Multiple Moralities and Religions in Post-Soviet Russia

Jarrett Zigon, Jarrett Zigon

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780857452108
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology of Religion
• Index: Social Sciences

In the post-Soviet period morality became a debatable concept, open to a multitude of expressions and performances. From Russian Orthodoxy to Islam, from shamanism to Protestantism, religions of various kinds provided some of the first possible alternative moral discourses and practices after the end of the Soviet system. This influence remains strong today. Within the Russian context, religion and morality intersect in such social domains as the relief of social suffering, the interpretation of history, the construction and reconstruction of traditions, individual and social health, and business practices. The influence of religion is also apparent in the way in which the Russian Orthodox Church increasingly acts as the moral voice of the government. The wide-ranging topics in this ethnographically based volume show the broad religious influence on both discursive and everyday moralities. The contributors reveal that although religion is a significant aspect of the various assemblages of morality, much like in other parts of the world, religion in postsocialist Russia cannot be separated from the political or economic or transnational institutional aspects of morality.

PART I

Introduction

CHAPTER 1

Multiple Moralities

Discourses, Practices, and Breakdowns in Post-Soviet Russia

Jarrett Zigon

Since the mid 1980s the Russian people have been living through an historically unprecedented period of social and political upheaval and cultural and epistemological questioning—what is often referred to as the post-Soviet transition. This process has been accompanied by, if not partly instigated by, a neoliberal version of globalization that has disrupted the social lives of innumerable peoples around the world. According to James Faubion, globalization has brought about an “increasing intensity of problematization” (2001: 101). The Foucauldian notion of problematization, like Heidegger’s breakdown (Heidegger 1996: 68–69), describes a reflective state in which such everyday unreflected practices and discourses are presented “to oneself as an object of thought and to question it as to its meaning, its conditions, and its goals” (Foucault 1984: 388). The so-called transition of post-Soviet Russia can be considered as a similar process of problematization or breakdown. One characteristic of this questioning is the struggle by individuals and institutions to articulate a coherent and widely acceptable notion of morality. Thus, the post-Soviet period has seen a cacophony of moral debate, argumentation, and questioning. The contributions of this volume show that in the post-Soviet period, religions have become one of the central social arenas in which these moral processes are taking place (see also Rasanayagam 2006; Steinberg and Wanner 2008).

The Russian Orthodox Church has been an integral part of Russian life for centuries (Boym 1994; Ellis 1998; Gutkin 1999). In the post-Soviet era the Russian Orthodox Church has reestablished itself as one of the most stable and influential cultural institutions in the Russian Federation (Pankhurst 1996; Hann and Goltz 2010). In particular, the Church has become increasingly involved in public debates concerning such specific moral issues and concerns as bioethics and reproductive rights, HIV/AIDS and drug rehabilitation, the family, and human rights (Ellis 1998; Russian Orthodox Church 2000, 2005, 2008; Zigon 2011). But as several anthropologists, including Caldwell and Raubisko in this volume, have argued, there is a long history within Russia of other religious traditions playing a significant role in both the social and moral lives of Russians. This continues in today’s Russia. Thus, for example, Judaism (Goluboff 2003), Islam (Johnson, Stepaniants, and Forest 2005; Raubisko, this volume), Protestantism (Caldwell 2004, this volume), and Old Believer Orthodoxy (Rogers 2008, 2009) have all been and continue to be major religious traditions central to Russian notions of identity and morality (see also Pelkmans 2009).

A particularly insightful anthropological study of the relationship between non-Russian Orthodox religion and morality in Russia has been done by Douglas Rogers (2009), who has done research on the moral practices of persons living in a predominantly Old Believer village in the Urals. Rogers argues that the context of socio-political transition in the post-Soviet years has allowed for the renewal of negotiations and debates over the constitution of moral relations guided by Old Believer values in a time of capitalist transformation. These conversations and conflicts, so Rogers argues, are in a dialogical negotiation with historically informed Old Believer dispositions and sensibilities, which, in turn, leads to the kinds of ethical transformations he writes about. What makes this dialogue and transformation possible is that “what one thinks of as ‘right’ or virtuous usually exists in many shades of similarity and difference to what one’s neighbors think” (Rogers 2004: 36). I find Rogers’ observation on the importance of these “shades of similarity and difference” significant for understanding how morality is articulated, negotiated, and embodied in post-Soviet Russia in general, and particularly so for those negotiating the often competing moralities of religion and capitalist market relations (see Zigon 2008a, 2009, 2010).

