G E R A L D W . C R E E D
Constituted through Conflict: Images of
Community (and Nation) in Bulgarian Rural Ritual
ABSTRACT Following the 20th anniversary of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, this article extrapolates how attention
to actual notions of community might redirect his important intervention. It suggests that locally and culturally specific ideas about collectivity
shape the experience and expectations of national-level projections. To demonstrate this outcome the analysis focuses on Bulgarian
mumming—spectacular winter rituals in which threatening masked figures transverse villages to banish evil and bring good
fortune. While these rituals clearly reinforce social solidarity, they represent a local notion of community in which conflict, both intraand
interethnic, is elemental and constitutive. This image of community does not demand consensus or homogeneity when imagined
on a national scale. Such variations in community notions may help explain the diversity of national experiences increasingly documented
by ethnographers. [Keywords: community, mumming, Roma, nationalism, Benedict Anderson]
WHY DO SOME NATIONALISMS succumb to what
Tom Nairn calls the “descent into dementia”
(1977:359), evident in subnational contests and violent
conflicts, while others avoid it? The following analysis
suggests that culturally contingent notions of “community”
may play a role. To illustrate I draw on ritual enactments
in rural Bulgaria that vividly demonstrate local notions
of collectivity. These enactments are saturated with
conflict, both among ethnic Bulgarians and between Bulgarians
and Roma, whose images permeate the rituals. I
believe these events reveal a notion of “community” that
is constituted through conflict, which may explain why
the “imagined community” of Bulgarian nationalism has
not provoked exclusions similar to those of its Balkan
neighbors. In Bulgaria, conflict is accommodated within
community notions (imagined or otherwise).
Once considered the prerogative of political science
and history, the study of nationalism has expanded within
anthropology to rival, if not eclipse, its ethnographic
predecessor: the study of ethnicity. This reflects the increasing
resonance of national identity for the people we
study (both because we have incorporated new groups
within our purview and because national concerns increasingly
impinge on groups we previously studied). But it
also reflects new understandings of nationalism beginning
in the early 1980s that laid its cultural essence bare. While
anthropologists contributed to this discovery (Gellner
1983; Handler 1984), seminal work by historians and political
scientists with anthropological sensibilities helped
spotlight the cultural forces involved in national processes
(Anderson 1991; Hobsbawn and Ranger 1983).
The work of Benedict Anderson was especially catalytic.
He saw nationalism as a change in consciousness
brought about by cultural shifts (driven by print capitalism)
which made it possible for local populations to imagine
an affinity with unknown people across large territories.
Twenty years later, his notion of “imagined communities”
informs most anthropological examinations of nationalism
and has become an accepted synonym for the nation
even among those who repugn his Marxist analytic. This
formulation has helped reveal the historical and political
construction of national ideas and attachments, but it has
been less productive in explaining why established nationalisms
often generate new exclusions or why nationalism
produces such different consequences in different places. I
believe that this is because scholars, following Anderson’s
lead, have focused almost solely on the imaginative quality
of nationalism without attending to the foundational
notion of community.1
This perpetuates the limitations of
Anderson’s analysis and accounts for why all the work invoking
his concept has not advanced our understanding
of nationalism proportionate to its volume. Shifting attention
to the notion of community may provide new insights
into persistent imponderables of nationalism.
How can we account for the exclusive focus on the adjective
in Anderson’s formulation? As stated, this was Anderson’s
intent in coining the phrase, but I believe so many
people have obliged because the notion of community
AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST 106(1):56–70. COPYRIGHT © 2004, AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION
reflects a taken-for-granted quality that obviates critical attention.
Despite repeated challenges and critiques this
quality continues to include images of uniformity, cohesion,
consensus, and cooperation—characteristics we
might refer to as “romantic.” The search for such a community
easily leads to social fragmentation or violence as
people strive for associations that are uniform and cohesive.
So the national tendency to spawn separatist movements,
or alternatively to construct unity through cultural
homogenization and ethnic cleansing, are best understood
not as the result of the need to materialize imagined
relations but as the product of a community conceptualization
that implies uniformity and harmony. In other words,
the major negative consequences of nationalism are not
due simply to its imaginary quality, but to the fact that it
is imagined as a community, in which the notion of community
carries romantic expectations. By extension, different
outcomes and variants of nationalism may reflect
different notions of community. If so, we need to examine
community as a culturally contingent notion and document
what it means to particular people in local and historical
contexts. This, of course, applies to community invocations
other than nationalism. Community is not just
a conceptual tool for delineating social relations but, increasingly,
a culturally specific expectation about the nature
of social relations, with consequences for anything
conceived in its image. Here I focus on its relevance for nationalism
in an effort to push beyond the rote and, consequently,
paralyzing invocation of Anderson.
This suggestion evolved from my effort to understand
why the violent nationalist conflicts pervading the Balkans
in the 1990s never spilled over into Bulgaria despite
the presence of historical animosities, ethnic minorities,
nationalist agitators, and irredentist territorial claims
equivalent to those blamed for the Yugoslav wars. Obviously,
there are a plethora of differences to explain this divergence,
but among them may be particular expectations
about community. This possibility was suggested to me by
my observations of Bulgarian mumming rituals. As elsewhere,
these masked rituals are decidedly about community,
indeed, I believe they are explicit statements on the
local nature of collectivity. In Bulgaria they are full of conflict,
contention, and selfish displays, some of which are
expressed in ethnic idioms (referencing Roma, Turks/Arabs
and “darkies”). The notion of community they suggest is
far from the romantic image that would drive division or
ethnic cleansing. Instead, they reflect a field of dense,
overlapping relationships, many of which are conflictive
and contentious.
In what follows, I examine mumming rituals in rural
Bulgaria to document a notion of community in which
conflict is not antithetical to community but, rather, a
constitutive element of community commitment and sentiment.
If we replace Anderson’s understanding of community
with this one, it may help explain Bulgaria’s particular
experience with nationalism. If so, it reveals a new
place to look for explanations of the multiple and nuanced
variations of nationalism increasingly documented by ethnographers.
To support this claim, I first attempt to document
the perpetuity of romantic assumptions about community
in analyses of nationalism. I then examine mumming
cross-culturally to verify its bearing on community relations.
