Introductory Essay: The Anthropology of Religion after Socialism

Since the revolutions of 1989, increased public interest in religion across the former Soviet bloc has helped to generate new topics of investigation in a variety of disciplines, from history to sociology to literary studies. Sociocultural anthropology has been no exception. At the 2003 Meetings of the American Anthropological Association in Chicago, a number of anthropologists who have worked on the topic of religion in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union gathered to discuss the state of the field. The four articles published in this theme issue of Religion, State & Society are substantially revised versions of papers originally delivered on this panel, entitled ‘Religion, Power, Political Economy: Postsocialist Views’. The Call for Papers for the panel set out dual questions for potential contributors to address, above and beyond the narrow context of understanding or interpreting their disparate field sites. First, what perspectives could the anthropology of religion contribute to the study of postsocialist transformations more broadly? (The implicit claim here was that religion had been a relatively marginal topic of interest among anthropologists working in the region.) Second, what could the study of religion in the postsocialist societies of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union contribute to the anthropology of religion as a whole? In the course of introducing the four papers that follow, I return to these initial questions to situate the contributors’ work and point to some areas of potentially productive research in the future.