Abstract: While there is an extensive historical literature on state atheism and its implementation in the Soviet Union, and while much has been written about the religious revival in former Soviet space, very little has been published about the changing meanings of atheism and being atheist in Eurasia. Many studies, surely, discuss the influence of Soviet state atheism on how religion is understood and practiced in the present. Studies that focus on the lifeworlds of atheists themselves and why atheism appears a convincing existential, ethical and political position to them, however, are largely nonexistent. In the presentation I will reflect on a project in-the-making focusing on atheism in contemporary Kyrgyzstan, and in particular on how atheism informs people’s efforts to constitute themselves as good or virtuous beings – and how atheism itself may be informed by moral experience.

Short Bio: Maria Louw is anthropologist and Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology, Aarhus University. Her research interests include religion (in particular Islam, Sufism, spirituality and mysticism), secularism and atheism in the context of modernity and globalization, morality and ethics, phenomenology and philosophical anthropology. She has done extensive fieldwork in Central Asia, notably Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Among her works is the monograph “Everyday Islam in Post-Soviet Central Asia” (Routledge 2007), based on fieldwork in Bukhara I 1998-2000.

 

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