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DOUGLAS ROGERS: The Old Faith and the Russian Land. A Historical Ethnography of Ethics in the Urals. Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press, 2009. XVII, 338 S., Abb., Tab., Ktn. ISBN: 978-0-8014-7520-7.
This ambitious volume started out as an anthropological study of Old Belief in the post-Soviet era. The author, who is an anthropologist, spent about a year (2000-2001) in the town of Sepych in the Perm region and recorded "hundreds of semiformal interviews, unanticipated interactions, and chance encounters" (p. 23). These materials "form the backbone of this work" (p. 23). However, Rogers states that he followed the advice of Russian historians of Old Belief, most importantly of Irina V. Pozdeeva, to contextualize recent developments in Sepych within the town's tercentenary history. This advice would have served the author well if he had limited himself to a historical overview of one or two chapters. Instead, he devoted more than twothirds of his volume to the Muscovite, Imperial Russian and Soviet past.
Rogers' central concern is to investigate how Old Believers "sought to fashion ethical lives across three centuries of precipitous transformations" (p. XI). The study is guided by anthropological concepts such as "moralizing discourses," "materials of ethics," "moral communities," "ethical regimes," and "ethical repertories" (p. 15-19). These concepts are superimposed upon the past without much attention to the historical record. The author himself notices, "that a good deal of historical detail is lost" (p. 110), but insists that "lived practices ... [can be] more easily glimpsed in the kind of field work I carried out...