Olivera Koprivica

No-Body in non-everyday life in two Orthodox Women Monasteries

The study offers a perspective on the spirituality of Orthodox nuns by grasping the constitution and experience of relationality in nuns’ lives. To explain and to interpret this relationality mean to understand the nature of nuns’ behaviour, engagements, and negotiations as being part of the monastic community. Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice and Hartmut Rosa’s sociology of relationship to the world are central to this kind of investigation. The common denominator of the approaches offered by Bourdieu and Rosa is the analysis of social conditions, of established institutional structures, practices, and power relations beyond the mere representations and direct social interactions. The study aims to propose a specific aspect to critically approach gender-related issues in female monasticism. The approach encloses an engagement with language and everyday ritualized behaviour of nuns, in order to outline and to illustrate the level of embodiment of gender inequalities, power-related issues and the processes that support and reinforce gender inequalities in female monasticism. The study is based on two contrasting female orthodox settings and comparative research design which encompassed the ethnographic research in two contemporary orthodox female monasteries. The advantage of the comparative research design is the possibility to portray the different patterns of experiences and to understand the causal mechanisms of monastic social reality in two contrasting contexts. The research focus was retained simultaneously on the contextual insight and the theoretical reflection about contrasting findings.