This book tackles the motivations, forms, strategies, and effects of the mnemonic engagement of the Serbian Orthodox Church (SOC) in post-Milošević Serbia. It is an interdisciplinary scholarly endeavor, relying on theories and methods developed within the contemporary “memory wave” in humanities and social sciences (e.g., Danièle Hervieu-Léger, Grace Davie, Michael Bernhard, Jan Kubik). Apart from the introduction and the conclusion, the book contains four main chapters: Dynamics between Religion and Memory in Late Modernity, The SPC within the Mnemonic Fields in Post-2000 Serbia, Memory of Suffering, and Memory of Resistance. Methodologically, this is a combination of multi-sited ethnography and context-generating historiography, with a multidisciplinary scope that also embraces the sociology of religion and memory studies. The primary sources include various documents, media outlets, and qualitative methodology data—interviews and participant observation.Remembering the past in collective and identity terms is essentially a political process, especially when bygone historical traumas are revivified in the present. The politics of memory is, in turn, inherently linked to the establishment of new collective identities and sources of political legitimacy. As far as the religious dimension is concerned, it “enables a constitution of a particular chain of memory, which transcends history. It provides continuity that reaches more nearly the foundation that feeds the consciousness of the chain and simultaneously postulates the historical fulfillment in the posterity of eschatology.” Accordingly, Dr. Roginer Hofmeister distinguishes two intertwined dimensions of mnemonic agencies in “collectivistic religions”: 1) the reproduction of religious memory itself and 2) the involvement of religious institutions in other forms of the social remembering processes. Religious memory, in her view, is understood “as the recollection of figures, events, and divine manifestations, recurrently realized through ritualized material operations and the priestly body while representing the core referential set of institutionalized religious beliefs.”The author makes her case within the mnemonic fields framed by post-socialist, post-secular, and post-conflict vistas of socially memorable events (e.g., World War II WWII public memory). She convincingly argues that the primary motivation of the SOC to enter the areas of WWII memory production was its long-standing goal of reasserting its position of power and confirming its legitimacy in the public sphere of influence in post-2000 Serbia. Accordingly, the SOC, as a dominant actor in the Serbian religious and social landscapes, could advance a wide range of mnemonic activities in both liturgical and nonliturgical contexts. For example, the SOC has developed various policies of action and interaction and has set its focus on the predominant features of a given mnemonic field. The SOC’s engagement in memorialization planning at the Holocaust site Staro Sajmište (Belgrade) serves, in the author’s view, as a typical empirical example of teasing out the SOC’s priorities and strategies toward a vast array of state or nonstate and domestic or transnational mnemonic agents. She, therefore, contends that the position of a memory “magnate,” which is present at all levels of cultural memory production, has become not only the main stratagem of the SOC’s mnemonic involvement but also its most substantial consequence.The last chapter is dedicated to the SOC’s shifting of the resistance narratives concerning occupiers during WWII in Yugoslavia. The selective view of antagonism between the Serbian royalist armed forces (Chetniks) and the Partisans has recently contributed to historical revisionism and the rehabilitation of the Serbian quisling movement. In her empirical research leading to the preparation of this chapter, the author conducted an ethnographic study of the memorial park at Ravna Gora (Serbia) as a focus of the annual commemorations of the Chetnik movement.In her conclusion, Dr. Roginer Hofmeister suggests that her analysis reveals the SOC “as a constant variable of otherwise heterogeneous and fragmented post-2000 memory production of WWII resistance. While all other agents have been appearing and disappearing, liquidly transforming and multiplying, the SOC and its rituals represent the continuity of remembering the lineage of heroic suffering in which lies a promise of eventual resurrection.” On the other hand, the Church was not able to develop “a centralized and institutionalized platform of mnemonic action beyond the liturgical plane of remembrance.”This work is, indeed, an innovative scholarship in the field of memory studies, providing an entirely new and fresh angle on the social and political role of the SOC in the twenty-first century. Although the number of books and studies covering the area of Orthodox Christianity has increased since the fall of the Berlin Wall, one may submit that there is still a huge deficit in the respective academic research concerning specialized topics such as the one presented in this monograph. Considering the chronic paucity of scholarly output dealing with the ecclesiastical politics of memory in contemporary Serbian historiography, ethnography, and sociology of religion, the present volume represents no small contribution to this particular field of research.
Milan Vukomanović (Fri,) studied this question.