Masquerade and Postsocialism: Ritual and Cultural Dispossession in Bulgaria

5. Ethnicity and Nationalism

c h a p t e r f i v e Ethnicit y and Nationalism In the winter of 2002 I began to focus pointedly on representations of Roma in mumming. Not having worked on Romani issues previously I began first with local scholars who had. By that point Romani studies was a burgeoning field for Bul­ garian researchers, justified intellectually and politically by the dearth of attention under socialism. As Isabel Fonseca (1996:129) notes, socialist political prohibitions on conducting and publishing research on Roma were reproduced by the capitalist profit motive after 1989, as publishers doubted the market for academic tomes on Roma. But Romani studies did enjoy a benefit Fonseca misses—the backing of foreign aid from Western countries in support of NGOs concerned with minority rights. In this period the line between NGOs and scholarship blurred, as scholars, like everyone else, tried to stabilize their eroding economic position by selling their knowledge and skills to the new and well-­ funded nongovernmental sector. As the apparent antithesis of state-­ dominated socialism and the foundation for the much vaunted civil society, NGOs were the darlings of Western sponsors. Some scholars formed their own NGOs to tap into the new resources. Others were hired or financed by NGOs to carry out research, which the NGOs helped publish and used as evidence of their accomplishments for their sponsors . In most cases these scholars remained in the employ of the state, constituting one of the many linkages between the purported nongovernmental and state sectors. Ethnicit y and Nationalism 163 Consequent to this flurry of activity in the 1990s, there were several specialists in Romani culture and performance for me to meet. Regardless of their areas of research, they, like all Bul­ gari­ ans, were familiar with mumming rituals and festivals. Several of them assured me that Roma did not participate in these rituals except as paid musicians. Although exclusion by ethnic Bul­ gari­ ans was acknowledged as a possible explanation, most of these commentators gave more weight to Roma’s disinterest in mumming, which, as one specialist observed, “is not part of their culture,” or, as another put it, “it is not a Gypsy tradition.” I was skeptical of this cultural essentialism, because the history of Bul­ garian folklore is full of examples in which Roma adopted Bul­ garian folk practices and rituals previously not part of Romani tradition. However, I did not doubt the substantive claim that it purported to explain. Indeed, I could not really imagine that Roma would find these rituals appealing precisely because of the derogatory Gypsy representations in many of them. Alternative explanations for disinterest, even if implausible, seemed to render the phenomenon itself more factual. A few specialists challenged this orthodoxy, assuring me that Roma certainly participated in various mumming roles, but they had not observed such involvement personally nor could they recommend a place where I might. Their lack of evidence only seemed to confirm that such cases were exceptional and minor. It was with this conviction that I arrived in the village of Gorna Aleksandrovo on February 10, 2002. I had begun the day talking with mummers in the village of Topolchane right outside the city of Sliven in east central Bulgaria as part of my effort to select a village in the area to observe a few weeks later at the beginning of Lent. One of my informants happened to mention that they were mumming that very day in some villages down the highway. This was a shock because, as mentioned in chapter 1, ethnographic discussions linked kukeri events to Lent with almost no discussion of the rather extensive juggling of dates that characterizes current practice. The colleague with whom I was traveling and I immediately looked at each other with the same thought—we had to go. I promised the informant to return to Topolchane later in the month to observe their own celebrations (which I did), and we hurriedly departed for the aforementioned villages. We headed east from Sliven and stopped first at the village of Trapoklovo , mentioned in previous chapters for its extremely aggressive mumming activities with heavy (homo)sexual symbolism. We then continued east a few more kilometers to Gorno Aleksandrovo. Upon locating the mumming party 164 Masquerade and Postsocialism there it was immediately apparent that we had stumbled upon something different. Having witnessed numerous mumming celebrations by this point, this group immediately impressed me as...