Sergei Shtyrkov, a social anthropologist, specialist in the anthropology of religion, ethnicity, and nationalism, and Director of the Anthropology Program at YCIE, will hold a public lecture on how Orthodox Church structures produce saints.

In his book Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar (2007), David Graeber, following the Foucauldian tradition, interpreted such practices as ordinary people’s stories about the past, dream interpretation, ritual prohibitions, and reflections on someone’s alleged magical abilities as primarily political actions. He contrasted these actions — accessible to all — with political power, concentrated in the hands of a few. This power, in his view, functions as a means of suppressing political action itself, as well as neutralizing its actual or potential influence on others.

This perspective on the nature of the political allows us to move away from the normative opposition between the spheres of political and religious praxis. In a secular society, this opposition has become part of everyday consciousness and may obscure the logic behind the actions of various social groups and institutions of authority. It leads us to interpret the political dimension of actions by “religious” actors — such as clergy — as a form of pathology, a sign of their dishonesty or even moral corruption. However, from the perspective of the social sciences, the political and the religious are inseparable in practice.

Thus, in the process of canonizing saints in the contemporary Russian Orthodox Church, what we see is not so much a search for spiritual ideals as a discussion about the limits of the Church as a corporation in making decisions, the nature of the agency of the “church people,” and the political mission of saints and the miracles associated with them.