Sonja Luehrmann
Biographic Data
| ID | 3596400 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sonja Luehrmann |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sonja |
| FAMILY NAME | Luehrmann |
| SIGNATURE | LUEHRMANN S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Simon Fraser University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 71 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1969 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2019 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
“Everything New That Life Gives Birth To”: Family Values and Kinship Practices in Russian Orthodox Antiabortion Activism
Russia is gaining a reputation for rigid gender stereotypes, ranging from hypersexualized political performance to images of deeply religious women enforcing conservative moral standards. This article argues that we can look beyond this binary by recognizing that even the conservatives work with a set of kinship-gender arrangements that are far removed from patriarchal ideals. Based on interviews with self-identified Orthodox Christian psychologi…
Note des rédactrices
Catriona Kelly. Socialist Churches: Radical Secularization and the Preservation of the Past in Petrograd and Leningrad, 1918–1988
Histories of Soviet-era religious life often juxtapose “the state” to “religious believers” as two homogeneous groups whose interests and strategies were fundamentally opposed. In Socialist Churches, a study of preservationist policies toward church buildings in Leningrad, Catriona Kelly breaks open this binary by focusing on a group of bureaucrats whose priorities were sometimes at odds with general trends of Soviet policy. While sharing the ide…
The Social Nature of Prayer in a Church of the Unchurched: Russian Orthodox Christianity from Its Edges
The Russian Orthodox Church portrays itself as a hierarchically ordered and socially influential “public religion,” but occupies quite a tenuous position in contemporary Russian society. Following Marcel Mauss’s idea of prayer as a social phenomenon, we argue that lay intercessory prayer as a way of assuming social responsibility is key to extending the Church’s reach into the lives of casual believers (so-called zakhozhane). Although individuali…
Soviet Atheism and Its Aftermath
If Soviet atheism is a variety of secularism, it more resembles eliminationist movements viewing religions as obstacles to the political integration of citizens into the state. Before World War II, the Bolshevik government issued decrees to disentangle the state from the church. Later, Khrushchev emphasized atheism and closed churches as part of a general populist, mobilizational approach to promoting communist values. By the 1970s, religious pra…
Praying with the Senses: Contemporary Orthodox Christian Spirituality in Practice
God values intentions: Abortion, expiation, and moments of sincerity in Russian Orthodox pilgrimage
A broad understanding of sincerity includes the assumption that intentions matter for evaluating an action. Studies of Western Christianity often tell of an increasing focus on internal self-interrogation that led to an ideal of sincerity as a form of modern self-expression. Based on research with Russian Orthodox women who expiate abortions, I argue that intention matters here too, but not always and not in the form of deep interiority. During c…
The politics of prayer books: Delegated intercession, names, and community boundaries in the Russian Orthodox Church
Prayer is most easily conceived of as political speech when it is a spontaneous practice showing individual and group reactions to current events. Where prayer is a routinized activity involving the recitation of canonical texts, interpreters locate politics in the disciplining of bodies and acts of claiming space. This paper takes inspiration from ethnographies of oral ritual performance and Quranic recitation to include texts and the delegation…
Iconographic Historicism: Being Contemporary and Orthodox at the Same Time
Religion in Secular Archives: Soviet Atheism and Historical Knowledge
Russian archives contain a wealth of information on religiosity during the Soviet era, but most of it is written from the hostile perspective of officials and scholars charged with promoting atheism. Based on archival research in locations as diverse as the multi-religious Volga region, Moscow, and Texas, this book argues that much can be learned about Soviet religiosity by a focus not just on what documents say but also on what their originators…
Antagonistic Insights: Evolving Soviet Atheist Critiques of Religion and Why They Matter for Anthropology
This article offers a critique of the common notion in contemporary anthropology that a positive attitude toward the people under study is a necessary precondition for a sophisticated understanding of their social world. The empirical sociology of religion that evolved during the last decades of the Soviet Union's existence started from the premise that religion was a harmful phenomenon slated for disappearance. Nonetheless, atheist sociologists …
Marina Mogilner. Homo Imperii: A History of Physical Anthropology in Russia
