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Dienstag
28
NOV

16.15 Uhr

Women and the Transformation of religious Roles and Practices in Kalmykia

Valeria Gazizova (Cambridge)

Kalmykia

Kalmykia

Kalmykia, an autonomous republic in the southwest of the Russian Federation, is perhaps the only region on the territory of Europe where Buddhism is historically practised. The Tibetan variant of Mahayana Buddhism had become the dominant religion of the Kalmyks by the time of the establishment of the Kalmyk khanate on the northern Caspian steppes in the mid-1600s by the Oirat Mongols, the ancestors of the present-day Kalmyks who had migrated from what today roughly corresponds to the northern part of Xinjiang. This continuity was interrupted by the anti-religious campaigns in the Soviet Union beginning in the late 1920s. By the end of the 1930s, Buddhism was completely eradicated from the Kalmyk public scene.
Since the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Kalmykia, in common with the other republics and ethnic groups of the former Soviet landscape, has been going through religious and cultural reconstruction after decades of atheistic policy. A prominent feature of contemporary Kalmykia is a profound transformation of the roles of women in the sphere of religion. Traditional Kalmyk society was characterized by male dominance in most spheres, including that of religion, with no Buddhist nunneries existing in the pre-communist period. A woman was considered not only inferior to a man, but also unclean and even dangerous, with numerous avoidance customs for women being common. The post-Soviet era brought new opportunities for Kalmyk women to reassert and reposition themselves as religious specialists and religious leaders. Not only have women been active agents in the process of religious renewal and reconstitution of what is considered the ethnic religious heritage, but there have also appeared religious practices and groups in which women play leading roles.
The lecture will present several life histories of female religious specialists of contemporary Kalmykia and discuss different ways in which women have taken up new roles and gained religious authority – including those of self-taught female Buddhist teachers with a secular academic background; ritual healers and clairvoyants claiming to have received their “tradition” from older Kalmyk monks of the Soviet and pre-Soviet periods; and adherents of so-called “cosmic religion” or “cosmic Buddhism”, whose beliefs and rituals are based on texts allegedly dispatched from the cosmos in an unknown language and who regard their leader, a Kalmyk woman, as Buddha Maitreya.

Adresse

Südasien-Institut

E11

Im Neuenheimer Feld 330

69120 Heidelberg

Homepage Veranstaltung

http://www.sai.uni-heidelberg.de/abt/IND/aktuelles/Poster%20Abteilungskolloquium_s.pdf

Veranstalter

Südasien-Institut, Abteilung Kultur- und Religionsgeschichte Südasiens

Homepage Veranstalter

http://www.sai.uni-heidelberg.de/abt/IND/index_kalender.php

Kontakt

Julie Pusch