Amato, Anthony J. The Stark Carpathians: Ritual, Text, and Authority among Ukraine’s Hutsuls

With his second highly original book on the Hutsuls and their region, Anthony J. Amato is proving himself to be the most impressive American scholar of the subject.He already has authored a major work of environmental and economic history on the Hutsul region, The Carpathians, the Hutsuls, and Ukraine: An Environmental History (Lexington Books, 2021).These two hefty and learned volumes shed a penetrating light on the vagaries of the region as a physical and economic space and on the lifeworlds and dogged agency of the fascinating highland population of the Eastern Carpathians (today in Ukraine) known as the Hutsuls.The Hutsuls were for centuries a remote and relatively isolated pastoral and equestrian peasant folk dwelling in the frontier region that was the mountains, speaking an East Slavic dialect related to Ukrainian and professing the Greek Catholic faith.They also have a rich, compelling, if at times gruesome and raunchy, folklore.According to Amato, the Hutsul region, and not Transylvania, should be credited with supplying the vampires on which Bram Stoker's Dracula was based.Amato's work has been informed by his profound contact with the region and its people, already visible in his 1998 dissertation "In the Wild Mountains: Idiom, Economy, and Ideology among the Hutsuls, 1848 to 1939," which was based on fieldwork in seven Hutsul villages: Dora, Holovy, Hryniava, Kosmach, Krasnolia, Kryvorivnia, and Sheshory.Instead of publishing that in lightly revised form, the author appears to have used what he learned, plus much additional reading and research, to write these two very different books.This one in particular gives evidence of a very close reading of his sources, be they archival or from the extant secondary literature, in at least seven languages and the Hutsul dialect.He also proves well read in the relevant anthropological literature.The notes amount to a hundred pages, suggesting-rightly-the learned nature of the book.The book's title encapsulates its focus well.It is a study of Hutsul "culture as it was manifested in rituals and texts" in the period 1848 to 1939-that is, the period beginning with peasant emancipation under Habsburg rule through the interwar years under Polish rule (xiii).Not easy to pigeonhole, the book is a work of ethnography, anthropology, history, and popular culture.The author demythologizes the Hutsuls, claiming no particular special origins or nature for them, while still uncovering much that is novel and original.Already the introduction probes the application and use of the name "Hutsul" and the creation of the Hutsuls as an ethnographic group, as well as the highlanders' relation to the authorities near and far, be they Habsburg or Polish officialdom, Greek Catholic clergy, or other non-Hutsuls.The first two chapters introduce the book's thesis, the Hutsuls, and the region.Chapter 1 provides information on the range of sources utilized in The Stark Carpathians while highlighting the interplay of text and ritual to come.