Jeanne (Zhanna) Kormina is an anthropologist specialising in religion and post-Soviet transformations. She is the Director of the Yerevan Center for International Education in Armenia, having previously taught at the Higher School of Economics in St Petersburg and served as Research Professor at GSRL–EPHE (PSL) in Paris. Her publications include two books, several co-edited special journal issues, and numerous articles, including “Popular Theopolitics and the Last Russian Tsar’s Intangible Remains” (Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2025), “Fervent Christians: Orthodox Activists in Russia as Publics and Counterpublics” (Religion, State & Society, 2023), and “‘The Church Should Know Its Place’: The Passions and the Interests of Urban Struggle in Post-Atheist Russia” (History and Anthropology, 2021).

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Where do you see the most exciting research/debates happening in your field?

In my view, some of the most interesting debates in anthropology over the past couple of decades have developed around what is usually called the ontological turn, associated, among others, with Bruno Latour in sociology and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro in anthropology. Like other “turns” before it, it offers a new way of describing and understanding the world, in which the capacity for agency — for acting independently — is attributed not only to humans but also to a broad category of things and entities referred to as “non-humans”. A non-human can be a deity, a jaguar — mythological or real — or, in Latour’s work, microbes.

Trying to imagine the world and the human being through the eyes of a jaguar or a baobab is a useful exercise. It can be quite mind-blowing, because it makes us question familiar analytical categories and, more generally, an anthropocentric view of the world. It develops the imagination, which I think is extremely important for a researcher, especially a young one, and teaches us not to think in ready-made categories. But I still think that the human being is the measure of all things. When we anthropologists write about forests, doors, jaguars, or gods, we do it, after all, because we want to understand how human societies work and how they change. In fact, much of the research that contributed to the “ontological turn”, addresses a very classical question: that of social hierarchies and inequality.

How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?

It is difficult for me to name a particular book or person who influenced me at some particular stage of my intellectual development. Besides, I think that learning continues throughout a researcher’s life, so I hope there are still important things ahead of me. I tend to see academic life as a kind of flow, made up of institutions, people, projects, and places where we meet — conferences, seminars, and many less formal settings — and where knowledge and opinions are constantly exchanged. Ideas emerge in dialogue: sometimes after giving a paper, even one that did not go particularly well; sometimes while thinking about a reviewer’s critical comments on your article, even if your first reaction was to disagree completely. They also emerge in smoking areas and over meals. And quite often an idea does not really have a single author. Ideas are collective.

For an anthropologist, fieldwork has a special place in this flow. Immersion in another social and cultural world gives us not only new empirical knowledge but also new concepts with which to think about the social world. Conversations with our interlocutors, regardless of their level of formal education, can be a powerful source for reflecting on our own ideas and transforming them. But I should add one more thing: knowledge is historical, and we, as analysts and authors, are part of history ourselves. I began as a history student in Sverdlovsk, now Yekaterinburg, where I was trained, among other things, in critical source analysis and close reading. As a graduate student in St Petersburg, I encountered cultural semiotics and structuralism, while friends and colleagues were also initiating me into anthropology through reading Western scholarship, conferences, and fellowships at European and American academic centres. I was fourteen when perestroika began, so, like others of my generation, I watched and lived through the enormous social transformations of the USSR and then Russia, the country in which I lived. One aspect of these transformations — the way atheists became religious believers — eventually became the main subject of my research.

IR scholarship typically treats religion either as soft power or as a source of civilisational conflict, and public debate increasingly demands clear answers and binary positions. Your work instead examines lived religion and insists that the task of scholarship is to complicate the world. What can this anthropological imagination offer scholars of international politics that conventional approaches miss?

I am not sure that anthropology can teach scholars of international politics what to do. We use different tools and ask different questions of our material. But anthropology can perhaps offer something useful precisely because it is suspicious of categories that seem self-evident. Political science sometimes seems to me more normative than anthropology tends to be: democracy is better than authoritarianism, for example, or religiosity is expected to correlate with political conservatism. Anthropology, with its interest in local knowledge and particular forms of social life, and its long and complicated relationship with evolutionary thinking, values the possibility of looking at the world relativistically. Marshall Sahlins made this point beautifully in his classic Stone Age Economics (1972), which challenged some of the basic assumptions of capitalist orthodoxy. His famous argument about the “original affluent society” reminds us that there is more than one formula for affluence: we can produce and........

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