In Mother Figured, Dierdre de la Cruz explores “the knotty condition of universalized religion in a postcolonial locale” (p. 5)—specifically what the modern history of Marianism in and moving through the Philippines reveals about “the convergence of divine and profane, localized and mass, as well as spiritual and mechanical, figures and modes of mediation” (p. 11). The book's central analytical concerns are the many “mediating practices” shaping Marian experiences and expressions, including “speech, various genres of writing, and the production of historical knowledge,” as well as, of course, “ritual, prayer, possession, and sacrifice” (p. 13). De la Cruz pays particular attention to the power of mass media—from the nineteenth-century printed word to the Internet—”to mirror, restructure, and even produce religious phenomena and experience” (p. 14).

Mother Figured pushes back against two scholarly tendencies. The first (by now perhaps a bit of a straw man) denies the “modern” character of Marianism (and, by extension, much of religion in general) by viewing apparitions “solely as reactionary phenomena, and their believers as, at best, resistant to change and, at worst, shackled by false consciousness” (p. 8). The second scholarly tendency stresses religion's “local,” “popular,” or “folk” aspects, a well-intentioned desire to historicize and pluralize that can nevertheless serve to ghettoize. De la Cruz's work instead explores the interplay and tensions between popular, national, and universal religion in an age of empire, mass media and communication, and diaspora.

The book's three sections (of two chapters each) focus on discrete chronological eras and media cultures. The first, spanning late Spanish and American colonial rule (roughly the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries), focuses on textual versions of apparition stories produced by Spanish friars and, later, by Filipino authors, both confessional and secular. It shows how a “worldview whereby the sacred was highly localized and particular, and believed immanent to material forms” (p. 20) became imbricated with globally circulating conceptions and forms of “the Virgin Mary” and “nation” in the Philippines. The book's second section focuses on apparition events in Lipa City, in Batangas Province on the island of Luzon, in 1948. It traces the official denial of the events in the context of the fraught ecclesiastical and political landscape of the immediate postwar era, and their transformation into a national and even global phenomenon through the circulation both of miraculous objects (rose petals that fell in showers ex nihilo at the apparition sites) and of reproductions of the petals in diverse forms of media, from photographs to newspapers. Section three explores contemporary Marian events and practices in what de la Cruz calls “the global Philippines” and their relationship to new forms of mass electronic media and to the growing role of Filipino Catholics in the global Christian mission.

There is much to admire about Mother Figured. Marian apparitions are notoriously difficult for historians to study, and this book's greatest strengths clearly stem from de la Cruz's anthropological training and sensibilities. The middle section of the book, about the apparitions in Lipa City, is a tour de force: a powerful un-silencing carried out through counter-readings of official documentation, unearthing of new archival materials, and astute ethnographic readings of her many face-to-face encounters. Oral history, at the heart of sections two and three of Mother Figured, has been strangely peripheral to the study of Southeast Asian history (unlike in African history, for example); de la Cruz's ability to mobilize it in Mother Figured should serve as an example for the rest of the field. Ultimately, the most powerful and successful aspect of Mother Figured is de la Cruz's ability to bring a disparate range of “texts” (in a broad sense) into a single analytical field and to read them in a manner equally attuned to content and genre.

Mother Figured explicitly distances itself from more conventional historical approaches, and often to good effect. Still, a more transnational and unbound conception of the history of the Philippines does not preclude a clearer sense of context and arguments about change over time that this book at times lacks.Footnote ¹ Despite de la Cruz's efforts in this regard, Mother Figured remains a deeply episodic work of scholarship that, while closely attuned to time and place in its three principal moments, is less successful in demonstrating the ties that bind these moments together and their broader relation to the modern history of the Philippines. This is a predictable criticism for a historian to make, and given Mother Figured’s fundamentally interdisciplinary character, it is perhaps a little bit unfair. But in the end, this excellent book will likely make more lasting contributions to the study of modern Marianism and to the anthropology of religion than to the history of the Philippines.