Modernity and the Unmaking of Men

Violeta Schubert

• Verlag: Berghahn Books
• Jahr: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781789208634
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Social Sciences
• Thema: Cultural & Social Anthropology

Responding to the renewed emphasis on the significance of village studies, this book focuses on aging bachelorhood as a site of intolerable angst when faced with rural depopulation and social precarity. Based on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork in contemporary Macedonian society, the book explores the intersections between modernity, kinship and gender. It argues that as a critical consequence of demographic rupture, changing values and societal shifts, aging bachelorhood illuminates and challenges conceptualizations of performativity and social presence.

CHAPTER 1

‘A VILLAGE IS FOR THE OLD AND DEAD’

The Disappearing Village Scape

Like leaves in spring, the young are blown away,

Without the sorrows of a slow decay;

I, like yon withered leaf, remain behind,

Nipped by the frost, and shivering in the wind;

There it abides till younger buds come on,

As I, now all my fellow-swains are gone;

Then, from the rising generation thrust,

It falls, like me, unnoticed to the dust.

—George Crabbe, 1783, The Village: Book 1, lines 206–15

In many scholarly and literary works the village scape brings forth a range of superlatives about the character and spirit of people forged by closeness to nature (the wild) and distance from modernity (the ‘city’) and the kind of stresses it compels. The subjectivity typically imposed on villagers of quaintness, lack of movement, (im)mobility of body as well as thought, serves to differentiate the modern self from past forms of being. As a time capsule that speaks to what it must have been like prior to modernity, the witnessing of a presumably ‘simpler life’ in the village becomes a reminder for many of what the moderns have gained, just as much as what has been lost in the process. The heightened sense of awareness of the imperative of movement also makes for a lament, if not a judgement, of the ‘sorrows of a slow decay’, as Crabbe (1783) describes it, in which what is left behind are those that cannot move. Indeed, the death or decay of villages has been a recurrent theme for many centuries. Moreover, the shifts and wanes of power, invasions and migration, and the currencies of politics and policies are woven into the village scape.

I draw on Appadurai’s notion of ‘scape’ in what he refers to as the ‘deeply perspectival construct, inflected very much by the historical, linguistic and political situatedness of different sorts of actors’ (1990: 296). Although Appadurai was concerned with global cultural economy, he includes ‘face-to-face groups, such as villages, neighbourhoods and families’ in the ‘multiple worlds which are constituted by the historically situated imaginations of persons and groups around the globe’ (1990: 296–97). Villages are not merely an assemblage of the multiple sites that we occupy, however; they are central to the very notion of what constitutes modernity. The rural or village scape is fundamental to the imaginings of modernity. Villages compel the necessary adjustments that need to be made in constructing and acting upon the self. They are a microcosm of intimacy, mutuality and individuation in which cultural values and political imaginaries are imbued with temporal and socio-spatial placement.

NUANCED DICHOTOMIES: THE WILD AND THE TAMED

The entrenched division between village and city is not about geographic distinction but rather a cognitive framing of modern and non-modern subjectivity. Although there are minute degrees of separation between urban and rural sites, the conceptual divide is colossal in the schema of social distance. For most people in Macedonia, asserting that a village can be ‘modern’ is an oxymoron. Being a ‘modern’ person is grounded in the distinction between urbanites (gragjani) and villagers (seljani). The most readily accessible understanding of modernity is simply that it is the opposite of the village (selo). Villages are ‘backward’ (zaostanati), and the people ‘uncouth villagers’ (prosti seljani). Some kind of marker is invariably found to point out the distastefulness of ‘village life’ (selski život) or ‘village mentality’ (selski mentalitet). The village interior serves as the sensorial and experiential construct of the nemesis (and thus the epicentre) of modernity, as a site of the wild, primitive and self-sufficient entities.

In the urban imaginary, the villager lacks the pressures of a modern existence because they are ‘closer’ to nature. A villager is considered more resourceful and self-sufficient, able to survive with what they can gather in the valleys and mountains, or with the produce of their agricultural, horticultural and pastoral endeavours. Urbanites would often compare their own plight of struggling economically with the inherent advantage of villagers who can forge a living, or at least remain afloat, by supplementing their livelihoods by working the land or exploiting natural resources. In fact, in times of economic hardship both villagers and city folk alike turn to the wild or undomesticated scapes of the village surrounds in the mountain, forest or meadows, where they collect herbs, nuts, berries, mushrooms or wood. Traditional medicines and ingredients for witchcraft and potions of healing, too, are found in these wild surrounds. The bajač (faith healer) and folk healers or traditional healers (naroden lekar) possess indigenous knowledge of the potentials of the natural surrounds. Likewise, the vegetable plot (bavča), predominantly attended to by womenfolk, is often supplemented with foraged stinging nettles and other ‘greens’ (zelje) to be found naturally.

