Ethnography, to this reviewer's abiding delight, can see the universe in a grain of sand—it finds answers to big questions in small, obscure, out-of-the-way places. Thus in this insightful study of religious difference in Europe, Agnieszka Pasieka looks not to London or Paris or Berlin but instead to Poland, the most ethnically and religiously homogenous large country in Europe: 97% ethnically Polish, 95% Roman Catholic (56). Within Poland, she neglects the burgeoning Vietnamese Buddhist community of Warsaw or the Chechen and Tatar Muslims in Gdańsk, seeking diversity instead in Rozstaje, a collection of tiny villages in the country's southeastern corner. And she finds it: the region features at least two ethnolinguistic groups and Christianity in six flavors: Roman Catholic, Greek Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Pentecostal, Seventh Day Adventist, and Jehovah's Witness. There is also a handful of cosmopolitan Buddhists (refugees from the big city, sometimes mistaken for Hindus or Muslims by their perplexed neighbors), and a single lonely atheist. Pasieka's study is not perfect—she all but ignores the Jews whose absence haunts the religious landscape, and we learn too little about some of the Protestant minorities (especially the Sabbatarian, pork-eschewing Adventists who partly fill the Jewish niche in local imaginaries). Nevertheless, she admirably succeeds in her intent to query the ways in which celebrations of multiculturalism can both allow for diversity and uphold the dominance of a majority religion.
After a theory-laden Introduction, Part I maps out the practice of “hierarchical pluralism” in time and space. A chapter tracing Poland's “History of Pluralism” reminds readers that the region has always been multi-religious, its recent Catholic dominance a historical anomaly brought about by a “homogenizing rather than homogenous state” (35). Chapter 2, “Making Pluralism,” emphasizes the active promotion of inter-religious conviviality. Neighbors actively engage in a “discourse of ecumenism” (69) and happily celebrate Christmas twice: according to the Gregorian (Roman Catholic and Protestant) and Julian (Orthodox and Greek Catholic) calendars.
Part II focuses on collective memory. Chapter 3, “Caroling History,” uses the framework of a wassailing party to uncover a heteroglossic oral history. Elderly inhabitants recall the first appearance of Pentecostals in the region, or the bad blood between Greek Catholics (often identifying with Ukrainian ethnicity) and Orthodox (identifying with Lemko ethnicity) in the interwar years. But most focus on the traumas of forced deportation, first to Soviet Ukraine in 1944, then to the “recovered territories” of recently German Silesia in 1947. Chapter 4 explores an ambivalent nostalgia for the socialist period, remembered as a time of repression and hardship but also neighborliness, family devotion, and mutual aid.
Part III describes the resilience of neighborhood, complexly interwoven from the threads of region, family, ethnicity, and religion. Pasieka criticizes an ethnographic tendency to treat religion seriously only in times of conflict—a view that underwrites secularism as the guardian of peace. In contrast, the people of Rozstaje express neighborliness through mutual religious respect, everybody “acting like Christians” (153) and refraining from outdoor work during other peoples' holidays. But respect can obscure other attitudes: the Orthodox and Catholics admire Protestant teetotalism but resent the barriers it places on conviviality, while Adventists and Pentecostals privately treat their neighbors' holidays as superstitious bacchanals.
The neighborly practice of interreligious respect reveals itself to be fragile and insufficient in the final chapter, “Debating Pluralism.” A seemingly trivial proposal—to add the Lemko names, in the Cyrillic alphabet, to village signs—quickly transforms the language of familiarity and fraternity into “us” and “them.” For a sour few months after the contentious vote over the street signs, “everyday politeness” came to seem a façade “obscuring the superficiality of local ecumenism” (191). However, locals eventually turned back to such politeness to heal the wounds it had failed to prevent: “despite their disillusionment with their neighbors' behavior, it was precisely to neighborly relations that they pointed in order to imagine how a different outcome might have been possible” (208). Soon things returned to “normal”—to a Polish-Catholic hegemony allowing other religious lifeways to co-exist as colorful folklore (the Lemko Orthodox and Greek Catholics), admirable but prudish rigorism (the various Protestants), or harmless exoticism (the handful of Buddhists). Pasieka's microcosmic study reveals both the importance and the inadequacy of “everyday practices of social conviviality,” which ease social strains while upholding the ethnoreligious status quo (212). Her discoveries are exportable westward.
