Scholarly Monographs

Bentley presents a "reconnaissance survey" of the food behaviors and dietary restrictions of the Oregon Old Believers. She draws heavily on other published studies for historical and ethnographic material, then proposes a list of seven nutritional hypotheses, positing that the Old Believer population is at risk for deficiency of 5 nutrients, at risk for obesity and at risk for the negative nutritional impact of alcohol. She concludes that a longitudinal survey of 2-3 years duration would be necessary to test these hypotheses. A major question is whether the recurrent "feast" periods prescribed by the religious calendar are sufficient to counteract the low nutritional intakes experienced during the religious "fast" periods.

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Drawing on field research conducted in 1984-85, Biggins presents a discription of the distinctive Russian dialect spoken by the Turchane ("Turkish") Old Believers of Oregon -- that subgroup of Old Believers who settled in Oregon after a 200-year sojourn in Romania and Turkey. He then draws on Russian and Romanian linguistic research to place the dialect spoken in Oregon within the context of the numerous South Russian immigrant dialects of Bulgaria and Romania. Although unable to establish a precise Russian "homeland" for the Oregon dialect, he concludes by discussing various southwest Russian candidates for that distinction. Along the way Biggins presents the most detailed history of Turchane migrations and settlements currently available in English. Maps, dialect texts, and an outline of the main features other Russian Old Believer dialects spoken in Oregon round out the work.

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Clymer's field work of 1969 focuses on the "Turkish" Old Believers who settled in Oregon after a 200-year sojourn in Romania and Turkey. Using the methods of cultural anthropology, she presents a fairly detailed account which covers social patterns, religion, religious organization, economic patterns, education, legal problems and areas of culture contact and change. She makes frequent references by way of contrast to the "Brazilians" (i.e. Old Believers originating in Siberia and China, who also arrived in Oregon in the 1960s after a few years settlement in South America, chiefly Brazil). The description is wide-ranging, well-organized, and marred by numerous minor errors. Still, it is a valuable picture of the Oregon Old Believers soon after their arrival in the United States.

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Based on field work conducted in 1966 and 1971, Colfer presents a solid ethnography of the Oregon Old Believers, followed by an analysis of their kinship system and a second analysis of Old Believer morality and boundaries. His discussion and diagrams of kinship terminology are especially valuable, as is the nuanced discription of how the community tolerates limited "rule-breaking". He demonstrates that canon law, through its detailed incest prohibitions, effectively defines alliance systems in this bilateral society. Canonically defined kindred consitute a source of resources which can be drawn upon to meet social or economic goals. Canon law also defines further moral behavior, largely in the form of "trait lists" . Exhibiting these traits demonstrates ritual purity, and is a prerequisite for inclusion in the sobor (congregation) and the community as a whole. Thus, the ethnic boundary and the moral boundary become one.

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This is a lightly reworked version of the author's dissertation(see above) in Anthropology.

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Mortuary structures known as “gravehouses” can be found in many Native American Orthodox graveyards in Alaska and Canada. These are usually explained as a blend of Russian Orthodox and Native American burial practices. However, as art historian Janice Currier demonstrates, such structures were not only forbidden by the mainstream Orthodox church but were unknown in Native tradition prior to European contact.

Currier proposes that the gravehouses reflect an Old Believer presence in 18th-century Russian America. She documents similar structures (“golubtsi”) in Old Believer cemeteries in Russia and Siberia and presents a mass of (admittedly) circumstantial evidence to support her thesis. She draws evidence from explorers’ reports, Native American folklore, Russian-American Company records and Orthodox Church documents; describes Alaskan Native Orthodox practices (including the wide use of metal icons) which could be explained as Old Believer in origin, and points out the likelihood of the Russian-American Company hiring from heavily Old Believer areas in Russia and Siberia. Maps, numerous illustrations, and a descriptive list of photographs in several Alaskan and Canadian archives.

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This appears to be an earlier version of Old Russia in Modern America (see below). The first edition of Change credits co-authors Lyudmila Kuzmina and Robert Muth -- subsequent editions do not.

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Dolitsky presents a brief ethnohistoric survey of the Nikolaevsk Old Believers, followed by an interpretation of the persistance of Old Believer culture within the context of Durkheimian evolutionary theory. He makes frequent comparative references to Siberian Trans-Baikal Old Believers, particularly the Semeskie. Dolitsky advocates refining the Durkheimian model to include the "rational preselection" of culture traits.Photos, maps, glossary, bibliography.

