Paper short abstract:

Training a spotlight on women who married priests and their households – two essential yet overlooked components of Orthodox churches – from the perspective of economic anthropology can pave the way for a new approach to religious organizations of this type.

Paper long abstract:

A large body of literature within anthropology and the social sciences has demonstrated that female productive, domestic and reproductive labour has played a pivotal role for the rise and development of capitalism (e.g. Meillassoux 1980; Goddard 2000; Yanagisako 2002; Federici 2004, among many others). Taking inspiration from this research, this paper addresses the households of Orthodox priests belonging to the Bulgarian Orthodox Church as a specific form of a collective labour arrangement shaped by organizational constraints established by the Church, the encompassing economic and political conditions, and the imposed or chosen prescription of gender roles. In the Bulgarian and other Orthodox churches, marriage is a prerequisite for ordination; a viable household is a key condition for the existence of parish clergy. The paper argues that training a spotlight on women who married priests and their households – two essential yet overlooked components of Orthodox churches – from the perspective of economic anthropology can pave the way for a new approach to religious organizations of this type. A focus on priests’ wives and households allows to grasp the structural and ideological implications of evolving economic and political regimes for the resilience and transformation of Orthodox churches in a novel way.

Ethnographic fieldwork conducted since early 2023 in Sofia and Sofia region, Bulgaria, allows to distinguish between two general models of entangled domestic and church organization, determined by shifts in the occupational trajectories of priests’ wives, respectively, under late state-socialism, and after the regime change in 1989 to the present day.