Time, Religion, and Social Experience in Rural Greece (review)

290 Reviews authors and the organizational flair and painstaking labors of its editors. Although the topics generally track the academic legal curriculum, user-friendly perspective and context help to round out the autiioritative reviews. Those who are not familiar with the Greek language are presented with an excellent summary of the caliber of the leading Greek legal texts. The individual chapter bibliographies of the relevant literature in languages other dian Greek are also very useful. Two by-products are that the Greek-speaking audience is rewarded with a reliable, one-volume treatise on Greek law (albeit in English only) and that accurate references to Anglo-American legal terminology are included. On the other hand, as the editors point out, the style is not uniform. Nonetheless, the variety of contributions adds to the attraction of this work. In future editions, however, the editors might consider dividing the segments on "Commercial Law" and "Tax Law and Investments" into several new chapters, including a separate contribution on international law aspects relating to Greece, and expanding the references to the European Union. The positive and encouraging reception of Introduction to Greek Law in the past should ensure many future editions. Serge B. Hadji-Mihaloglou Senior Counsel, TRW Inc. Laurie Kain Hart, Time, Religion, and Social Experience in Rural Greece Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Litdefield. 1992. Pp. xviii + 292. 11 figures, 30 plates. $24.50 paper, $60.00 cloth. Based on fieldwork in 1983,1984, and 1988 in Richiá, the central village of the Zárakas region in the eastern Péloponnèse, this book explores the play of the religious imagination in local and everyday life. A dialectical analysis of the historical development of tiie canon of Greek Orthodoxy and its organic links to bodi pagan cults and the natural or economic year of rural life is central to Laurie Kain Hart's approach. The result is a book that is beautifully written, wonderfully illustrated, and ethnographically rich. In an excellent introduction, Hart outlines the central premises of her work. She sees Christianity as an "indigenous tradition" in Greece, one imbued with symbolism drawn from tile local landscape and intimately familiar to rural dwellers. Description of the local religion embodied in a particular village is the foundation of her study. "At the most general level... I ask what composes local religion, what makes religious practice meaningful or not meaningful, and how Orthodoxy is connected to local life" (8). Hart argues that a more general discussion of Greek ethnic identity is also necessary for an understanding of Orthodoxy. Thus, central to her analysis is an exploration of tiie role of the Church in die development of ideologies of modern statehood—an uneasy task given tiie divergent historical forces of a Reviews 291 romanticized classical antiquity, a vast imperial Christian history, and the realities of four centuries of Ottoman domination. Hart argues that religion has informed assertions of national identity in Greece as an indigenous tradition. She is careful, however, to acknowledge that "tradition" is not static, nor is it to be opposed to cosmopolitan systems of knowledge. Hart argues diat, despite the analytical insights of Redfield's folk-urban continuum and of more recent dependency tiieories of rural economies, "what local cultural dynamics are and mean" still remains an open question. A history of invasions, migrations, war, and the vicissitudes of world trade and land reform programs have infused rural life witii instability rather dian stability, and there is "litde that is definable as an exclusively 'folk' social universe, knowledge or imagination" (16). When Hart speaks of local religion she does not mean "a religion diat is unique to die village setting and opposed to a cosmopolitan variety (owing, for example, to an absence of critical tiiought) but one diat is imbued with local experience and ideas of local value" (16) and that engages in a dialectical relationship with Orthodoxy. Noting mat the "past" is positively valued as a time of richness in contrast to a present of emptiness, Hart sees die power of "memory" as central to the process by which, in ritual contexts (most importandy, the liturgy) the past can enter die present. A further question motivating Hart's study is: How does...