Fields of Wheat, Hills of Blood: Passages to Nationhood in Greek Macedonia. ANASTASIA N. KARAKASIDOU. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997; 334 pp. The recent and tragic conflicts in the Balkans have raised forcibly and anew the challenge for anthropology to provide insight into the processes of national identity formation, both in Europe and elsewhere. The virulence of the controversy over the imagery, history, and area of Macedonia has appeared most vexing to European specialists in other fields. Anastasia Karakasidou has provided a careful and thoughtful account of these processes in one locale, and on the way has faced courageously censorship and antagonism from many quarters. The story of this book's journey to publication has been told elsewhere, however, I will concern myself here with reviewing the work from within the field of anthropology. Karakasidou's book is particularly successful in illuminating the issues of class and history as they relate to the re-ignition of the Macedonian issue in the last few years. She explores the economic, political, and cultural history of a township, Assiros (including a few outlying communities), in Northern Greece using a combination of local archival resources, oral life histories, and her day-to-day encounters with the complex modes of selfpresentation and ascription that Assiriotes employed to make claims of national descent (see p. 106). By playing these sources against one another Karakasidou is able to piece together convincingly the development and maintenance of power by a set of local elites (tsorbadjidhes) who come both to dominate the economic, political, and social life of the town and to become agents for the Hellenization of the township on behalf of the emerging Greek nation-state. The scope of this ambitious undertaking is impressive, and it is clear that Karakasidou sought carefully to situate the local histories she encountered within the broader processes of national and international transformation in the region. She thus demonstrates that Assiros and its environs were heterogeneously populated under Ottoman rule and that its position on key trade routes during that period linked its development to these larger interests, ones which later competed to establish hegemony in the area The local Greek-speakers who became the tsorbadjidhes, many of whom had arrived in the region in the mid-nineteenth century from points south, began to acquire power from their central role in merchant trade under Ottoman rule, and continued to exert a great deal of influence on local affairs through to the present day. Karakasidou navigates sure-handedly through this history, following the emergence and maintenance of the power of these elites through the struggles over the region leading up to the Balkan Wars (1912), the influx of Orthodox refugees after the exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey in 1923, the turbulence of Greek political life in the interwar period, the trials of German occupation, and the loyalty-wrenching era of the Civil War. Through this economic control the local elites, alongside religious and educational measures imposed by state and church authorities, were able to establish cultural and political hegemony in the area, and thus social structure, organization, and identity in local communities were destroyed and transformed and replaced by rew strictures, organizations, images, and identities manufactured and propagated by new national ruling classes and their local agents (p. 25). It is perhaps the tinges of colonialism that Karakasidou's pointed depiction of the maneuverings of these elites reveals that may have combined with her anti-essentialist claims to raise the ire of some nationalist voices further an awareness of colonialist activity with Greeks as its agents is nearly absent from public discourse in Greece, where it is so often the portrayal of the nation and its citizens as victims of said colonialism that gets political and social mileage. …