Luehrmann S. Secularism Soviet Style. Teaching Atheism and Religion in a Volga Republic. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2011. - 292 p. Sonia Luhrmann's book is a combination of thorough case study with interesting generalizations. Based on the material of one specific Russian Republic Ma- page 516The author tries to trace the bizarre relations between religion and secularism in the Soviet and post - Soviet times in the Riy El (former Mari Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic) - a material related to the "big" XX century with the capture and beginning of the next century. The Republic of Mari El, which the author has been studying intently for many years, is a modest, small and very special imperial periphery, which was hit by grandiose waves of secularization and desecularization, transforming along the way and acquiring a tangible local identity. However, it is precisely this reliable local knowledge (and this work, in fact, is almost the first experience of this kind) that allows us to reliably speak about the meaning of "large" processes. The disciplinary optics that the author calls "historically-informed anthropology" (p. 222), i.e., anthropology supported by historical knowledge, serves to achieve the volume and depth of the resulting picture. The book begins with an outline of the pre-revolutionary confessional regime in the Volga region, then moves on to the twists and turns of the XX century with periodic returns to the past. The region was characterized by a complex interweaving of ethnic and confessional identities, the key to which was what the author calls the "tradition of interreligious neighborhood" at the level of intercommunal fragmentation; not dogmatic differences, but local identity was the key principle of this fragmentation; such a confessional mosaic was both dividing, but also, quite understandably, connecting - or at least at least as a mitigating factor: In any case, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the region ... Читать далее