Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Nina Vlaskina
(Russian Academy of Sciences, Southern Scientific Centre)
Irina Stahl (Institute of Sociology, Romanian Academy)
Send message to Convenors
- Formats:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Performativity
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 22 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
The panel examines a variety of cases in which people adapt old rituals (both secular and religious) to coincide with the circumstances of changing environments. Causes and agents of change, challenges and mechanism of adaptation etc. are explored. The round table will focus on the ongoing pandemic.
Long Abstract:
Rituals are thought to be immutable. In reality, they slowly evolve over time and space. However, sometimes they change rapidly in response to events, which challenge social cohesion. The past few decades have witnessed accelerated social and cultural transformations, induced by economic conditions, political and ideological changes, wars and the resultant migrations, a general increase in the mobility of people (rural to urban and vice versa), plagues, natural disasters and new technologies. These events have resulted in people adapting old rituals (secular and religious) to coincide with the rules of the new environments. Changing old rituals often occasions resistance and even conflicts (e.g., the religiously faithful's objections to changes in the administration of the Holy Eucharist during the Covid-19 pandemic).
The panel addresses the following or related themes: changes in rituals (what aspects can be changed and what remains unchanged), causes and agents of change, challenges and mechanism of adaptation, loss of rituals, cultural cohesion, place-making etc. The reconfiguring gender roles in society and in rituals respectively, rethinking the concept of health and consequently proper ritual food, praising of selective features of traditional culture (e.g., within the 'new sincerity' movement) will also be discussed. Of particular interest are examples of changes in rituals due to the Covid-19 pandemic. This will serve as the main topic of the roundtable, which will follow the panel sessions.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 22 June, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
The suffocation of the groom with a towel in the Bulgarian traditional wedding, as well as the choice of a ritual character by raising on hands (on St. Triphon's Day; Spring Fasting; Summer St. Ivan's Day; Palm Sunday) hides a connection with an ancient Turkic state ritual.
Paper long abstract:
In the paper I follow the emergence and development of ritual gestures in the Bulgarian tradition. When participating in various ritualized actions, some of them retain their physical shape and purpose, but acquire different meanings. I call them syntagmatic models of the ritual gestures, which are established through the method of studying the System of dimensions of the ritual gestures.
Throughout the Middle Ages, some Turkic peoples applied an ancient ritual, which legally confirmed the chosen khan in the supreme power. This ritual, known as "raising on a shield", was applied by Rome, Byzantium, Bulgaria in the election of emperors (kings). The main gestures of the ancient ritual are: raising a ruler sitting on a mat; his suffocation with a rope; three times asking how many years he will rule.
In the Bulgarian tradition, a week after the wedding, a ritual of suffocation of the groom is performed. He is asked three times if he wants the bride. There is no other similar ritual. But there are several in which the raising up of a person is a basic ritual act. Through this gesture the choice and status of different characters in some calendar holidays is confirmed: king of the vineyards; king of the mummers; Ivan's bride; lazarka. The preserved form of the two gestures − raise, suffocate, as well as their preserved original purpose suggests borrowing from the ancient ritual. In the paper I consider the reasons for the acceptance and existence of the two syntagmatic models.
Paper short abstract:
The focus of our attention is on the custom of making the “plague shirt”. The paper tells about the calendar holidays associated with this custom and about different paths of evolution of this custom among the Romanians of Oltenia and the Vlachs of the Timok Valley.
Paper long abstract:
The paper is based on the data of our field researches in Romanian (Vlachian) settlements of Eastern Serbia and in the villages of the Mehedinţi district in Romania. The Mehedinţi district borders Eastern Serbia along the Danube. The speakers of Oltenian Romanian subdialect live in all the settlements mentioned in the paper. The focus of our attention is on the custom of making the “plague shirt”. This custom is widespread among the Romanians, as well as among the Slavic peoples. Romanians living in Ponoarele community (Mehedinţi district, historical province Oltenia, Romania) have a calendar holiday named Plague Friday and motivated by this custom. This holiday is celebrated on one of the Fridays between Elijah’s Day (July 20) and St. Paraskeva (October 14). The legend associated with this holiday tells of a shirt made overnight to stop the plague epidemic. As we know, the Vlachs from the Timok valley have no calendar holidays associated with the “plague shirt”, but the “plague shirts” themselves are in some houses. According to information from the village of Šipikovo (Zaječar district, Eastern Serbia), men who went to the front took scraps of the “plague shirt” with them (including during the 1998–1999 war in Kosovo). The evolution of this custom in this area is obviously connected with the peculiarities of the modern history of Serbia.
