Beschreibung
This volume offers original insights into the religious transformations taking place in postsocialist
western Ukraine. Applying a cognitive theory based on two modes of religiosity, the doctrinal
and the imagistic, Vlad Naumescu reveals the mechanisms of reproduction and change that make
the local eastern Christian tradition a living tradition of faith. He combines rich ethnographic
materials with historical and theological sources to depict a religion in equilibrium between the
two modes, maintaining revelation at the core of its doctrinal corpus. He argues that religion is a
potential source for social change that empowers people to act upon reality and transform it. With
his innovative exploration of the dynamics of an eastern Christian tradition, Naumescu makes a
major contribution to the emerging anthropology of Christianity as well as to studies of
postsocialism.
Vlad Naumescu is an adjunct professor in social anthropology at the Central
European University, Budapest. In 2003-2006 he was a doctoral student at the Max Planck
Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle/Saale, Germany.