In contrast to cultural anthropology/ethnography, whose role in the governance of Russia and the Soviet Union has been the subject of several recent books, the history of physical anthropology in Russia is virtually unknown to English-speaking readers. A revised and adapted translation of a study that appeared in Russian in 2008, Marina Mogilner's book not only fills the factual gap, but also puts the politics of the discipline in a larger Europe…
Vincent Goossaert and David A. Palmer, The Religious Question in Modern China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011, pp. xii + 464
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The Magic of Others: Mari Witchcraft Reputations and Interethnic Relations in the Volga Region
Starting from the portrayal of a Mari-speaking soothsayer in the recent Russian television series “Ivan Groznyi”, this essay asks what the Maris’ longstanding reputation for witchcraft tells us about interethnic relations in European Russia, and about the place of magic in Russia’s popular imaginaries. A Finno-Ugric-speaking group that served as a buffer between Muscovy and the Khanate of Kazan’ until it was brought under Moscow’s rule in the six…
Islam and assisted reproductive technologies: Sunni and Shia perspectives , edited by Inhorn, Marcia C. and Soraya Tremayne
Reconstructing the House of Culture: Community, self, and the makings of culture in Russia and beyond , edited by Donahoe, Brian and Joachim Otto Habeck
The spirit of late socialism and the value of transformation: Brezhnevism through the lens of post‐Soviet religious revival
Cet article conteste la thèse d'un renouveau religieux durant l'époque brejnévienne et cherche d'autres explications à la façon dont cette période a façonné les consciences et les habitudes des activistes religieux postsoviétiques. En s'appuyant sur des recherches archivistiques portant sur le travail culturel de l'époque brejnévienne dans la région de la Moyenne Volga, ainsi que sur des entretiens avec des activistes religieux postsoviétiques, l…
Secularism Soviet Style: Teaching Atheism and Religion in a Volga Republic
Visit the author's website Like the New Anthropologies of Europe series page on Facebook
The Modernity of Manual Reproduction: Soviet Propaganda and the Creative Life of Ideology
A Dual Quarrel of Images on the Middle Volga: Icon Veneration in the Face of Protestant and Pagan Critique
Communities of the Converted: Ukrainians and Global Evangelism by Catherine Wanner
The Old Faith and the Russian Land: A Historical Ethnography of Ethics in the Urals. Douglas Rogers
The Tlingit Indians in Russian America, 1741-1867
Book Review| April 01 2007 The Tlingit Indians in Russian America, 1741-1867 The Tlingit Indians in Russian America, 1741-1867. By Andrei Val'terovich Grinev. Translated by Richard L. Bland and Katerina G. Solovjova. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. xi + 386 pp., preface, translators' introduction, maps, documentary appendix, glossary, bibliography, index. $55.00 cloth.) Sonja Luehrmann Sonja Luehrmann Search for other works by this …
Recycling Cultural Construction: Desecularisation in Postsoviet Mari El1
Russian Colonialism and the Asiatic Mode of Production: (Post-)Soviet Ethnography Goes to Alaska
This article discusses the concept of politarism (politarizm), developed by die Soviet ethnographer Iu. I. Semenov as an elaboration on Marx's Asiatic mode of production. Presenting both its origin in the revisionist debates of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras and its recent application in an innovative analysis of Russian colonialism in Alaska by the ethnohistorian A. V. Grinev, Sonja Luehrmann attempts to grasp the intellectual complexity of Se…
Mediated marriage: Internet matchmaking in provincial Russia
(Girls, don’t marry foreigners—support a domestic producer!) —Slogan on a mug bought at a department store in Yoshkar-Ola, summer 2003 SUSAN GAL AND GAIL KLIGMAN HAVE ARGUED that concerns over the reproduction of the nation have placed women’s behaviour at the centre of political debates in many post-socialist states (Gal & Kligman, 2000, p. 15). During a year as a teaching fellow at Mari State University in Yoshkar-Ola, the capital of one of the…
Recycling Cultural Construction: Desecularisation in Postsoviet Mari El1
The Modernity of Manual Reproduction: Soviet Propaganda and the Creative Life of Ideology
God values intentions: Abortion, expiation, and moments of sincerity in Russian Orthodox pilgrimage
A broad understanding of sincerity includes the assumption that intentions matter for evaluating an action. Studies of Western Christianity often tell of an increasing focus on internal self-interrogation that led to an ideal of sincerity as a form of modern self-expression. Based on research with Russian Orthodox women who expiate abortions, I argue that intention matters here too, but not always and not in the form of deep interiority. During c…
The Social Nature of Prayer in a Church of the Unchurched: Russian Orthodox Christianity from Its Edges