Paper short abstract:
The paper analyses the changes of the ritual year of the Nekrasov Cossacks influenced by the altering natural, economic, and cultural context after their migration firstly to Turkey and then back to Russia.
Paper long abstract:
The Nekrasov Cossacks are an ethno-confessional group, which endured the adaptation to new environments twice: firstly, after Nekrasovites emigrated from Russia to Turkey, because they refused to follow church reforms in Russia in the 17th century, and secondly, after their return to Russia in the 1960s. Originated from the southern Russian provinces with agriculture as a predominant type of economy, they might preserve the sphere of the folk agricultural calendar well. But ethnolinguistic expeditions to the Nekrasovites in 2007–2012 showed only the remnants of agricultural motifs in the descriptions of the ritual year.
Analysing the causes of this, the paper follows Nekrasovites’ adaptation to the changing natural, economic, and cultural context. I pay attention to a different dominant in their economy in Turkey, where fishing acquired higher status than agriculture; the climate difference between Turkey and Southern Russia, which may cause the fact that timed calendar omens and prescriptions could lose their relevance. The necessity of religious consolidation of the Christians in the Turkish Muslim community led to the formation of the confessional dominant in the Nekrasovite’s ritual year. After their re-emigration to Russia, Nekrasovites endured the adaptation to the new rules of the Soviet atheistic society and another round of changes in the predominant activities, being settled in the region specializing in viticulture and winemaking. The following changes in the ritual system and the use of certain calendric elements (e.g. the Shrovetide round dance) as the base for the performances will be analysed.
Paper short abstract:
This paper, co-presented by an Assyriologist and a Social Anthropologist, proposes a theoretical model that tries to makes sense of both continuity and discontinuities in the celebration of New Year Festivals in the Middle East over three Millenia.
Paper long abstract:
We will first formulate our theoretical model. The longue durée of New Year festivals rests on their very specific place in the astronomical and socio-economic fields. We suggest that religious and political practices are superimposed upon this base, but that they always remain permeable to the flux of time.
We will explore Mesopotamian New Year festivals in the First Millennium BCE and see how, despite long-lasting paradigms of a unified celebration through time and space, a close reading of cuneiform sources reveal important discontinuities. We will contextualize them by pointing out the changes of configuration between the religious and political elites that accompany the shift from one Empire to the next, with special attention to the effect of the political control shifting outside the Mesopotamian heartland with the takeover of the area by the Achaemenid and Seleucid rulers.
We will then fast forward to modern Turkey, where successive generations of Kurdish nationalists managed to turn the New Year festival into a wide-scale political ritual, Newroz, that brings together millions of people who describe the event as a symbol of Kurdish culture and resistance to the oppression of the Turkish state. We will see how this led the Turkish political elite to engineer a “Nevruz” festival and then successfully use it to serve specific geopolitical goals in Central Asia.
We will conclude by coming home, to Helsinki, and looking at how the current sanitary crisis impacts the New Year festivities organized by Kurdish communities.
Paper short abstract:
In my paper I am seeking to answer how and why Hungarian wedding service providers and marrying couples started to create, re-interpret and adapt old-new wedding traditions and rites in order to regulate and break the new restricting rules impacting weddings during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Paper long abstract:
Similar to many countries worldwide, the Hungarian government introduced various restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. For instance, the number of attendees at wedding ceremonies was limited (to close relatives), in some periods wedding ceremonies were strictly regulated and even banned. Reactions of couples and the wedding industry were diverse. While some people were swimming with the tide, others were rather swimming against it, that is, they were trying to manage and carry out, modify or suspend their wedding ideas by maneuvering between social structures or manipulating rules. This also implied disregard for recognized regulating structures and the aim to change or transform them.
Besides many other things, there was a common element in these strategies and practices: social actors aimed to adapt, interpret and transform old and new wedding patterns that derive in domestic and international, personal and family examples, ethnographic descriptions, different historical sources and contemporary practices. As a result, a great number of tiny but very intimate micro-weddings took place, and official wedding ceremonies and big wedding feasts were often organized on separate dates.
In my paper I will examine these intensive acts of searching for information, the process of selecting and constituting the wedding “tradition” (‘bricolage of tradition’) based on my digital anthropological research carried out in wedding-planning groups on Facebook, online questionnaires and in-depth interviews. I am seeking to answer how and why the old, new, popular, or irregular wedding practices were used by the social actors during the special circumstances of the pandemic.