Catherine Wanner

Money, morality and new forms of exchange in postsocialist Ukraine

Abstract One of the legacies of Soviet socialism is a moralizing lens through which to evaluate wealth and consumption practices. A contrast between the moral underpinnings of generating and consuming wealth under capitalism and those emerging in postsocialist Ukraine shows that socioeconomic differences are emerging as proxies for moral indictments that strain the social fabric. Soviet-era economic practices and exchange networks of favors are giving way to cash-based forms of exchange that are redefining moral commitments to social obligations. When legal codes are mobilized in diverse ways in response to divergent moralities the forging of moral consensus to shape emerging economic practices is rendered elusive.

The city as promised land: moral reasoning, evil, and the dark side of capitalism in Ukraine

The theological prescriptions of a believers burden preached at a large non-denominational Charismatic megachurch in Ukraine involve transforming the city in which one lives into a promised land. The means to do so involve making money and using that money to create ‘blessings’ for others. The actions of a group of entrepreneurs associated with this megachurch who have put this theology into practice have led to cross-cutting indictments of evil. The controversy that ensued over the proper response of a believer to suffering and urban plight reveals how the processes of moral reasoning to determine the sources of evil can be interpreted very differently when there is little agreement over the divine or demonic providence of money and what the public role of religion should be.

Public religions after socialism: redefining norms of difference

ABSTRACT Religion has come to assume quite a public presence in many parts of Eastern Europe. The instrumental use of clergy, religious sentiment and transcendent symbolism reflects the emergence of conditions in which religion is capable of playing an expedient role in processes of forging a new governing and moral order. At this critical juncture, when norms of gender, ethnicity, regionalism and language politics are being redefined, the ambient presence of religiosity makes political initiatives and political protest expressed in a religious idiom particularly effective. Religion has become a resource used to provide the moral justification for proposed norms of behaviour and to legitimate the legal regulations and coercive mechanisms to enforce them. In this way, religion is going public. This article analyses why and how religion assumes a public presence capable of steering the direction of political change and explains how this relates to the practices of everyday religiosity revealed in ethnography.

Review Article: An Anthropological Light: Ethnographic Studies of Russia and Ukraine in the Post-Soviet Era

It used to be that people called ethnographers asked questions and people called informants answered the questions, which the ethnographers duly recorded and worked into monographs, but things don’t work that way anymore. It is not merely that the subjects of ethnographical study are increasingly unwilling to submit to so one-sided an exchange, one which reduces them to walking around archives from which data are to be extracted; ethnographers have a clearer understanding of what it is they must do if they are to comprehend people different from themselves—start a conversation and maintain one. It is dialogue that does it, however delicate and liable to misfire, not inquisition, however orderly and straight from the shoulder.1

Quelling the “Unquiet Dead”: Popular Devotions in the Borderlands of the USSR

Communist ideology in the USSR envisioned a public sphere in which the presence of religious institutions and manifestations of belief were eliminated. However, lived religious practices circumvented or outright flouted Soviet secular mandates when it came to burial, funeral, and commemorative rites. Particularly after World War II, the Soviet state itself used commemorations of death, sacrifice, and transcendence in transformative rituals that made extensive use of the sacred. Such rituals privileged appeals to supernatural forces over those to an anthropomorphic God as worshiped in an institutional setting. Using ethnographic and archival sources, this chapter provides an analysis of the ritualization of death by those living in a state committed to promoting atheism and a supraethnic sense of nationality.