a long tradition of authoritarianism" (p.
I l l ) that Why is it, then, that anthropologists explain reli-
has no qualms about violating human rights and
oppressing its ethnic minorities. In short, what
emerges from the book is the image of a country
that, even though nominally European, falls short of
the standards of cultural and political excellence set
by the "liberal, pluralistic democracies of Western
Europe" (pp. 109-116).
Sadly, Danforth's discussion of Creek political
culture is regressive. It takes the reader back to a
time when the societies of southern Europe and the
Mediterranean were understood in terms of the bi-
nary opposition between a totalitarian, despotic,
backward Orient and a pluralistic, liberal, modern
West. The discussion is also puzzling because Dan-
forth's earlier work on modern Creek culture is
based on an explicit and uncompromising rejection
of this sort of binarism. In an excellent study of
death rituals in rural Greece (Death Rituals of Rural
Greece, Princeton, N): Princeton University Press,
1982), for instance, Danforth argues that the villag-
ers' seemingly alien practices should not be used as
a means to distance the self from the Other. Such
practices are metaphors of mediation, symbolic at-
tempts to resolve the opposition between life and
death, and therefore responses to a universal hu-
man predicament.
This kind of analysis is nowhere to be found in
Danforth's discussion of Creek nationalism. Rather,
the author explains what he sees as the Creeks' in-
ability to behave like their "civilized" European
partners by an all-too-predictable reference to
Greece's contact with the Orient during the 400
years of Ottoman rule. For even though Greece has
been de-Ottomanizing and "is now in the process
of becoming increasingly 'Europeanized' " (p. 114),
it has not managed to escape from the "margins of
Europe." Danforth borrows the latter phrase from
Michael Herzfeld's work [Anthropology through
the Looking-Class: Critical Ethnography in the Mar-
gins of Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1987), but the use he makes of it is bitterly
ironic. For Herzfeld, Greece does not just happen
to be situated on the "margins of Europe." It has
been historically constituted as a marginaKy Euro-
pean society by Europe itself. Modern Greeks,
Herzfeld argues, have been constituted as the living
ancestors of Europe to fit (and to legitimize) the
grand evolutionary scheme that posited classical
Greece as the cradle of Western civilization and co-
lonial Europe as its crowning achievement. In short,
for Herzfeld, the marginalization of Greece is a his-
torical event loaded with geopolitical significance.
Perhaps Danforth's discussion of Greek national-
ism could have been more fruitful had he situated it
within the context of Greece's marginalization by
colonial Europe. As it stands, the discussion takes
this historical event for granted and, sadly, helps to
reproduce it. And yet one cannot help but pose the
question as to the kinds of tensions and contradic-
tions that this marginalization generated for Greece.
One cannot help but wonder <f Greek nationalism
might not be, to use a phrase from Danforth's ear-
lier work, a "metaphor of mediation," a symbolic
attempt to resolve the contradictions with which
European imperialism burdened Greece.
gion in symbolic terms, but not nationalism? Is not
the latter as much a sociocultural phenomenon as
religion? What kind of identities (and privileges) are
threatened by nationalisms such as the Greek one?
And what sorts of limits do they impose on anthro-
pological discourse and the truth that it claims to
possess? Such questions cannot be answered here,
but they might be worth considering.
Medjugorje: Religion, Politics, and Violence in
Rural Bosnia. MART BAX. Amsterdam: VU
Ultgeverij, 1995. xlx + 139 pp., maps, notes,
bibliography.
TONE R. BRINCA
University of Bergen
Medjugorje: Religion, Politics, and Violence in
Rural Bosnia provides a fascinating account of how
a small community in Western Hercegovina is
transformed as it becomes a devotional center for
millions of pilgrims. The account is rich in its de-
scriptions of competition between local Francis-
cans and the church hierarchy, and how an appari-
tion of the Virgin, with her message of peace and
reconciliation, affected a local pattern of vendettas.
Unfortunately, the book suffers grievously when
author Mart Bax seeks to generalize from the local
history and conflict pattern to the whole country of
Bosnia and Hercegovina.
Over an 11-year period (1983-94), the author
spent a number of weeks annually in the village of
Medjugorje in the municipality of Citluk in western
Hercegovina. (Although the book's title refers to
rural Bosnia, Hercegovina is not part of Bosnia but
is rather a separate geographic entity that, together
with Bosnia, forms the country: hence the name
Bosnia and Hercegovina). Today the Medjugorje
area is all but in name attached to neighboring
Croatia.
In 1981 the Virgin Mary supposedly appeared to
a group of local children with messages of repen-
tance, atonement, and peace. The apparitions con-
tinued for several years, and Medjugorje (along
with the neighboring, and sometimes competing
village of Bijakovici) became a worldwide pilgrim-
age center. By the time war broke out in 1991, more
than 18 million pilgrims had visited the center.
The book can be divided into two parts accord-
ing to thematic focus. In the first part (ch. 1-5), Bax
chronicles the development of the devotional cen-
ter and the battle between local Franciscans and the
bishop in nearby Mostar. In the second part (ch.
6-8), the author discusses the new inequalities that
arise from the pilgrimage business and that serve to
revive latent conflicts among families and hamlets.
Here the author moves into a discussion of ethnic
animosities and traces resentment between Serbs
and Croats through history.
