Academic visitors to balticorthodoxy.com may be interested in the following CfP for a special issue of the journal Ab Imperio.
Forum in Ab Imperio: “Religion, National Indifference, and Forms of Solidarity: Historical Perspectives from Imperial and post-Imperial Borderlands”
Guest Editors Catherine Gibson (University of Tartu) & Irina Paert (University of Tartu)
There has been an invigorating body of scholarship in recent years seeking to challenge dominant nationalist narratives of ‘national awakening’ by highlighting the flexible and often ambiguous ways in which inhabitants of Central and Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century engaged with ideas about nationhood. Rather than been swept up in an overwhelming tide of nationalism, scholars have drawn attention to populations who remained ‘indifferent’ to national ideas, who strategically side-switched for political, economic, or social reasons, who felt a stronger sense of identification towards their local area, or who had a hybrid or hyphenated sense of belonging as a result of multilingualism or mixed marriages (Judson, 2006, King, 2002, Zahra, 2008). Research on ‘national indifference’ has mostly focused on problematising national and linguistic categories for grouping people, yet the conversations about ‘national indifference’ have many parallels with the themes and approaches of historians working on the fluidity and flexibility of religious practices and behaviours (Emiliantseva 2008, Kefeli 2016, Paert 2016). So far, however, the interplay between ‘national indifference’ and religious forms of identification and solidarity have often been overlooked in this larger discussion (Van Ginderachter & Fox 2019, Fellerer et al, 2019; notable exceptions include Paces & Wingfield 2005, Bjork 2008, Cusco 2019, Aoshima 2020).
In this Ab Imperio Forum, we invite contributors to critically reflect on how the concept of ‘national indifference’ might be applied to understand flexible religious behaviours and identifications and to problematise the simplistic confessional classifications still often used by scholars and the media. The papers will discuss populations who converted or oscillated between commitment to different confessions, displayed confessional indeterminacy, informality, ambivalence, or ‘situational religiosity’, or who proved problematic in some way for state and Church authorities to classify using routine administrative practices of religious classification and statistical enumeration. Through consideration of different historical case studies, the articles will explore how religion was not displaced by nationalism as a pre-modern relic, but intersected and overlapped with emerging ideas about nationhood in complex ways. By reflecting on the imperial period, the Forum will provide insights on historical dynamics and processes underpinning intersectional identities in the post-Soviet space today.
We invite submission from scholars working on the Russian Empire (including its border regions with the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires, and Central Asia) and successor territories from c.1850 to c.1950. Themes and questions to be covered in the Forum may include, but are not limited to:
- The relationship between ethnolinguistic, national, and religious forms of personal identification and group identity;
- Responses of religious minorities to various nationalising projects, forms of bureaucratic ascription, calendar reforms, language policy, and name-changes
- Attempts by Church and state authorities to tackle religious ambivalence, hybridity and people who went back and forth between different religions.
- Conversions and re-conversions
- Interconfessional marriage, mixed-faith schools
- Cartographic, ethnographic, and statistical representations of religious diversity
- The responses of religious groups to various forms of national mobilisation, including the war effort. Did all religious groups rally behind the patriotic and xenophobic slogans of their governments during the First World War? How did groups that shared a religious identity with the enemy react?
- What was the position and identity of the multilingual clergy who served mixed ethnic communities towards the nationalist agenda? How do ego-documents shed light on the self-understanding of such clergy?
- How was confessional inter-ethnic solidarity affected by transitions from empire to nation-states in the 20th century? In what ways did confessional networks and communities promote feelings of transnational and international solidarity across state borders?
- To what extent can approaches from the ‘national indifference’ historiography be applied to study religious groups? What are the possible limitations of such an approach? What insights and perspectives can scholars of religion bring to the broader discussion of ‘national indifference’?
Provisional Timetable 2021-2022
1 February 2021 Abstracts to be submitted
1 March 2021 Selected abstracts will be invited for full article submission
15 June 2021 Full article will be collected for internal review
June-July 2021 Articles will be sent back and forth to authors for internal revisions, if necessary
1 August 2021 Articles submitted to Ab Imperio for peer-review
2022 Year of publication
We invite those interested to send us article proposals (title and an abstract max. 300 words) to Catherine Gibson (catherine.helen.gibson@ut.ee) and Irina Paert (irina.paert@ut.ee) by 1 February 2021.
We look forward to receiving your proposals. Please do not hesitate to get in touch with any questions.
Kind regards,
Catherine & Irina