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Graber investigates the intersection of literacy, gender and culture among Old Believer women in Alaska. The author teaches English and college skills at a university branch campus near Alaska's Old Believer communities, and her interviews and statistics concentrate on college-level students. However, her work includes a sympathetic, detailed account of the history and struggles of two Old Believer village schools, providing a valuable picture of the interplay between the educational establishment and Alaskan Old Believers between 1973 and 2003. Starting with a very broad definition of "literacy" (essentially: "formal education") Graber examines the motivations of six Old Believer women who pursue literacy, the impact higher literacy has on their self-perceptions, and the blessings and burdens expanded literacy brings to their lives. She allows us to hear her subjects' voices at length through substantial quotes from interviews and from student compositions. She finds that educators, mothers, and educated older sisters are major forces for the expansion of women's literacy, whereas the Old Believer community, fathers and husbands tend to oppose it. Graber points out that "feminist pedagogies" are not welcome or effective here, as her students reject neither domesticity, nor their responsibility to others, nor many other 17th century cultural values. Yet, she finds that it is precisely these women students who "take the lead in reshaping culture among Alaska's Old Believers in a postmodern era" as they renegotiate traditional roles in light of their increased confidence, broadened world view and workplace competence.

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Taking the 1970 Old Believers of Marion County as the founding population of a group expected to exist as a religious isolate, Hall documents biological and genetic traits to lay the groundwork for future studies on changes in gene frequency. She also examines demographic factors (residence patterns, mating practices, composition of population, fertility), historical factors affecting population structure and composition, and cultural practices affecting biological features. Besides comparing the Old Believers with the broader host society, Hall compares the three component Old Believer sub-groups with each other. Hall's work is based on household surveys, blood samples, and county health clinic records. Her survey instruments, charts, and tables are included.

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Hardwick focuses on the role of religion and the importance of religious networks in the migration and settlement decisions made by Old Believers and five other Russian religious groups (Orthodox, Doukhobors, Molokans, Baptists and Pentecostals) who relocated from Russia to the North American Pacific Rim region. Using the tools of humanistic geography (in which archival and census data are augmented by field observations and in-depth interviews), Hardwick examines each group's North American location patterns, "cultural landscape" and adaptation to North American life in light of its members' religious beliefs and practices.

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Holdeman investigates the Erie, Pennsylvania Old Believer community as a case study in language shift. Drawing extensively on archival sources, he presents an excellent history of the Erie Old Believers (and related groups in Detroit, MI; Marianna PA; and Millville, NJ) from ancestral origins in the Pskov region, to settlement in the Suvalki area (modern Poland), to resettlement to the United States starting in the 1880s, down to the present day. This history is graced with several maps and what is undoubtedly the only published list of North American Old Believer sports stars.

Turning to linguistics, Holdeman compiles material gathered in language interviews into a lexical, phonological and orthographic description of the Erie Old Believer dialect. He discusses the Pskovian substratum, the subsequent influences of Polish, English and standard Russian, and analyses the factors responsible for language shift from Russian to English. Survey results and the historical data point to poverty, illiteracy, occupational choice, public schooling, the Americanization movement, exogamy, lack of repression, cessation of in-migration, and the low status of the dialect as contributing factors in the shift to English.

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Jaffe examines "multi-cultural education" and its impact on three cultural minority groups - Old Believers, Hispanics and Jehovah's Witnesses - in a rural Marion County school. After a year's field work and observation, Jaffe reports that the school has no planned multi-cultural curriculum. While the school does have a plan in place to address language differences, in other areas of "surface culture" (clothing, food,) the school works around varying customs, not with them. Jaffe finds no coherent vision for accommodation to the pluralistic student population. Not only are mainstream models of "surface culture" taught directly (This includes such things as language, sports, holidays and food), but the mainstream version of the "deep culture" construct of time is taught indirectly. Ignoring the past-oriented, cyclical nature of Old Believer time, and the present-oriented, cyclical nature of Hispanic time, the school operates strictly according to future-oriented, linear, mainstream time. This essentially monocultural presentation at school has produced changes in the traditional cultures of all three minority groups.

