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.

2012 William A. Douglass Prize in Europeanist AnthropologyWinner, John D. Bell 2012 Memorial Book Prize of the Bulgarian Studies AssociationCreed's book is both ethnographically rich and theoretically significant. Moreover, it is a deeply humane book, an homage to the resilience and resourcefulness of the Bulgarian peasants whom Creed has made it his life's work to understand. Accessible to a broad audience, it is must reading for anyone interested in the costs of the 'revolutions' of 1989.Masquerade and Postsocialism would be of interest to anyone in globalization or development studies, as well as European studies. Creeds emphasis on the role of ritual and performance broadens the audience. . . Creed demonstrates that ritual, a long-standing topic of anthropology, not only serves as a useful site of analysis but can also challenge teleological ideals of Western modernity. Fall 2012Masquerade and Postsocialism is written with great sympathy for the people it describes and bears the marks of a work matured by decades of fieldwork.[A]?brilliant scholar's masterpiece.[A]n empirically rich and theoretically sophisticated analysis of the postsocialist condition in rural Bulgaria.Masquerade and Postsocialism is a valuable book flC&