Introduction

This chapter explores the acceptability of the idea of a biographical turn in order to explain women's conversion to Orthodoxy in contemporary Russia, which has taken place in a situation of widespread mass conversion and religious renaissance in the post-Soviet period.

In order to trace representations of religious conversion as a biographical turning point (or process) I analysed Orthodox biographical narratives and religious scriptures. This chapter aims to identify typical representational schemes or ways of speaking about religious conversion as biographical experiences that exist at both individual and institutional levels, that is, at the level of biographical narrative and church discourse, and to compare them.

The following argument with regard to narratives of conversion is rooted in the assumption that a ‘real’ process of conversion and the narration about it are not the same thing. It is not important what a ‘real’ conversion is; rather, the main interest lies in the discursive principles and forms of construction and its representation. Therefore, on the one hand, a conversion story is part of the biography as a whole (as a turning point or as something else). On the other hand, it could play the role of a dominant story, and thus highlights and transforms the whole biography. In that perspective a conversion story reflects and constructs the new, that is, Orthodox, version of the life story, using for that purpose formal rhetorical devices and biographical patterns that exist in public Orthodox discourse.

Biographical studies of biographical turns

Within the biographical approach, ‘turning points of biography’ were at first conceptualised by Anselm Strauss (1959), and since then this notion has become central to studying biography. This approach pays attentions to various ways of representing turning points in the course of biography, where the main goal is often to reconstruct an ‘objective’ reality and its causation and procedure which lay behind the ‘subjective’ narrativ. Furthermore, in biographical research it is common to explore in the situation of biographical turning whether some alternative choices existed, and then to compare the realised life trajectory with an unrealised one that had a chance to be implemented (Schuetze, 1983; Bertaux and Bertaux-Wiame, 1997; and others).