LAUSR

McBrien begins this ethnographic study of religion and secularism in Kyrgyzstan with snapshots of the town of Bazaar-Korgon, the site of most of her research: a Soviet-era statue of Lenin, a government office now representing the independent Kyrgyz republic, and a mosque built in the post-Soviet period. “[The structures] suggest a startling fact: the mosque construction did not seem to necessitate the removal of Lenin’s image” (p. 5). The book sets out to trace “how this complex, sometimes contradictory landscape of religion and politics came to be,” highlighting the legacies of illiberal Soviet secularism as well as contestation over religion and secularism in the post-Soviet period. McBrien summarizes the book’s central argument as follows: “The conception of religion held by the majority of Bazaar-Korgonians differed significantly from the locally new variants circulating in the region— ideas that premised the notion of belief and conviction. Their ideas about religion had more to do with collective belonging, and they had been cast by the modernizing campaigns of the Soviet Union and its political project of secularism” (p. 8). Thus, in the Soviet period, a collectivist approach to illiberal secularism constructed religion as essentially a category of belonging, while the post-Soviet period has opened space for more liberal, belief-oriented conceptions of religion, and contestation has ensued as a result. “Religion,” or at least the popular conception of its appropriate form, is an outcome of distinct secular projects. This belief-belonging distinction at times seems a bit overstated, as McBrien