Masquerade and Postsocialism: Ritual and Cultural Dispossession in Bulgaria

In this compelling and evocative study, Gerald Creed analyzes contemporary mumming rituals in rural Bulgaria for what they reveal about life after socialism-and for what they can tell us about the state of postsocialist studies. Often called kukeri or survakari, these rituals are all-consuming events, as dancers in elaborate costumes go from house to house, demanding food and drink and bestowing blessings to ward off evil and ensure fertility. Mumming has flourished in the post-Soviet era. Creed uses the analysis of mumming as a platform for critiquing 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 kukeri 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. This work makes an important contribution to the ethnographic literature on Eastern Europe and to theories of postsocialism.