Tobias Köllner

Research Area 4

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Stay at EEGA: two and a half weeks in June 2017

Tobias Köllner’s research interests include politics, religion and economy in contemporary Russia and Eastern Europe. He received his PhD in social anthropology in 2011 from the University of Leipzig based on his research on Russian entrepreneurs and their relations to Russian Orthodoxy. Prior to that (2006–2009), he was a member of the research group ‘Religion and Morality in European Russia’ at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. He is currently a member of the Centre for Research on Transformation at Otto von Guericke University in Magdeburg. In 2013, he received a grant from the German Research Association (DFG) for the research project ‘The Interrelationship between Religion and Politics in Contemporary Russia’. In November 2019 he successfully completed his habilitation in General Sociology at the Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg. Meanwhile, the accompanying publication has been accepted as a monograph by Routledge and will appear later this year under the title „Religion and Politics in Contemporary Russia: Beyond the Binary of Power and Authority“ in the Religion, Society and Government in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet States Series.

He is the author of Practising without Belonging? Entrepreneurship, Morality, and Religion in Contemporary Russia (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2012) and has published recently in Journal of Religion, State and Society; Europe-Asia Studies [still forthcoming]; Archives de sciences sociales des religions; Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology; and Anthropology Today. During his stay at the Leibniz ScienceCampus EEGA, he focused on the “Day of Family, Love and Faithfulness” and the role of Russian Orthodoxy in the promotion of ‘traditional moral’ values in the global arena.

My stay at EEGA Campus and my scientific question – a field report