Shrines and Sovereigns: Life, Death, and Religion in Rural Azerbaijan

You are invited to
A Scholarly Intersectons Talk supported by: Departments of History,
Anthropology, Religious Studies, Internatonal Studies, and Romance, German,
Russian Languages and Literature.

“Shrines and Sovereigns: Life, Death, and Religion in Rural Azerbaijan” 

Taking up the case of a regionally famous mystical actor and rebel in the Caucasus region of the former Soviet Union, Bruce Grant considers how anthropological readings of key historical events can suggest understandings of how Islam as a project both divine and mundane has unfolded across the spaces of the Silk Road, offering fresh readings of transnational worlds that have long gone under the radar of more contemporary master narratives of politics, history, and religion.

Bruce Grant is Professor and Chair of Anthropology at New York University. A specialist on cultural politics in the former Soviet Union, he has done fieldwork in both Siberia and the Caucasus. He is author of In the Soviet House of Culture: A Century of Perestroikas (Princeton 1995), and winner of the Prize for Best First Book from the American Ethnological Society; as well as The Captive and the Gift: Cultural Histories of Sovereignty in Russia and the Caucasus (Cornell 2009). He was co‐editor of Caucasus Paradigms: Anthropologies, Histories, and the Making of a World Area (LIT 2007) and The Russia Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Duke 2010). His current research explores the early twentieth‐century, pan‐Caucasus journal Molla Nasreddin (1905‐1931) as an idiom for rethinking contemporary Eurasian space and authoritarian rule within it.