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Taking dress (with hairstyle) as both object and signifier, Johnson sets out three aims: to document the historic dress of the Oregon Old Believers prior to their immigration to the US; to determine the functions of dress in Old Believer society; and to show how dress reflects the acculturation process. To these ends she interviewed and surveyed 30 Old Believer adults, 30 middle school children, and some kindergarteners. Johnson describes the everyday and special-occasion dress of each of the three sub-groups of the Oregon community, with special attention to clothing at life-cycle events and to the social function of clothes. She examines the use of traditional dress along a continuum of non-secular - secular situations, analyzing by age, subgroup, education, languages spoken, date of immigration, town/rural residence, birth order, marital status and food preferences (Russian vs. American). Sketches and graphs round out this solid piece of scholarship which easily surpasses the usual Masters level work.

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Scholarly readers will be disappointed with this work. This is a surprise, as the author is widely known and respected for the sensitive way in which he established, taught and administered the first "American" school at the Old Believer settlement of Nikolaevsk, Alaska. Alas, very few insights from that experience make it into print. Moore's laudable goal is to make the history of the Alaska Old Believers available to themselves and to their neighbors. To this end, he devotes the first, larger part of the thesis to a popular history of Old Belief in Russia. The second section, which presents oral histories from Nikolaevsk residents, consists of about 10 pages of fragmentary anecdotes with no particular indication of the age, gender, or birthplace of the speakers. More skillfull editing and the use of pseudonyms could have preserved his subjects' privacy while making their voices heard and their stories more fully known.

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This booklet presents an anaylysis of the znamenny signs used for musical notation by the Oregon community of Old Believers, translating them into solfege and western staff notation. The author also offers advice for learning to sing them correctly, with a description of the necessary books.

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This is a lightly reworked version of the author's doctoral dissertation in Anthropology (see below).

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Morris examines the Old Believers of Oregon in terms of their mechanisms for "boundary maintenance" -- those aspects of culture and behavior which act to delineate groups one from another. He compares Old Believer ways with those of the nearby Molokan and Russian Pentecostal communities, noting how these three ethnically Russian groups distinguish themselves from the host society and each other. Morris finds differences in boundary mechanisms attributable not only to differences in each group's history, but to each group's subjective understanding of its own religious and social culture. Along the way he compiles a top-notch, detailed, sympathetic portrait of the Old Believer way of life in Oregon in the 1980s.

Old Believers share their corner of Oregon with Russian Pentecostals, and chapter five of Neuburger's thesis compares Pentecostal and Old Believer processes of acculturation from a geographer's point of view. Each group, she points out, has distinct patterns of spatial interaction within Russia and Oregon. In addition, various aspects of their systems of group interaction (relationships to the host society, degrees of community diversity, degrees of cohesion and of networking ) express themselves geographically through migration and settlement patterns in Russia and North America, as well as in the interactions of the group members within social space.

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Nickerson sets out to determine how the American public school system affects the role of Old Believer women. He surveyed 14 Old Believer women and girls (ranging from ages 13 - 40) to measure their attitudes towards women's rights, roles and privileges, while noting the subjects' age, education level, employment, and expectations for their children's educations. Among these women, higher education leads to higher expectations for the education of their daughters, even extending to the college level. The primary reasons cited are financial. These women want job equality and a larger role in community leadership. At the same time they value their traditions, value their traditional roles as wives and mothers, and are content to leave leadership in church matters to the men.

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Robson draws on census records, church records, interviews and a range of scholarly literature to trace the story of the Erie Old Believer community. He roots his account firmly in early Russian church history and covers the events of the schism and the flight to Poland. The heart of this work, however, deals with the community's life in the United States from its arrival in the 1880s up to 1984. Robson casts the community's experience in terms of a tension between "khitrost" - (foreign cleverness) and "blagochestie" - (piety or ardent loyalty)( The struggle between khitrost and blagochestie played out differently over time as successive generations dealt with mainstream culture, military service, education, prosperity and dispersal. After hitting a low point in the post-World War II years, church life was revived by the second American-born generation.

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Working from four months of observation in 1968-1969, Sabey presents a careful, even-handed description of the somewhat strained relations between the Gervais School District and Gervais's early Old Believer immigrants.

