St. Petersburg: St. Petersburg University Press, gon. - 411 p.

In the preface to the Dictionary, the author warns that he is "aware of the imperfection of individual efforts and the impossibility of exhaustively addressing the entire range of general and particular questions that arise here"; and then he notes with restrained optimism that, nevertheless, " with the almost complete absence in the Russian scientific literature of experiments that generalize the history of the sociology of religion, theories and It is hoped that this work will prove useful for the sociology of religion in modern Russia" (pp. 3-4).

The author is deeply correct in this self-assessment. And the main thing here is this: The Dictionary in the form in which it was compiled by M. Smirnov is not just "not useless"; it is an indisputably useful publication. The epithet "useful" in this case is the most accurate: the meaning of this book cannot be taken out of the context of the serious lag, despite all the efforts of recent decades, of Russian knowledge in this area from the world research experience. The efforts of the Russian sociologists in question have included quite a large number of specific empirical studies, many of which are informative and effective. What most of them clearly lack, however, is the connection of concrete empiricism with the theoretical and conceptual baggage - and a dynamically developing one at that - accumulated today in the world sociology of religion. Most authors do not even try to fit their research into the general reference framework developed within the discipline, preferring to explain the data obtained in as strict but semi-publicistic language as possible. The point here is precisely the isolation from the developed and complex Western tradition, the lack of constant contacts, the unavailability of current literature, the lack of translations of key theoretically significant works, and so on. We can say that the works of the founding fathers, M. Ve-

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Such concepts as "charisma" and "profane" are now more or less "digested", and such concepts as "charisma" or "profane" look quite organic; but everything that followed the classics is understood fragmentary and simplified, and much is simply unknown.

There were also attempts to present the fundamentals of the sociology of religion in a holistic, conceptual way: in the 1990s - 2000s, several textbooks were published (I. N. Yablokov, V. I. Garadzhi, V. I. Veremchuk, O. G. Filatova).1, in which, in one way or another, the world experience of the discipline is broadcast. All these publications, important as they are, only selectively address the entire complex system of ideas, concepts, and methods, giving clear preference to some and ignoring others; the author's approaches are clearly visible in them. This is quite natural: I must say that even in the West, many textbooks of this kind are based, quite understandably, on the research preferences and experience of the authors. 2

M. Smirnov's" Dictionary " seeks to give the most complete and objective picture possible, while muting the author's own preferences (even if they are still, of course, overlooked both in the selection of dictionary entries and in their presentation). And the great benefit of the Dictionary is precisely to cover the wide range of facts, concepts, and controversies that have made up the discipline's century - long history-material that goes far beyond what is presented in Russian textbooks and that is mostly ignored in the self-absorbed Russian empirical sociology. In the text of the Dictionary, classics do not suppress the authors, relatively speaking, of the "second" and" third " series, who also have a worthy place: not only Weber and Parsons, but also Robert Bella, Peter Berger, Rodney Stark, as well as even more modern us Eileen Barker, Grace Davey, Jose Casanova and many others. others that are even less well-known, but are part of a complex whole.

The author has, however, another obvious goal in this Dictionary: the integration of Russian names and achievements in world history

1. Filatova O. G. Sotsiologiya religii [Sociology of Religion]. Lecture notes. Saint Petersburg: Mikhailov Publishing House, 2000; Yablokov I. N. Sotsiologiya religii [Sociology of Religion]. Textbook, Moscow: Knizhny Dom "Universitet", 2001; Veremchuk V. I. Sotsiologiya religii [Sociology of Religion]. Moscow: Unity-Dana Publ., 2004; Garadzha V. I. Sotsiologiya religii [Sociology of Religion]. 3rd ed., reprint. Moscow: Infra-M Publ., 2005.

2. For example: Cipriani R. The Sociology of Religion: An Historical Introduction. Aldine Transaction, 2000; Davie G. The Sociology of Religion. London: Sage, 2007; Christiana K. et al. Sociology of Religion: Contemporary Developments, 2nd Ed. London: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2008, and others.

