Insofar as Buryatia, and Siberia more broadly, tend to occupy a peripheral status both in contemporary Russian political formations and in anthropological studies of global connections, Anya Bernstein's Religious Bodies Politic productively unsettles this apparent marginality. Bernstein's ethnography interrogates the intersection of religion, transnational mobility, and sovereignty, and offers a richly nuanced account that, as she writes, “recenters” (122) Buryat Buddhism in relation to the Russian and Soviet state, to the pan-Buddhist world, and to Inner Asia as an identifiable geographic region. She shows how the body politics of Buryat Buddhism explicitly contend with, and offer a privilege window into the transformations of moral economies, biopolitical regimes, and the politics of sovereignty in postsocialist Russia. The ethnography focuses on local debates and tensions that cleave Buddhist communities both in Buryatia proper, and along the complex networks that connect Buryat Buddhists to their coreligionists elsewhere, and details how living and dead bodies in Buryat Buddhism shape transnational flows that transcend expected temporal, political, and religious boundaries. Religious Bodies Politic thus disengages from and moves beyond more standard accounts that tend to situate the postsocialist world and Russia in particular in relation to familiar Cold War narratives and geopolitical pairings.

Bernstein's work is a striking example of a multi-sited ethnography both as research methodology and as text. Her ethnographic writing emulates the book's main concern with layered movements and flows, and demonstrates both remarkable historical depth and a facility for drawing lateral connections. The study follows the movements of religious pilgrims between Buryatia and India, and thus bridges multiple scales of analysis by gathering seemingly disparate phenomena, from tantric ritual practices to transnational multilevel marketing schemes. The unexpected juxtapositions afforded by these shifts across different scales give Bernstein's work much of its analytical traction. The book speaks directly to anthropological studies of religion by combining a careful historical analysis of Buryat Buddhism with an ethnography of religious mobilities that is truly impressive in both geographic and conceptual scope. In addition to these contributions, through its discussion of necropolitics, Religious Bodies Politic expands debates in medical and political anthropology on the relationship between power and embodiment.

As a researcher intimately familiar with postsocialist “transitions,” through both her long-term fieldwork in Russia and her personal connections and biography, Bernstein offers an incisive and complex take on the uneasy economic, political, and social shifts of the last twenty some years, contextualizing these processes in relation to the proliferation of religious logics in post-Soviet spaces. While Bernstein begins with classic questions of biopolitics—more specifically, with a timely interrogation of the concept's applicability in Soviet and post-Soviet spaces—the different kinds of bodies that populate her ethnography are themselves complex, plural, and frequently distributed formations. In this sense, bodies seem to operate as problematic shifters, symbolically and corporeally, as uncertain materializations of changing religious, cultural, and economic identities. This “deictic” nature of bodies has concrete political effects for local Buddhist communities, as is pithily illustrated by some of Bernstein's interlocutors in the ironic label of [lamy-]oborotni (or lama-werewolves/lama-shape shifters) to designate religious practitioners who wear monk robes as professional uniforms, rather than as signs of internal religious authenticity (143). Throughout the book, Bernstein brings to light such cases of embodied ambiguity, while productively maintaining the tensions that characterize them: between religious pilgrims and imperial agents; between dead Soviet leaders and “undead” Buddhist monks; or between human bodies and ritual objects. In so doing, the book both illuminates the political and social processes that characterize postsocialist religious revivals and offers important reflections on embodiment and religious practice; on shifting moral economies in contemporary Russia; and on the relationship between secularism and modern state-building projects.

Bernstein's rich ethnographic writing makes Religious Bodies Politic appropriate for both advanced undergraduate and graduate audiences interested in the anthropology of religion, political anthropology, studies of indigeneity, and questions of mediation and mobility. But it also offers an important intervention into the anthropology of the body and embodiment. It will also be a valuable teaching resource for a range of anthropology and social theory courses, since it expands on such classical anthropological themes as gift economies, ritual life, questions of gender and reproduction, religious practice, and transnational flows.