His ethnographic description of Old Believer life includes maps, tables, about a dozen snapshots, and a fine collection of Old Believer anecdotes and quotes on the topics of money, education, and life in China. This matched by a detailed description of the Gervais School District, from the school board down to the classroom aides, covering goals, curriculum, and finances.

Sabey points to a certain discrepancy between the district's beliefs and the district's practices. He then indicates further discrepancies between beliefs and practices of the district on the one hand and the beliefs and practices of the Old Believers on the other. He notes that each group lacks information about the other, and points to the existence of "more searching questions" dealing with conformity, pluralism, and enforced culture change -- questions which lie at the root of the tension, yet remain unstated and unanswered. He recommends that teachers and administrators become better acquainted with the Old Believer community through home visits and the establishment of an advisory committee.

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Samoilova presents a social-linguistic and lexico-semantic description of the speech of the Nikolaevsk (Alaska) Old Believers, emphasizing unique aspects of this Russian dialect which exhibits very little influence from literary Russian. Her sources include field observations, written work of local schoolchildren, written samples from Old Believer college students, and written materials published by the Nikolaevsk school in support of its bilingual program. She includes a description of the dialect, several transcribed samples of local speech, a short glossary of dialect terms, and ethnographic material dealing primarily with costume. Samoilova examines two "lexico-thematic" groups in some detail: words dealing with food and words dealing with clothing. Maps, sketches, bibliography.

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In this lightly re-worked dissertation, Samoilova presents a social-linguistic and lexico-semantic description of the speech of the Nikolaevsk (Alaska) Old Believers, emphasizing unique aspects of this Russian dialect (which exhibits very little influence from literary Russian). Her sources include field observations, written work of local schoolchildren, written samples from Old Believer college students, and written materials published by the Nikolaevsk school in support of its bilingual program. She includes a description of the dialect, several transcribed samples of local speech, a short glossary of dialect terms, and ethnographic material dealing primarily with costume. Samoilova examines two "lexico-thematic" groups in some detail: words dealing with food and words dealing with clothing. Maps, sketches, bibliography.

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Partly based on the author's doctoral dissertation, In the Shadow of Antichrist examines the Old Believer community founded in Alberta in 1973-1974 by Chasovennye who had previously resided in the state of Oregon, USA. Scheffel provides a useful history and ethnography of the Alberta Old Believers (these sections are substantially the same as those presented in his dissertation, The Old Believers of Berezovka, described below). The heart of the present work, however, lies in its description and analysis of Old Believer religious life.

Scheffel carefully examines the Old Believers' religious understanding of tradition, purity, ritual, worship, nature, food, appearance, and sexuality. He then draws on the field of art history to illustrate the ramifications of iconic transmission of culture (long predominant in Eastern Christendom) as distinguished from symbolic transmission of culture (discernable in the West at least as early as Charlemagne.) In an "iconic" system, ritual acts and artifacts are primary vehicles for cultural transmission and for religious dialog with Christians of the past. Scheffel's description of iconic cultural transmission, especially when coupled with an awareness of the effects of limited literacy, sheds a welcome light on the Old Believers' famed attachment to the material aspects of spiritual life.

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Scheffel’s doctoral dissertation largely consists of an ethnography of the Old Believer village of Berezovka in Alberta, Canada. He presents a substantial account of the history, economy, kinship system, political organization and cosmology of these Chasovnennye, but his real interest is in Berezovka’s religious culture. Here he notes three cardinal properties: attention to outer forms, tradition understood as a continuation of the iconic principle, and parallel dichotomies of orthodoxy/heterodoxy and purity/pollution.

These three properties are repeatedly expressed in Berezovka’s practice of Christianity as kinship, Christianity as ritual purity, Christianity as natural purity (a prerequisite for ritual purity), and in the understanding of rituals as iconographic “scriptures” for the expression of dogma. Scheffel further refines this line of though in his later book, “In the Shadow of Antichrist” (see entry above), but the two works only partially overlap, and scholarly readers will find both well worth the reading.

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Sen applies Durkheimian analysis to the Oregon Old Believers to evaluate Durkheim's theories of the collective nature of religion and religion's role in social solidarity. She presents a competent description of Old Believer life in Oregon, with especially thorough coverage of local employment patterns. She finds that religion plays a significant role in maintaining Old Believer community solidarity (supporting Durkheim's thesis), but notes that other factors -- kinship, language, a "face-to-face" way of life, isolation, acceptance of tradition -- are also important. Even so, assimilation is a threat, and Sen recommends isolation for those who wish to maintain a traditional way of life.

