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c h a p t e r t w o Gender and Sexualit y Driving to the village of Brezhani in southwest Bulgaria is a fitting prelude to a mumming encounter. Located at the northern edge of the Pirin Mountains, at an elevation of nearly six hundred meters, the first-­ time visitor has the feeling of leaving the known world behind. This impression is hardly unique to foreigners; I was traveling there in 2002 with two Bul­ garian sociologists from Sofia who expressed similar sentiments. The narrow road, which doesn’t go much beyond the village, twists and turns as it ascends allowing only circumscribed views of the surroundings. Not that there is much to see beyond the forests and hills in this sparsely inhabited area. Unexpectedly, around another sharp curve, the village spreads out in front of you across a small valley below. At first picturesque in this quasi-­ Alpine setting, the charm diminishes as you approach and the signs of neglect so characteristic of rural Bulgaria in the 1990s become evident. I had been given the name of a village mumming enthusiast here by an accidental informant in another village. Inquiries at the village square revealed that he lived at the far edge of the village. When we arrived he was not at home, a common problem with this particular research protocol, so we began talking to a middle-­ aged man sitting on a pile of wood on the street across from the house. He was also a mummer, here called babugari. As we talked, a couple of young men joined us, then another, and another, until there were eight or nine, all participants in mumming and happy to tell us about it. They celebrate on New Year’s and I noted to myself, with some disap- Gender and Sexualit y 71 pointment, that direct observation might be difficult since I doubted the village was predictably accessible in the winter. This was confirmed when one of the young men told us that mumming was so popular because villagers were usually stranded in the village by snow with nothing else to do. Well into this discussion, the man we had originally been looking for returned and invited us into his house, actually his basement mehana, a sort of tavern-­ like social room with low tables, stools, and folk decor where men clearly gathered regularly. Some of the men we had been talking with joined us, a few others took off, only to return later with friends. Word had spread quickly around the village that a foreign ethnographer was interested in mum­ ming, and it produced a spontaneous gathering of mumming devotees. Before long the large room was full with twenty to thirty men of various ages, listening to the “interview” and contributing to what became a group discussion . Their effusive enthusiasm revealed more than the actual comments, which were often hard to follow or document because of the cacophony of excited voices. Luckily they had paid a videographer to tape the entire mumming ritual this year, and they played it on the conveniently located television while we talked. In this casual men’s-­ club atmosphere it was impossible to miss the link between their investment in mumming and masculinity. One young man arrived to see the video playing and complained, “We’ve watched this twenty times already since New Year’s!” and then quickly began watching again and commenting energetically. Another entered and approached a friend sitting near me and tried to convince him to come outside for a game of volleyball, to which his friend replied, “be quiet, we’re talking about babugarie here,” suggesting with his tone that this was patently more important than volleyball . In a context where collective socializing is itself a masculine attribute (cf. Loizos and Papataxiarchis 1991), the fascination with mumming as a topic for regular sociability, even displacing sport for many young men, powerfully demonstrates its link to masculinity, which in turn reveals much about its continuity and increasing fortunes in places like Brezhani. The lessons learned in Brezhani were primarily experiential. The link between mumming and masculinity was no surprise, given that the rituals were traditionally all-­ male affairs, commonly restricted to bachelors as part of their passage to manhood.1 Still, the emotional and deep engagement with mumming in a collective male context outside the ritual activity itself convinced me that it is linked to male subjectivity (that is, an individual’s sense of himself as a man) in more...

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