Suchergebnisse

This volume examines Russia's war on Ukraine. Scholars who have lived through the Russian invasion or who have conducted ethnographic research in the region for decades provide timely analysis of a war that will leave a lasting mark on the twenty-first century.

Using the concept of dispossession, this volume showcases some of the novel ways violence operates in the Russian-Ukrainian war and the multiple means by which civilians, within the conflict zone and beyond, have become active participants in the war effort. Anthropological perspectives on war provide on-the-ground insight, historically informed analysis, and theoretical engagement to depict the experiences of dispossession by war and the motivations that drive the responses of the dispossessed. Such perspectives humanize the victims even as they depict the very inhumanity of war.

Dispossession is geared towards upper-level undergraduate and graduate students, scholars, and the general reader who seeks to have a deeper understanding of the Russian-Ukrainian war as it continues to impact geopolitics more broadly.

"Freedom is Our Religion" : Enabling the Religious Dimensions of Political Life -- Gold Domed Kyiv : An Atmosphere of Religiosity -- Radical Hope : The Maidan as Historic Event -- The Aesthetics of Relatedness : Commemorative Spirits and Public Space -- Serving on the Front and the Home Front : Military Chaplains in Public Institutions -- Conclusion : The Politics of Hope and Belonging.

This article analyses the religiously infused talk therapy provided by military chaplains to soldiers as they transition to civilian life. They offer a form of empathic care that centres on dialogue and existential engagement, which often begins in hospital and extends beyond physical healing. Proposals to treat the emotional distress soldiers experience include creating residential centres in monasteries and the use of a religiously oriented therapeutic idiom to 'work on the self' so as to hear and obey the 'voice of one's soul'. State-sponsored military chaplains harness religion for therapeutic purposes with the goal of transforming soldiers into high-functioning, religiously committed, patriotic, moral citizens dedicated to protecting a newly fortified sovereign country. This normativises a spiritual dimension to care, healing and understandings of the sources of wellbeing. More broadly, this injects religious practices and symbolism into secular social institutions and shifts the emotional tenor of public domains by mobilising the therapeutic qualities of religion for the purposes of social healing.

AbstractWhen religious institutions engage the secular emotively and publicly, they can foster an affective atmosphere of religiosity, which potentially has motivational power, even for non-believers, because it shapes the sensorium of those who circulate in public space. When individuals appeal to "places animated with prayer" for the transformative energy that resides there through ritualized practices, they reaffirm an affective atmosphere of religiosity. In Orthodox Eastern Europe and elsewhere, a confessional tradition is allied with state borders, further normativizing this affective atmosphere and giving it pronounced political implications. When an affective atmosphere of religiosity inspires practices that are intentionally designed to prompt experiences rendered meaningful in otherworldly terms, over time such performativity can create mimetic instincts that become second nature. This is an essential step to religion becoming an expedient political resource and to the emergence of religious nationalism or a confessional state.

A medical anthropologist explains how a popular view of drug addicts as devoid of morality and autonomy has contributed to an HIV/AIDS epidemic in Ukraine.

The war in eastern Ukraine continues to produce casualties and an ever growing number of refugees and displaced persons every day. When urban public space is dedicated to commemorating the dead who have died since the Maidan protests, the frontiers of war become inscribed in the urban landscape and in the everyday life of many Ukrainians. These commemorative spaces are an unrelenting reminder of the armed conflict in eastern Ukraine that threatens to remake political borders once again. Commemorative practices articulate new understandings of relatedness as symbolic statements that, once inscribed in public space, have the potential to affect the thinking of locals and far outlive the actual armed conflict that produced them.

In this article, Catherine Wanner explores the historical factors contributing to a greater degree of religious pluralism emerging in Ukraine compared to Russia and Belarus and illustrates some of the cultural and political consequences of these more permissive policies. Using the intersection of foreign missionaries and evangelical communities in Ukraine as a lens, this article draws on historical and ethnographic evidence to argue that faith-based communities are sites of cultural innovation where the legacy of Soviet culture blends with values and practices born of other historical experiences to shape notions of morality and attitudes toward the state. Evangelical communities in this traditionally Orthodox land increasingly represent robust social institutions that offer new sources of self-definition, belonging, and communal life that are at once intensely local and broadly transnational in orientation.