A Third Story Neither Side of the Argument Tells

Aitamurto's fieldwork among Rodnover communities found the ethnic and inclusive positions its own record sets against each other, but it also documented a third narrative running alongside both, one neither position fully owns. Beside revival, the claim to be restoring an authentic native religion, and beside kinship, the dispute over who the tradition rightly belongs to, she identifies pluralistic nature spirituality as a separate self description many Rodnovers give their own practice, framing the gods as approaches to a shared natural order available to any sincere practitioner rather than as inheritance or as a blood claim at all. A related fourth thread she records is more therapeutic than doctrinal, Rodnoverie offered as a source of meaning and orientation to people her interviews describe as disoriented by the collapse of Soviet certainties, a motivation that has nothing to do with either ethnicity or nature worship and everything to do with what the post 1991 decades did to the societies Rodnoverie grew up inside. None of this resolves the dispute over belonging, it complicates it, since a movement popularly summarised as split between an ethnic camp and an inclusive one turns out, on the ground, to contain people whose actual reasons for practising do not sort cleanly into either box, which is closer to what a fieldworker meets than the two party account usually presented from outside.