articles by Irina Sadovina
Проблемы марийской и сравнительной филологии, 2020
Nova Religio, 2021
Attitudes toward alternative spirituality in Russia are shaped by legislative limitations on reli... more Attitudes toward alternative spirituality in Russia are shaped by legislative limitations on religious freedom, the state's traditionalism, and Russian Orthodox anticultism. Nevertheless, public personalities associated with new religious movements persist and flourish. Oleg Torsunov, popularizer of Vedic Psychology and holistic medicine, is a striking example. Despite ongoing controversies about his religious affiliation, medical claims, and gender ideology, Torsunov continues to attract followers. This article examines why public figures such as Torsunov seem unsinkable in hostile cultural environments. Mapping the heated discursive landscape surrounding Torsunov, I argue that the secret to this resilience is a "legitimation lattice"-the strategy of grounding one's authority in several sources of legitimacy. Torsunov's lattice is composed of different interlocked strips: science, Indian spiri-tuality, personal charisma, and common stereotypes. This structure increases the resilience of controversial public figures in two ways: by making their legitimation strategies flexible and by allowing them to emphasize mainstream values as needed.
Journal of Contemporary Religion , 2017
book reviews by Irina Sadovina
Thesis Chapters by Irina Sadovina
PhD Thesis, 2020
The social climate in contemporary Russia is not particularly indulgent towards alternative spiri... more The social climate in contemporary Russia is not particularly indulgent towards alternative spirituality. Viewed by the law as secondary to the country’s “historical religions,” such movements often appear at the center of controversies and are vilified in the media. Nevertheless, alternative spirituality in today’s Russia has not only survived but flourished. For example, the teachings of Vedic Wisdom have made successful inroads into popular psychology. How can we explain the resilience of this concept, and the alternative spirituality milieu in general, given the hostile environment? Current scholarship on Russian alternative spirituality tends to approach these questions either by tracing the large-scale changes in the country’s religious landscape, or by focusing on the dynamics of single movements. I argue, however, that the picture of alternative spirituality in Russia is incomplete without a third perspective, which can capture the mutual entanglement of the milieu. In this project, I develop such a perspective by focusing on Vedic Wisdom. Based on traditional and virtual ethnographic research in Russia (2012-2019), this project shows that Vedic Wisdom is not a single teaching, but a discursive cluster that forms a distinct vernacular belief tradition within the Russian alternative spirituality milieu. In the thesis, I describe three of its most influential iterations: neo-Hindu teachings, Slavic-inspired spirituality and popular psychology. In the case studies that make up this project, I show how different actors – from spiritual seekers to feminist activists – engage in negotiation, legitimation, contestation and other discursive practices that make and unmake the Vedic Wisdom tradition. To explain the paradoxical resilience of Vedic Wisdom, I show that it is implicated in broader national and global cultural phenomena: notably, the turn towards traditional values and the popularization of neoliberal practices of the self.
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articles by Irina Sadovina
book reviews by Irina Sadovina
Thesis Chapters by Irina Sadovina