Rasa Pranskevičiūtė-Amoson

The article presents research on contemporary religiosities related to individuality and subcultural features, influenced by the processes of social change and religious diversification in the post-communist region. Its aim is to discuss individual and communal thinking (orientated to esotericism, magic, and ecology) typical for representatives of two nature-based spirituality movements—Vissarionites and Anastasians, which is expressed through concepts of New Age spirituality of Oriental origin. The concepts of energy, non-violence, vegetarianism, karma, and reincarnation are used in both movements and appear as an example of how such concepts arrived through Western cultural influences, transformed, and took root in the post-communist cultural context of New Age spirituality. The findings are based on data obtained from fieldwork in 2004–2015, including participant observation and interviews with respondents in the Baltic states and Russia.

The article presents a study into the implementation of environmental and spiritual ideas of alternative communitarian movements during the establishing of quickly spreading nature-based spirituality communities and their settlements in the East-Central European region. It focuses on the Anastasia “spiritual” movement, classifiable as New Age, which emerged in Russia in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and since has spread to East-Central Europe and beyond. It considers the process of indigenization via assembled nature-based spiritualities and traditionalistic ideas in the movement. It will discuss how the Anastasian process of sacralization of natural space, together with the romantic mode of a narrativization of the archaic past, serve as a source for the formation of images of “indigenousness” in the movement. During the process of “indigenization,” a negotiation, interpretation and presentation of nationalistic and traditionalistic ideas serve as a basis for a...

The article presents a study into the implementation of environmental and spiritual ideas of alternative communitarian movements during the establishing of quickly spreading nature-based spirituality communities and their settlements in the East-Central European region. It focuses on the Anastasia “spiritual” movement, classifiable as New Age, which emerged in Russia in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and since has spread to East-Central Europe and beyond. It considers the process of indigenization via assembled nature-based spiritualities and traditionalistic ideas in the movement. It will discuss how the Anastasian process of sacralization of natural space, together with the romantic mode of a narrativization of the archaic past, serve as a source for the formation of images of “indigenousness” in the movement. During the process of “indigenization,” a negotiation, interpretation and presentation of nationalistic and traditionalistic ideas serve as a basis for an imagination of (trans)local prehistoric and local national pasts— including a golden age myth, a “back to nature” worldview with attempts to reconstruct variously perceived traditions, as well as a development of utopian visions of a prospective heaven on earth—intended to widely spread future social projects. The findings are based on data obtained from fieldwork in 2005–2015, including participant observation and interviews with respondents in the Baltic countries and Russia.

Witchcraft is generally related to beliefs in magical powers, when individuals or groups, by gaining occult knowledge and skills within such powers, use them in rituals or other forms of magical activities. The terms “witchcraft” and “sorcery” originated in pre-Enlightenment Europe and are mostly used to describe esoteric and magical unities in non-European, small-scale or tribal societies. The conception of witchcraft differs depending on the sociocultural context. Even if witchcraft is typically perceived negatively, it can sometimes be differentiated between positive forms, that involve healing, and negative forms, that seek to harm people. Western witchcraft was closely related to witch-hunts and trials during the Middle Ages and early modern period in Europe. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, at the peak of the witch-hunt period, witches were often accused of making pacts with Satan, receiving their maleficent magical powers from him. Nowadays, modern Western witchcraft is perceived quite differently and is closely related to New Age spiritualities.

Vodou is a syncretic Afro-Caribbean religion that combines Roman Catholic practices with traditional African beliefs and rites. It is today an official religion in Haiti, practiced to some degree by 80–90 percent of the population. Often, Vodou and Catholicism are practiced together, at least among the rural inhabitants and urban workers. It is also practiced by a majority of Haitian Catholics living in the Dominican Republic (which together with Haiti shares Hispaniola island), and among the Haitian diaspora. Until recently, Vodou had adherents in Cuba, and particular forms of Vodou were also practiced in Martinique, and Guadeloupe. The folk theology and practices were developed by diverse African ethnic groups who were enslaved and sent to the former French colony of Saint-Domingue (today’s Haiti) and then were converted to Roman Catholicism by missionaries during the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries.
As a syncretic religion, Vodou blends the diverse cultural elements practiced in Haiti, where some 115 African ethnicities fuse their identities. Vodou incorporates religious worldviews and rituals based on more than a century of beliefs and practices. The practices of contemporary Vodou are still closely related to their origins in West African Vodun. Vodou is based on religious rituals and worldview elements drawn from a mixture of various African sources (such as symbols from Yoruba and Kongo), European sources (such as mysticism and Freemasonry), Christian sources (especially Roman Catholic practices), and Native American sources (such as polytheistic Taíno religious beliefs). The practice of Vodou is continuously modernized, changed, and adapted to sociocultural conditions.

