In Masquerade and Postsocialism Gerald Creed delves into the world of contemporary Bulgarian mumming rituals as a lens through which to critique post-1989 transformations in Eastern Europe. Creed’s primarily theoretical framework—cultural dispossession—describes the erosion or reformation of cultural options and alternatives evident in mumming rituals before their benefit or suitability in addressing the postsocialist transformation’s broader social problems could be recognized. Creed argues that the imposition of Western models of transition to democratic capitalism intrinsically favor and precipitate Western biases, both in the implementation of postsocialist structural changes and in the manner they are evaluated as successful by outsiders. By examining the radical post-1989 transformations of social relations vis-a-vis gender relations, civil society, autonomy, and community, as well as ethnicity and nationalism in contemporary mumming rituals and festivals, Creed argues that the cultural and socioeconomic reforms of the 1990s eschewed any strategies or social formations that already existed in Bulgaria, opting rather for models that sought to Europeanize Bulgaria. Using mumming rituals as an evaluative lens on Bulgarian cultural dispossession, Creed describes how the application of European models of postsocialist transformation ignored and displaced indigenous models that could have eased the transition to postsocialism.
Masquerade is the product of ten years of intermittent field research across Bulgaria. Creed began this project in part to explain the continuity and rising popularity of these pre-modern rituals in postsocialist Bulgaria. While pre-modernism or “backwardness” is often blamed for East European rejection of Western modernism (read: capitalism, democracy), Creed’s nuanced analysis reveals that the imposition of Western modernism often provoked social and political crises in the postsocialist period. Bucking many popular trends in postsocialist studies, this argument questions commonly held assumptions that supposedly backward, local conditions are to blame for Eastern Europe’s bumpy road to a strictly defined, modern (Western) capitalism and democracy in the postsocialist period.
In the first chapter, Creed presents a richly detailed ethnographic description of the kukeri and survakari rituals and organized festivals, respectively associated with New Years’ celebrations and Lenten fasts in many rural Bulgarian villages. Throughout, the author notes the tradition’s modes of transmission, variations, and historical changes in the dress and adornment and performative practices of these village rituals and stage festivals, as well as their continued role in the formation of regional and national identities.
Chapters 2 through 5 each deals with a specific theme relevant to the experience of postsocialism in Bulgaria as it is expressed in ritual performance. In each chapter, Creed tackles a thematic problem of postsocialist studies as it relates to broader scholarship and theory; the author then analyzes how mumming practices reveal processes of cultural dispossession relevant to these themes. In the process, Creed uses mumming practices to flesh out socio-cultural paths not taken in the postsocialist period and the effect of Western-centric reforms on the mumming tradition and society at large.
In an examination of gender and sexuality in chapter 2, Creed analyzes mumming ensembles as a key site for the creation and mediation of hegemonic, homophobic masculinities in postsocialist Bulgaria. Creed argues that this particular expression of masculinity developed recently as a result of neoliberal changes in the division of and access to labor opportunities, as well as global visibility of minority sexualities, causing performers to reinterpret and compensate for arguably homoerotic elements of their rituals.
Chapter 3 critiques Western-style civil society as the singularly acceptable path to modern democracy. Creed argues that the postsocialist, pro-Western turn delegitimized informal networks of the socialist and earlier periods. He argues that mumming organizations fulfilled many roles as civic organizations on village and national levels that NGOs are now unable or unwilling to fulfill. Evaluating the role of mumming organizations in village life, Creed describes how Western democracy’s civil society, as a civilizing force of performative democratization (114-115), operated as an ineffective, self-fulfilling prophecy of 1990s reforms.
Creed takes aim at the epistemological basis of community and autonomy in the East European context of post-socialism in chapter 4. He maintains that conflict and autonomy are fundamental components of a local variant of community. Creed’s analysis contradicts the popular argument that socialist atomization destroyed East European communality by illustrating how mumming organizations mediate conflict between individuals and households within the community and reinforce communal sentiment through ritualized conflict.
Chapter 5 addresses issues of ethnicity and nationalism in postsocialist Bulgaria, specifically as they relate to the country’s Roma minority. Creed problematizes the human rights initiatives of EU accession by illustrating how such initiatives have at times aggravated village ethnic relations. Creed argues that indigenous models of ethnic dynamics—variously termed “ambivalent inclusion” (167), “antagonistic tolerance” (168), “unequal inclusion” (183), and “ambivalent incorporation” (185)—as they are enacted in mumming rituals involving “Gypsy” characters, reveal previous, more nuanced relations between ethnic Bulgarians and Roma, which reproduce group identities and functions within the village economy.
For Creed, the cultural dispossession that underlies much of Bulgarian life, including mumming practices, represents the failures of the idealized transition to postsocialist, capitalist democracy, and attests to the Western-centric and often culturally inappropriate nature of postsocialist reforms (and studies thereof) across the region. Creed’s thorough and nuanced analysis of mumming rituals testifies in part to the popular rejection of a Western-style modernity and calls for more culturally-grounded modernities to play a larger role in postsocialist societies and politics. Throughout, this rich ethnography documents missed opportunities and depletions of alternative modernities that could have served postsocialist Bulgarian society better than neoliberal reforms since the 1990s. Nonetheless, Creed presents these already transformed mumming rituals and, presumably, other performances of “modernity in premodern drag” throughout the region, as beacons of hope for the future (216).
Creed consciously and reflexively walks the thin line connecting ethnographic specificity to broadly applicable theory. Although overall successful in this effort, future scholarship must evaluate how true his theory of cultural dispossession rings for other postsocialist societies, and establish, more generally, its applicability to other forms of expressive culture besides mumming rituals.
Overall, Masquerade presents a compelling theoretical argument for re-conceptualizing Western involvement in the failures of the postsocialist period as well as the possibility of salvaging culturally-grounded solutions for the future. Masquerade represents an important theoretical and rich ethnographic contribution to studies of postsocialist Eastern Europe with far-reaching import and application for folklorists, anthropologists, and other scholars whose work is located at the intersection of culture, postcolonialism, and postsocialism.
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[Review length: 1049 words • Review posted on January 29, 2014]