belief in conspiracy theories (van Prooijen, 2020; Uscinski, Parent & Torens, 2011). Both types of beliefs namely activate interpretive frameworks that bring a sense of understanding and control over the situation.

Paper short abstract:

The paper focuses on apocalyptic conspiracy theories popular among present day conservative Russian Orthodox believers as related to particular forms of ontology. The apocalyptic fears are informed by the ideas of contamination and social control and appear to fit in a broader ontological program.

Paper long abstract:

The paper focuses on apocalyptic conspiracy theories popular among present day conservative Russian Orthodox believers as related to particular forms of ontology, aesthetics, and social imagination. Apocalyptic imagination of conservative Orthodox believers pays particular attention to the loss of individual agency as well as pollution understood both in moral and physiological sense. Both themes are discussed and represented by means of bodily images and metaphors. This world view proceeds from a kind of holistic principle that makes the categories of bodily, spiritual, and social equal or even identical and operates within the idea of “extended body” threatened by pollution and loss of autonomy. In this context, apocalyptic fears are related to the idea of physiological contamination and external social control and appear to fit in a broader ontological program.