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disciplines. M. Smirnov, based on his past experience in the study of this question3, includes in the Dictionary Russian names, from a. Vvedensky and M. Kovalevsky to R. Lopatkin, V. Garadzhi and others. The task of such integration is not easy and risky: For example, Igor Yablokov is assigned the same amount of space as Jose Casanova 4, and Dmitry Ugrinovich - about the same amount as Gaetano Mosca and David Martin. For all the patriotism of the idea and the absolutely justified desire to highlight the little-known efforts of compatriots, such an interweaving risks distorting the balance of real contribution to discipline. Apparently, the author himself admits that understanding religion as a social phenomenon in Russia did not lead to the formation of a "tangible" school or established tradition. The only exception is the largely state-imposed Marxist system of thought that prevailed in the twentieth century, and whose potential virtues were often overridden by overtly reductionist interpretations. Sociologically minded Russian religious scholars (let's use this euphemism due to the lack of proper discipline) Nevertheless, as the author shows, they achieved results, but, of course, not because of, but in spite of, simplified Marxist schemes: people like Yuri Levada were fueled by the ideas of Western sociology, and people like Alexander Klibanov directly paid for their studies with years of Stalinist camps.5
I repeat: the very desire to reflect the experience of Russian reflections on the social functions of religion is completely justified and appropriate in a dictionary written for those who read in Russian. But it does not seem motivated to expand the list of compatriots who have made contributions to the sociology of religion unnecessarily. Pyotr Lavrov, who is the subject of a very extensive article, despite all his sensitivity to sociology, considered it completely instrumentally, and the author of the Dictionary himself finds his judgments about religion "evaluative". And even more so, it is a stretch to talk about the contribution to the sociology of religion of such authors as Georgy Plekhanov and Vladimir Ulyanov (Le-

3. Smirnov M. Ocherk istorii po rossiiskoi sotsiologii religii [Essay on the history of Russian Sociology of Religion]. St. Petersburg: St. Petersburg University Press, 2008.

4. It is Jose, according to the rules of Spanish reading, and not Jose, as in the Dictionary.

5. It is strange that instead of directly stating this fact in Klibanov's biography, the author of the Dictionary resorts to an incongruously evasive, cautious phrase: "The ideological circumstances of the 1930s and mid-1950s prevented this work from being carried out."

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nin), to which M. Smirnov also devotes a lot of space - even if in the case of Ulyanov, the author of the Dictionary, usually reserved in his assessments, allows himself to be reproached for "narrowness" and " obvious disregard for the scientific vision achieved by that time...". After all, other rulers who also claimed to be sociologists spoke in a similar spirit about the "social roots of religion"...

Some names look all the more out of place when you consider that some important names of bona fide sociologists of religion have not found a place in the Dictionary: we are talking, for example, about such modern Russian scientists as Dmitry Furman or Sergey Filatov, who once wrote about religion in the West, and since the 1990s have been actively working on it. They worked in the field of research on contemporary Russian religiosity. (I believe that Furman has done more for the sociology of religion than Ulyanov.) Some key Western names are also missing from the Dictionary: for example, Louis Dumont, a prominent representative of the Durkheim-Mauss school, whose ideas about holism and hierarchism were based on a comparison of India and Western societies, in particular, their religious traditions. The Dictionary of American sociologist Nancy Ammerman and the entire associated tradition of congregational research at Hartford Seminary and beyond are missing. Nor does the Dictionary include Ronald Inglehart, the author of the concept of "post-material values" and the associated idea of "new spirituality"; the mastermind and administrator of the World Values Survey(World Values Survey) - attempts to "measure" values, for several decades, now in almost 80 countries of the world, and religious indicators occupy one of the leading places in these surveys. The reader will not find Jurgen Habermas in the Dictionary either, despite the fact that his works of the 2000s, conceptualizing the dynamics of religious pluralism and "post-secularism", strongly influence modern discussions about religion. Talal Asad, who writes a lot about the meaning and correlation of religion and secularism, is also absent from the Dictionary. It is true that Habermas and Asad are not "sociologists of religion" in the narrow disciplinary sense; but the Dictionary contains, quite justifiably, articles on some other philosophers and anthropologists.

But enough about what's not in the Dictionary; let's go back to evaluating what's in it! I will repeat once again: the publication contains a huge amount of information about most of the leading sociologists and their contribution,

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moreover, their main ideas are presented both briefly and clearly, and at the same time quite deeply, revealing the huge work that the author has done on the pages of books and magazines; and most of these sociologists are unknown in Russian translations.

In addition to a large number of personalities that have defined the history of the discipline, the author of the Dictionary attempts to describe the basic concepts of the sociology of religion. I would say that in this part of the work, he takes even greater risks, literally causing possible criticism for the interpretation of concepts, and for their very selection.

