dining with Russian Old Believers: guesthood, gender roles and rules of ritual purity

Abstract

This paper discusses religious restrictions of the Old Believers, a group within Russian Orthodox Christianity. In particular, I refer to communities of the Chasovenny faction in Siberia. These Old Believers are supposed to eat separately from anyone who does not belong to the group and to use tableware (the so-called “fine bowls”) that are not shared with anyone except community members to avoid defilement. I observe my own field experiences as a guest in these communities, in which the practice of separation is often performed ad hoc. I argue that, despite seeming to establish strict isolation from non-Old Believers, the rule of separate tableware is more important for structuring social relations within the group than for drawing boundary lines between different confessions. I also focus on the gendered aspects of this practice. Maintenance of ritual purity concerns both women and men, but it is represented in their lives differently. The rule requires women to keep profound knowledge of dogmas and local community practices because this is important for supporting other aspects of group religious and social life.

Keywords: :

• gender roles
• ritual purity
• Orthodox Christianity
• Old Believers

Notes

1 Here and elsewhere all personal and location names from the author’s field notes are changed.

2 The note was made in early August 2018.

3 Here I refer to other researchers who were participating in this field trip, and Stepan, our Old Believer guide.

4 See the explanation of the term further.

5 Author’s field notes (AFN), entry on August 8, 2018.

6 AFN, Mountain Shoriya, Filinsk, Serafima, August 2017.

7 The Chasovenny had to leave Russia after the Revolution, because of severe antireligious policy of Bolsheviks and further repressions against religious groups and peasantry.

8 Russian terms such as Mirsky, Dobry, etc. spelled with the uppercase letter refer to the group of people. At the same time, I want to distinguish them from the objects, for which I choose the lowercase spelling. Also, because most of the objects I refer to in the paper are of feminine gender in Russian, I use the feminine ending -a to define them, as in mirska chashka (common or worldly bowl), dobra posuda (fine tableware), etc.

9 David Scheffel (1991, 4–5) and Richard Morris (1991, 114–115) failed to receive any formal consent from Canadian and Oregon communities respectively for the same reason.

10 In the Chasovenny villages, drinking water is normally stored in containers that has a dipper next to it. It is prohibited to drink water just from that dipper, but the water must be poured to a glass, Strangers often defile the dipper by using it for drinking.

11 In particular, council resolutions of the Chasovenny have paid particular attention to routine practices as an inherit part of Christian exterior since XVIII century (Pokrovsky 1999, 332–394).

12 These terms have negative and positive connotations respectively. External piety is more relevant for contemporary studies.

13 Such as computers or cell phones, for instance, see: Rygovskiy (2020a).

14 Richard Morris argues that the Chasovenny in Oregon call a person permanently living in an unclean state Pogany (filthy). At the same time, one who breaks the bowl rule under the circumstances, such as eating hospital food while being a patient, is considered as the Mirsky (Morris 1991, 75). According to this division, Morris himself belonged to the Pogany people as he was not an Old Believer. However, I have never heard the term Pogany employed by the Siberian Chasovenny in such a strict sense.

15 I discuss elsewhere how various territorial groups of the Chasovenny create their own competing hierarchies, trying to claim spiritual leadership among their peers (Rygovskiy 2020b, 195–202).

16 An Old Believer guide, with whom we came to Dmitry and Tanyusha.

17 Compare this to list of epitimias published in Pokrovsky (1999, 385–387).

18 This resembles a Tuvan story represented by Nikitina but provides a point of view of a stranger who was denied a proper hospitality.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Estonian Research Council grant (PRG670).

Notes on contributors

danila rygovskiy

Danila Rygovskiy is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Estonian and Comparative Folklore at University of Tartu, Estonia. He has been working with the Russian Old Believers in Siberia since 2014. Currently, his research is focused on women’s participation in the religious life of Siberian and Estonian Old Believers. His previous education includes History at Novosibirsk State University and Philology at the Russian State University for the Humanities. He has also finished a graduate program in Cultural Anthropology at the European University at St Petersburg.[email protected]