From there I take up the case of Bulgarian mumming,
which I use to verify a notion of community based
in conflict. My conclusion extrapolates what such a notion
might mean when projected (imagined) onto the state.
THE LIMITS OF IMAGINATION
The concept of community has been thoroughly and repeatedly
cross-examined, but for me this is part of the fascination:
Why does community continue to be employed
so routinely and casually in academic parlance given its
excoriated past? Whether fieldwork is rural, urban, multisited,
transnational, or virtual, most contemporary anthropologists
define their foci as communities, and they
do so with almost no specification of what that means.2
Scholars seem to assume that past criticism legitimates
contemporary usage, as if earlier efforts thoroughly and
permanently redeemed the term. This assumption denies
the power of language and discourse, especially when pervasive
popular usage continually threatens to reappropriate
the term. It also rejects the conclusions of some of the
most penetrating critics of the concept, who have insisted
it must be abandoned (Leeds 1973; Young 1986).
I am not the only one concerned about the concept’s
ever-expanding popularity: Zygumunt Bauman (2001)
sees community as a postmodern security blanket, Nikolas
Rose (1999) believes it represents a new means of governance,
and Miranda Joseph (2002) implies it has become
the handmaiden of late capitalism. These various roles
may account for what Joseph aptly calls the term’s “relentless
return” (2002), usually with its romantic baggage in
tow. Elsewhere (Creed 2003) I have recounted in detail
how romantic notions eluded various critical exorcisms.
The most common dynamic, evident in research from the
late 1950s to the present, is the way criticisms of consensual
community models based on the documentation of
conflict often lead to the conclusion that there is no community,
or a crisis of community, rather than a redefinition
of the term incorporating conflict (e.g., Banfield
1958; Cancian 1992).
Other scholars have taken up the role of conflict in
group formation and dynamics. Indeed, recognizing conflict,
opposition, and contestation as constitutive of social
groups was central to both Marxist and postmodern critiques
of “culture” as a unified, homogenous concept
(Abu-Lughod 1991; Clifford 1988; Wolf 1984). However,
these indictments rarely implicated the concept of community.
Indeed, the concept of community became even
more common as a replacement for the troubled notion of
culture, suggesting a conceptual displacement of these
qualities onto “community.” As Jaenette Edwards and
Marilyn Strathern note for the English town of Alltown:
Creed • Community and Nation in Bulgaria 57
“While it is well known . . . that community is as much a
forum of gossip and the generation of stigmas as it is
about communication and respect, this divisive side is
often missing in academic commentary” (2000:151). If
conflict and contestation are assumed by most anthropologists
who use the term community, they rarely specify
this. By contrast, contemporary scholars who focus more
explicitly on the term use it precisely for its romantic connotation
(Cancian 1992; Cohen 2000; Mallon 1983; Wall
1990). These meanings are not shared by all anthropologists
who use the term, but the fact that some anthropologists
and historians use community in this way with approbation
confirms that romantic associations remain
endemic to the term at some level.
To return to the issue of nationalism, Anderson’s formulation
is perhaps the best evidence. As previously indicated,
the fact that his bedrock noun has attracted little attention
(at least compared to its imaginary qualifier)
confirms that it carries a commonsensical understanding
that needs little examination or elaboration. What is that
understanding? What is imagined in Anderson’s formulation
if not the collectivism, consensus and experiential
unity I call romantic? For Anderson, these are the very
things that print capitalism made it possible to imagine.
Among the few words he actually devotes to the community
concept, he says the nation is “imagined as a community,
because regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation
that prevail in each, the nation is always conceived
as a deep, horizontal comradeship” (1991:7). In other
words, he employs the term community precisely for its romantic
implications. He can thus conclude that (contra
Gellner) “all communities larger than primordial villages
of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined”
(1991:6). This is because the singular notion of community
he utilizes is an unattainable romantic one. He
does not even wrestle with the redundant implications of
this claim, which renders his idea of nation a metaimaginary
(an “imagined, imagined group,” if you will).
Anderson allows that communities differ in the “style
in which they are imagined” (1991:6), but for him the nation
constitutes a single style, rather than a product
shaped by culturally distinct community images. He also
recognizes different types of nationalism. This, in fact, is
one of the major contributions of his analysis, but the differences
he delineates are determined primarily by timing
(“creole pioneers” vs. “the last wave”), and the distinctive
consequences of different time frames do not pertain to
different notions of community. Community remains a
generic romantic entity. But if we reject his understanding
of community and see the notion as a cultural and historical
variable, then his framework takes on new explanatory
potential. We can start to look at how different conceptualizations
of community shape the nationalisms modeled
on them, or, perhaps, more likely, how alien notions of
community are imposed by external models of the nation.
At least one well-documented case verifies how notions
of community can shape nationalist outcomes. The
path-breaking work on Fiji by John Kelly and Martha
Kaplan (2001) challenges Anderson’s notion of imagined
communities with that of “represented communities,” in
which the legal, ritual, and electoral processes of decolonization
replace the homogenizing and identity processes of
modernity. They demonstrate how homogenous (romantic)
images of community held by the colonial authorities
produced a vision of the Fijian nation that excluded Asian
populations. Kelly and Kaplan retain the notion of community,
but they argue explicitly “against the homogenous
empty community in contemporary social theory”
(2001:30). Their notion of “represented communities” attends
to what is actually being represented, whereas Anderson’s
use of “imagined communities” assumes a particular
notion of community and focuses on how it comes
to be conceivable.
Another postcolonial case suggests a different outcome.
Partha Chatterjee’s (1993) notion of community is neither
imagined nor coterminous with the nation but, rather, an
indigenous quality that survived colonial domination to
distinguish the hybrid nationalism of the colony. For him
the presence or absence of community distinguishes different
variants of nationalism. If we purge the vestiges of
romanticism and suggest that what Chatterjee sees as a
lack of community may be a different notion of community,
then his case also supports my contention that notions
of community shape variants of nationalism. Once
we accept this we can no longer operate with vague, a priori
understandings of community. Instead, we have to decipher
culturally contingent notions of collectivity. How
do we get at these notions? One strategy is to examine
communal dramatizations such as mumming in which social
relations are vividly self-represented.
