Public Spaces between Secular and Religious Claims

Alexander Agadjanian (Russian State University of the Humanities)

Secular/religious borders in Russia: Multiple, questioned, elusive

This paper will summarize trends in how ‘the religious’ is constructed and interpreted in today’s Russia. It will attempt to draw the line between ‘the religious’ and ‘the secular’ and to catch the way it is moving. The paper will present aspects/levels where this moving, elusive line manifests itself: physical environment and urban landscape; mass media and virtual space; markets and commodities; non-commercial ‘moral economy’; bodily practices; artistic life; education systems; legal casuistry; political discourses; bioethics and medicine; national historiosophy and post-memory; finally, individual moral self-fashioning. The de-secularization seems obvious, played with by the ruling regime, but the secular resistance, both passive and articulated, looks strong, and cannot be ignored.


Tsypylma Darieva (ZOiS)

Religious pluralization: Popular beliefs and informal practices in Azerbaijan

The sacred constitute a hierarchy of challenges for contemporary authorities in Azerbaijan as urban public spaces are appropriated and claimed by a variety of actors in traditional and innovative ways. Within de-secularization processes in the post-Soviet Caucasus, we observe internal pluralization in Islam on one hand, and homogenizing projects on the other hand with the tendency to purify, to take control over ‘informal’ hybrid folk practices and incorporate into national narratives. In Azerbaijan, different groups (local and transnational clergy, new ‘purist’ practitioners) increasingly contest informal shrines, pilgrimage sites and popular beliefs related to Shia Islam, however the state does not seem to have a clear project regarding the strict segregation between the ‘little’ and the ‘great’ traditions. This paper discusses how ‘vernacular’ Islam and small-scale worship sites project their visions on religious boundaries and how these convivial public places adjust to new political and social realities in Baku.


Catherine Wanner (Pennsylvania State University)

Martyrs and the creation of an affective atmosphere of religiosity in Kyiv

Religion was an undercurrent during the Maidan protests in Kyiv in 2013-14, and remains so given the hybrid war on the Ukrainian-Russian border, because it plays a key role in defining space in terms of sovereignty, borders and sacredness. The popular turned official commemoration of the murdered protesters have turned the Kyiv city centre into a space of death. Personalized, shrine-like graves mark where each person was killed and small chapels replete with religious objects, such as icons and candles, foster an atmosphere of religiosity that creates attachments – or alienation – to persons, places and events. As such, urban space has become a site of politicized place-making and self-making, situating individuals in newly redefined political and cultural spaces. The projection of injustice, struggle and death onto urban space mediates the ongoing twin processes of producing the materiality of urban space and constructing the meanings of that space and the encounters that may or may not take place there. By considering affectivity, urban space and political ritual together, we see how politicized subjectivities and understandings of citizenship are interactively created as well as how urban affect is generated through the materiality of death. Affective experiences and the presence of martyrs serve as vehicles to validate particular interpretations of the recent past with the aim of forging a new governing and moral order.