-----Original Message-----
From: ESRCs East West Programme [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
On Behalf Of Serguei A. Oushakine
Sent: Monday, November 02, 2009 11:24 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: New Book: Douglas Rogers. The Old Faith and the Russian Land: A
Historical Ethnography of Ethics in the Urals
Cornell University Press is pleased to announce the publication of The
Old Faith and the Russian Land by Douglas Rogers, the latest book in
the Culture and Society after Socialism
<http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup8_seriescsas.html> series,
edited by Bruce Grant and Nancy Ries.
The Old Faith and the Russian Land is a historical ethnography that
charts the ebbs and flows of ethical practice in a small Russian town
over three centuries. The town of Sepych was settled in the late
seventeenth century by religious dissenters who fled to the forests of
the Urals to escape a world they believed to be in the clutches of the
Antichrist. Factions of Old Believers, as these dissenters later came to
be known, have maintained a presence in the town ever since. The
townspeople of Sepych have also been serfs, free peasants, collective
farmers, and, now, shareholders in a post-Soviet cooperative. Douglas
Rogers traces connections between the town and some of the major
transformations of Russian history, showing how townspeople have
responded to a long series of attempts to change them and their
communities: tsarist-era efforts to regulate family life and stamp out
Old Belief on the Stroganov estates, Soviet collectivization drives and
antireligious campaigns, and the marketization, religious revival, and
ongoing political transformations of post-Soviet times.
Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork and extensive archival and
manuscript sources, Rogers argues that religious, political, and
economic practice are overlapping arenas in which the people of Sepych
have striven to be ethical-in relation to labor and money, food and
drink, prayers and rituals, religious books and manuscripts, and the
surrounding material landscape. He tracks the ways in which ethical
sensibilities-about work and prayer, hierarchy and inequality, gender
and generation-have shifted and recombined over time. Rogers concludes
that certain expectations about how to be an ethical person have
continued to orient townspeople in Sepych over the course of nearly
three centuries for specific, identifiable, and often unexpected
reasons. Throughout, he demonstrates what a historical and ethnographic
study of ethics might look like and uses this approach to ask new
questions of Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet history.
Reviews
"Douglas Rogers has produced an incisive analysis of the formation and
reconstitution under changing circumstances of moral community among the
priestless Old Believers of the Urals. This extraordinarily skillful and
instructive account of a community's creation of ethical practices and
subjectivities uses ethnography to illuminate history and historical
study to elucidate current efforts to define community standards.
Rogers's work also speaks powerfully to the role of religion and
community in the post-Soviet world more broadly."-David L. Ransel,
Robert F. Byrnes Professor of History, Indiana University
"This beautifully written and highly original historical ethnography
moves with extraordinary acumen across disciplines and prompts us to
rethink ethics, moral personhood and historical experience in rural
Russia. Douglas Rogers's sensitive analysis of the twists and turns of
Russian history offers a critique of many theories of transition and
breaks new ground in offering fresh perspectives and theoretical tools
that are guaranteed to stimulate debate. The Old Faith and the Russian
Land is a must-read for anyone interested in the region."-Catherine
Wanner, author of Communities of the Converted: Ukrainians and Global
Evangelism
About the Author
Douglas Rogers is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Yale
University.
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