MUMMING, COMMUNITY, NATION
Mumming is a generic term for masked rituals of European
origin commonly performed at Christmas and New Years,
but also around Shrovetide and All Saints Day. Examined
comparatively, mumming practices run a gamut from ribald
house visits by groups of crudely disguised villagers to
large urban parades with elaborately costumed neighborhood
units. A mummer’s play is central to several traditions
and is often associated with the ancient origins of
theater. Its bawdy and socially transgressive masquerade
elements obviously overlap with carnival traditions. Indeed,
in Greece events that mirror Bulgarian mumming are called
“carnival” and participants “karnavalia” (Cowan 1992). Historical
accounts of carnival in Trinidad refer to participants
as mummers (Crowley 1996) and discussions of New
Orleans Mardi Gras acknowledge the contribution of
Anglo-Irish mumming traditions (Halpert 1969:54). In
one of the few efforts to characterize mumming rituals
comparatively, Herbert Halpert (1969) devised a four-part
typology of activities based on degree of formality and
location of activity: (1) the informal house visit; (2) the visit
with a formal performance or play; (3) informal wandering
58 American Anthropologist • Vol. 106, No. 1 • March 2004
around the village or town usually accompanied by boisterous
behavior; and (4) formal outdoor movements such
as processions and parades. Examples of these mumming
elements, separately and in concert, are documented
throughout Europe and the New World.
Despite significant similarities, the variety of practices
included in the category limit the value of treating mumming
as a discrete generic phenomenon, and I use the
term primarily for heuristic convenience. What we can
say, however, is that nearly all reports of mumming tell us
something about the nature of collective social relations.
Indeed, these enactments are usually explicit statements
about the nature of local social relations; as such they reveal
much about what community might mean for local
populations. As Don Handelman notes about public events
generally: “It is vital to the ongoing existence of any moreor-less
dense network of persons that there exist media
through which members communicate to themselves in
concert about the characters of their collectivities” (Handelman
1990:15). Dorothy Noyes goes further to suggest
that “community is made real in performance” (1995:468).
Mumming is the quintessential example. These are not
only archetypal “community” rituals; they are usually
symbolic commentaries on the very nature of community
relations. As Henry Glassie puts it, “mumming is a symbolic
essay on the drama of social interchange” (1975:133).
Mumming may even be constitutive. Glassie (1975:
71–72) allows that the different rhymes recited by different
mumming troops in Ireland actually helped define
community boundaries. Similarly, Michelle Bigenho (1999)
claims that the indigenous community (ayllu) in highland
Bolivia is delineated by the movement and sound of the
carnival trek—the community is actually defined by carnival
practice. Clearly these types of rituals play a particularly
significant role in relation to the categories and relations
we refer to as community.
What makes mumming even more expository in relation
to the nation is its intermediate status between family
and state ritual. While family-based rituals such as weddings
and funerals may engage entire communities, and
even invoke the nation, the focus remains on the family
unit and the ritual is usually perceived as essentially a family
event. At the other extreme, the state rituals and invented
traditions that have captivated scholars of nationalism
are more reflections of an established national image
than windows onto local understanding of community. As
Pamala Ballinger (2003) illustrates with World War II memorials,
these types of commemorations efface alternatives
in an effort to emphasize national uniformity—they
eclipse local communities. In contrast, mumming and
similar rituals do not celebrate a singular unit, nor do they
strive to replace lower-order identities with higher-order
ones. These rituals are expressly about the articulation of
the culturally significant groupings within which people
live. They present a symbolic physiology of the social organism
rather than a descriptive anatomy.
Here it is important to recall that the word nation is
rooted in ideas of relatedness by blood (Hobsbawm 1990).
This makes images of kinship and family as potentially
significant to national identifications as “community”
(Connor 1994; Williams 1995), a link obvious in the family
metaphors used for the nation such as “motherland”
and “fatherland” (Danforth 1995; Delaney 1995). Still, expectations
about relations within a “nation” are not just
family sentiments writ large. This suggests that analyses of
nationalism could benefit from looking at how notions of
family and community articulate in the worldview and
everyday life of local populations. If nations are imagined
communities, then it is certainly important that most people
experience communities through component groups
such as families (as well as the numerous other divisions
that may apply in particular contexts). In ideas about the
complexity of social relations between groups, we find expectations
often projected onto the nation. Mumming is
expressly about these ideas.
Glassie (1975) connects Irish mumming directly to the
communal ethnos associated with open-field cultivation
and the need for cooperation between village families. The
decline of the community’s socioeconomic significance
spelled the end of Irish mumming. In Newfoundland, perhaps
the most analyzed case of mumming, Gerald Sider
(1986) connects the practice to the complex communal
and family relations necessitated by the organization of
family fisheries. Mumming emerged and disappeared with
this production complex. Handelman (1990) offers an alternative
view in which mumming mediates suspicions
about outsiders, but also about the selfish stranger believed
to lurk within local residents, both of which are
threats to community. Jane Cowan (1992) reveals carnival
celebrations as an arena of struggle for opposing political
factions in a northern Greek town. These are not rituals
defined by a singular national image, but a reflection of local
community relations. What better place to grasp the
array of expectations that might inform a national entity
imagined as a community?
To make the case I suggest a literal interpretation, or
what might be called an “anti-interpretation” of these
events. Most investigations of mumming and similar rituals
rely on the notions of reversal (Bakhtin 1968) and antistructure
(Turner 1969), or what Handelman (1990:156)
suggests is better described as “inversion–reversion.” In
this paradigm, spectacular but temporary violations confirm
and affirm everyday social parameters (see also
Gluckman 1963). I am not denying the validity of these
theories, but following Abner Cohen’s (1993) analysis of
London’s Carnival, I believe some meanings are more direct.
The excessive violation of social norms in these events
seems to demand extraordinary explanation, but these efforts
deflect attention from the rituals’ more straightforward
statements. By emphasizing inversion we may miss
spectacular statements about the quotidian.
This possibility suggests that we supplement Victor
Turner and Mikhail Baktin with Clifford Geertz and read
Creed • Community and Nation in Bulgaria 59
elements of social structure into/from mumming “texts.”3
Interestingly, Geertz (1973) popularized his approach with
a rather mundane event—a cockfight, rather than a spectacle
such as mumming. Perhaps the type of event influences
the choice of interpretive theory. When the activity
seems to conform to social norms we accept a literal reading,
when it seems to violate social norms we assume it
cannot be a direct statement and opt for inversion. If so,
our preconceptions of normalcy restrict our interpretative
insights. I am suggesting that many mumming violations
may not be violations at all, but, rather, exaggerated statements
of the mundane. For example, while Glassie believes
mumming promotes social solidarity, he points out
that “the boastful, weakly motivated fight in the drama is
the kind people have seen” (1975:134). One might also
ask why Newfoundlanders are so suspicious of a person’s
real character, including their own, if experience has not
revealed good cause? Bulgarian mumming is as much
about such actual community relations as it is about reversals
or alternatives.
