Books of Note
The Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University and the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies are jointly sponsoring a new annual book prize in political and social sciences for the best monograph on Eastern Europe, Russia, or Eurasia. One of the two studies to receive honorable mention in 2008 was Communities of the Converted: Ukrainians and Global Evangelism
by Catherine Wanner (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press). Following is an excerpt from the prize committee’s commendation. An anthropologist, Wanner provides an expertly crafted and elegantly written study of the resurgence of evangelical Protestantism in Ukraine. Based on exemplary multi-sited ethnographic research in both the U.S. and Ukraine, the book combines thoughtful and thorough historical contextualization with extended forays into the evangelical worlds and shows the processes through which international movements were able to establish a presence in disenfranchised communities as well as what they contributed to those communities.
Editor’s note: Communities of the Converted was also a 2008 Choice Outstanding Academic Title and the 2008 winner of the Heldt Prize for the best book by a woman in Slavic/East European/Eurasian Studies; the William C. Douglass Prize for the best book in European anthropology; and the American Association of Ukrainian Studies Best Book Award. For a review, see East-West Church & Ministry Report 16 (Summer
2008): 13.
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The Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize for the most important contribution to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies is co-sponsored by the Center for Russian and East European Studies at Stanford University and the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies.
The 2008 prize was awarded to Islam after Communism: Religion and Politics in Central Asia (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press).
Following is an excerpt from the prize citation.
With a finely tuned appreciation for the work of historical consciousness, cultural frames, and theological reason, Adeeb Khalid takes today’s “Central Asian problem,” and turns it on its head in this bravura study of how seven decades of Soviet rule deeply transformed religious and social action in contemporary Central Asia. Drawing on a diverse, polyglot range of sources, he shows the multiple ways by which socialist rule redefined the contours of Islamic practice in the USSR. Khalid offers close readings of archival sources, memoirs, ethnographic records, and interviews to suggest a predominantly Muslim world area that is by no means antiquated or isolated from the political transformations across the formerly socialist world. Canons old and new are challenged in this finely written and elegant study.
Editor’s note: Not surprisingly, Khalid has harsh words for evangelical missionaries in Central Asia, implicitly affirming the inviolability of the majority culture’s religious tradition at the expense of genuine freedom of conscience, the latter being dismissed as merely a Western construct.
Source: AAASS NewsNet (January 2009): 12-13. Excerpts reprinted with permission.