The Virgin of Guadeloupe was an apparition of the Virgin Mary reported to have taken place between December 9 and 12, 1531, in Tepeyac, a hill in a poor area outside Mexico City, at the beginning of the evangelization of Latin America. The Virgin Mary emerged as an example of inculturated evangelization by becoming the link between the Amerindian and the European Christian worlds. Nowadays, up to 20 million people come every year to the sanctuary built at the place of the Virgin Mary’s first apparition, making Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe the most visited pilgrimage site in the world. The Roman Catholic Church proclaims the Virgin of Guadeloupe as the patron saint of the Americas, the empress of Latin America, and the protectress of unborn children.

The Franciscans are a wide range of monastic orders and lay communities that ground their activity on the teaching of their founder, St. Francis of Assisi (ca. 1182−1226). The Franciscans, established in 1209, developed their distinctive style of spirituality leading to the revival of Christian spirit and a significant reorganization of the church in the thirteenth century. During the Middle Ages, the Franciscans became the largest and farthest reaching religious movement among European and overseas missionaries within the Roman Catholic Church.
During the thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries, Roman Catholic missions covered all Europe, and during the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries the Americas were included. From the 1490s, a new missionary era was established alongside the imperial colonization process in the New World. In 1493, Pope Alexander VI (r. 1492–1503) issued the papal bull Inter Caetera, which authorized the conversion of the New World’s inhabitants to Christianity by dividing the newly discovered territories between Portugal and Spain. Missionary work became a priority for the Catholic kings of Spain and Portugal. Acting as agents of the church as well as the Crown, Franciscans traveled widely, built missionary churches, and gained a vast number of new church members.

This topical issue of "Open Theology" addresses alternative religiosities in the communist regime countries up to 1990. The circumstances for the existence of socio-cultural alternatives and religious communities during the Soviet regime were specific, for most religious and spiritual activities existed here when atheism was the officially established ideology.  Due to such a controlling Soviet approach, alternative religiosities were mostly active underground and could exist only if expressed clandestinely. In the late-Soviet period, the underground activities, including access to alternative spiritual and esoteric ideas and practices, generally existed in parallel, or even jointly, with the official culture and institutions.
The editorial can be found on: https://www.degruyter.com/downloadpdf/j/opth.2017.3.issue-1/opth-2017-0052/opth-2017-0052.pdf

The open access articles of the topical issue can be found on: https://www.degruyter.com/view/j/opth.2017.3.issue-1/issue-files/opth.2017.3.issue-1.xml

About the Book

This book aims to revisit the notion of subculture for the 21st century, reinterpreting it and extending its scope. On the one hand, the notion of resistance is redefined and applied to contemporary practices of cultural production and entrepreneurship. On the other hand, contributors reconsider the connection of subcultures to everyday culture, exploring more mainstream forms of cultural production and consumption across a wider range of social groups. As a consequence, this book extends the scope to look beyond the white, male, adolescent, urban cultures identified with earlier subcultural studies. Contributors also examine fusions and crossovers between Western and non-Western cultural practices.

Table of Contents

Introduction Alexander Dhoest, Steven Malliet, Barbara Segaert and Jacques Haers 1. Contextualizing the Spectacular Paul Hodkinson Part I: Exploring New Ground 2. Nerds, Geeks, Gamers and Fans: Doing Subculture on the Edge of the Mainstream Benjamin Woo 3. Creative Entrepreneurship in the Cultural Industries: Rhetoric and Realities of Youth Creative Work Miranda Campbell 4. The Influence of Happenings on the Performative Display of Subcultures: Insights into the Beat, Mod, Provo and Hipster Movements Stefan Wouters 5. "Fed Up with Men": Music as Symbolic Resistance in the Flemish Lesbian and Women’s Movement Robbe Herreman, Alexander Dhoest and Bart Eeckhout 6. Why Are All the Gospel Rappers Online?: The Role of Social Media Sites in Building Communities in Buffalo, NY Erika Gault Part II: Revisiting Old Ground 7. Young People on the Edge: A World of Post-Subcultures and Post-Suburbs? Rupa Huq 8. Club Culture in the Cultural Periphery: The Case of Estonia Airi-Alina Allaste 9. "Thank You for Being So Professional!": The 1990s Club Culture as a Vehicle of Entrepreneurialism in the Post-Socialist Context Zuzana Kepplová 10. Respect for the Blood: The Hungarian "Radical Galaxy" and "National Hip Hop" Ágnes Patakfalvi Czirják 11. Communal Utopias within Nature-Based Spiritualities in the Post-Soviet Region: The Visions of an Ideal World among Vissarionites and Anastasians Rasa Pranskevičiūtė

Summary
The specifics of the contemporary search for spirituality that influences the formation and spread of sociocultural alternatives in the post-communist eastern and Central
European region is discussed in the article. Alternative religious movements related to individuality and subcultural features influenced by the processes of social change and
religious diversification are also discussed here. The reasons behind the origin, trends and prevalence of alternative religious movements, the manifestations of new religious
movements, New Age and nature-based spirituality movements in post-communist societies are analysed in the work. The author claims that after the short revival of “traditional” religion in Eastern and Central Europe in the beginning of the period of regaining independence, religious processes related to sociocultural alternatives in this region are developing in the same direction as religious processes of a similar character in the West.