BULGARIAN MUMMING
Bulgarian mumming includes all the elements elaborated
by Halpert’s typology. Here, I focus on local village-based
rituals rather than the urban festivals that bring together
mumming groups from numerous villages in a paradelike
competition reminiscent of Mardi Gras or the Philadelphia
Mummer’s Parade (cf. Welch 1970). In the village context,
mumming is an agrarian ritual intended to drive off evil
spirits and bring fertility to the land, animals, and people.
Actually, the Bulgarian rituals lumped together in English
translation as mumming consist of a collection of locally
differentiated practices known by many distinct local
terms. A primary division is between New Year and prespring
activities. The latter, commonly known as kukeri,
are found throughout southeastern and south-central Bulgaria.
They are usually pegged to the beginning of Lent,
but many villages in the east have forgotten or forsaken
the connection and celebrate on the most convenient
weekend in February or early March. New Year’s mumming,
most commonly known as survakari, is found south
of Sofia in the western part of the country. It takes place
on January 1 or January 14 (New Year’s day by the old calendar).
According to Christian tradition, it is associated
with the so-called dirty days between Christmas and
Epiphany when evil spirits were thought to be active and
dangerous. Despite the links to Christian holidays, mumming
traditions are pre-Christian and only tangentially influenced
by Christianity.
Mumming practices have followed a trajectory similar
to that Gail Kligman (1981) described for c7lus* rituals in
Romania, including a transition from supernatural enactment,
to a form of local resistance under early communist
repression, to folkloric revival as national culture in late
socialism. Currently, their sheer entertainment value
seems to dominate. These “stages,” however, fail to eclipse
one another and the history of the ritual becomes part of
its current resonance. For example, supernatural expectations
continue to be significant even though many people
deny belief. Even in the strictly performative context of
folklore festivals members of the audience often ask mummers
to dance with small children. For believers this insures
a child’s health, but the skeptical may tacitly acquire
the same benefit in the guise of entertaining their child.
Moreover, the hope that mummers might bring an amorphous
luck is widespread among villagers, and research in
2002 elicited an increase of espoused belief in mumming’s
supernatural efficacy (compared to the 1980s and 1990s).
The short period of communist repression in the
1950s enhanced the value of mumming for villagers in the
postcommunist context and may have contributed to its
survival into the 21st century. Villagers point to contemporary
enactments as evidence of their past resistance to
communist control, which carries significant symbolic
capital in a postcommunist country with little history of
socialist dissent. The mumming festivals, organized by the
socialist state in an effort to convert “archaic” beliefs into
folkloric performances of nationalist value, failed to displace
village activities and actually helped sustain them.
In its effort to homogenize folk practice, the socialist state
sanctioned a very narrow model of ritual, which ultimately
could not compete with the richness and meaning
of local traditions (see Silverman 1983, 1989). Villagers
typically incorporated state-sanctioned elements into local
traditions but schemed to evade any restrictions on the
latter (Buchanan 1996). Thus, the state’s involvement
with mumming first granted it meaning as resistance
through prohibition, then facilitated its continuity
through state-sponsored festivals, which sustained divergent
village practices. Mumming thus supported and challenged
the state simultaneously. A similar relationship
continues in the postsocialist context with festivals now
organized by municipalities and underwritten by local private
enterprises, as well as the European Federation of Carnival
Cities. By participating, mummers create a picture of
cultural vitality that masks rather desperate economic
conditions and attracts tourists, but their enactments also
continue a protest against the uniform hegemonic modern
project, now in its capitalist guise.
Bulgarian mumming events are usually day-long affairs
and may span several days. Time compression of the
ritual is one of the principal changes over the last 50 years,
primarily in response to the less flexible work schedules
accompanying industrialization and state control. The
profile of participants has also changed. Traditionally all
mummers were bachelors. While young men continue to
predominate in contemporary practice, middle-aged men,
children, and a growing number of women now participate.
Participants can be grouped into a few distinct categories.
The most spectacular figures are masked creatures
whose costumes run a gamut from natural animal skins
and synthetic imitations to variations on traditional folk
costume. Their masks also vary from the ornate to the
60 American Anthropologist • Vol. 106, No. 1 • March 2004
animalistic. Many are constructed on wooden frames,
some taller than the participants who wear them, covered
with fabric, trinkets, animal skins, horns, feathers, and
even whole stuffed animals and birds (see Figures 1–3).
These mummers wear bells around their torso of the type
usually hung around the necks of livestock. The number
of bells varies inversely with the size—either a few very
large ones made especially for the purpose (Figure 2) or
30–40 smaller bells (Figure 3). The collection can be extremely
heavy, especially on a day-long trek around the
village with constant running and jumping to produce the
deafening noise that signals the mummers’ approach and
helps drive away evil.
While these figures are the most spectacular, the second
category of figures is actually more important. It centers
on a transvestite figure, usually referred to as a “bride”
or “virgin,” and her escort, commonly called a “groom” or
“fiancé” (Figures 4 and 6). This group might also include a
“priest” and other wedding participants such as in-laws
and godparents. They are usually accompanied by musicians—at
least a drummer, but, perhaps, other instruments,
if available (Figure 4).
The third category of participants includes villagers
dressed as “gypsies,” or sometimes more generic “darkies,”
who might also be marked as Middle Eastern (Figure 5).
This is a disturbing element of the ritual for anyone with
political sensitivities and testimony to the lack thereof on
the part of most participants and observers. The actors are
usually younger teenagers and adolescents who dress in
rags and blacken their faces with soot, embodying and
performing the negative stereotypes of the Roma or generic,
dark “other.”4
A fourth group of mummers includes costumed couples
which operate somewhat independently, usually
either a “gypsy” with a dancing bear, or a camel driver and
his camel (parallel to the Christmas bull and hobby horse
figures in English/Welsh mumming; see Halpert 1969:45).
