Religion and Magic in Socialist and Post-Socialist Contexts. Vol. 1: Historic and Ethnographic Case Studies of Orthodoxy, Heterodoxy, and Alternative Spirituality

The chapters collected in Religion and Magic in Socialist and Post-Socialist Contexts are informed by two political events of the recent past: the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Without those events and the sociocultural dislocations that ensued, interest in religion and magic in Eastern Europe very likely would have remained displaced by the more familiar stories, at least among Anglo-Saxon scholars of secularization and disenchantment. Instead, the upheaval of those years helped reveal an array of transnational, national, and regional cultures in Eastern Europe that, like cultures around the globe, are permeated by religion and magic.