Reviewed by Charles Stewart
Every year, on the feast day of SS. Constantine and Helen (May 21), a charismatic Greek Orthodox sect assembles in the Macedonian village of Ayia Eleni (St. Helen) where they venerate their patron saints (primarily Saint Constantine) by means of a celebration that climaxes in a barefoot dance over glowing embers. Participants, called Anastenarides, claim that St. Constantine inspires and safeguards them during this rite and they prepare for this contact by fasting and focusing their prayers on his icon. With the help of percussive music played by local musicians, the participants pass into a state of trance. Then, holding the icons above their heads and draped with scarves symbolic of their dedication to the saint, they may dance over the coals. Thousands of tourists come to witness the Anastenaria ritual. Besides Ayia Eleni, where Loring Danforth conducted field research in the mid-1970s, the Anastenaria is also performed in the town of Langadas and in a working-class neighborhood of Thessaloniki, Greece's second-largest city.
This review concentrates on Danforth's treatment of the Anastenaria as a healing ritual because it raises many important questions about the compatibility of interpretive anthropological and medical anthropological assumptions. Before proceeding, however, I would like briefly to indicate the broad scope of this impressively wide-ranging book so as not to give the misleading impression that it solely concerns ritual healing.
In his Introduction Danforth proclaims his intention to de-center the authoritative voice of the anthropologist by suspending it at times in favor of actors' accounts and also by taking excursions into a more evocative form of writing which he labels "literary journalism." In some passages he portrays himself as an uncomfortable voyeur, and at one point, when he sees that the head Anastenaris cannot possibly heal a severely crippled girl, he candidly represents himself weeping tears of complex empathy. The author's courage and sensitivity are certainly admirable, but this does not exempt these empathic passages from consideration as authorial strategies (Roth 1989). Here they are self-consciously intentional, but nonetheless in need of deconstruction against the backdrop of anthropology's current contortions about the place of such descriptions in