Anthropology Colloquium is the department’s speaker series that invites a mixture of anthropologists from within and outside of UBC to present their research. This speaker series is scheduled throughout the academic year, typically with a lunch reception in the AnSo Lounge.
Thursday, February 3rd 11:30-1:00 ANSO 134
Sonja Luehrmann (Killam Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Anthropology, UBC)
Holy Innocence: Sin, Childraising, and Memory in Russian Orthodox Anti-Abortion Activism
After decades of being the most accessible method of fertility control, abortion is becoming contentious in post-Soviet Russia in the context of religious revival and publicized concern over a national “demographic crisis.” Based on fieldwork at a Russian Orthodox pregnancy consultation center in St. Petersburg, this paper explores how reframing past actions in the idiom of sin becomes a source of moral authority in post-Soviet appropriations of transnational pro-life activism. Since a majority of the pension-aged women who make up the bulk of Russian Orthodox churchgoers have had several abortions during their reproductive lifespans, anti-abortion activism is often a form of penance for past abortions. As female activists present themselves as virtuous mothers and grandmothers who are also grave sinners, Orthodox Christian teachings about sin and penitence combine with psychological debates about “post-abortion syndrome” to create a circumscribed space of gendered moral agency. While women in Russia generally have fewer opportunities than men to derive authority from the ability to confront moral ambiguity, demographic concerns make reproduction and childraising a sphere where women’s fraught decisions gain public weight. At a time when Russian citizens are rarely encouraged to think critically about their Soviet past, practices of confession and penance at once demand and contain critical memory, making moral ambiguity useable for political life by reducing it to a tolerable level.