The Russian Orthodox Church portrays itself as a hierarchically ordered and socially influential “public religion,” but occupies quite a tenuous position in contemporary Russian society. Following Marcel Mauss’s idea of prayer as a social phenomenon, we argue that lay intercessory prayer as a way of assuming social responsibility is key to extending the Church’s reach into the lives of casual believers (so-called zakhozhane). Although individuali…
The politics of prayer books: Delegated intercession, names, and community boundaries in the Russian Orthodox Church
Prayer is most easily conceived of as political speech when it is a spontaneous practice showing individual and group reactions to current events. Where prayer is a routinized activity involving the recitation of canonical texts, interpreters locate politics in the disciplining of bodies and acts of claiming space. This paper takes inspiration from ethnographies of oral ritual performance and Quranic recitation to include texts and the delegation…
The spirit of late socialism and the value of transformation: Brezhnevism through the lens of post‐Soviet religious revival
Cet article conteste la thèse d'un renouveau religieux durant l'époque brejnévienne et cherche d'autres explications à la façon dont cette période a façonné les consciences et les habitudes des activistes religieux postsoviétiques. En s'appuyant sur des recherches archivistiques portant sur le travail culturel de l'époque brejnévienne dans la région de la Moyenne Volga, ainsi que sur des entretiens avec des activistes religieux postsoviétiques, l…
Iconographic Historicism: Being Contemporary and Orthodox at the Same Time
Russian Colonialism and the Asiatic Mode of Production: (Post-)Soviet Ethnography Goes to Alaska
This article discusses the concept of politarism (politarizm), developed by die Soviet ethnographer Iu. I. Semenov as an elaboration on Marx's Asiatic mode of production. Presenting both its origin in the revisionist debates of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras and its recent application in an innovative analysis of Russian colonialism in Alaska by the ethnohistorian A. V. Grinev, Sonja Luehrmann attempts to grasp the intellectual complexity of Se…
Islam and assisted reproductive technologies: Sunni and Shia perspectives , edited by Inhorn, Marcia C. and Soraya Tremayne
Note des rédactrices: Préserver l'accès à la recherche
Note des rédactrices
Mediated marriage: Internet matchmaking in provincial Russia
(Girls, don’t marry foreigners—support a domestic producer!) —Slogan on a mug bought at a department store in Yoshkar-Ola, summer 2003 SUSAN GAL AND GAIL KLIGMAN HAVE ARGUED that concerns over the reproduction of the nation have placed women’s behaviour at the centre of political debates in many post-socialist states (Gal & Kligman, 2000, p. 15). During a year as a teaching fellow at Mari State University in Yoshkar-Ola, the capital of one of the…
Recycling Cultural Construction: Desecularisation in Postsoviet Mari El1
Russian Colonialism and the Asiatic Mode of Production: (Post-)Soviet Ethnography Goes to Alaska
This article discusses the concept of politarism (politarizm), developed by die Soviet ethnographer Iu. I. Semenov as an elaboration on Marx's Asiatic mode of production. Presenting both its origin in the revisionist debates of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras and its recent application in an innovative analysis of Russian colonialism in Alaska by the ethnohistorian A. V. Grinev, Sonja Luehrmann attempts to grasp the intellectual complexity of Se…
The Tlingit Indians in Russian America, 1741-1867
Book Review| April 01 2007 The Tlingit Indians in Russian America, 1741-1867 The Tlingit Indians in Russian America, 1741-1867. By Andrei Val'terovich Grinev. Translated by Richard L. Bland and Katerina G. Solovjova. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. xi + 386 pp., preface, translators' introduction, maps, documentary appendix, glossary, bibliography, index. $55.00 cloth.) Sonja Luehrmann Sonja Luehrmann Search for other works by this …
A Dual Quarrel of Images on the Middle Volga: Icon Veneration in the Face of Protestant and Pagan Critique
Communities of the Converted: Ukrainians and Global Evangelism by Catherine Wanner
The Old Faith and the Russian Land: A Historical Ethnography of Ethics in the Urals. Douglas Rogers
Secularism Soviet Style: Teaching Atheism and Religion in a Volga Republic
Visit the author's website Like the New Anthropologies of Europe series page on Facebook
The Modernity of Manual Reproduction: Soviet Propaganda and the Creative Life of Ideology
Vincent Goossaert and David A. Palmer, The Religious Question in Modern China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011, pp. xii + 464
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The Magic of Others: Mari Witchcraft Reputations and Interethnic Relations in the Volga Region
Starting from the portrayal of a Mari-speaking soothsayer in the recent Russian television series “Ivan Groznyi”, this essay asks what the Maris’ longstanding reputation for witchcraft tells us about interethnic relations in European Russia, and about the place of magic in Russia’s popular imaginaries. A Finno-Ugric-speaking group that served as a buffer between Muscovy and the Khanate of Kazan’ until it was brought under Moscow’s rule in the six…
