From Russia with faith: Orthodox Old Believers in Uganda as a manifestation of cultural processes in contemporary Africa | Sibirskie Istoricheskie Issledovaniia – Siberian Historical Research. 2018. № 1. DOI: 10.17223/2312461X/19/12

From Russia with faith: Orthodox Old Believers in Uganda as a manifestation of cultural processes in contemporary Africa

Based on field evidence collected in the summer of 2017 the present article deals with a very recent phenomenon - the Orthodox Old Believers in the Republic of Uganda in East Africa. This faith originated in Russia, but in Uganda all its adherents belong to the native ethnic groups and, except children, consciously converted to Old Believers from other religions in adulthood. We describe the short by now history and current state of the Old-Believer communities in Uganda and then concentrate on their members' motivation for converting to Old Believers versus knowledge of this religion. We show that their knowledge of the Old-Believer doctrine is poor and they usually cannot tell how it differs from that of other Christian denominations. What brings them to become Old Believers is their search for true faith associated with the original and hence the only correct way of performing Christian rites. In this we see an intricate interplay of the features typical for authentic African cultures and acquired by them in the course of interaction with the wider world. Drawing on our study of Old Believers in Uganda, we discuss in the closing section how globalist and anti-globalist trends manifest themselves in the spiritual (religious) context in contemporary Africa.

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Keywords

старообрядцы, Уганда, мотивы крещения, знание религиозной доктрины, истинная вера, ритуализм, современная африканская религиозность, духовные глобализм и антиглобализм, Orthodox Old Believers, Uganda, motivation for conversion, doctrinal knowledge, true religion, ritualism, contemporary African religiosity, spiritual globalism and anti-globalism

Authors

Name	Organization	E-mail
Bondarenko Dmitri M.	African Studies (Russian Academy of Sciences); Higher School of Economics; Russian State University for the Humanities	dbondar@hotmail.com; dmitrimb@mail.ru

Всего: 1

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