Paul Manning

Material Objects in Cosmological Worlds: An Introduction

In the Republic of Georgia, official Georgian Orthodox rituals blend into a series of lay practices that are sometimes ignored, sometimes tolerated, and sometimes incorporated into church rituals, often at the whim of the individual local priest. One such practice is animal sacrifice. Animal sacrifice is never allowed within the church proper, but within a church’s courtyard it is sometimes accepted. To the extent that the priest participates in such lay rituals, it is usually a simple ritual involving blessing the sacrificial ani mal with a candle; the priest will not actually perform the sacrifice. But a priest who does choose to participate in this way may well be motivated by desire for material gain: in return for this religious service of rather dubious orthodoxy, the priest may expect or demand some of the meat, and perhaps some wine, too. Once, apparently, some Georgians brought a sheep to a church for sacrifice, along a rough road in the trunk of their car, where, importantly, they also had a couple of loosely sealed cans of gasoline. In the church’s courtyard, the priest offered to bless the sheep prior to sacrifice in the usual way. The priest began to make the sign of the cross with a lit candle over the sheep which had been soaked with gasoline while traversing the bumpy road. The sheep explodes. The story is popular with Georgians for several reasons, especially because the seemingly opposed categories of high-minded religious ritual and grotesque materiality are brought into conjuncture in a bit of folk anti-clericism.

Just like England: On the Liberal Institutions of the Circassians

With Pushkins narrative poem Prisoner of the Caucasus (1822), Circassians entered the Russian imperial imaginary as exemplary personifications of the savagery and freedom of the Caucasus as a whole (Layton 1994; 1997; Grant 2005; 2007). Accordingly, the Russian imagination of Circassian polity, now as egalitarian “free societies,” now as hierarchical aristocracies, now as “noble savages,” now as ignoble brutes, Muslim “fanatics,” or “Asiatic despots,” was a microcosm of the Russian colonial engagement with the Caucasus as a whole, often as not reflecting tensions in the self-perception of imperial autocracy and its elites more than indigenous political organization of Caucasian groups like Circassians in reality (Layton 1997; Jersild 2002; Grant 2005). Inasmuch as such imperial imaginings informed the fantasies of young men, causing them to enlist in search of the poetry of warfare, or informed fantasies of conquest among agents of the Russian state, these imaginings became real in their consequences for various Caucasian groups (Layton 1994; 1997). Nor was the exemplary alterity accorded Circassians limited to Russian audiences; it exerted a considerable fascination across Europe as well (King 2007: 241–45).