The Stark Carpathians: Ritual, Text, and Authority Among Ukraine’s Hutsuls

The Stark Carpathians: Ritual, Text, and Authority Among Ukraine’s Hutsuls addresses rituals and texts in a small mountainous area located in today’s Ukraine. The residents of this remote region are known as the Hutsuls. This book argues that Hutsul rituals and texts, cast as ancient and extraordinary, had more mundane roots. They formed out of contact between the region’s residents and lowland institutions, and they became foundations for everyday life. Words and symbolic action had an inherent tension that stemmed from contests over authority. The nature of these contests was such that distant officials, willful locals, and diverse sources of information were often as important as collective traditions in shaping rituals and texts. Prolific producers of texts, Hutsuls carried on discussions that included diverse topics, such as agriculture, astrology, mass gymnastics, divine punishment, and witches and vampires. This volume covers these and other discussions in their small and exact particulars, and it investigates texts and rituals in their fullness and irreducible complexity. By crossing traditional lines of inquiry and following the region’s winding trails to their divergent ends, this book offers insight into a larger Hutsul world. Ultimately, the study of Hutsul creations informs the study of rituals and texts in many elsewheres far from the Carpathian Mountains.

About the Author :
Anthony J. Amatois professor of social science at Southwest Minnesota State University.

Review :
Anthony J. Amato has now added to his earlier pathbreaking book on the Hutsuls' complex relationship with their Carpathian mountain environment a sensitive and original account of their evolving values, traditions, and popular lore. He illuminates in vivid colors how the Hutsuls continuously constructed and adapted their understandings of themselves and their relations with governmental and church authorities, landowners, Jews, tourists, and other outsiders. This learned study will fascinate students of history, anthropology, and cultural studies. Blending insights from history, ethnography, and anthropology, Dr. Amato takes us into the rich cultural world of the Hutsul people of the Carpathian mountains between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. Morbid and comic, everyday and mundane, the Hutsuls' largely oral culture reflected the ways these shepherds and smallholders lived their lives in their mountainous environment and their relationship with authority, both spiritual and secular. Through a series of episodes involving different aspects of their cultural and nicely supported by carefully chosen illustrations, Amato helps us make sense of this world before it was transformed by the forces of Soviet modernity. This is a richly detailed and researched investigation of an understudied region of the world. Focusing on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Anthony J. Amato examines historical print resources, including earlier ethnographic studies, to tease out subtle meanings on uses of a variety of cultural performances and traditions. Amato is attuned to the conflicting political, religious, and geographical claims being made through such traditions as Christmas caroling, funeral games, political rallies, and beliefs in witchcraft and vampirism. Always sensitive and never simplistic, this book is a fine example of historical ethnography.