Issue theme: Religion and the city

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The article is based on field material collected in Mednogorsk (Orenburg region) in December 2021. It is dedicated to the study of the interactions between the religious and cultural landscapes of the city. A distinctive feature of industrial Mednogorsk, founded during the era of industrialization, is its “church history” of the Soviet era. An constant element of this history was the life of the parish, which since 1943 took place in a prayer house later converted into the church of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker. The decades-long existence of the so-called “old St. Nicholas Church” in the city havs led to the enrichment and complication of the religious landscape, which includes hidden public practices of faith protection and places of prayer. The latter include an episode of collective protection of the church from destruction in 1961 and the book by Vera Popova, who became recognized in the city as the “historian of the temple” from among the oldest parishioners. The article provides a comparative analysis of the oral and written versions of the history of St. Nicholas Church. 
In 2007, the new Church of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker was consecrated in Mednogorsk. The authors analyze the distribution of functions between the two St. Nicholas churches in the small town in the post-Soviet period. The conclusion is drawn about the interpenetration of the historical, cultural and religious heritage of the city, which originated as a settlement near a copper-sulfur plant. Additionally, it is suggested that the church component of Mednogorsk’s history allows for the interpretation of its Soviet period as an alternative version of Soviet industrialization in a small factory town.

This article examines the problem of church selection among Moscow residents, using Orthodox churches as an example. By highlighting the factors that make churches significant for parishioners and analyzing the various types of services offered by churches, the author considers the church in three dimensions: social, environmental, and informational. Through the course of the research, the author answers the question of why some muscovites are willing to prefer a distant church over one within walking distance. The article is based on empirical data collected by the author during field research in seven Moscow churches in 2022–2023. The most significant factors in choosing a church are those which derived from social practices: the personality of a priest, the atmosphere in the church, and the parish community. The geographical location of the church and the quality of the surrounding environment determine differences in the localization of parish communities. By analyzing the variety of non-liturgical services provided by churches, the author reveals a subtle process, unnoticed by most city residents, of redrawing the boundaries between the religious and the secular, and calls for studying churches as indicators of these changes.

The article presented to your attention addresses the problem the virtualization of the well-known traditional Japanese divination practice — “omikuji” (translated from Japanese as “divine lot”), and also touches upon more global issues such as how Japanese religious practices are currently developing on the Internet. A significant portion of the research is dedicated to analyzing the transformation process of a religious tradition that used to be practiced exclusively “in person” and examining how contemporary Japanese people of different age groups and social status relate to the phenomenon of web religiosity. The study is based on data collected from an online survey conducted in July 2023. A total of 32 people responded to the survey (almost all informants are either Japanese or long-time foreign expatriates residing in Japan). The article includes screenshots of digital omikuji and their translations made by the author. The results of the study indicate that virtualization has made the practice of omikuji more accessible to laypeople, especially for people with disabilities. The texts of the predictions were significantly simplified during their virtualization. However, as the survey results suggest, the accessibility of the practice has led to a certain degree of loss of trust among believers. While omikuji had previously been perceived by the Japanese as a kind of entertainment within the temple or shrine grounds, the transition of the practice to the online space has further “simplified” it. Moreover, virtualization has turned the practice of traditional divination into another tool of promoting and advertising Japanese commercial companies, which negatively affects the perception of the omikuji tradition among believers.

The article is devoted to the latest forms of manifestation of religiosity in the city space. The study focuses on studying the micro-levels of religious life in urban ergonymy. By examining store signs, navigation maps, and goods on the shelves of chain stores using the names of the gods of Ancient Greece, the article sets the task of reconstructing a non-verbalized mythological narrative composed by ergonyms and product names. The religious life of urban space is understood as the practices of piety characteristic of ancient Greek religiosity: invocation and dedication. The specific mechanisms of cultural reproduction in Ancient Greece and Europe of the 21st century are reconstructed. Based on the distinction made, the myth-socializing function of modern education in the process of broadcasting the mythological narrative and reinterpreting the Olympic myth is described. The article refers to data on the religious life of legal entities. Based on an analysis of the frequency of mentioning the names of the Olympic gods in the unified register of legal entities, and a comparison of the names of the gods with the declared forms of economic activity, the Olympic myth of the 21st century — the “Ergonymic Myth of Hermes” — is reconstructed. The article assumes scaling up the research to the study of “chorographies” — materially embodied spaces of the sacred on the streets of modern cities. The study of chorographies is proposed as a new methodology for studying culture and human coexistence.

The article describes the experience of field research conducted during 2023–2024 on the territory of the church of the Holy Martyr Antipas of Pergamon in Kolymazhny Dvor (Moscow), where the “ANTIPA” coffee shop is located. The research addresses the issues of creation, organization, functioning and structure of the public space initiated and supervised by a religious community, as well as social agents who interact with it. The coffee shop “ANTIPA” is proposed to be examined through the lens of five aspects: 1) spatial, 2) social, 3) aesthetic, 4) organizational, 5) economic and labor. The church complex’s adjacent territory can be characterized as a secular space with religious elements, which performs the following functions: 1) a meeting place (as a point on the map where people can meet), 2) a place of communication (as a place where one can spend time socializing), 3) a mediator between the city and religion (as a place that allows residents and visitors of the capital to encounter the religious).

Conference reviews are usually dull: they are easy to write but tedious to read, and what was lively and dynamic in person often becomes less engaging in text. In the review below, we’ve tried to bring the event to life with videos and photos, capturing what was essentially a showcase of applied anthropological research being conducted in Russia in the 2020s. We will include links to studies and Telegram channels that, perhaps even more effectively than academic articles, demonstrate how applied sciences are evolving — from folklore studies and museum design to anthropology and sociology. During the event, the authors of these Telegram channels actively covered the proceedings, helping us capture the most important moments included in this review. We would like to extend our gratitude to Mikhail Alekseevsky, Dmitry Rogozin, and Oleg Bazaleev.