![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
In this article, I draw on interviews and participant observation data from a two-year-long ethnographic study in a Russian Orthodox parish in the United States. I argue that both the Russian Orthodox immigrants and the Protestant converts to Orthodoxy attending this parish may be usefully thought of as diasporic groups. Seeking to construct their particular Orthodox identity, both groups deal with their own physical and symbolic displacements, and attempt to find their place of belonging. I demonstrate how in the process, through reliance on religious narratives, prayer, and Russian Orthodox icons, parishioners construct two overlapping, yet distinctive places of their origin: Holy Rus’ and Orthodox Russia. Finally, attending to how some Orthodox Christians were able to position themselves in two groups simultaneously, I suggest that we think of religious practitioners as able to inhabit two diasporas at once.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the Orthodox practitioners about whom this article is written. They volunteered time and shared their thoughts, without which this study would have been impossible. I would also like to thank Oliver Freiberger, Jennifer Graber, Azfar Moin, Chad Seales, John Traphagan, Thomas Tweed, Justin Doran, and Joshua Urich for reading various versions of this article, and offering their feedback. Additionally, I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their productive comments.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Elena Kravchenko holds a PhD at the University of Texas at Austin. Her dissertation project attends to the subjectivities of the contemporary Eastern Orthodox women in the United States.
Notes
1 To protect identities of my informants, all names used in this article are pseudonyms.
2 See footnote 3 for comments on scholarship that attends to ‘multiplicity’ in the studies of diasporic production, and my position in this article in relation to this scholarship.
3 That members of a diasporic group, because of the multiple ways they can imagine their past(s) and place(s) of origin, are capable of maintaining multiple racial, national, and ethnic identities has been well documented through detailed ethnographic and theoretically sophisticated studies. For example, Appadurai and Breckenridge (Citation1989, i) note that ‘diasporic groups have memories whose archaeology is fractured,’ thus allowing the members of these groups to occupy multiple histories, embody multiple imaginations, and form multiple attachments. Glick Schiller, Basch, and Blanc-Szanton (Citation1992, 11) state in the introduction to their edited volume: ‘within their complex web of social relations, transmigrants draw upon and create fluid and multiple identities grounded both in their society of origin and in the host societies.’
Furthermore, Johnson (Citation2007, 8) theorizes diasporic groups as having a potential to inhabit ‘multiple diasporic horizons,’ or in simple terms, imagine different places of origin. Johnson (Citation2007, 8–9) and other scholars (Ballantyne Citation2006; McNeal Citation2011) who examine creative interrelations between diaspora and religious practice help us to productively think about diaspora as ‘a subject position an individual moves in and out of.’ Capturing those practices in specific geographical and historical locations, they call our attention to how practitioners can create more than one diasporic subjectivity (Johnson Citation2012, 105). However, none of these scholars, as far as I know, theorize the members of the host country as a community that is itself diasporic, nor how this affects religious migrants who come in contact with it. By making this theoretical move, I want scholars to consider that religious practice may enable some religious practitioners to simultaneously and entirely inhabit the diasporas of multiple groups – with their unique ranges of subject positions and permissible movements between them.
4 Instead of calling the difference between everyday Orthodox practitioner’s beliefs and official theological doctrines a ‘deviation,’ as does Hämmerli (Citation2010, 110–112), I find it more useful to call it ‘productivity’ or ‘creativity,’ as do Johnson (Citation2007, 6) and Ballantyne (Citation2006, xiii) in their respective studies of religious communities in diaspora. This helps to maintain the analytical focus on the specific needs of the religious immigrants and to discard the idea that those Orthodox Christians describing their experience as diasporic are somehow inauthentic Orthodox Christians and are in need of being corrected.
5 For example, Hämmerli (Citation2010), in her study of Orthodox Christians in Europe suggests that:
Despite a solid umbilical cord to their homeland, the Orthodox Churches in the west do not dream of some return to the breast of the ‘Mother Churches’. On the contrary, they tend to affirm Orthodoxy’s universal dimensions and develop strategies of implantation in the host countries, although concomitantly they are committed to ethnic identity preservation.
6 See Johnson’s (Citation2002, 313–315) discussion of ‘indigenizing’ discourses and practices, where he makes a similar argument for the practitioners of Candomblé in Brazil.
7 I thank an anonymous reviewer for providing this information.
8 This is consistent with other studies on ROCOR parishes in the United States (see Volkov Citation2005).
9 For the purposes of this project, I interviewed both men and women. However, there is an inadvertent focus on the words and experiences of the women here, which comes from the simple fact that women more often than men volunteered to participate in interviews. This enabled me to make apparent the differences between how Russian women who married a convert and those who became Orthodox in the United States individually imagined and experienced Holy Rus’ and Orthodox Russia respectively. However, I was not able to attend to this difference for the male parishioners, as I did not have sufficient data.
10 These are the common types of employment identified by the practitioners interviewed for this project.
11 I am unable to address the influence of this discourse in detail in the scope of this article. I address this issue expansively elsewhere. Here, I want to signal that this discourse is a factor contributing to the production of diasporic consciousness for both Russian immigrants and American converts discussed in this study. Through various forms of social media, the Russian Orthodox Church creates and affirms a politically informed difference between East and West. The ideas about how the Russian Orthodox norms weather against and over American and Protestant values generated by this discourse are appropriated by the American Orthodox theologians and appear in their books and blogs. The ideological tropes from these broad discourses tend to map the West/East ‘divide’ on self-interest/altruism, individualism/communalism, and greed/temperance binaries. Perceptions of proper gender roles serve as another such differentiating factor: in this discourse, perceptions of Russian Orthodox conservativism are often set in sharp contrast to the perceptions of Western liberal feminism, and as such questions of gender turn not simply into a moral issue, but often gain a sacred significance. For specific examples of this discourse consult: http://www.pravmir.com and http://www.ancientfaith.com.
