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doi:10.1017/S000964071 1001 156
Eastern Christians in Anthropological Perspective. Edited by Chris Han ? and Hermann Goltz. The Anthropology of Christianity 9. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. ? + 375 pp. $60.00 cloth; $24.95 paper.
Eastern Christians in Anthropological Perspective is a collection of sixteen essays edited by Chris Hann, Director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Antoropology 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, toe 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 toe 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, toe greater part of toe new evidence presented here derives from first-hand observations and interviews recorded on...