The Religio-Magical Domain as a Bilingual Mechanism of Culture

The identification of ethnicity with religion is one of the most problematic aspects of cultural phenomena. Broadly speaking, this identification entails an imposed union between the culture’s temporal and regional dimensions. This forced association is based on the ideology of monolingualism, whereby all negative symbols are spurned and regarded as part of the linguistic domain of the Other. Thus, the significance of the “past/future”, i.e., the temporal vertical, is only interpreted either in terms of the ideology in question or the sanctioned symbols of a politicized religion; and local cultural dimensions take the form of particular territories which the bearers of ideology regard as exclusively their own, denying the existence of Others in the same territory. For those remaining within the boundaries of the structure, Otherness emerges as a negative linguistic domain. Nevertheless, beyond ideological oppositions and one-sided interpretations of history lies another multilingual reality. The religio-magical domain provides a way out of this closed sphere. In the climate of day-to-day multilingualism the opposition between different linguistic domains is also transformed into a mutual exchange which gives substance to and renews the contents of the cultures’ antisystems. I am exploring this issue in terms of religio-ethnic tensions in so-called Ingria, in the St. Petersburg area.