2014 saw the relaxation of the transition
controls that were imposed on Bulgaria after it was accepted into the EU as a
mechanism to reduce the number of workers who travelled west seeking
employment. Whilst this has been at the forefront of British media and
political discourse over the past two months, and with it this notion that
large swathes of Bulgarians teeming at the border eager to plant themselves in
the UK, this refreshing text enlightens us with the converse notion. Creed
returns to the villages of Bulgaria and their remaining residents to observe
the annual celebratory events known as kukeri
or survakari, and seeks to place them
in their new postsocialist, globalised setting.
Kukeri, or mumming
as it is known in English, is as striking in its visual display as it is unique
in the rituals that it follows in the early months of the New Year. Creed, in
his general introductory observations, describes the participants as usually
having masks, furs, bells, a staff, and an assortment of other props. A usual
celebration lasts a day or two, and starts from the making of the masks or the
unpacking of ones from past events. The acts that make up this event consist,
in varying order, of a procession, a ritual dance around a fire in an open
space in the village, trips to nearby villages or visitors from them to perform
together, setting up road blocks for ‘donations’, but all contain a central
event – the procession around each of the houses in the village.
Each participant is assigned a different role,
and each has their part to play during the proceedings. Even these adhere to
village specific protocols. All the participants are traditionally men, their varying
roles including the bride, the groom, a priest, an arap or gypsy, a bear and bear tamer, as well as other
carnivalesque figures. He describes many visits, ranging from those residents
accepting them cheerfully; to those who are obviously not playing the game, to
those who lavish food, brandy and paper money or those less able that provide
eggs, beans or coins to the guests. Mocking of the people or property through
pinching or throwing yard furniture around is to be expected. The perishable
booty is then consumed and money counted in the evening. This could be repeated
the next day.
What Creed then does is go one to describe in
more detail individual rituals but in the context of four themes: Gender and
sexuality, civil society and democracy, autonomy and community, and ethnicity
and nationalism. On the first, he looks at how gender relations have evolved
through socialism and postsocialism, and how the mumming ritual took on or
replaced lost symbolic meanings for men as women became more equal. Also, since
socialism departed a Western image of homosexuality arrived and began to alter
the way in which an all male troupe saw their innocent comradeship, especially
centered on the transvestite bride. Katherine Verdery and Jane Sugarman in their commanding review for the Slavic Review (Vol. 71, No. 1 (SPRING
2012), pp. 135-137) focus on Creed’s analysis of masculinity in this context, and
highlight his observation that prior to the transition masculinity was a ‘whole’
and took on many behaviours, but now rested on a continuum whereby being a
lesser ‘man’ equates with new ‘feminized’ behaviours. The homogenization of gender
and sexuality roles is the consequence of postsocialism. In looking
at civil society, he takes umbrage at the West’s perception of what civil
society does and what it should look like. Mumming, he argues, has taken on
this role, as the state withdrew during the transition, and it either retained
or nurtured further relations between villagers and villages. Accepting that civil
society can be formal and informal, in its interactions with the state, he sees
elements of civil society in mumming that the West tend to ignore because he
believes it is seen as a premodern ritual in a supposed modern state (i.e. a
representative democracy with a formal civil society); and thus not accepted to
be included in such classifications.
In terms of the third theme, he observes the
paradoxes of conflict and atomization & community that the rituals express
in social relations in the village. On the one hand social relations express
conflict – over booty, over who plays what roles, between the performers and
the villagers in their homes, or between rival groups. But it also showcases
unity – in the face of ‘outsiders’ such as other village troupes, arguments
between families actually underscore their unity as a ‘village’ through the
autonomy and interdependence of households. Finally, in addressing ethnicity
and nationalism, he looks at the character of the gypsy in the mumming ritual
along side the inclusion of Roma in the events themselves. Although inclusion
was ambivalent with racism still present, mumming allowed Roma to participate because
indigenous Roma (according to the villagers) were ‘their’ Roma. However, the
threat to inclusion was always from those who returned and never interacted with
the Roma on a daily basis, anchored in ethnic Bulgarian feelings of national
inferiority. And so Creed ends by mourning the
modernizing trends in mumming ritual and appearance, as a result of the
transition from socialism and the penetration of Euro-American norms.
Creed’s text does provide a provocative
insight into one cultural event that Bulgarian’s enact by weaving it into a
polemic on the legacies of socialism, the ‘transition’ and the difficulties of
postsocialism for the ‘village’ and villagers. But by describing mumming as
‘modernity in drag’ he does perhaps pine too much for what he sees as a ritual
that had better days before it, and perhaps even under socialism. But he does
this not from a rose tinted view of the ‘golden age of mumming’, but more as a
critique of how Western imaginings, assumptions and concepts have altered the
symbolism and meanings the rituals had as they were carried out by the mummers.
I would argue though that the cultural value of the ritual must still be worth
something if villagers continue to practice it, even if it has ‘modernised’ in
its attempt to be more Western. And this chimes with Creed’s pursuit to account
for the increase in the practice of mumming. The fact that the celebration
takes place owes much to the value it has to the participants and the observers,
many who travel home to witness it, despite the overarching postsocialist and
neoliberal challenges to it from outside ‘the village’.
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