Eastern Christians in Anthropological Perspective is a collection of sixteen essays edited by Chris Hann, Director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology at Halle, and the late Hermann Goltz, former Professor at Martin Luther University, Halle-Wittenberg. The essays are summaries and interpretations of fieldwork undertaken in most cases among select Eastern Christian groups that celebrate rituals and occupy locations in the borderlands between the greater cultures of Western Christendom, the Orthodox world, and Islam. The authors are academic professionals from North America, Europe, and the Russian Federation seeking to understand religion through its social and personal aspects rather than through formal dogma. As stated in the introduction, the book's unifying theme is set in “contemporary socio-cultural anthropology” (5). The essays are presented in four separate categories dealing with sensuous expression (icon veneration and singing), monastic life and the means of handing down its practices to novitiates, visitation at shrines and experiences on pilgrimages, and, finally, the various ways through which individual religious feelings can find a place within the larger community (Alexander Agadjanian and Kathy Rousselet, “Individual and Collective Identities in Russian Orthodoxy”).
As is typical of anthropologists, the greater part of the new evidence presented here derives from first-hand observations and interviews recorded on the spot, what has been called “the living experience.” In fact, the writers themselves had often become voluntary participants in religious rituals walking in processions or traveling to holy sites by bus in the hope of better recording “the shape of things as they are,” as Hamlet stated the case. Intellectual histories, theology, politics, and economics make occasional appearances but only as background information. It must also be noted that the authors make frequent referrals to a considerable body of secondary works written by anthropologists and sociologists from other fields of study, and these already completed research projects along with their theoretical conclusions play a substantial supporting role in many of the book's arguments.
The greatest strength of the collection is the authors' skillful use of detailed information collected during the observation of religious activities carried on by peoples who are easily overlooked by the world at large but have thus far survived to some degree the modernizing forces of secularization, industrialization, globalization, and tourism. Each of the unique groups analyzed in Eastern Christians in Anthropological Perspective has retained a traditional pattern of worship or a custom that relies heavily on ancestral memories. Among the dwindling number of the Finno-Ugrian Setos of southeastern Estonia it is group singing that holds the past and present together (Jeffers Engelhardt, “The Acoustics and Geopolitics of Orthodox Practices in the Estonian–Russian Border Region”). In the case of isolated populations in Uniat villages in Romania and Hungary, it is a search in what may be termed “authentic and invented religious traditions” (Stéphanie Mahieu, “Icons and/or Statues? The Greek Catholic Divine Liturgy in Hungary and Romania, between Renewal and Purification”). Among an ethnic minority in the Marii El Republic on the Middle Volga, it is belief in an invisible power represented in a sacred painting (Sonja Luehrmann, “A Dual Quarrel of Images on the Middle Volga: Icon Veneration in the Face of Protestant and Pagan Critique”).
In another approach taken to “the facts on the ground,” the authors review in detail how old rules of discipline in the monastic routines of nuns and monks in Romania and Ukraine are being tested by new situations that prevail in what had once been rather quiet corners of the world. In one Romanian area, rigidity has resulted in frustration (Alice Forbess, “The Spirit and the Letter: Monastic Education in a Romanian Orthodox Convent”), but in the Ukrainian example, flexibility has met with some success (Vlad Naumescu, “Exorcising Demons in Post-Soviet Ukraine: A Monastic Community and Its Imagistic Practice”). Systematic study of this sort also tries to explain the motivation of pilgrims during visitations to holy places (tombs or shrines), locations “bearing God's footprints” (Jeanne Kormina, “Avtobusniki: Russian Orthodox Pilgrims' Longing for Authenticity,” 275). In Macedonia the anthropologist found a tradition of respect between Christians and Muslims, heterogeneous peoples, to be a living principle at mutually shared shrines but warned of the fragility in such intercommunication where nationalism and dogmatism can quickly replace amity with antagonism (Glenn Bowman, “Orthodox–Muslim Interactions as ‘Mixed Shrines’ in Macedonia”). A similar description of interfaith mingling at the monastery of St. George on Prinkipo Island is explained as “a modern syncretic phenomenon belonging to an old tradition” (Maria Couroucli, “Empire Dust: The Web of Relations in Saint George's Festival on Princes Island in Istanbul,” 220).
Much of Eastern Christians in Anthropological Perspective is not for tyros, and, unfortunately, it has at times a tendency for clumsy and hybrid language construction. The vocabulary used in all too many cases is intermixed with an in-house jargon made up of such terms as “archetype,” “paradigm,” “prototype,” “model,” and “otherness.” Furthermore, the use of these terms is often tied together with various abstract notions drawn from the published works of other academic anthropologists, as though these terms, concepts, and theories have been sufficiently clarified and tested to be deemed suitable for a general, educated readership. There is no question, of course, that there is a place for complicated explanations and professional vocabularies where there is an obvious need and merit. The authors' discussions about the use of both the word and the concept “syncretism” in the integration of religious beliefs, for example, demands a level of abstract thought. Writing that cannot fully convey with elemental clarity an understanding of activity surrounding popular rites and customs will likely be confined to a narrow academic audience.
