About my project, or, how did I get here?

For those of you wondering what it is I'm actually doing here in Mother Russia, here's a brief synopsis. My project, which has been funded by a National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant (commonly, DDRI) and a couple of internal grants from CU, is about Buddhism in Russia. Buddhism is one of the four "traditional" religions of the Russian Federation (Russian Orthodoxy, Islam, and Judaism are the others), as defined by Russia's 1997 Law on Freedom of Conscience and Religious Associations. This Law in itself is fascinating, and its name utterly misleading. It was actually designed to target members of 'non-traditional faiths', notably Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons, who flocked to Russia (with its ~150 million atheists) after the fall of Communism. Basically, the law made it difficult, if not impossible, for these groups to establish their own religious institutions (read: churches) without jumping through a number of bureaucratic hoops.


I suppose this still doesn't answer the question, why Buddhism? There are a couple of reasons, beyond a general fascination with Russia as a political and cultural space. First, this project is building off of my Master's Thesis, which, in part, dealt with the revival of Islam in Dagestan, which is a multi-ethnic republic just to the south of Kalmykia that has been affected by the two wars in Chechnya. I don't necessarily envision comparing Dagestan and, say, Buryatia, but the infrastructure in terms of resources, colleagues, regional knowledge, and (partial) comprehension of the Russian language is already in place. Second, not many people have studied the three regions where I'm working (though Buryatia is something of an exception to that), and I know of no comparative study that has collected survey data from these 'Buddhist' regions. This might mean a couple of things: 1) they're not worth studying because there isn't anything interesting happening there; 2) these regions are hard to get to, scholars can only stay in Russia for three months at a time, and most of those who visit prefer to party in Moscow and Petersburg (ok, that last point was somewhat of a cheap shot...); or 3) academics aren't all that interested in a minority religious population when there are much more interesting things (conflict, migration, AIDS, drug trafficking) happening in Russia and the former Soviet Union. I'm pretty sure 3 is off-base; academics love the obscure. And I've seen firsthand that there actually are some pretty interesting things happening here with respect to Buddhism; I talked to a couple of lamas at the khurul last week who characterized Kalmykia's religious revival as broad but not deep. The republic was basically moving forward from nothing, from 70 years of state-enforced atheism, so what's been achieved so far is commendable. It's superficial, however, with its emphasis on the construction of stupas and khuruls, but not sufficient in terms of widespread practice, knowledge of Buddhist customs and scholarship, and an un-self-centered approach to religion. So I'm going with 2, at least until I get back my first peer-reviews.


Having been in Kalmykia 12 days, the next two weeks will be spent conducting two focus groups here, one among students at KGU, and one among active practitioners of and believers in Buddhism. The first one will be Wednesday, and the next will be sometime during the first week of March. This is designed to serve as a test-site for questions to be included in a survey, the main component of the project, which will be carried out this summer and fall. I'll be sure to give a report on how they go.