For example, such concepts as "charisma", "fundamentalism", "pluralism" or "sect" are absolutely necessary: they are, in fact, the special language of the discipline; and the author gives clear and precise definitions, and if you disagree with something, it can be subject matter a dispute. But when the author takes up a scientific description of such concepts as "faith", "belief" and "believer"; or builds a series of articles about" religiosity"," religious consciousness "and, finally," religion"; or tries to separate the concepts of" priests "and" ministers of worship"; or gives definitions of "religion".ecclesiasticism" or "superstition" - in these cases, he enters a slippery path, fraught with stretch marks, looseness, intersections, going beyond the language of the discipline and even the scientific language itself. It seems that while revealing the meaning of general (non-special) words, it would make sense to at least link them to how they are used in the context of sociology: for example, when talking about" pilgrimage", we should not limit ourselves to general information that can be found in any other dictionary or encyclopedia (etymology, definition as "pilgrimage").individual and group trips to sacred religious sites... " etc.), and to show how and by whom this phenomenon was studied from the sociological point of view. Some articles may cause confusion: for example, the term " rite "is quite appropriate, but for some reason the author tries to separate this term in meaning from" ritual", to which a separate article is devoted: a ritual is interpreted as" an ordered sequence of rites", which in sociological usage is by no means necessary. But the article about "ritualism" - a completely evaluative word - already seems completely out of place in the sociological dictionary. In the article about "folk religion", the author correctly distinguishes between folk religion (also local religion, although it would be correct to also use the now very popular term vernacular religion)

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in contrast to popular religion; but first, for some reason, folk religion is defined only as a set of " beliefs "(although in fact it is inseparable from a set of practices), and secondly, it seems that the reader of a Russian-language Dictionary should be made to understand exactly how Russian the version ("folk religion")is It is particularly ideologically loaded, almost to the point of being out of use in scientific discourse. On the contrary, in the article on "non-traditional religions", the author clearly and convincingly discusses the "ambiguity of application" of this term, its ideological load, but still does not dare to recognize it as unsuitable for scientific language at all. By leaving out and analyzing such terms, the author may be setting himself a certain super-task - not only to present the language of a scientific discipline, but also to deconstruct the politicized language environment that has developed around him, in a wider public space. This is an extremely complex task, and its more consistent implementation would be possible if it is clearly and consciously formulated as part of the entire project.

At the end of the Dictionary there is a huge and very useful bibliography of Russian, Soviet and Western works (by the way, all the names that I regret to mention are not included in the Dictionary are present with their works in the bibliography: this last one is much more complete, and, of course, it would be impossible and unnecessary to include separate articles about each of the authors).

I'll conclude this review with what the Dictionary starts with. At the beginning of it there is a brief outline of the history of the discipline, also divided into Western and Russian parts for convenience and clarity. Among the main themes, in my opinion, some important ones are omitted: for example, the huge literature devoted to the phenomenally growing Pentecostal and charismatic movements in the last two decades, or the same ideas within the framework of the concept of "post-secularism"; the dominant American tradition of quantitative sociology of religion, in contrast to the European tradition, is almost not emphasized. However, in general, the historical sketch is very complete and logical. The logic of the discipline itself, its self-determination in the form of a series of distinctions (and the experience of self-limitation of individual scientists)is perfectly shown: These are the separation of the positive from the normative, the really understood from the incomprehensible "religious experience", and so on.

In my opinion, the final section of the essay is also well written, where the author makes a general assessment of the "state and repack".-

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tiwam " disciplines. Here is a vivid quote about "the problem of [its] scientific self-determination": "The sociology of religion can be considered as one of the branches of general sociology, as one of the directions of religious studies, and as a reflection of religious thought on the social dimension of religion... Any of these states-the hierarchy of these "hypostases", or their equality and complementarity, or the exclusivity of any of them-has its adherents and opponents. So far, in general, there is a dynamic balance of these "disciplinary identities". All of them, although in different ways, turn out to be limited... "- and then there are excellent formulations of these "limitations", which I will not reproduce here, but I advise everyone to read (pp. 31-32). And then the author shows how dynamic the subject area of the discipline is: it radically narrows or expands depending on the interpretation of what a particular sociologist puts into the concept of "religion". As we have seen, M. Smirnov chose a complex and risky genre, which makes his material sometimes difficult to"tame". However, in general, this is a justified risk, and the first assessment of the extreme usefulness of the publication remains my last word.

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