Masquerade and Postsocialism: Ritual and Cultural Dispossession in Bulgaria [Paperback]

Gerald W. Creed analyzes contemporary mumming rituals in rural Bulgaria for what they reveal about life after socialismand the current state of postsocialist studies. Mumming rituals have flourished in the post-Soviet era. Elaborately costumed dancers go from house to house demanding sustenance and bestowing blessings. Through the analysis of these rites, Creed critiques key themes in postsocialist studies, including understandings of civil society and democracy, gender and sexuality, autonomy and community, and ethnicity and nationalism. He argues that these events reveal indigenous cultural resources that could have been used both practically and intellectually to ease the postsocialist reconstruction of Bulgarian society, but were not.

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Gerald Creed'sMasquerade and Postsocialism: Ritual and Cultural Dispossession in Bulgariais an empirically rich and theoretically sophisticated analysis of the postsocialist condition in rural Bulgaria. Using the Bulgarian ritual of mumming as a window onto the lived experiences of ordinary men and women, Creed masterfully explores a variety of scholarly themes.

Mumming and modernity in rural Bulgaria

2012 William A. Douglass Prize in Europeanist AnthropologyWinner, John D. Bell 2012 Memorial Book Prize of the Bulgarian Studies Association

Gerald W. Creed is Professor of Anthropology at Hunter College and the City University of New York Graduate Center, where he is Executive Officer of the Anthropology Program. He is author ofDomesticating Revolution: From Socialist Reform to Ambivalent Transition in a Bulgarian Village.

Gerald Creed has produced an unusually perceptive account of the cultural dynamics of post-Communist development in Bulgaria. His efforts not only illuminate the patterns and practices of Postsocialil³+