In some traditions the camel dies and is brought back to
life as a promise of spring renewal, or the bear attacks and
wrestles members of the household to ensure good fortune.
A number of burlesque figures such as men dressed
as overly buxom women, doctors, and nurses might be
found among other groups, or roaming on their own, performing
lewd acts and enhancing the carnival quality of
the event.
Survakari rituals begin in the evening with the lighting
of a big bonfire on the village square. Villagers watch
as survakari circle the fire in rhythmic steps. Fires are left
FIGURE 1. New Year’s mummers from the region of Blagoevgrad, (southwestern Bulgaria), at the biannual festival of “Masquerade Games”
in Pernik (1998). (Photo by Dimitur Dobrev)
Creed • Community and Nation in Bulgaria 61
to burn out overnight and might provide the soot for the
gypsy figures the following day. As with kukeri, the main
activities commense in the morning with a gathering of
village participants, either at the village square or the
house of an organizer where masks are stored. Mummers
begin by dancing around the square and then set off to
canvass the village. En route, the masked figures jump and
dance to simple rhythms periodically culminating in a frenetic
free-for-all of jumping and noise.
Mummers visit each village house, entering the yard
through the ubiquitous gate and calling out the residents,
whom they bless with various invocations for wealth, fertility,
and agricultural abundance. They might also perform
some element of wedding ritual, throw household
items around the yard, or instigate “fights” with the men
of the house, hitting and pinching them to drive out evil
and ensure good fortune. The “priest” blesses residents
with excessive amounts of “holy water.” A circular folk
dance is often required and phallic elements carried by the
mummers, such as wooden swords or staffs, are wielded
prominently. The hosts join in and participate according
to their own proclivities: Some are very active participants,
others just passive recipients of blessings. Mummers are
rewarded with food and drink, usually homemade wine or
brandy. They also receive other gifts from the household’s
agricultural production, such as flour, beans, wool, potatoes,
or eggs. The most important gift is money: It is usually
given to the female/bride figure but also may be distributed
among other figures, notably the priest, the tzar
figure, and the musicians. “Gypsies” beg for more and
may or may not get it. The money is pooled and usually
expended on a collective banquet. Mummers might also
contribute to some village need, or use it to finance ritual
expenses, such as travel costs to mumming festivals. Many
hosts offer additional libation for the mummers to take
with them. With the help of food and drink the group gets
progressively more festive and the atmosphere is infectious.
After visiting the village homes, mummers might disperse
or join others in the village tavern. In some cases
there is a final gathering of music, dancing, and noise
making at the square, perhaps with competitions for best
costumes between individuals or groups if the village has
more than one mumming troop. Kukeri usually return to
the square for a ritual enactment of the agricultural cycle.
Masked men pull a wooden plow around the square, after
which a plowman performs a pantomime sowing and harvesting
of wheat (Figure 6). The container holding the
seeds is then rolled across the square and whether it lands
up or down foretells the future of the year’s harvest. One
of the figures, usually the bride, climbs atop the plow and
FIGURE 2. New Year’s mummers from the region of Breznik (west-central Bulgaria) at the Pernik festival in 2002.
62 American Anthropologist • Vol. 106, No. 1 • March 2004
repeats the ritual blessings that have been invoked at each
house, perhaps adding additional blessings and commentary.
In the village of Turiya this finale was replaced by a
ritual battle between the masked figures and the “darkies”
culminating in a doll that had represented a new birth
during the day’s events being thrown into the village
stream, provoking mummers to jump into the freezing
water to save it.
This description highlights only a few of the variations,
which are nearly as numerous as the ritual enactments.
Variations actually multiply each year as particular
figures disappear or take on new roles and new figures are
added (perhaps borrowed from neighboring villages). Each
event is a goldmine for symbolic analysis and the meanings
of various elements have been explored by folklorist
and ethnographers (e.g., Kraev 1996; Raichevski and Fol
1993; Stamenova 1982). Here I only wish to point out the
qualities of community these rites convey.
BULGARIAN COMMUNITY
While the above description might easily fit into a Durkheimian
model of ritual solidarity, the demonstrations of
solidarity and goodwill are interwoven with contrary images.
The very sequence of the ritual, which follows a pattern
similar to many other calendric rituals, makes the relationship
clear. Masks and costumes transform ritual participants
from members of potentially antagonistic village
families into a village entity, often at the village square (itself
a symbol of the village). They then move to household
units, verifying their independence, incorporating them
only individually, and in situ, into the collective celebration.
Solidarity is demonstrated not by a collective village
gathering but by the visit to each separate domestic space
by a small subset of residents whose disguises embody the
mythic, usually unseen, amorphous and potentially monstrous
aspects of community.
The canvass of households also reveals evident conflicts.
In some villages not all households are visited. A recent
death in the family requires avoidance, but others
who refuse to receive mummers are likely to be labeled
stingy or unsocial. Often town residents with villas in the
countryside watch the mummers go by with neither side
initiating interaction, dramatizing the rural–urban tension
so rife in Bulgaria. Ethnic tensions are demonstrated as
Roma households are usually skipped, even when the
mummers themselves include Roma. If Roma are visited, it
is likely to be “assimilated” families. When mummers include
Roma in their ranks, the reception of the mummers
by Bulgarian hosts may include negative ethnic commentary
or actions.
FIGURE 3. Pre-spring mummers in the village of Topolchane (east-central Bulgaria, 2002).
Creed • Community and Nation in Bulgaria 63
In villages where every household is visited, not all
hosts receive the mummers with equal enthusiasm. Some
view mummers as petty extortionists who must be paid off
to prevent them from reeking havoc on household property—a
threat that was purportedly more real in the past.
In these cases, the visit itself exudes resentment on the
part of the host. Mummers are resentful when their hosts
include a young man, which is read by some mummers as
a refusal to join their ranks and, thus, a tacit criticism of
their actions. In such cases even a warm reception includes
potential conflict, demonstrated by physical abuse
of the “offender” by the mummers. Reception may be enhanced
by kin connections between participants and
hosts, reminding the mummers that family has not been
totally eclipsed by their ritual status. In fact, the ritual is
most animated when members of the host family are also
mummers, which threatens the symbolic division between
mummers as representatives of the community and
individual families. In such cases, the evident increase in
conviviality is countered by more exaggerated enactments
of conflict in the form of fighting, theft, and destructive
behavior. These actions effectively reassert opposition in
those cases where it is least structurally apparent.
