Religious Diversity in Post-Soviet Society

Ethnographies of Catholic Hegemony and the New Pluralism in Lithuania

Milda Ališauskiene, Ingo W. Schröder

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317066965
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Since the end of state repression against religion, two major processes have taken place in the formerly socialist countries: historically dominant churches strive to reassert their position in society, while new religious groups and ideas from various parts of the world are proliferating. This generates pluralism of religious communities and individual religious attitudes. Religious Diversity in Post-Soviet Society presents the first collection of ethnographies of this new religious diversity for Lithuania, a country that has a long history of a dominant Catholic Church. The authors reveal how Catholicism has become increasingly diversified and other religions (Charismatic Protestantism, Baltic Paganism, Eastern religions and other alternative spiritualities) are claiming their space in the religious field.

Chapter 1
Catholic Majority Societies and Religious Hegemony: Concepts and Comparisons

Ingo W. Schröder

The Anthropology of Christianity and the Neglect of the Majority

In this chapter I set out to sketch a theoretical framework for the study of the religious environment of a society like Lithuania that is dominated by a single church. The emergent anthropology of Christianity has paid comparatively little attention to the political dimension of religious affiliation in general and Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant majority churches in particular.1 An earlier interest in majority-minority relations and the politics of religious authority2 has been obliterated by a focus on meaning and culture. Studies on mainline churches have been rare in the anthropology of Christianity.3 Only recently has the study of dominant churches and the specific societal ramifications of this dominance experienced a minor revival in the context of the resurgence of such institutions in Eastern Europe after the demise of socialism.4

In times of the global dissemination of religious ideas and identifications, such majority churches present an important case against the notion of the religious market, where believers shop around for faith among an almost limitless supply of religions according to short-term rationalities. Majority churches and their continuing societal dominance demonstrate that the plausibility of religious selection, large as the number of choices may be, still is to a great extent derived from the longue durée of an established religious culture. The close ties of majority churches to ideas of cultural heritage and local historicity make the establishment of “other” religions, perceived as strange and essentially foreign to the local social environment, especially difficult and the joining of such religious communities appears as an act of conscious rejection of one’s historic culture.

The Catholic Church – along with the Eastern Orthodox Churches – represents the longest-lasting institution of European society. It provides a stable, long-term, formal religious standard,5 an orthodox version of faith supported over an extended time span by the authority of a highly stratified organization. There is a type of society across Europe where the authoritative position of the Catholic Church has been particularly salient, because this Church has dominated the religious field for centuries without the presence of any other strong religions. These Catholic majority societies comprise Ireland and France in Western Europe; Portugal, Spain, Italy, and Malta in the Mediterranean region as well as Poland, Lithuania, and Croatia in Eastern Europe.

Much of the existing research on Catholic majority societies has focused on folk religiosity, exemplified by pilgrimages and popular Marian devotion. A classic example of this dominant interest in popular Catholicism is Badone’s collection of essays,6 which explores the tension between official and popular religion that has been exacerbated by the changes introduced by the Vatican II reforms. The implicit or explicit focus on the dichotomy of “official” and “popular” forms of religiosity has been typical for studies of Catholic majority societies. In practice, this often implies a perspective that privileges localized religiosity as something that is in a way opposed to – rather than a constituent part of – the majority religion. Thus anthropology has largely avoided addressing the issue of the majority and the politics of religious domination that was called for by Wolf and Bax twenty years ago. The specific relationship of majority religions and national politics and culture, radically different from more pluralistic settings, has received as scant attention as has the specific situation of minority religions under conditions of dominance in the religious field by a historic majority church, when they are perceived not simply as different but as “others” that are foreign to the society’s cultural heritage. In other words, in Catholic majority societies issues of cultural authenticity and political power relations are equally important themes in the religious field as questions of belief and religious practice.

Religious Hegemony

In laying the theoretical foundation for a study of Catholic majority societies, I have relied especially on Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony which – although only occasionally applied to the context of religion – appears to be uniquely well-suited for a situation where a dominant institution has established a culture of consensus over time that marginalizes other institutions and cultural expressions. References to hegemony and common sense in research on religion invoke the older, political-economic tradition in the anthropology of Christianity mentioned above, which was introduced in the collections of essays edited by Eric Wolf and through Mart Bax’s concept of the “religious regime” (see below). Religion is understood here as a political reality, a social relationship that aligns groups and individuals vis-à-vis the sources of social power. In the following, a general overview of the main points of Gramsci’s theoretical reflections and their adoption by anthropologists will be sketched, with special reference to their usefulness in studying religion.

In most general terms, hegemony emerges out of a widely varied set of actions and ideas that are rooted in class experience and historically accumulated understandings. It represents a view of the world that naturalizes elite domination through a diverse set of strategies in the realm of culture. Culture structures people’s perception and experience of everyday reality in such a pervasive way that the hegemonic view is accepted as absolute throughout society. The subaltern people’s commonsense view of the world, in contrast, remains inchoate and fragmented and can only under specific historical circumstances be orchestrated into counter-hegemonic resistance. Antonio Gramsci introduced the concept of hegemony in his effort to theorize subaltern consciousness as the product of power inequalities.7 In Gramsci’s writings, hegemony encompasses a wide range of power relations from direct coercion to willing consent, which structure a world of inequality where subaltern people are prevented from producing coherent accounts of the world from their own perspective. More recent uses of the concept by Marxist anthropologists like Donald V. Kurtz, Gerald Sider, and Gavin Smith have mostly followed the influential reading of Gramsci by Raymond Williams8 that equates hegemony more or less with culture. The most influential examples of applying the theoretical apparatus of hegemony to sophisticated ethnographic case studies come from Gerald Sider, who conducted long-term field research in rural Newfoundland and among the Lumbee, a Native American group of the Carolinas,9 and Gavin Smith who studied peasants in Peru and Southeast Spain.10

