Converging Worlds: Religion and Community in Peasant Russia, 1861-1917
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Chris J. Chulos. Converging Worlds: Religion and Community in Peasant Russia, 1861-1917. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003. xv, 201 pp. Illustrations. Appendices. Glossary. Bibliography, Index. $42.00, cloth.Chris Chulos's monograph is about traditional Russian peasant life through the lens of religion and its transformations during the post-emancipation and revolutionary period. The book argues that peasant Orthodoxy was an integral part of traditional patterns of life, and that peasant religion has been misrepresented as dvoeverie and superstition. The modernizing processes after emancipation, especially literacy, did not detract from peasant adherence to Orthodoxy, contrary to the usual assumptions, but rather deepened it. Empowered by deeper knowledge and experience of the faith, peasants were more invested in their local parish church and felt more entitled to a say in it. Elite perceptions (whether intelligentsia or clergy) that the peasants were defecting from Orthodoxy (whether to secularism or sectarianism) were misperceptions of these changes. The central focus for the book's research is the peasantry of Voronezh province, based upon ethnographic accounts, the local ecclesiastical press, and selective use of local and central (Synodal) archives. The basic argument of the book (which is supported by other recent research) radically overturns previous assumptions about peasant religion and its decline during late Imperial Russia; unfortunately, the sub-arguments of individual chapters are neither so clear nor so convincing.Chulos's book certainly makes some valuable contributions. Most importantly, he takes peasant religion seriously, against elite condescension toward it, whether by Russian Orthodox clergy, secular intelligentsia, or modern historians. Second, he argues persuasively that religion continued to be central to peasant life right up to 1917 and beyond. As the village encountered modernizing processes, it adapted the traditional to the new circumstances. Literacy, in particular, served the spread of religious literature about saints and holy sites, which in turn fuelled a massive increase in pilgrimage in late imperial Russia. Even after 1905, with greater religious freedom, the number of defectors from Orthodoxy-even to other, sectarian, religious groups-remained low in Voronezh. The clergy's fear of religious decline was, he argues, the result of increased literacy and demand for control over parish affairs, which was threatening to a church hierarchy that sought to maintain its traditional authority, and it blamed secular influences for peasant assertiveness.One of the more important arguments Chulos makes is to challenge long-standing and prevailing assumptions about dvoeverie, the supposed peasant dual faith that consisted of a Christian veneer that masked an essentially pagan base. Chulos rightly insists that such a characterization is an elite imposition on peasant religion, while the peasants thought of themselves unquestionably as Christians. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".