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Based on fieldwork conducted in the Old Believer communities of Oregon and Alaska in 1975-1976, Smithson examines identity structure and identity change. Eighty-eight autobiographical interviews with informants from the Harbintsy and Sintsyantsy sub-groups were analyzed and coded to measure the occurrence of non-traditionality and its co-variance with sex, age, subgroup and residence (Oregon or Alaska). Types of non-traditionality (overt,covert) and their distribution were analyzed for clustering.

Smithson detects three major catalysts for non-traditionality: religious doubts, desire for a non-traditional goal, and readjustment strains after an involuntary separation from the community. Women's religious doubts usually stem from dissatisfaction with the traditional female role. Men's religious doubts most often result from contradictions between religious and secular schooling and from observing the freedoms enjoyed by mainstream peers. Desire for a non-traditional goal (typically a career goal requiring higher education) leads to friction with family members and ultimately a break with the community.

Examining the consequences of non-traditionality, Smithson contrasts the psychological burden carried by covert non-traditionals with the physical and social dangers encountered by the overt non-traditionals.

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This report presents an exemplary portrait of economic life and material culture in the Manchurian Old Believer village of Romanovka in the early 1940s. Compiled by a team of 14 Japanese researchers, it is packed with maps, diagrams, photos, charts, tables ,statistics and text describing crops, livestock, equipment, tools, agricultural methods, architecture, household furnishings, clothing, food preparation and schooling. Many Romanovka residents ended up in North America, making this work a useful baseline study for studies of cultural change. In Japanese. Available from Harvard University's Yenching library. (Thanks to Yoshikazu Nakamura for his assistance in compiling this annotation.-- MM)

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Thompson's field work in 1998 at the Gervais, Oregon Church of the Holy Ascension aimed to examine the transmission of an Old Believer chant tradition from generation to generation. Given this focus, one might be excused for expecting some fairly concrete data in her report: descriptions of the chant and its notation, for example; or a description of formal and informal methods of transmission, perhaps profiles of teachers and learners, interviews with accomplished chanters, etc.

As it happens, Thompson barely touches on the above. Rather, she pursues more abstract questions, drawing on the ideas of Leo Treitler, Thomas Turino and especially Mikhail Bakhtin to illuminate the relationship between the oral and written aspects of the chant. Thompson stresses that the Old Believers are not "fossils", but contemporary people living in contemporary times. Thus, rather than focusing on the immutability of the chant tradition, she emphasizes the role of the worshippers themselves; as they embody or carry out ritual words and actions, the actions and texts of the service remain alive, renewable and changeable within a stable dialog. This resonates with the general Old Believer practice of actively embodying faith through everyday, concrete, ritual acts which bring the Word to life.

Valuable as these insights are, Thompson leaves a great many questions unanswered. Why, in a tradition dominated by men, does she interview mainly women? Why does the word of one informant convince her that there is no secular folk song here (besides stikhi), when other observers have described and recorded numerous examples? How much of a chant performance is performed from memory or notation, and how much is re-created according to known rules and formulas? While she makes several interesting points, the paucity of data and apparent gaps in the field work are disappointing.

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Untiedt describes his work as a "modified ethnography", focusing not so much on Oregon Old Believers as on institutions and individuals that "impinge" upon the group's boundaries and belief systems. He draws primarily on informants from outside the Old Believer community or from its fringes. He reports "impingement" in the areas of education, law enforcement, health care and economics. He sees flight as the Old Believers' only alternative to eventual assimiliation into the host culture. Untiedt's work stands out primarily for its sources. He includes minutes from two meetings of Tolstoy Foundation rrepresentatives with Oregon Old Believers and government bodies; a table of the religious/ethnic breakdown of students in local schools; statistics on Old Believer auto insurance, personal finance and occupations from a local insurance firm; Old Believer arrest records by age, sex and offence; Fire Department statistics on causes of fires in Old Believer-owned buildings, data on the value of Old Believer land holdings; birth and death rate statistics; and public assistance statistics. While uneven in scope and depth, these sources do shed valuable light onto poorly-understood areas of economic and social activity.

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