Jean and John Comaroff have undertaken a highly sophisticated anthropological re-reading of Gramsci in the introduction to their voluminous study of the encounter between British colonialism and the Tswana people of southern Africa.11 Here they describe hegemony as “that order of signs and practices, relations and distinctions, images and epistemologies – drawn from a historically situated cultural field – that come to be taken-for-granted as the natural and received shape of the world and everything that inhabits it”.12 Hegemony is thus not seen as fully identical to culture but as connected with it through different modes of domination. These modes involve the assertion of control over various forms of symbolic production: educational and ritual processes, canons of style and self-representation, public communication, bodily discipline, etc.13 The Comaroffs define the two modes of domination as agentive, i.e., based on the ability of humans to wield command in specific historical contexts, and as nonagentive. The latter form of power “proliferates outside the realm of institutional politics, saturating such things as aesthetics and ethics, built form and bodily representation, medical knowledge and mundane usage. What is more, it may not be experienced as power at all, since its effects are rarely wrought by overt compulsion. They are internalized, in their negative guise, as constraints; in their neutral guise, as conventions, and, in their positive guise, as values.”14 The Comaroffs identify “power in the agentive mode” with ideology and “power in the nonagentive mode” with hegemony. The basic difference between the two lies in the fact that ideology is recognized as the expression of the interests of a particular social group, whereas hegemony is seen as a set of conventions shared and naturalized throughout a political community. For this reason the former is more likely to be perceived as guided by particularist interest and therefore open to contestation.15 The actual relationship between hegemony and ideology is established in an ongoing negotiation of domination in the cultural field that involves the elite and various subaltern groups. The relative proportions of the two modalities of cultural domination are constantly liable to shift, and the way specific symbolic expressions and practices are perceived within the continuum, whose ends they constitute, is always contingent upon the specific socio-historical context.16

Another important and useful reading of hegemony is William Roseberry’s classic description of cultural domination as a common idiom of communicating about the social world.17 Such a common idiom is crucial for the formation of a “systematic philosophy”, which Gramsci identifies as necessary for the formation of a homogeneous social group.18 Religion has the potential of constituting such an idiom, as well as constructing a unified “tradition”, described by Raymond Williams as the most evident expression of hegemony that offers a “historical and cultural ratification of a contemporary order”.19 What the hegemonic idiom needs to overcome is the “spontaneous philosophy” of common sense. Common sense as the concepts and beliefs held by ordinary people is viewed by Gramsci as a fragmentary collection of ideas drawn from different philosophies, ideologies, scientific notions, religion, folklore, and experience.20

In terms more familiar to anthropologists, common sense can be described as “local culture”. While it is by its very nature disorganized, incoherent, and fragmented, its resilient strength lies in the fact that it represents accumulated local history, everyday experience, and social relationships that contradict a unified hegemonic idiom. In Comaroffian terms, common sense tends to perceive elite discourses first of all as ideology that serves particularistic elite interests, as long as the latter do not succeed in inculcating people with their hegemonic idiom. Religion plays an important role here: on the one hand, because of the lasting influence of “folklore”, i.e., local historic culture and its popular religious beliefs, on current common sense, which tends to encompass aspects that are in opposition to the church hierarchy’s doctrine. On the other hand, because of people’s different individual religious experiences and everyday life scenarios that may contradict the official doxa.

Unlike the more immediately political aspects of Gramsci’s writings, which have enjoyed a resilient popularity among Marxism-inspired social scientists since the 1970s, his concept of hegemony and common sense has only sporadically been applied to the study of religion. Unlike Marx and Engels themselves, Gramsci recognized religion (which, due to his focus on Italy, mostly meant Catholicism) as an active mode of experiencing the world and social relationships, which had played an important role in the social development of Europe.21 Religion’s relationship with power has rarely been unambiguous. On the one hand, the Catholic Church has been a long-time ally of the ruling classes and a guarantor of support for the political hierarchy, supporting the “historical bloc” of hegemonic domination in both civil and political society. Yet, Gramsci also recognizes the great variability of Catholicism among different social groups:

Every religion, even the Catholic (in fact, especially the Ca...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Catholic Majority Societies and Religious Hegemony: Concepts and Comparisons
• 2 The History of Religion in Lithuania since the Nineteenth Century
• 3 “We Are All in Exile Here”: Perceptions of Death, the Soul, and the Afterlife in Rural Lithuania
• 4 The Elusive Religious Field in Lithuania
• 5 From Confrontation to Conciliation: On Syncretic Rapprochement between Catholics and Charismatic Evangelists in Lithuania
• 6 Romuva Looks East: Indian Inspiration in Lithuanian Paganism
• 7 The New Age Milieu in Lithuania: Popular Catholicism or Religious Alternative?
• 8 Muslims in Catholic Lithuania: Divergent Strategies in Dealing with the Marginality Status
• 9 The Neo-Buddhist White Lotus Movement in Search for Legitimacy
• Concluding Thoughts
• Index