School of History, UCC
Dr James Kapaló, Study of Religions Department, UCC
Thursday 1 December 2022, 16.00 (4 PM), Teams
The paper will be delivered through MS Teams. Please, contact Dr Jérôme aan de Wiel, School of History, UCC, for a Teams link or use the link below.
Paper In this presentation, I explore the implications of the material turn in the study of religions for scholarship on lived religion during communism. Based on the findings of the Hidden Galleries ERC project (hiddengalleries.eu), which focused on the archives of the secret police in Hungary, Romania, Moldova and Ukraine, I suggest ways in which the insights and methods employed by scholars of religions can help us access the agency and creativity of religious communities under surveillance, and in so doing reveal the processes of religious change that have helped shape contemporary Central and Eastern Europe.
The secret police archives contain an array of confiscated items such as photographs, artworks and pamphlets, as well as diaries, poetry, letters and postcards. These materials are, however, embedded within case files compiled, curated and edited by the secret police agents, who engaged in their own creative practices of representation, for the purposes of investigations, criminal cases and propaganda, those that they were charged with destroying or discrediting. Using examples from Hungary, Romania and Soviet Moldavia, I will present the multi-layered, hybrid assemblage of texts, items and images that comprise the secret police holdings on religions and illustrate how an ethnographic attentiveness to materialities can contribute to our understanding of the past.
Dr James Kapaló is Senior Lecturer in the Study of Religions at University College Cork. He is a historian and ethnographer of religion and has conducted archival and ethnographic fieldwork in the Republic of Moldova, Romania, Ukraine and Hungary. From 2016 to 2021, he was Principal Investigator of the European Research Council Project Hidden Galleries (project 677355) (http://hiddengalleries.eu/), which explored lived religion during communism through the archives of the secret police. He is the author and editor of several books on lived and material religion in Central and Eastern Europe including Inochentism and Orthodox Christianity: Religious Dissent in the Russian and Romanian Borderlands (Routledge, 2018) and The Secret Police and the Religious Underground in Communist and Post-Communist Eastern Europe (with Kinga Povedák, Routledge 2022).