It is also significant that the central figures of mumming
are identified with family-based ritual roles. This is
most explicit in the survakari wedding, but it is also evident
in kukeri celebrations where the female is usually associated
with either recent or impending marriage or recent
childbirth. The family symbolism is further affirmed
by the gifts handed over to the mummers, which are symbolic
of dowry/wedding or christening gifts. So the mummers
as community figures tap into the symbolism of family
ritual to acquire community offerings: Apparently, the
community can only be affirmed through the manipulation
and use of the family.5
I refer to these events as
“metarituals” since they consciously reference and manipulate
other rituals and, thereby, underline the centrality
of the component at the same time they provide a different
message. The fact that mummers depend on family
rituals to affirm community relations encapsulates the
kind of community they are affirming—one that is constituted
in large measure by the distinctions and possible antagonisms
between families.
Even at the collective finale the conflicts continue in
the form of symbolic bride theft and physical skirmishes
between mummers and onlookers. Theft or seduction of
the central female figure is a leitmotif in most kukeri activities
and some survakari practices. Throughout the
mumming activities—whether at the square, en route between
houses, or inside the courtyards of village houses—
FIGURE 4. New Year’s mummers, including the “bridal party” and musicians, in the village of Yardzhilovtsi (west-central Bulgaria, 1997).
64 American Anthropologist • Vol. 106, No. 1 • March 2004
men who are not mumming try to steal the bride, or in
more ribald practices have pantomime intercourse with
her. When she is visiting their yard they try to get her into
the house itself. Mummers are kept busy retrieving her.
They take the job seriously and have been known to break
doors and windows in the process. They always follow
such efforts with a ritual flogging of the thief. The attempt
to steal the female symbol of fertility and bounty is above
all a representation of the selfishness and envy that separates
village households—the desire to monopolize and
keep all the largess she represents in one’s own house. The
kukeri are charged to prevent such efforts and to punish
those who persist. While the lesson is clear, it is equally
clear that no one takes it to heart and that attempts will
continue. Perpetual enactments are not simply warnings
against such attempts but a demonstration of how such
selfishness is part and parcel of the village community.
Moreover, people gain luck and fertility from the theft and
short-term possession of the bride—despite the fact that
they are ultimately thwarted. What appears to be a demonstration
for the purpose of moral instruction is also a
contribution to the ritual objective of household fertility
and well-being. Theft is expected and has individual benefits,
just as it does in the daily life of villagers (Creed
1998:197–200).
Perhaps the clearest demonstrations of opposition are
the episodes of ritualized conflict. Mummers are fighters
and often armed with symbolic weapons. Traditionally
different mumming groups are believed to have even
fought to the death and there are legends of kukeri graveyards
where groups of kukeri were buried after deadly confrontations.
For the most part these battles are perceived
as conflicts between different villages, reinforcing the association
of mumming with the village and supporting
the idea of community solidarity against outsiders. But
there are elements of ritualized battle and conflict within
villages as well. The village of Yardzhilovtsi maintains two
large survakari groups representing two different parts of
the village and they are not allowed to cross into one another’s
territory. The culminating event at the ritual
square is nothing but a competition between the two
groups to see whose wedding is nicer, whose musicians
play better, whose masks are more impressive, and, most
importantly, who can make the most noise. Other villages
have multiple mumming groups that overlap in territory,
but the constitution of the groups still illustrate the vectors
that divide the village, noteably neighborhood, generation,
and friendship. The village of Lesichevo in central
Bulgaria has several groups of mummers organized primarily
according to friendship, and the groups only visit
FIGURE 5. Two “gypsy” figures collecting brandy during New Year’s mumming in the west-central village of Cherna Gora (1998).
Creed • Community and Nation in Bulgaria 65
households where they have friends or relatives. Some
houses might be visited by several groups, while others are
not visited at all. Evidence of any village solidarity is limited
to the village square after the canvass when all the
groups join together and where conflict in the form of
wrestling and fighting is the central activity.
Some mumming groups in Lesichevo include the figure
of a traditional peasant with whom the masked figures
fight constantly. In other words the conflict between
mummers and hosts is here incorporated symbolically
into the mumming performance itself—mumming has become
a metaritual reflection of itself, underlining the centrality
of the refracted theme of conflict. In the village of
Turiya mummers carry wooden swords and greet each
other with a patterned step that can best be described as a
mixture of sword fight and mating dance, in which swords
move between each others legs and culminate in a ritual
shaving with the sword. Their mumming day culminates
in the ritual battle between masked kukeri and the Arablike
“darkies” that could easily be viewed as a conflict between
the community and “outsiders” were it not for the
important and different role these figures played throughout
the day. They are alternately both insiders and outsiders,
as the costume of one “darkie” captured perfectly: a
jacket with the name of the village written across the back,
accompanied by a fez. The “bride” in this village is always
dressed in shalvari (baggy “Turkish” pants) and her escort
is a “darkie.”
Mumming events not only represent conflict; they
also generate it. A common conflict is over the role individuals
will portray. While there may be an unlimited
number of masked figures and gypsies, other roles, such as
the bride and members of her entourage, are limited.
Sometimes no one wants to fill these roles and someone
must be cajoled or forced to do so, at other times multiple
individuals want to play the same role and someone must
be denied. In either case conflicts may result. Mumming
can generate conflicts between villagers who think they
should lead the event, or between leaders and mummers
over how heavy-handed leadership should be. Mummers
or villagers may get angry with participants who are not
performing their role adequately, especially at festivals in
which they are judged as a group in competition for
awards. Mock battles can escalate into real fighting when
one combatant decides the other has crossed the line from
horseplay into aggression. All these possibilities become
more probable with more drinking, which is itself a possible
bone of contention.
In many villages the event has lead to conflicts between
the mummers and the secretary of the village “reading
room” (chitalishte) who was officially responsible for
village cultural activities during the socialist era. The
FIGURE 6. Pantomime plowing, led by transvestite bride, in the village of Kabile (east-central Bulgaria) during pre-spring mumming in 1988.
