An Affective Atmosphere of Religiosity: Animated Places, Public Spaces, and the Politics of Attachment in Ukraine and Beyond

Abstract

When religious institutions engage the secular emotively and publicly, they can foster an affective atmosphere of religiosity, which potentially has motivational power, even for non-believers, because it shapes the sensorium of those who circulate in public space. When individuals appeal to “places animated with prayer” for the transformative energy that resides there through ritualized practices, they reaffirm an affective atmosphere of religiosity. In Orthodox Eastern Europe and elsewhere, a confessional tradition is allied with state borders, further normativizing this affective atmosphere and giving it pronounced political implications. When an affective atmosphere of religiosity inspires practices that are intentionally designed to prompt experiences rendered meaningful in otherworldly terms, over time such performativity can create mimetic instincts that become second nature. This is an essential step to religion becoming an expedient political resource and to the emergence of religious nationalism or a confessional state.

Anthropology of Transformation

“…Like the various modes of 'civility' our group depicted, an ambient faith falls in between well-defined social categories and institutional frames, defying politics of differentiation yet being potentially recruited by them to create difference. Inserting itself in secular space without challenging it directly, and being susceptible to politicisation without being explicitly political, ambient Orthodoxy remains even today an important mobilising factor in Ukraine to legitimise nationalist causes or sustain a war against an enemy that shares the same faith (Wanner 2020).…”

Shockwaves

“…Peter Adey (2013), at the same time, has called for complementing geographies of militarization research with their experiential aspects and more specifi cally has invited "explor[ing] the atmospheric aff ects of the intensifi ed presence of something like an occupation, or the resonances constituting political change" (Adey 2013: 53). Recent interdisciplinary work is also using non-representational frameworks to address how atmospheres are enrolled and weaponized for political violence and the policing of protest in cities (Nieuwenhuis 2018;Shaw 2016; see also Graham 2015); shaped during religious ritual in confl ict zones (Loi 2018;Wanner 2020); how they fl uctuate in escalation toward armed confl ict (Fregonese 2017) and their amplifi cations shape daily practices in the proximity of confl ict (Navaro 2017); and fi nally how they linger in post-confl ict settings (Laketa 2016). Importantly, atmosphere allows us to extend the focus of studying confl ict from the spectacularly militarized events in war zones and into the oft en silenced but persisting "gaps, creaks, and crevices not entirely smothered by the bombastic politics at play nor fl attened by .…”

A Place of One’s Own: Pilgrimage and the Reinterpretation of Culture in Russia’s Ural Region

“…Within Russia and the former Soviet space, local Muslim pilgrimage may have profited from [4] the Soviet targeting of institutional religion, which in some people created a distrust towards official clergy and helped to transfer religious practice from the mosque to specific places of veneration (Wanner 2020;Kormina 2010, 270;Sartori 2019). But irrespective of the Soviet experience, pilgrimage to sacred places is an aspect of Muslim religious expression with a considerable history all across Europe, Asia, and Africa.…”