The article focuses on the origins and early development of the Hare Krishna community in Lithuania until 1989, when the collapse of the Soviet Union began and official registration of religious communities started. Using a historical narrative method, the authors retrace the formation of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) and how the movement came to Lithuania from Moscow, Russia through Tallinn, Estonia and Riga, Latvia. The community developed in the underground under the threat of KGB repressions, where it existed until the beginning of the Sąjūdis (the Reform Movement of Lithuania), when public community activities became possible, such as public programs, book distributing and the founding of official temples. The ideas and practices of ISKCON were a form of resistance to the Soviet regime and communist ideology, and the Lithuanian ISKCON community played a significant role in the development of ISKCON throughout the Soviet Union, because after the imprisonment of Armenian activists, Lithuanian members organised the secret printing and distribution of the ISKCON literature throughout the Soviet region. The article depicts a very different ISKCON that, compared with today, lacked an organisational structure and functioned without guidance by senior foreign ISKCON members.

Historically, temperance movements have most often involved those who criticize excessive alcohol drinking and promote personal moderation or, more often, complete abstinence. Their aim has usually been to regulate the availability of alcohol or even its prohibition. Nowadays, most temperance advocates speak for gradual rather than abrupt restriction of drinking. From the beginning, temperance and prohibition have been tightly intertwined with widespread religious activities. In the United States and Europe, an abstinence pledge was introduced by churches as early as 1800, and many of the early temperance societies had religious affiliations.

This article focuses on the twin phenomena of the Vissarion religious movement and the Anastasia “spiritual” movement, both classifiable as New Age. These groups arose in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and spread throughout Europe from the East.

The linkage with Nature and the Earth (opposed to what they regard as artificial technocratic civilization), the importance of harmony – i.e. loving and respectful personal relationships with people, the Earth and God, and other ecological ideas – are characteristic of the subcultural “back to Nature” philosophy (the idea of returning to the “right” world and lifestyle) in these movements. Such ideas are realized in the process of sacralizing space (creating the united family of the Vissarionites and the Anastasian love spaces), which is fundamental to the self-understanding of these subcultures. Findings are based on data obtained from fieldwork carried out over a six-year period (2004-2010) in Lithuania and Russia, including participant observation research and interviews with respondents in both countries.

Keywords: ECOLOGY; NATURE (EARTH); NATURE-BASED SPIRITUALITY; NEW AGE; NEW RELIGIOUS MOVEMENT; “BACK TO NATURE”.

The Anastasia movement is one of the New Age environmentalist phenomena, which has been originated around 1997 in the central part of Russia and is currently spreading to Europe. Russian and Lithuanian Anastasians’ understanding and definition of space - both secular and religious - result in the “creation of Love Spaces”, namely Family Homesteads about one hectare in size (which are set up in various places around the cities of Russia and Lithuania), which are conceived as linking “a person, Nature, and cosmos”. The “Love Space” provides a context for an alternative system (related to ecology, homeland and opposite to eschatologically understood technocratic “system”) of individual social structures. The findings are based on data obtained from fieldwork carried out over a four-year period (2006-2010) in Lithuania and a two-year period (2008-2009) in Russia, including participant observation and interviews with respondents in both countries.

Contemporary religiousness Vissarion movement (other denominations: the Last Testament Church, the United faith community, the sect of Vissarion) originated in the South Russia, Krasnoyarsk region in Sayan mountains base is spreading through Eastern and Central Europe countries to the West. The community of Vissarion followers is building up in Siberia of the South Russia. The article analyses the concept of United Family as establishing alternative (possibly and utopian) society in Vissarion movement, separating indentifying it features: the concept, structure and the real phenomenon of community and United Family; the idealization of images and the roles of members of the community, the rejection of based on money intercommunication; the relation of Siberia community with the Old World.

Knyga "Subkultūra" - tarpdisciplininio pobūdžio leidinys. Įvairių subkultūrų, jų atstovų ir alternatyvios pasaulėžiūros asmenybių tapatybė ir individualumas knygoje atskleidžiami ir tekstais, ir vaizdais. Čia vienodai svarbūs yra ir pačių projekto dalyvių pasisakymai, ir dalyvavusiuosius projekte žmones įamžinusios fotografijos.

