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Accepted Paper:
Eschatology, pollution, and danger: apocalyptic ontology in post-Soviet Russian Orthodoxy
Alexander Panchenko
(University of Tartu)
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.