Narrating victimhood : gender, religion and the making of place in post-war Croatia /

In this perceptive, fieldwork-based ethnography focusing on the Dalmatian region of Croatia, anthropologist Schäuble (Univ. of Manchester, UK) documents and theorizes a number of ways in which subnational identities are becoming ever more significant in the postwar, postsocialist Balkans. Far from fading from view, for instance, religious pilgrimage sites tied to very specific geographical locations have become ever more prevalent in and after wartime. The status of war veterans as highly masculinized and patriarchal "defenders of the homeland" likewise feeds local resistance to globalized norms and expectations. Schäuble uses her accounts of gender, religion, space, and landscape in Dalmatia to build innovative arguments about the construction of victimhood and the making and remaking of the Balkans-and, indeed, Europe-over the long term, and especially in the aftermath of the Yugoslav wars. --Douglas Rogers, Yale University