open access

https://hdl.handle.net/2115/39230

Re-/Construction of Knowledge as a Practice : Traditional Religion and Divination of the Chuvash

日本語

2009

北海道大学スラブ研究センター

Slavic Studies

56

157-178

研究ノート

In an attempt to ascertain the current tendencies of religious movements in the world, it is inevitable to distinguish between two different types of phenomena. The first type is religious activity based on people's knowledge as habitus. This type of knowledge is embodied by people almost unconsciously due to circumstances from their childhood. The knowledge as habitus is usually merged into everyday life, and affects people implicitly. Conversely, the second type of activity is based on knowledge as facts, which has been defined from a reflective point of view. Knowledge as facts is defined explicitly in a scientific manner. It usually serves abstract and rationalistic purposes, such as in ecological or nationalistic endeavors. Regarding the matter of cultural change including religious consciousness, it is often said that knowledge as habitus gave way to knowledge as facts in the course of modernization. However, such a generalization by no means captures the complex dimension of practices of people. I will elucidate this point by examining the religious phenomena of the Chuvash, a Turkic people of the Middle-Volga basin. First, I will illustrate how the Chuvash intellectuals, who devote themselves to a nationalist movement, have tried to revive the traditional religion. The Chuvash traditional religion has a pantheon of gods and spirits composing various strata of the celestial world. The Chuvash people held onto their indigenous beliefs until the mid-19th century, when the Orthodox Church promoted systematic Christianization among them. Their beliefs were lost almost completely by the time of the Russian Revolution. Later, since perestroika, Chuvash intellectuals, in a nationalist mood, have paid most of their attention to the pre-Christian indigenous beliefs. This has been adequate for promoting a national identity, because it clearly distinguishes the Chuvash from both Orthodox Russians and from Muslim Tatars. The illustration shows how the religious knowledge has been transformed from habitus to facts in an attempt of the Chuvash intellectuals to revive their traditional religion. Next, I will turn to the divination of the Chuvash. Diviners had a close relationship with the Chuvash traditional religion. During the pre-Christian era, diviners appointed dates, places and sorts of offerings to be sacrificed on the occasion of the communal rituals. As the power of traditional religion was lost, the social role of the diviners was diminished. But it has not been lost completely because the divination process remains, and serves to counsel individual clients for whom diviners indicate the reasons and solutions for misfortunes. Although the divination was excluded by both the Orthodox Church and the Bolshevik Party, in the same way as the traditional religion was excluded, the diviners are still in large demand today. This makes the divination a marked contrast to the traditional Chuvash religion. In this case, the habitus form of knowledge has been maintained through the practice of divination among the people. Examination of the traditional religion and divination of the Chuvash demonstrates that the relationship between modernization and the transformation of knowledge cannot be reduced to a fatalistic generalization. As the case of the divination shows, knowledge as habitus is not always transformed into knowledge as facts through modernization. At the same time, the practices of people based on habitus should not be construed as resisting modernization. Such an alternative view whether people's habitus should surrender to modernization or resist it, reduces the people's experiences to a simplified dimension. In truth, knowledge involving religious affairs can be constructed in various ways, depending on where an agency is situated between the two poles of knowledge as habitus and knowledge as facts. Furthermore, the knowledge is by no means fixed in a single situation, but rather it can be shifted in other situations due to other setting of relationship established between agencies. People reconstruct their knowledge through the act of coming and going between different situations. Those who are engaged in a reflexive study of culture, should turn their attention to each practice as construction and reconstruction of knowledge.

紀要論文

Version of Record

0562-6579

AN0012574X