66 American Anthropologist • Vol. 106, No. 1 • March 2004
conflicts might be aesthetic or organizational, but they are
usually financial. In many villages the secretary previously
coordinated mumming activities and received part of the
money collected to buy books or other cultural materials.
Now that the secretary has few state resources or rewards
to return to the mummers they have begun to insist on
keeping the collected money for their own uses, which
erodes the secretary’s interest in the event. The declining
role of this official has opened up new possibilities for organizational
conflict between participants. Conflicts also
emerge over ritual innovation with some villagers insisting
on “traditional” practice and others embracing novelty.
The traditionalists use the festivals and the expectations
of the ethnographers who judge them as the
justification for their concern with authenticity. They usually
carry the day at festivals, but not in village practice
where innovators are freer. Any of these conflicts can escalate
to the point of group division leading to two antagonistic
mumming groups, as in the village of Sinitevo, but
more often they end with a disgruntled individual or
group refusing to participate. Such conflict, of course, is
not always solely about mumming, which provides a convenient
vehicle for expressing other ongoing tensions in
the village.
The conflicts evident in Bulgarian mumming by no
means eclipse its collective character, and while themes of
conflict may predominate in some villages, in many cases
the communal nature of the ritual is overwhelming. Still,
the interpretations pursued here suggest that mumming
does far more than simply reinforce the village unit; it
verifies, affirms, and even produces the very contradictions
and oppositions it seems to redress.
A BALKAN EXCEPTION
In bringing together conflict and cohesion Bulgarian mumming
represents village relations in a way social scientific
categories cannot easily express. This is not a case of antistructure
(Turner 1969), reversal (Bakhtin 1968), or catharsis
(Gluckman 1963), but, rather, a ritual in which the contradictions
and reversals of everyday life are given ritual expression.
In a sense Bulgarian mumming achieves the contradictory
combination of meaning and symbolism that
Sider (1986:92) suggests distinguishes mumming from
scoffing in Newfoundland. He sees mumming as expressing
the alliances between families, while scoffing—the
theft of food from covillagers for a ritual feast—expresses
the antagonisms. In Bulgaria mumming takes on both
tasks and in so doing highlights the intricate interweaving
of these two forces in Bulgarian village life. In Handelman’s
(1990) typology of public events, then, Bulgarian
mumming is not just an event of “re-presentation” (based
on the interplay of multiple possibilities though inversion),
as he categorizes Newfoundland mumming, but also
an event that “models” the world (by promoting fertility
and prosperity) and “presents” the lived-in world (by
showing the conflicts of community life). These various
roles help explain why mumming is such a fecund source
for sociocultural insights. While Handleman acknowledges
that single events can perform all three roles, he
does not suggest it occurs with mumming. This may reflect
differences between Newfoundland and Bulgaria, but
it may also stem from the tendency to approach radically
nonnormative enactments as inversions rather than dramatic
statements about the ordinary. Meanwhile, our tendency
to see them as nonnormative to start with may
stem from a romantic image of community in which consensus
and harmony, rather than conflict and contention,
are definitive.
The dangers of romanticism are not restricted to Eastern
Europe or even social scientific analysis; they exist
wherever the notion of community is deployed. The
search for a romantic community can easily lead to social
fragmentation or violence as people strive for associations
that are harmonious, uniform, and cohesive. This dynamic
may account for the continuing fragmentation and
attendant political evisceration of communities defined
by identity vectors such as ethnicity, race, or sexual orientation.
Conflicts within these groups take on added consequence
if the group is perceived as a “community” of consensus
and cooperation, in which case disputes require
division. This division and conflict may provoke calls for
community revival, which generate even more divisions
in a vicious positive feedback loop. Breaking the cycle requires
that we first interrogate the underlying ideas of
community that drive such actions.
The documentation of an alternative view of community
in rural Bulgaria brings me to the contentious claim
with which I began. The possibility that rural Bulgarians
have a notion of community that is based on conflict may
account for the lack of extreme xenophobic and virulent
nationalism in this multiethnic country. Since the beginning
of the Yugoslav crisis Bulgaria has been touted internationally
as an “oasis of stability” in the Balkans. This
distinction deflects attention from the severe economic
difficulties that have devastated much of the country
since 1989, and the significant racism and nationalism
that saturate political discourse and everyday interactions.
Still, it does reflect a distinctiveness that I have noticed
ethnographically. In numerous villages I have noted a particular
form of racist discourse regarding Roma that is derogatory
yet inclusive. Villagers complain about the Roma
yet recognize and envy their abilities and talents. This is
captured in the common expression: “Nice work, but it’s
gypsy.” This may not seem distinct from run-of-the-mill
racism, but such comments are often accompanied by inclusive
recognition of Roma as part of the village communities
where they live. Roma in the village will often be referred
to as “our” Roma, in distinction to outsiders.6
While
there is resentment about slough, theft, and begging, Bulgarians
are quick to engage Roma for work when needed
and are often generous when Roma ask for assistance with
food or money. This is not to deny the terrible oppression
visited on the Roma by the Bulgarian socialist state, which
Creed • Community and Nation in Bulgaria 67
forced them to settle and assimilate (Silverman 1996), the
success of which probably inspired subsequent efforts
against the Turkish population (Bates 1994; Creed 1990). I
do suggest, however, that these state policies did not perfectly
reflect the more ambiguous sentiments of many Bulgarians
towards Roma, which may be linked to their understandings
of community.
These sentiments are demonstrated in mumming activities.
In villages where Roma live, the “gypsy” figures in
mumming are ritually complex. They define a separate ritual
group and both their distinctiveness and their marginality
are graphically emphasized, yet they are elemental to
the activity at hand. Those who portray them indulge in
the most offensive stereotypes but their very ritual presence
and importance verifies Roma inclusion within the
village community. Indeed, their sharing of food and appeal
for money at each house is based on village cultural
obligations to provide for Roma, even though Bulgarian
villagers might resent it. In some villages, Roma participate
in mumming, and in a few villages around the city of
Sliven, they actually predominate. In addition to the typical
role of musician they also perform as masked mummers,
sometimes with costumes borrowed from ethnic
Bulgarians. I heard one report of a young Roma performing
the role of “gypsy” at a mumming festival (Manova
2002). To gauge from the profile of observers, Roma
clearly enjoy the rituals. None expressed any sense of insult
and most dismissed my effort to point it out. Ethnic
Bulgarians often complained about excessive Roma participation
but then expressed gratitude to the Roma for
sustaining an endangered local tradition. A notion of community
in which conflict is part of its very constitution
easily accommodates such ambiguity. Ethnic antagonism
is not anathema to community where community linkages
between co-nationals are also relations of conflict and
tension. The gypsy component in mumming testifies to a
community that is unavoidably diverse and antagonistic
as well as unequal. The challenge is to find ways to redress
the unequal relations between community members without
destroying the inclusiveness that the notion of “community-through-conflict”
facilitates. Increases in anti-Roma
violence and discrimination since 1989 do not augur success
in this endeavor.
