The Old-Believer tradition in terms of memory studies

The concept of collective (social) memory is being used in social sciences to expose the link between the past of the group and its identity. It was developped in 1950 in the works of the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs and further investigated by P. Conner-ton, J. Assmann, A. Assmann, P. Nora and others. The Canadian anthropologist D. Sheffel has demonstrated the potential of this methodological approach in examining the frameworks of identity of the Old Believer community. He emphasised the distribution of commemorative functions between the written and oral tradition that allows the Old Believer community to be flexible to the changes without jeopardizing the basic elements of the tradition. The current paper aims to integrate the various techniques of memory studies to question the state of identity of the bezpopovtsi (without-priest) Old Believers in the South Viatka region. First, the author approaches the structure of the old believers' collective memory, organized around the Shizm (Raskol) as the triggering event of the process of delimitation of the Old Believers and the major "figure of memory" (the term developed by J. Assmann). Following the Russian anthropologist R. Karagezov, the author adopts the notion of pattern as a dynamic form of collective memory which inscribes the figures of memory in the actual cognitive frame of individuals, establishing the link between the past and the present of the community, the "cultural" (distant) memory and the "communicative" (recent) memory. The main patterns of the Old Believer collective memory represented in the sacred texts or in the polemical writings referring to the former are those of the "last times" (predicted in the Bible), the "profanation of priesthood", the "non-interaction with infidels", the "persecutions", the "eternal sinful-ness and penitence". The patterns are thus ruling the adaptation strategies of the community, providing its members with the instruments of treating the social reality. The absence of stable structures charged to transmit the figures of cultural memory (the clergy) is instrumental in the active forgetting of tradition. The recent past shapes the process of remembering, rearranging the self-concept of the community. The local tradition becomes justified by the authority of the forefathers, even if it they altered the rites bound to be kept intact.

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