Sacred Places, Emerging Spaces

Though long-associated with violence, the Caucasus is a region rich with religious conviviality. Based on fresh ethnographies in Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and the Russian Federation, Sacred Places, Emerging Spaces discusses vanishing and emerging sacred places in the multi-ethnic and multi-religious post-Soviet Caucasus. In exploring the effects of de-secularization, growing institutional control over hybrid sacred sites, and attempts to review social boundaries between the religious and the secular, these essays give way to an emergent Caucasus viewed from the ground up: dynamic, continually remaking itself, within shifting and indefinite frontiers.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Tsypylma Darieva, Florian Mühlfried and Kevin Tuite
Chapter 1. Between 'Great' and 'Little' Traditions? Situating Shia Saints in Contemporary Baku
Tsypylma Darieva
Chapter 2. Women as Bread-Bakers and Ritual-Makers: Gender, Visibility and Sacred Space in Upper Svaneti
Nino Tserediani, Kevin Tuite and Paata Bukhrashvili
Chapter 3. The Chain of Seven Pilgrimages in Kotaik, Armenia: Between Folk and Official Christianity
Levon Abrahamian, Zaruhi Hambardzumyan, Gayane Shagoyan, and Gohar Stepanyan
Chapter 4. Sacred Sites in the Western Caucasus and the Black Sea Region: Typology, Hybridization, Functioning
Igor V. Kuznetsov
Chapter 5. The Power of the Shrine and Creative Performances in Ingiloy Sacred Rituals
Nino Aivazishvili-Gehne
Chapter 6. Accompanying the Souls of the Dead: The Transformation of Sacral Time and Encounters
Hege Toje
Chapter 7. Not Sharing the Sacra
Florian Mühlfried
Chapter 8. Informal Shrines and Social Transformations: The Murids as New Religious Mediators among Yezidis in Armenia
Hamlet Melkumyan
Chapter 9. Sharing the Not-Sacred: Rabati and Displays of Multiculturalism
Silvia Serrano
Index