As already pointed out above, one way of describing contemporary Russia is as a place where there is much open and public debate and negotiation between competing moralities of both the sacred and secular variety. Although post-Soviet Russia has been characterized as a society of bespredel, or a society without moral limits (Kon 1996: 205), I hesitate to make such a characterization and instead would say that in today’s Russia there is a struggle over competing moral conceptualizations. In this sense, contemporary Russia is not a place without morality, but rather a place of multiple moralities where various sacred and secular moral discourses and ethical practices have become, to varying degrees, legitimate options (Wanner 2007: 10, this volume).

This multiplicity of morality and the concern of its potential danger to a perceived social and moral cohesion of collective life is not unique to the post-Soviet period and, in fact, seems to characterize much of the post-Stalinist years. For example, during the late-Brezhnev years many Russians, using a discourse very similar to that heard in the post-Soviet period, showed constant concern for the immorality of Soviet youth, the increasing negative effects of materialism and Western entertainment on Soviet morality, and a shocking rise of publicly expressed sexuality, the response to which was a widespread call for a return to traditional Russian and Soviet family values (Binyon 1983). Similarly, the Communist Party’s promulgation of “The Moral Code of the Builder of Communism,” a kind of communist ten commandments that was eventually taught in schools and spread door to door by members of the Komsomol, was conceived as a response to a perceived breakdown of morality in the early 1960s (De George 1969). Therefore, what Kon sees as an erosion of morality in post-Soviet Russia, and what I see as a cacophony of moral debate and questioning, is in large part a continuation of a public discourse that has been voiced for generations. In fact, it could be argued that one of the primary differences between post-Soviet Russia and the previous moral questioning of the post-Stalinist years is the emergence of various religious traditions in the public arena of moral debate and contestation.

A significant part of this moral questioning, and one shared by several sacred and secular moralities in contemporary Russia, has been an emphasis on individuals ethically transforming themselves into new moral persons (Ries 1997: 119; Fitzpatrick 2005: 304). As I have shown elsewhere through the life-historical portraits of post-Soviet Russian Orthodox believers, religions of various sorts have been central to this process of self-transformation (Zigon 2008a, 2009, 2010). This process is also clearly seen in the chapter by Panchenko, among others in this volume. Interestingly, however, this post-Soviet emphasis on working on the self (rabota nad soboi) has roots in the Soviet discourse of creating the New Soviet Man by means of individual self-disciplining (Etkind 1996: 107–09; Kharkhordin 1999; Fitzpatrick 2005). Kharkhordin (1999), in turn, has argued that Soviet emphasis on working on the self had its roots in the pre-revolution Russian Orthodox Church and continued well into the late-Soviet years. These practices continue in the post-Soviet period. Pesmen argues that tropes of self-analysis and suffering are central to the ways in which her informants spoke of working on themselves, and that they believe such practices are the necessary “work of dusha” (2000: 54n). Similarly, Rivkin-Fish shows that among reproductive health activists in Russia, there is a “common tendency to construe their work for reproductive health as a mission to promote moral changes in interpersonal relationships and the development of personality (or what might be called ‘work on the self’)” (284). As can be seen, then, although the moral discourse and ethical practices of work on the self are central to various religious traditions in contemporary Russia, this discourse and practice has much wider secular and historical cache, rendering it, perhaps, the most powerful moral concept in contemporary Russia.

Anthropology of Moralities and Religion

The recent explicit focus of some anthropologists on local moralities constitutes a theoretical and conceptual shift in attention of the anthropological gaze (e.g., Heintz 2009; Robbins 2007; Zigon 2008b, 2009). It has been argued that anthropologists, as well as social scientists in general, have not explicitly studied moralities because of a deep-seated Durkheimian influence that tends to equate the moral with the reproduction of social norms. In this sense, sociality as such is basically equated with morality. This Durkheimian perspective also tends to put significant emphasis on religious discourse, practice, and ritual for the maintenance and reproduction of this sociality as morality. While a number of contemporary anthropologists of morality tend to agree with this critique of the Durkheimian legacy, several of them have, nevertheless, researched and theorized local moralities through the lens of local religious life. In an attempt to explain this anthropological focus, Michael Lambek has argued that “religion provides objects and occasions, no less than models, ‘of and for’ meaningful, ethical practice” (2000: 313).

