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Basque Studies Program Newsletter
· Issue 57,
1998
For the
Bookshelf
by Joseba Zulaika
Review of: William A. Christian, Visionaries: The
Spanish Republic and the Reign of Christ (University of
California Press, 1996)
This is an extraordinary book that reads as a novel,
an ethnographic version of the Divine Comedy, a profound
study of religious phenomena situated in the Basque rural
society of the 1930s. It describes exhaustively the
apparitions of the Virgin Mary that took place in the
Gipuzkoan town of Ezkioga. About one million people gathered
there during the years 1931-32. Hundreds of visionaries
alleged to have seen the Virgin. The church declared that
the apparitions were not “true”; subsequently the
believers were prohibited from attending the site of the
apparitions and were prosecuted if they did
so.
With meticulous rigor and unusual empathy,
historian/anthropologist Christian traces the historical
background and examines the political and cultural context
of these religious events. The result is quite exceptional.
A leading author in the study of popular religion, this is
Christian’s towering work, one that took fourteen years
of his research.
This monumental work is a landmark for Basque
anthropology. It conjoins the best of Barandiaran’s
ethnographic research, Caro Baroja’s historical
approach, and fieldwork, anthropology’s participant
observation. Employing detective work across regions and
countries, making use of ethnographic and archival sources,
shunning facile explanations of psychological phenomena, and
combining it all with an uncommon understanding of religious
concerns, this is a uniquely complex and humane study, at
times funny and at times compellingly moving, a labor of
love that readers interested in Basque society and culture
have the fortune to be able to enjoy.
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