In the late Summer of 2002, in a swampy field in rural Transcarpathia, the Virgin Mary appeared before two young Greek Catholic girls. So what? This is hardly the first time that Mary has introduced herself to impressionable youngsters: do the apparitions of Dzhublyk merit a 300-page study?

It turns out that Agnieszka Halemba is not especially interested in the nature of the girls' religious experience. Her stance as a social anthropologist resembles that of the Church itself: the apparitions should be analyzed in terms of their local effects, the authenticity of the visions is a distraction. She claims to pursue a cognitive approach, but this is not elaborated. Rather, the analysis is thoroughly grounded in the history of the region and her own recent ethnographic fieldwork at multiple locations within the Irshava Deanery between 2006 and 2011. These aberrant religious phenomena in a remote region of central Europe serve as a catalyst for a highly original study of the intersections between religion and politics in a post-Soviet state where Catholic and Orthodox forms of Christianity have long been intertwined. The recent crisis in Ukraine increases the work's topicality.

Mary had several political messages for the faithful in Dzhublyk and the pilgrim masses who have flocked there since 2002. One was a clear preference for using the Ukrainian language in the Catholic liturgy. The Mukachevo Eparchy, which struggled to manage and control these apparitions (outlined in Chapter 2), belonged historically to the Kingdom of Hungary. Despite the Vatican's general policy to make ecclesiastical boundaries congruent with political borders, no unity with the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (the successor to the Galician bishoprics that belonged to Austria and earlier to Poland) has been implemented. Although all Greek Catholics were equally repressed in the socialist decades, not all are equally committed to the Ukrainian national cause today. In Chapter 3, Halemba provides a balanced overview of the complex regional history and the stigma attached by today's Ukrainian elites to “political Ruysnism.”

The Virgin Mary (and Halemba following her), however, also addressed politics in the micro register of priestly authority. This is problematic due to the legacies of socialism, when some communities had underground priests and others formally converted to Orthodoxy while remaining as loyal as they possibly could to their distinctive Catholic traditions. The outcomes of contemporary legitimation strategies are shown in Chapter 4 to be path-dependent at the parish level. Various strategies are possible, but the “democratizing” consequences of the socialist era, combined with the current regulatory frameworks of both the state and the Church place the laity in a strong position in crucial domains such as finance. While receptiveness to the visionaries is evidently colored by the underground tradition of priest-martyrs, in this chapter (the longest in the book) the apparitions are only mentioned in passing.

In her fifth and last substantive chapter, Halemba moves to yet another register as she shows how the Greek Catholics of rural Transcarpathia are developing a new form of identity based on commonalities and connections with the Catholic Church, an organization that nowadays packages itself as a global civil society. Even if there is no consensus among the clergy on key points, the Dzublyk apparitions are thus an instance of glocalization. In the context of new forms of differentiation in church architecture, language, soundscapes, and much more besides, these Greek Catholics are no longer part of a common “Orthodox imaginary,” as argued by Vlad Naumescu on the basis of his research among Greek Catholics on the other side of the mountains. Halemba is careful to point out that increasing differentiation goes against Rome's ostensible policy of re-Byzantification. She finds, however, that Catholics and Orthodox re-Bytantize in different ways, the former looking typically to Greece and the latter to Russia.

The issues raised by Halemba on the basis of her rich historical and ethnographic materials will intrigue and inspire many scholars in religious studies as well as anthropology, the sociology of religion, and postsocialist studies. The book is attractively produced and illustrated. It is above all well-organized and scholarly. The author's insistence on conceptual clarity pays dividends, notably her clear distinction between an organization (such as the Catholic Church) and an institution (such as a Marian apparition). Her emphasis on the ways in which a conservative, even reactionary, cult can promote new negotiations of local social relations and religious innovation is convincingly supported. Further work is needed to explain why her results differ so markedly from those of Naumescu, who worked primarily in L'viv just a few years earlier. Finally, while the patterns to which she draws attention clearly differ from older forms of Latinization, a critic might still argue that current developments in Transcarpathia (the recent diffusion of the Neo-Catechumenical Movement) are a reprise on the age-old theme of subjugating eastern models to western ones (now represented as global).