Knygos autorių atlikti meninis ir antropologinis tyrimai, perteikia vizualiąją ir vertybinę alternatyvių pasaulėžiūrų ir gyvenimo stilių išraišką. Siekiant išsamiau atskleisti supančią socialinę tikrovę, knygoje pristatomos dalyvaujančiųjų refleksijos individualios ir subkultūrinės tapatybės tematika, socialinę įvairovę atspindinčios skirtingos pasaulėžiūros ir gyvenimo stiliai, sociokultūrinių judėjimų teikiamos alternatyvios tikrovės įžvalgos ir socialinių problemų sprendimų siūlymai. Svarbus vaidmuo projekto dalyviams taip pat teko kuriant vizualiąją jų subkultūrinio ir individualaus identiteto išraišką. Pozuojant foto studijoje jiems buvo suteikta saviraiškos laisvė, kurios nevaržė nei išankstiniai stereotipai, nei estetiniai fotografijos kanonai ar techninio tobulumo siekis.

Skirtingas meno ir mokslo sritis atstovaujančių autorių bendro darbo rezultatas – tai knyga, leidžianti atsiverti tikrajai įvairovei, netgi jei tai reikštų prieštaravimus tarp skirtingų subkultūrų ir pasipriešinimą vyraujančioms „normalumo“ sampratoms. Leidinys nepropaguoja konkrečių subkultūrinių grupių pasaulėžiūros ar gyvensenos ir neteigia tobulos tolerancijos utopijos, bet tampa savita tribūna autentiškai įvairių subkultūrinių grupių atstovų ir ryškių individualybių saviraiškai.

Knygos leidybą parėmė Lietuvos Respublikos kultūros ministerija ir Vytauto Didžiojo universitetas.

This is a quick reminder that a deadline for Call for Individual Papers of the 20th Annual Conference of the European Association for the Study of Religions is approaching. Submit your panel proposal until January 31, 2023! 
This year’s conference's central theme is ‘Religions and Technologies” and it will focus on how technology and religion have co-evolved in the past, consider which are the critical engagements of religion with technology today, and imagine how they could develop in the future. The conference is organized by the Lithuanian Society for the Study of Religions and will take place from September 4 to September 8, 2023 in Vilnius, Lithuania.
More details about the paper submission can be found here and in information below: https://www.easr2023.org/call-for-papers/

20th Annual Conference of the European Association for the Study of Religions (EASR) “Religions and Technologies”

4-8 September 2023 in Vilnius, Lithuania
https://www.easr2023.org/
Throughout most of the history of the study of religion, there has been a latent tendency among scholars to see religion and technology as not just separate phenomena, but sometimes as mutually antagonistic. Nevertheless, in recent decades, scholars have advanced a more nuanced understanding of this relationship, depending on which particular aspects are being considered.
For instance, when considering religion as a practice, one discovers that religious institutions and individuals have used a wide range of technologies since ancient times, including printing and writing to preserve teachings, time-measurement devices and astronomical knowledge to determine the correct ritual time, and, of course, complex ritual actions to attract followers and engage natural and supernatural forces.
These precedents illustrate the complexity of the relationship between religion and technology, a relationship which encompasses not just technology in its material sense, but techniques such as knowledge organization and the specific methods needed to achieve particular ends. In addition to the way in which technology affects religious practices, their spread, and religious dialogue, new technology underlying communications and the social and digital spheres facilitates the systematization of religious data, making religions more accessible to academic study than ever before.
Thus, what we can state about the relationship of religion and technology is not their separation or antagonism but their entanglement, which calls us to take into account how technology and religion have co-evolved in the past, consider which are the critical engagements of religion with technology today, and imagine how they could develop in the future. Considering all of the above, the theme of this year’s EASR conference encourages participants to present and discuss any aspect relating to religion and technology in the broadest sense, e.g.
1. The concepts and connotations of technology across various religions.
2. Discussing how religions have viewed and treated technology historically and more recently.
3. The relationship between religion as practice and theory, or religion and science, including their interactions, conflicts, or other types of interactions.
4. Investigating esoteric, magical, or other religious practices as techniques.
5. Reflecting the spread and practice of religion via technology. The ways in which religions invent, adopt, and adapt technological innovations, including communication technologies and new media.
6. Understanding religion through the lens of concepts associated with social technologies, technological knowledge, etc.
7. The use of technologies and techniques in religious studies. Studying religion in the digital age: advances in the digital humanities and beyond. The ways in which existing technologies and their notions influence the study of religion.

Important Dates
Call for Session Proposal (open and closed panels):
October 1, 2022 – November 15, 2022
Notification of Acceptance of Panels:
until November 25, 2022
Call for Individual Papers
December 1, 2022 - January 31, 2023
Notification of Acceptance of Individual Papers
February 28, 2023
Registration
Early bird registration: until May 31, 2023
Standard registration: until June 30, 2023 (Deadline for presenting authors)
Late registration & on site (non presenting participants): from July 1, 2023