with parallels to ‘the study of religions’ (as in the name of the European
Association for the Study of Religions), sciences religieuses(as in the name of
the advanced-studies faculty at the École Pratique des Hautes Études), and the
common designation in German, Religionswissenschaft. These differences are
apparent in the names of the various other national societies (English
translations are those which the societies themselves use): in the Czech Republic
‘the study of religion’ (studium nabozenstvi), in Greece ‘the study of culture
and religion’, in Hungary, ‘the academic study of religion’ (vallástudomány),
in Poland ‘the science of religion’ (Religioznawstwo), in Russia ‘the history of
world religion’, ‘history of religions’ (Istorija religij) or ‘religious studies’
(religiovedenie), in Slovakia ‘the study of religions’ (stúdium nábozenstiev),
and in Ukraine ‘religious studies’ (religiyeznavstvo—taken not from the name
of the Ukrainian Association but from the title of the its journal Ukrayins’ke
religiyeznavstvo).
Furthermore, different parts of Eastern Europe concentrate on the religions
of different areas. One major concern has been the religions of Eastern Europe
itself, with a specific focus on one’s own particular location. Mircea Eliade (e.g.
1970) collected and interpreted much of the material relevant to studying
Eastern European religions. Contemporary Russian historians have worked on
the Slav (‘heathen’) religion and (comparative) mythology. Meanwhile, Bulgarian
scholars such as G. I. Kazarow, Vladimir Georgiev, and Zlatozara Goãeva, have
studied Thracian religion. Baltic scholars have predominated in the study of
Baltic religion (bibliography in Biezais 1954). Vaira V¥ ̇e-Freiberga (1997–2002;
cf. V¥ ̇e-Freiberga and Freibergs 1988) collected and interpreted over 4,000
Latvian dainas (lyrical folk-songs) pertaining to the archaic Latvian sun cult in
their mythological, chronological and meteorological aspects, before she became
the president of the Republic of Latvia in 1999. Eurasian shamanism has also
been a major theme, as in the work of M. A. Czaplicka (1914) or, nowadays,
Mihály Hoppál, director of the European Folklore Institute.
Within Central Europe there has been a special interest in the religions of
Central Asia. During the nineteenth century German-speaking academics
in Budapest, Vienna, Prague, and sometimes St Petersburg, such as Julius
Klaproth, Csoma, Schiefner, the brothers Schlagintweit, and Heinrich August
Jäschke (1817–1883) established a special tradition in the study of Tibetan
religions. For more than a century, the study of the Tibetan language outside
of Tibet was based upon the two dictionaries masterly compiled by two Eastern
Europeans traveling extensively in the Himalayan region, the first by KŒrösi
Csoma (1834), published in Calcutta, the other by Jäschke (1883). Early
Tibetologists like Csoma and Isaac Jakob Schmidt (1779–1847), associated
with the Russian Academy in St Petersburg, were much more careful than their
Western counterparts, who were rapidly spreading the often deprecatory
category ‘Lamaism’. With direct expertise of the Buddhist Kalmyks, Schmidt
had perceptively commented already in 1836:
1111
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
1011
1
2
3111
4 5 6 7 8 9
20111
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
30111
1
2
3
4
35
6
7
8
9
40111
42222
3
411
EASTERN EUROPE
63