Turks do not “enjoy” the same ambivalence as Roma.
Their otherness is reinforced by close association with another
nation-state (Turkey), greater geographical segregation
(most live in predominantly Turkish settlements and
regions), and a history of political domination over Bulgarians
(five centuries of Ottoman control). Consequently,
I found no evidence of Turkish participation in mumming
activities. In addition, explicitly Turkish figures in mumming,
usually Ottoman soldiers who reenacted historical
events, exhibited no evidence of the ambiguity that qualified
“gypsy” characters. Still, during fieldwork in the
1980s I heard almost no support for the state’s infamous
assimilation campaign against the Turks, and numerous
villagers actually confided their disgust and distaste for
such actions. The subsequent prospect of democratization
made many Bulgarians living in heavily Turkish areas anxious
about their future and generated anti-Turkish sentiments
(Creed 1990). Nonetheless, compared to other examples,
Bulgarian variants of nationalism seem to include
muted forms that fail to displace robust individualistic, familial,
and village alliances, while actually expecting a degree
of inevitable conflict. This quality is perhaps detectable
in the country’s much-touted refusal to deport Jews
during its alliance with Germany in World War II (Chary
1972; Todorov 2001). It is also evident in the general lack
of interest on the part of Bulgarians abroad in establishing
ethnic associations, which stands in stark contrast to the
actions of immigrant populations from other parts of the
Balkans. I believe Bulgarian mumming not only reflects
such an understanding of community/nation but also reproduces
it. As locally differentiated and identified rituals,
mumming practices deny the homogenizing imperative of
a nationalizing state. Moreover, the message they convey
is that conflict need not be centrifugal. Together these
qualities restrain nationalistic tendencies and forestall the
“descent into dementia.”7
Proving that different notions of community lead to
different consequences in “imagined” forms would require
an extended comparative analysis of neighboring
countries regarding notions of collectivity. Because other
researchers have not addressed community directly in
their research, the extrapolations required at this point
would invalidate any conclusions. Still, it is worth noting
that village-based mumming rituals are less extensive in
other parts of the Balkans. Where they are practiced, the
connection to Christianity is more significant (Cowan
1992; Supek 1982), perhaps reflecting and constituting a
more sectarian notion of community. Moreover, Robert
Hayden (1996) demonstrates that the conflicts in Yugoslavia
followed constitutional processes that made heterogenous
communities unimaginable (i.e., that perhaps
changed notions of community). Beyond the Balkans, anthropological
contributions to the study of nationalism
have alerted us to some very particular qualities of national
attachments, which might reflect unique notions of
community (Munasinghe 2002). This model also accommodates
different variants of nationalism within a nation
based on divergent images of community among different
sectors of the population (Dobrescu 2003).
Of course the inverse must also be entertained. Is it
possible that the romantic community inherent in the
model of nationalism described by Anderson (1991) can
reshape local notions of community when that model is
adopted by a state or installed by international forces? Put
another way, do European images of nationalism create
romantic expectations of community or do different notions
of community generate different nationalisms? There
is no escaping the romantic community of European nationalism.
Whether this tradition actually began in the
colonies (as Anderson suggests), or in Europe itself, it saturates
the global consensus about what constitutes a
68 American Anthropologist • Vol. 106, No. 1 • March 2004
nation. This dominance explains why Anderson could not
imagine multiple images of community. However, where
local alternatives exist, people may also envision a different
type of nation. They may work politically to install
these qualities at the state level or simply propel them
onto the national stage through everyday interactions and
spectacular enactments such as mumming. On the state
level alternative images of the nation contend: Perhaps
with shifting fortunes, perhaps with one vanquishing alternatives,
or, perhaps, with multiple versions producing
new hybrids. To even see these processes we must first recognize
the local notions of community that inform different
national imaginings.
GERALD W. CREED Department of Anthropology, Hunter College
and the Graduate Center, City University of New York,
New York, NY 10021
NOTES
Acknowledgments. This article draws on observations of mumming
made during repeated periods of fieldwork in Bulgaria between
1987–2002. The most recent periods of research and writing were
underwritten by fellowships from the Howard Foundation and the
Agrarian Studies Program at Yale University. The latter’s colloquium
series provided a critical forum for an earlier iteration, from
which this version benefited significantly. I am grateful to Donna
Buchanan and Carol Silverman, as well as the anonymous reviewers
and editors of this journal, for transformative suggestions. For
recent assistance in the field I thank Stanka Dobreva, Veska Zhivkova,
and Tsvetana Manova.
1. See Amit 2002 for a recent exception.
2. This trend is most explicit in cultural anthropology, but it is
also evident in linguistics (Johnston 1990), archeology (Canuto
and Yaeger 2000), and biological anthropology (Fleagle et al.
1999).
3. This literal reading focuses attention on the structural elements
of enactment rather than the experience of performance and does
not attend to the voices of participants. I believe the latter support
my interpretation, but space limitations do not allow their inclusion
here.
4. Blackface was central to Philadelphia mumming traditions as
well but was replaced with gold paint/makeup with increasing racial
sensitivity.
5. Interestingly, the mumming tradition of Belsnickels reported
from German communities in North America in the 19th century
also centered on a family group, including a husband, transvestite
wife, and child (Cline 1958).
6. “Our” is commonly used in Bulgarian to signal collective inclusion,
not ownership.
7. Several anthropologists (esp. Herzfeld 2003) have explored how
the quintessentially local quality of folklore comes to serve primarily
nationalist agendas and identities. This has happened in Bulgaria
as well, but as previously noted, the state failed to fully co-opt
local distinctions and meanings. This is especially true for rituals
such as mumming that continue to be performed locally and are
not defined solely by the national domain of folk festivals.
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