The concept of “religious infrastructure” in Russian anthropology of religion

The article examines the material religion approach, intensively developing in western religious studies, as well as religious infrastructure studies influenced by the approach. It also analyses cases of the approach applications in the Russian anthropology of religion. The author focuses on religious infrastructure studies explanatory potential assessment and its position in Russian religious studies methodology. The author turns to researches of Russian anthropologists of religion (Jeanne Kormina, Alexander Panchenko, Andrei Tiukhtiaev, Danila Rygovskii, Ekaterina Khonineva, Dmitrii Doronin, Anastasiya Zavyalova, Sergei Mokhov) and reveals the main problem areas of their investigations: the construction of sacred space and the role of religious infrastructure as a mediator of religious experience. The author compares the «network» way of constructing the sacred and the classical concepts of Marcel Mauss and Mircea Eliade – the «sacred» is distributed throughout the network of religious infrastructure, and the religious practices of adherents and religiously motivated narratives circulating within the network, which often differ from the «traditional» legitimizing narratives, play an active role in its production. Further, a special mechanism is explained, called by the author «the dialectic of legitimation», demonstrating the relationship between religious experiences and religious infrastructure. The religious infrastructure as an «ecology» of certain values and narratives initiates and structures the religious experience of people-in-network; on the other hand, the religious experiences form the basis of legitimizing narratives, structuring, in turn, the religious infrastructure and related religious practices. At the end of the paper, the conclusion is substantiated: «religious infrastructure» is not an externally introduced conceptual framework that distorts the subject of research, but is a flexible methodological tool that allows an anthropologist to work with small local religious communities, referring to the categories of their local ontologies, which allows researchers to talk about the culturally specific nature of the relationship with the sacred.