The Russian Foundation for Humanities has published a list of research projects, that will be awarded with its grants.
Congratulations to the research team led by Professor Boris Kolonitskii for being awarded a grant for their project "The politicization of the language of religion and the sacralization of the language of politics during the Russian Civil War."
About the project:
Languages of religion and politics are closely intertwined: religious symbols are used for legitimization of power and for the sacralization of the political, while the church actively instrumentalizes political discourse. The era of the Civil War is a unique moment in history, when social actors faced a wide range of practices in the construction of the language of politics and religion. There have been factors that severely limited the choice with regards to this matter in both the public and private spaces.
This project scrutinizes the mutual influences of the languages of politics and religion on a local scale in the era of the Civil War. Particular attention is paid to the individual choices and subjectivity practices of various actors in the centers and peripheries of the former Russian Empire. The project is interested not only in the dominant discourse of the Russian-speaking Orthodox Church and its interaction with state power in the imperial center, but also in the local individual strategies reflected in Islamic texts using the Arabic script.
How were religious concepts refracted in the political struggle between different groups and individuals? In what forms did political slogans and ideas transform in the religious discourse of clerics and intellectuals? How did the "little men" in the imperial outskirts and in the center of the country react to the dynamics (or chaos?) of the language practices of the elite?
The project combines a number of research directions and subject areas: studies of the Russian Revolution and the Civil War from the point of view of Slavic studies; the Islamic studies perspective with its reliance on the "voices" of the imperial borderlands and the analysis of Soviet subjectivity through the prism of personal documents and the language of self-description. The authors of the project believe that such a research mix will allow them to see a wide range of language practices heavily influenced by politics and religion. These would not only be the practices that later became dominant, but also those that were marginalized or were manifested only at some point in time, and then they were forgotten or forbidden.
Working group of the project:
- B. Kolonitskii
- A. Bustanov
- N. Sahakyan
- K. Godunov
- P. Rogozny
- D. Dorodnykh