Narrating Victim-hood

The book under review is the result of a longer field study which took the author to the Dalmatian hinterland in Croatia a number of times between 2003 and 2012. Schäuble was especially interested in the small city of Sinj near the Bosnian-Herzegovinian border about thirty-five kilometres from Split, the Dalmatian capital. In the rest of Croatia and in the capital Zagreb especially Sinj and the whole region are known both for strong rural and religious traditions and for the dominance of radical nationalist political attitudes, an image providing fertile ground for mocking the people of the hinterland. At the same time, Sinj is an important religious and cultural site because of its mysterious icon of the Virgin Mary and its historical Alka tournament. The Miraculous Painting of the Blessed Virgin Mary was brought there in 1687 by Franciscan friars from the northern Herzegovinian village of Rama, after the friars joined the rest of the population in their escape from advancing Ottoman troops. That historical event is the foundation for the self-conception, under investigation here, of a suffering and heroic people, and for the author therefore must play a prominent role in deciphering the local identity.

The subtitle suggests the complexity of Schäuble’s approach to her subject. Focusing on social and cultural constructions of gender and place as well as on their rooted-ness in religious practices, her aim has been to create an ‘in-depth description of local responses to present processes of the European Union’s integration policy and [to] analyse how and where people in post-war rural Dalmatia position themselves within the imaginary cartography of the “new Europe” — and/or its immediate outside’ (2). As the author shows, the immediate past which saw traumatic experiences of the violence of recent war has converged with old wounds from World War II — mass graves hiding partisan atrocities against the local people are still unrecovered — to constitute the narrative frame for the negotiation of recent political conflicts. It is not a new insight that in Croatia and other former Yugoslav countries the construction of historical ‘self-victimization’ represents the central narrative used to vindicate new political claims. But Schäuble succeeds in unfolding a whole panorama of regional but deeply nationalist cultural and political practices, bound to a rural landscape that is harsh and still poor. Showing how discourses on that landscape, and on politics, identity, and ‘lived experience’ (15) are intertwined, Schäuble distances herself from the trauma paradigm and interprets practices of remembrance and their nationalist goals rather as strategies of self-empowerment, particularly wherever injustice and lack of sovereignty are dominant experiences. Thus she stresses the central role of emotions in times of radical change, a factor which has until now been largely overlooked in the research on postsocialist societies and their transformation in a globalizing world.

To achieve her own empathetic and at the same time critical research narrative Schäuble uses what I would call a chiastic and reflexive methodological approach by resorting to discourses and forms of several representations as well as to the immediacy of social practices as sources. Outlining her chain of thought and her research responsibility to her interlocutors while also rejecting their radical political att itudes, she always reflects her own standpoint as a researcher. Thus, for example, she includes long citations from her notes of her fieldwork in a bid to uncover the various layers of interpretation as a knowledge process, while tying her interpretations to theories or other studies.

In an impressively accomplished manner, Schäuble connects all three of her main topics — gender, religion and the making of place. First, she analysed the Alka-tournament as a complex lieu de mémoire; and then looked at Marian devotion as a strategy to justify both violent resistance and ecclesiastical influence on society and politics. Third comes the religious and political marking of landscapes as milieu de mémoire and the strong emotional rootedness to the region, while fourth is the construction of militarised heroic masculinities and their role in dealing with societal, economic, and psychological instabilities in a postwar society. Fifth and fi nally Schäuble has addressed the region’s economic deprivation and its consequences for the retraditionalisation of family structures and the ‘nationalisation of village life’ through the romanticisation of subsistence farming (277). In all of these chapters, the author uses as a research prism the contested way war crimes committed by Croatian soldiers during the ‘Homeland War’ (1991-1995) has been dealt with, and with that the protest against the accusations against high-ranking members of the Croatian army. It seems every time Schäuble turned her att ention to the matter she discovered some new detail in a panorama which, in the beginning, she had not been able to comprehend.

Laying aside the many convincing insights Schäuble’s book provides for an understanding of the postsocialist situation in marginalised rural regions, I must record a few critical remarks, albeit minor ones. My first objection is to her inconsistent use of the concept of postsocialism, for example when she speaks of communism and thus refers to the counter-narrative of her interlocutors. That sometimes leads her to overlook the socialist heritage in the specified social practices and discourses on the one hand, while on the other hand she fails to question the historical evaluation, as narrated by the locals, that socialist Yugoslavia was a centralised state (286) and thus part of the experience of depravation (in fact technically it was a federal state, based on a model of economic self-management). However, that is not really a failure of the author but rather points to the general problem that there has simply been too little research on how the socialist state interacted with its rural regions in terms of its concrete political practice. Thus, the experience of discrimination in the region that Schäuble notes cannot be checked against a more realistic interpretative framework. My second reservation concerns the missing interpretation of the Franciscan friars’ masculinities, although their political engagement is indeed strongly described. While Schäuble’s citations of catholic masses are noteworthy for clearly showing how the clergy manipulates its prerogative of interpretation, a glance at the friars’ own masculinities would have been illuminating to help understand their roles in stabilizing local power relations as both individuals and representatives of a local elite.

On the whole, in vivid terms Schäuble has encompassed the gendered self-conception of martyrdom and (self-)victimisation as narratives intended to strengthen a defensive masculine identity that was historically adjusted against foreign imperial powers and is now set against neoliberal globalisation. However, that same masculinity is also directed against the state, a political entity never experienced as trustworthy — not only during Yugoslav times, but also now, in the Croatian nation-state. Pointing to the absurdities and contradictory results of that attitude, Schäuble’s careful presentation of people’s persistence on autochthony and suffering makes clear that both, the centres and the margins alike, must take responsibility for changing that dangerous one-way road. Hence, this well researched and sensitive study is of particular importance because of its focus on hegemonic and marginalised masculinities and on emotions, for it well describes the central role of both in the widening gap between rural and urban lives in marginalised mediterranean regions. This excellent book should inform and stimulate further research on the region, on masculinities, on state building, and on right-wing politics.