In the World and of It: Russian Mennonites and Narratives of Community in Contemporary Canada

Abstract

This dissertation explores the shifting conflicts and paradoxes that come to constitute identity, subjectivity, and personhood within Russian Mennonite communities in contemporary Canada. I argue that the central tension within Christianity, the paradox of the incarnation, defines what it means to be Mennonite in this time and place, for it is through attempts to manage this paradox that Mennonite lives are lived, and this tension is generative of both pragmatic action and social transformation. In attending to these tensions ethnographically, I show how Mennonite constructions of community are a response to the problem of incarnational living in Christianity, where the past is neither stable nor resolved.