How to make a shrine with your own hands: Local holy places and vernacular religion in Russia

During the last decades of the twentieth century, the study of popular religious cultures in ethnology, folkloristics and historical anthropology underwent serious changes related to the crisis of dogmatic, institutional and systematic explanations of religious folklife. The changes are particularly obvious in the rejection of the residualistic ‘two-tiered model’ (as Peter Brown has called it) (Brown 1981) which presumes opposition between ‘Christianity’ and ‘paganism’, ‘official’ and ‘folk’ religion, ‘religion’ and ‘magic’ and so on. Furthermore, it has appeared that borderlines between various confessions and denominations, which usually play an important role in constructing and maintaining religious identity, do not impede the diffusion and interaction of practical forms of everyday religious activity. Today, folklorists and ethnologists prefer to discuss ‘vernacular’ (Primiano 1995: 37-56) or ‘local’ (Christian 1981) religions or ‘religious praxis’ (Panchenko 2002), on the one hand, and norms, institutions and other forms of representation and legitimization of power and social authority in the religious domain, on the other. As to the methodological strategies that dominate in the study of religious phenomena in contemporary folkloristics and ethnology, they, as a rule, proceed either from various sociological theories and approaches (elaborated by Émile Durkheim, Victor Turner, Mary Douglas et al.) or from contemporary cognitive anthropology (for example Boyer 1999: 53-72; 2001). Of course, the range of contemporary methods and explanatory modes in the study of vernacular religion is not limited by sociological and cognitive

* Alexander Panchenko is Chair of the Centre for Literary Theory and Interdisciplinary Research, Institute of Russian Literature, Russian Academy of Sciences; Director of the Centre for Anthropology of Religion, European University of St Petersburg; and Director of the Program for Sociology and Anthropology, Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences, St Petersburg State University, Russia.