Historically, the Franciscans have been very in-
fluential in western Hercegovina. Like their peasant
parishioners, they were strongly antistate, anticom-
munist, and fervent Croat nationalists. By contrast,
the Mostar-based church hierarchy enjoyed good
relations with the communist Yugoslav authorities.
reviews 241
In 1981 the hierarchy and the Franciscans were
locked into a long-standing struggle as to whether
the latter would fall under the authority of the for-
mer. The young seers, who were totally controlled
by the Franciscans, arrived on the scene at a critical
moment in this struggle.
Parallel with this struggle was a striking resur-
gence—from the 1960s on—of "blood vengeance,
vendettas and other forms of violence of private jus-
tice" (p. xvii). The apparitions had the important ef-
fect of stopping the vendettas. Thus Bax provides us
with a keen insight into how a message understood
by Catholics as a worldwide message for peace and
reconciliation had primarily a local address and a
local logic.
Unfortunately, the author pushes his analysis
from local circumstances in the Citluk municipality
to a more general explanation of the larger war in
Bosnia and Hercegovina. In so doing, the author
makes liberal use of historical accounts but does
not provide any contemporary data to support his
proposition that the recent war is rooted in centu-
ries-long ethnic conflict. Indeed, such a proposition
is contradicted by his own ethnography and is puz-
zling in the light of the census data for his research
area. Furthermore, his grand conclusions are not
supported by comparable data from Bosnia.
The author asserts that the vendettas he describes
in western Hercegovina were normal phenomena
throughout the regions of Bosnia and Hercegovina.
While such feuds were common in certain other
parts of former Yugoslavia (Montenegro for exam-
ple), they were not characteristic of Bosnia. Indeed
in central Bosnia, an area I know well, people often
made a point of distinguishing themselves from the
Hercegovinians, whose propensity for violence and
extreme nationalism they considered primitive.
Moreover, even in Bax's research area, the ven-
dettas are not primarily ethnic. From his own ethno-
graphic material it is clear that kinship loyalties, not
ethnic ones, define these conflicts (cf. ch. 7). This is
not surprising in an area that is 99 percent Croat.
Bax discusses ethnic conflict in terms of Serbs and
Croats; yet there were virtually no Serbs living in his
research area during the years of his fieldwork. For
example, the 1991 census showed that in Medju-
gorje there were 1,367 Croats and one Serb, while
in the larger municipality there were 14,823 Croats
and 19 Serbs. (There were 111 Muslims in the mu-
nicipality in 1991, and in 1993-94, the Muslims
and Croats fought a vicious war; Bax curiously ig-
nores this fact.) Bax makes much of World War II
massacres of Serbs by local Croats but does not ex-
plain how, in the absence of a Serb population
(partly as a result of those massacres), the local ven-
dettas could have had a transcendent significance
for "ethnic war" in Bosnia and Hercegovina as a
whole.
The author's perspective on history is ultimately a
localized one, but one that, he claims, has a wider
validity. I would like to have seen a more critical
and reflective use of sources, particularly in view of
the central role of the historical presentation in the
political discourse fueling the recent war. Further-
more, if he is to draw conclusions about Bosnia and
Hercegovina as a whole, he needs ethnographic
data and historical perspectives from Bosnia.
242 american ethnologist
In sum, Bax's work is an informative study of one
community in western Hercegovina and of the in-
terplay there between religion and politics over
time. It is not, however, a contribution to our under-
standings of the recent war.
Visionaries: The Spanish Republic and the
Reign of Christ. WILLIAM A. CHRISTIAN JR.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
xxii + 544 pp., drawings, maps, photographs,
appendix, notes, bibliography, indexes.
BEGONA ARETXAGA
Harvard University
"How do we explain an entire Catholic society
that delegates its direction to its children and to
some of its least prestigious members?" (p. 401).
This is the question that William A. Christian ex-
plores with masterful skill through more than 400
pages of engrossing reading. This is possibly the
best piece yet of a long list of exceptional scholarly
works that Christian has produced on popular
religiosity.
Visionaries is about a group of Basques who, in
the early 1930s, claimed to have seen and talked to
the Virgin Mary, and about the thousands of people
who saw them see, believed them, and accompa-
nied them in their quest for miracles and answers to
their personal and political tribulations. The setting
of this story is Ezkioga, a beautiful village in the
Basque province of Cipuzkoa. The first apparition
occurred in 1931 —the dawn of the Spanish Second
Republic, a time of political and religious turmoil, a
time of passionate hope for those seeking a classless
society, and a time of intense uncertainty and dread
for those who saw their world coming to an end.
The story begins with two children, aged 7 and
11, who first saw the Virgin Mary while they were
playing. The news attracted people to the site, and
soon there was "a rash of visions" (p. 170) in
Ezkioga and in other places as well. Here unfolds
an intricate story about the inseparable connection
between religion and politics, and the mutual shap-
ing of personal and collective histories. Not every-
body was credible as a seer. In Visionaries, Chris-
tian explores the structures of authority, political
interests, social class, and moral values that sorted
the visionaries into credible and distrusted catego-
ries, and filtered the reports of their visions. Chil-
dren and teenagers enjoyed a distinctive preference
as mediators of the divine, while adults (particularly
married women) who claimed to have had visions
were often disregarded by promoters, reporters, and
the general public alike. Reversing everyday struc-
tures of authority, ( hildren came to occupy an
unusual position of moral authority for adults as
the grantors of grace and dispensers of spiritual
counsel.
As Christian brilliantly shows, encounters with
the divine do not occur in a vacuum. The visions at
Ezkioga were mediated by a thickness of social net-
works, news circuits, political struggles, and eccle-
siastic institutions that shaped the belief in the ap-
paritions of the Virgin, the content of her messages,
and ultimately the fate of the visionaries them-