I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for indicating a need to include a reference to this discourse here.
12 One of the most commonly cited reasons for why these Russian immigrants were not able to participate in an interview after the Sunday Liturgy service was that they had a scheduled Skype conversation with their parents or other relatives in Russia at that time.
13 Hämmerli and Mayer (Citation2014, 8) convincingly argue that scholars studying Orthodox practitioners in the places of immigration will do well to pay attention to the specific social and cultural context within which practitioners work to establish a connection between the nation and the Orthodox Church. Hämmerli and Mayer (Citation2014, 8) specifically call for illuminating the conditions of migration, the minority status of religious immigrants, and the specific ways in which the immigrants establish and maintain contact with the homeland in order to elucidate ‘different realities’ and ‘different patterns of adaptation and transformation of migrants’ religion and of reconstruction of religious identity in the process of settlement.’
14 Thorbjørnsrud (Citation2015b) has effectively argued that it is more productive to analytically consider the type of Russian immigrants I am discussing here as converts, rather than carriers of faith, in order to better understand the process of transformation that they undergo by adopting Orthodoxy in their places of immigration. However, what interests me is that the practitioners themselves insist on a certain type of religious continuity between their past and present in order to establish a strong connection with the Russian land they leave behind and to secure their diasporic identity. The active imagination of themselves as already having a spirit of Orthodoxy inside them, even when they were atheists in Russia, as Elena puts it, signals a diasporic consciousness.
15 This is a traditional prayer said at the end of each liturgical service. The copy of the text was emailed to me by one of the parishioners, on 20 July 2014.
16 Some converts, specifically Laura and her husband Ilia, expressed the desire and intent to return to Russia.
17 This is a traditional prayer said at the end of each liturgical service. The copy of the text was emailed to me by one of the parishioners, on 20 July 2014.
18 Clifford (Citation1994, 132) also points to this cultivated sense, when he proposes that diasporic consciousness is defined by the tension between ‘loss and hope.’
19 Johnson (Citation2002, 313–315) makes a similar argument for the practitioners of Candomblé in Brazil when he talks about ‘African-ness’ being ‘subsumed within a religious affiliation.’
20 Thorbjørnsrud (Citation2015a) and Volkov (Citation2005) make a similar argument about Russian Orthodox immigrants in Norway and the United States, respectively, as discussed further below.
21 Here I am less interested in locating American practitioners in the ‘anti-traditional tradition’ as does Herbel (Citation2014) or in the ‘spiritual market place’ as does Slagle (Citation2011) in order to explain their choice to convert to Orthodoxy. Rather I explore how these practitioners, through their Orthodox practices, construct the very perception that the American social and cultural environment is defined by a tradition that valorizes progress and a spiritual economy that elevates personal choice above all else.
22 The turn to studying practice as a medium through which certain religious commitments and subjectivities become possible rather than expressed has been productive in the field of religious studies. In particular, it has allowed scholars to consider the choices to convert to a religious tradition, or to identify oneself as a member of a diasporic group, not as concrete decisions made at a single point in time, but as on-going processes, entailing a certain amount of constraint as well as productive ambiguity and instability. Tanya Luhrmann’s Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England (Citation1989) and When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God (Citation2012) convincingly describe how both magic and Vineyard Evangelicalism became real and viable options for practitioners only in the process of, rather than prior to, engaging the historically and locally contingent practices of these movements. In a similar vein, Johnson’s Diaspora Conversions (Citation2007) illuminates how the choice of Garifuna practitioners to claim African origins, and to assert membership in a diasporic community with African roots, was made through the engagement in their specific practices, rather than preceded them. Alongside these scholars, I emphasize practice as constructive of subjectivity. However, my work here also aims to illuminate something different. It does not theoretically consider diaspora as conversion, nor simply claim that diasporic consciousness or the consciousness of a convert arises from practice. It instead considers how production of both – the consciousness as an Orthodox believer and the consciousness of a convert to Orthodoxy – influence each other through practice. The Protestant converts are made into a diasporic group by defining their convert identity and their Orthodox Christian identity. Their two identities overlap and are constructed in tandem.
23 Many of the practitioners articulated that they had difficult time explaining to their parents and relatives their decision to convert to Orthodoxy, and that Orthodoxy was ‘theirs,’ despite the fact that they were born in the United States and not Russia.
24 Practitioners have often articulated this to other converts and to me in casual conversations. These findings are also consistent with Slagle’s (Citation2011) study.
25 See footnote 11 for a discussion of how these types of articulations, which posit Orthodox and Russian gender norms in sharp contrast to those promoted in the West, are influenced by the official discourse of the Church.
26 See Bender’s (Citation2010) excellent ethnography, where she discusses how the religious practitioners she studied through their particular practices worked to erase the history and the origins of their ‘newly’ embraced spirituality.
27 I thank an anonymous reviewer for helping me articulate this commitment to two distinct diasporas as developed through a single processes of ‘crafting, reformulating, constructing, maintaining and reproducing Russian Orthodoxy in the US.’