Islam and assisted reproductive technologies: Sunni and Shia perspectives , edited by Inhorn, Marcia C. and Soraya Tremayne
Reconstructing the House of Culture: Community, self, and the makings of culture in Russia and beyond , edited by Donahoe, Brian and Joachim Otto Habeck
The spirit of late socialism and the value of transformation: Brezhnevism through the lens of post‐Soviet religious revival
Cet article conteste la thèse d'un renouveau religieux durant l'époque brejnévienne et cherche d'autres explications à la façon dont cette période a façonné les consciences et les habitudes des activistes religieux postsoviétiques. En s'appuyant sur des recherches archivistiques portant sur le travail culturel de l'époque brejnévienne dans la région de la Moyenne Volga, ainsi que sur des entretiens avec des activistes religieux postsoviétiques, l…
Marina Mogilner. Homo Imperii: A History of Physical Anthropology in Russia
In contrast to cultural anthropology/ethnography, whose role in the governance of Russia and the Soviet Union has been the subject of several recent books, the history of physical anthropology in Russia is virtually unknown to English-speaking readers. A revised and adapted translation of a study that appeared in Russian in 2008, Marina Mogilner's book not only fills the factual gap, but also puts the politics of the discipline in a larger Europe…
Religion in Secular Archives: Soviet Atheism and Historical Knowledge
Russian archives contain a wealth of information on religiosity during the Soviet era, but most of it is written from the hostile perspective of officials and scholars charged with promoting atheism. Based on archival research in locations as diverse as the multi-religious Volga region, Moscow, and Texas, this book argues that much can be learned about Soviet religiosity by a focus not just on what documents say but also on what their originators…
Antagonistic Insights: Evolving Soviet Atheist Critiques of Religion and Why They Matter for Anthropology
This article offers a critique of the common notion in contemporary anthropology that a positive attitude toward the people under study is a necessary precondition for a sophisticated understanding of their social world. The empirical sociology of religion that evolved during the last decades of the Soviet Union's existence started from the premise that religion was a harmful phenomenon slated for disappearance. Nonetheless, atheist sociologists …
The politics of prayer books: Delegated intercession, names, and community boundaries in the Russian Orthodox Church
Prayer is most easily conceived of as political speech when it is a spontaneous practice showing individual and group reactions to current events. Where prayer is a routinized activity involving the recitation of canonical texts, interpreters locate politics in the disciplining of bodies and acts of claiming space. This paper takes inspiration from ethnographies of oral ritual performance and Quranic recitation to include texts and the delegation…
Iconographic Historicism: Being Contemporary and Orthodox at the Same Time
Soviet Atheism and Its Aftermath
If Soviet atheism is a variety of secularism, it more resembles eliminationist movements viewing religions as obstacles to the political integration of citizens into the state. Before World War II, the Bolshevik government issued decrees to disentangle the state from the church. Later, Khrushchev emphasized atheism and closed churches as part of a general populist, mobilizational approach to promoting communist values. By the 1970s, religious pra…
Praying with the Senses: Contemporary Orthodox Christian Spirituality in Practice
God values intentions: Abortion, expiation, and moments of sincerity in Russian Orthodox pilgrimage
A broad understanding of sincerity includes the assumption that intentions matter for evaluating an action. Studies of Western Christianity often tell of an increasing focus on internal self-interrogation that led to an ideal of sincerity as a form of modern self-expression. Based on research with Russian Orthodox women who expiate abortions, I argue that intention matters here too, but not always and not in the form of deep interiority. During c…
Catriona Kelly. Socialist Churches: Radical Secularization and the Preservation of the Past in Petrograd and Leningrad, 1918–1988
Histories of Soviet-era religious life often juxtapose “the state” to “religious believers” as two homogeneous groups whose interests and strategies were fundamentally opposed. In Socialist Churches, a study of preservationist policies toward church buildings in Leningrad, Catriona Kelly breaks open this binary by focusing on a group of bureaucrats whose priorities were sometimes at odds with general trends of Soviet policy. While sharing the ide…
Sociology (15 works) · Political science (14 works) · History (13 works) · Law (13 works) · Philosophy (12 works) · Soviet and Russian History (12 works) · Politics (9 works) · Religion and Society Interactions (9 works) · Art (7 works) · Archaeology (5 works)