Despite this shared focus on the interrelationship between religion and morality, anthropologists have taken different approaches to their studies. Thus, for example, Steven Parish (1991, 1994) is primarily concerned with the ways in which Hinduism helps shape what he calls the moral consciousness and conceptions of his informants; Joel Robbins (2004, 2007) takes a structuralist approach shaped by the likes of Durkheim, Weber, and Dumont in his analysis of the moral torment that has resulted from the conversion of the Urapmin of Papua New Guinea to Pentecostalism; and Saba Mahmood (2005) has utilized a post-structuralist Foucauldian approach in her analysis of the ethical cultivation of virtue among women of an Islamic Piety movement in Egypt. Therefore, while these anthropologists agree that religion is an important and central social arena for the study of local moralities, each have approached this in very different ways.

These differences tend to reflect a basic distinction between two approaches within the anthropology of moralities. In my reading of the anthropology of moralities literature there are two predominant approaches: the moral reasoning and choice approach and the Neo-Aristotelian and Foucauldian approach. Howell and several contributors to her edited volume on the ethnography of moralities suggest that a cross-cultural study of moralities may best be served by focusing on the acting individual’s process of moral reasoning, during which choices are made between alternative possible actions (1997: 14–16). Robbins agrees and claims that the moral domain is a conscious domain of choice (2004: 315–16; see also Laidlaw 2002). While to some extent attention to choices and reasoning are important, I am concerned that this position limits what Robbins calls the moral domain. This is so because it must be recognized that a person is not only moral when she must make a conscious decision to be so. Rather, the need to consciously consider or reason about what one must do only arises in moments that shake one out of the unreflective everydayness of being moral. This moment is what I will call in the next section a moral breakdown. What is often missing from the reasoning and choice approach, then, is an explicit framing of those moments of moral breakdown when one must find ways, and choosing and reasoning may only be two of the possible ways, to return to the unreflective state of being moral.

The other predominant approach taken by anthropologists to the study of local moralities is what we could call dispositional or virtue ethics (e.g., Hirschkind 2001; Mahmood 2005; Widlok 2004). These studies take Neo-Aristotelian and Foucauldian approaches in considering how people make themselves into properly attuned moral persons. While there certainly are differences between these two approaches, both share the notion that one becomes a moral person primarily by means of developing certain dispositional capacities. Mahmood describes this approach “as always local and particular, pertaining to a specific set of procedures, techniques, and discourses through which highly specific ethical-moral subjects come to be formed” (2005: 28). One becomes a moral person, in this way, not by following rules or norms, but by training oneself in a set of certain practices (Widlok 2004: 59). As will become clear below, I am also sympathetic to the dispositional/virtue approach. However, what is limiting about this approach is that the practices and techniques of moral training are too often restricted to certain local domains. Thus, this approach rarely allows us to see how persons can transfer and translate these dispositional trainings across various social contexts.

In my own work on morality in contemporary Russia I have been influenced by both of these approaches, as well as recognized the importance of religion in the shaping of public discourses and individuals’ moralities. Nevertheless, taking a phenomenological approach to the study of local moralities, I am primarily concerned with the multifarious relationships between institutions, groups, and individuals within a society that come to constitute what counts as morality and ethical practice. It is also important to recognize that the various religions in Russia offer just one of several institutional and public variants of moralities that make up the assemblage of what we might call a local moral constellation. For this reason although religious discourses and practices of religion are highlighted within this volume, it is important to realize that they make up just one of several aspects of morality—for example, various secular, Soviet, and non-Russian/Western moralities are also significant—that constitute the range of possible moral worlds in contemporary Russia. In the next section, an anthropological theory of moralities will be outlined that makes distinctions among different aspects of morality, as well as between morality and ethics. In taking this phenomenological approach it is possible to more clearly discern the varied and distinctive discourses and practices that come to constitute local moral worlds.

Moralities and Ethics

The anthropological study of moralities is best begun with a distinction between morality and ethics (see Zigon 2007, 2008b, 2009). The advantage of this distinction is twofold. First, it highlights the important existential fact of the difference between morality as acted and articulated in either a nonconscious manner or discursively, and ethics as a conscious attempt to be moral in moments of dilemma and questioning. Second, by making further distinctions between the different aspect...