PROJECT: Parish Community and Liturgy: the space of the Orthodox church in communicative practices of parishioners
FUNDING: The project was supported by Saint Tikhon’s Orthodox University and The Active Tradition Foundation in 2025-2026.
DURATION OF THE PROJECT: 2025 – 2026
PROJECT COORDINATOR: Ivan Zabaev
RESEARCH TEAM: Svetlana Bankovskaya, Victoria Idolenko, Elizaveta Kostrova, Anna Zueva
ABOUT THE PROJECT
In social sciences, the parish community of the (Orthodox) church is understood as the sum of people involved in various types of extraliturgical activities. In this sense, it is no different from other social aggregates – communities and non-profit organizations. Theology, at least in some parts, rather provides the basis for such an understanding of the community (the central sacraments of the Orthodox Church are described as an individual encounter with God).
The idea of this project is to see the community as directly connected to the liturgical life of the church. To describe what is happening at the liturgy not as something that prevents the ceremonial performance of the service, but as the order generated and/or actualized by this very service. To analyze what happens (between people) during the liturgy, as an immediate part of the liturgy and as an important component of the life of the community.
The aim of the project will be to present a functionally differentiated/ordered space of the church during the liturgy through a video analysis of the communicative practices of members of the parish community. During the project, we will try to analyze the space of the church from the point of view of practices carried out in various parts of the church building. The researchers’ attention will be drawn to the nature of communication in various areas of the church, what regulates the communication of parishioners in these areas, and how they demarcate these zones. With this approach, we will try to see the space of an Orthodox church as the sum of communications between different actors. The project is based on the methodology of multimodal video analysis. The theoretical foundations of the project are the sociology of space, the analysis of the constitution of local order in ethnomethodology and empirical liturgical studies.
The project is a continuation of the work initiated within the framework of the study “Confession as a way of constituting the community of the Orthodox Church“; supported within the framework of the Scientific Research Program of the St. Tikhon University Development Fund and the Living Tradition Foundation for 2024-2025.
