McBrien, Julie and Naumescu, Vlad (2022) The ‘Post’ in Perspective: Revisiting the Post-socialist Religious Question in Central Asia and Central and Eastern Europe. In: Anthropology of Transformation: From Europe to Asia and Back. Open Book Publishers, pp. 51-80. ISBN 978-1-80064-362-8
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
This chapter revisits the ‘post-socialist religious question’ twenty years later, reflecting on its theoretical import and contribution to broader debates on religion, modernity and social transformation. It draws on the comparative work produced by the MPI research group on ’Religion and Civil Society’ focused on the ‘religious revivals’ in CEE and Central Asia. Observing the fast re-emergence of religion in the public space, its rapid pluralisation and its entanglement with secular politics, this ambitious project managed to simultaneously interrogate the aftermath of secular-atheist experiments in the region and the ‘post-secular’ deprivatisation of religion and its global reordering. In this chapter we argue that while some of the trends identified by the Civil Religion Group were ephemeral products of the ‘transition period’ others proved more durable, like the thorny ethno-national-religious knot and its impact on national, regional, and global politics. Moreover, methodological impulses important to the group, like the inclination to start from an analysis of religion’s internal logics in the interrogation of social and political phenomena, contributed significantly to broader anthropological discussions and developed new directions of research. Ultimately, we argue that the Civil Religion Group’s attempt to answer the ‘post-socialist religious question’ proved that the post-socialist context was a true laboratory for anthropological theorisation.
| Item Type: | Book Section |
|---|---|
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | anthropology, post-socialism, ethnography, politics, economics, religion |
| Subjects: | B Mission theology/theory > Identity issues B Mission theology/theory > Public Theology |
| Divisions: | Central Asia Central Europe Former Soviet Union |
| Depositing User: | Katharina Penner |
| Date Deposited: | 01 Feb 2026 10:03 |
| Last Modified: | 01 Feb 2026 10:03 |
| URI: | https://ceeamsprints.osims.org/id/eprint/3242 |
Actions (login required)
 |
View Item |
