Orthodox Landscape of the Siberian Taiga Region: the Concept of Research

The article presents the programme of research into the system of religious objects and sacral loci in the Siberian taiga region. This investigation attempts to determine the circumstances of interaction between Russian Orthodox Church and popular religion, provides an explanation for the differences in adaptive and identifying practices of Russian farmers in the 1890s-1930s. The analysis of those will be conducted using recent foreign and domestic studies of «cultural landscape» and applies the approach to identity as a phenomenon of binary nature where the initial ethnic and religious identity is combined with any other types of identifications offered to a person by a historical epoch and his/her social environment. Two models of the interaction «peasant community^Orthodox clergy» and «peasant community^ Old Believers' skit» were selected as the issues of this study. Their analysis will be conducted using the conception of dual structures studied by A. Hocart, C. Levi Strauss and their followers. This conception allows us to establish the similarities and differences in territorial relations functioning simultaneously, to explain the origin and sources of religious space images, to define the meaning of the terms «sacral» and «secular» for a resident of Imperial and subsequently Soviet Siberia. The investigation enables to solve the problem of methodology and source studies. It presupposes: а) the specification of key terms of identity theories and their adaptation to the analysis of ethnic-religious community in the context of macro-social transformations; b) the extension of scientific sources. In particular, the research will include the study of the body of texts describing administrative and law frameworks of living the peasant community and its routine as well Cyrillic book collections, as the Orthodox parish and Old Believers' skit libraries contain the explicit and implicit information about cognitive, behavioral and communicative practices of their readers. The investigation is expected to be conducted in two directions: 1) historical and social anthropological one, in which the life of Orthodox inhabitants of the Siberian taiga region will be reconstructed on the basis of data available on the settlements, the parish and Old Believers' communities in the 1890s-1930s; 2) historical and cultural direction aimed at revealing the nature of regional social networks and studying the role of national language, Cyrillic characters and the interpretations of authoritative Christian texts to maintain the ethnic and religious identity. In practice they will help reconstruct the ways by means of which Siberian farmers adapted to the terms of economical integration at the turn of the XIX-XX centuries, the October Revolution and the Civil War, the forced Collectivization and atheistic policy; to discover the factors modifying the initial model of identity. Conceptually, to generalize the efficiency of the social strategies used by the local peasant community for the adaptation to the macro-social transformations as well as the intended and unintended results of this process.

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