During the communist era (1947–1991), excursions into nature were especially prolific. Cheap hotels, caravans and campsites appeared to accommodate the ‘working’ class, and busloads of schoolchildren frequently arrived seeking mountain ski lodges during winter and lakeside bathing in summer. Likewise, there was a continual scurry of youth brigades and village cooperatives undertaking mass replantings of fast disappearing forests (an activity since resurrected as ceremonial ‘National Tree-Planting Days’). And, as villages were sites of romanticism, evoking a compulsion to escape the city, many ex-villagers during this time reclaimed old family homes to build ‘weekenders’ (vikendici), or returned on weekends to maintain the bavča to supplement irregular city incomes.¹

Mountains and forests also play a significant part in the imaginary of spirituality and paying homage to particular saints. There are many ritual visits to monasteries (manastiri) that scatter the fringes of mountains and forests. Individuals or small groups also undertake spiritual sojourns on non-religiously significant saint days. Alongside such sojourners, animal herders, the occasional European trekkers and bushwalkers, and the village forester (šumar) may be seen in the distance traversing the mountains and forests. Moreover, there are locals whose affinity or attachment to the mountains and forests is especially notable. That ‘eccentric’ (odkačeni) and deviant individuals also abound in these ‘natural’ sites is often mentioned by locals. With both admiration and mirth, villagers often recount the peculiar affinity with the natural, with the wild, that some locals have, such as ‘Dragi’ who climbs the tips of the Molika pine tree to collect seeds. Another local man from a mountainous village caught national attention with the death of his ‘daughter’, a bear that he had raised from a cub who was shot in suspicious circumstances by a ‘jealous’ co-villager.

In historical and contemporary folk accounts of political troubles, mountains and forest are also most significant. Where there are no roads, and only goat or donkey tracks, the mountains afford some protection from the gaze of authorities. Roads and highways herald both civilisation and potential threats. Suspect autonomous Macedonia agitators, for instance, would escape into the mountains and forests, using them for refuge, as a source of protection, and as sites for meetings and preparation. Many older village women would retell mythic accounts of the hardships they endured being left in the villages as their menfolk escaped into the mountains to avoid the Turci (Ottoman authorities). Mountains and forest sites were the preeminent grounds of political agitation even on the eve of independence from Yugoslavia; paramilitary training occurred in many such surrounds. Furthermore, the rough terrains of mountain passes continue to be used extensively for border crossings between neighbouring states. Remote settlements meant distance from the gaze of authorities, a lesson learnt from experience that the villages and towns settled along main roadways or flatlands were the first to be invaded.² That is, the development of agriculture in the plains and valleys that compelled the creation of roads for access to markets also left these same places susceptible to rapid change and subject to the incursion of foreigners and traders and, thus, to shifting fortunes.

The precarity of remote mountain village communities is especially notable for the pastoralists and animal herders. The presence of fertile lands, resource rich mountains, and an abundance of water typically mark the ‘rich’ as opposed to the poor or ‘burnt’ villages: i.e. the truly backward from the more progressive. Yet, pastoralist communities were the first to disappear with rural depopulation. The isolation of mountain villages prevented them from taking advantage of the process of modernisation, interaction with cities and reformed modes of engagement in economic development. The development of cities may have served as points of interaction between different rural peoples, especially for the more isolated mountain villages and the folk that ‘come down’ to sell their wares, trade or visit kinfolk in lower surrounding villages. For most villagers, the pazar (bazaar, market) in the city served as a point of limited interaction with urbanites. Understandably, in some places the larger villages lying at the foothills of the mountains swelled with migrants from the mountain interior. Today, however, even the larger villages are rapidly depopulating in favour of settlement on the outskirts of nearby towns.

In the imaginary of the village scape, agriculture is the quintessential work of villagers. Agriculture continues in many ways to contribute significantly to the overall economy but the neglect of investment in services and infrastructure during the Yugoslavian period and by the various parties that formed government following independence is glaringly obvious. There is a renewed focus on rural sites today, driven by various factors such as the need to respond to the demographic ‘crisis’ of rural depopulation, political ambitions (re-zoning of electorates to consolidate power), and reform imperatives brought on by the entry of external development agency actors.³ Predictably, to counter the intensification of the processes of rural depopulation, reform of agriculture has been touted as a priority area of investment, including incentives for younger ‘farmers’ and a hope for repopulation of rural sites.⁴ But, the new paradigm of focus is ‘agriculture’ as an economic sector rather than ‘villages’ per se. Moreover, the much-worn phrase, – ‘We all wait [depend] on villages’ – no longer has any meaning since nowadays produce is largely imported and many agricultural plots lie abandoned. Paradoxically, irrespective of the precarity of many village communities, there is a tendency to gift visiting urban relatives or friends with bags full of potatoes, nuts, peppers, white cheese or pickled vegetables.

During the Yugoslavian period, the rapid urbanisation and centralisation process was especially important in reinforcing the social divide between village and city.⁵ In the ‘tremendous expansion’ concentrated in the larger cities (Spangler 1983: 90; Halpern 1975b; Buric 1976: 125), Macedonia was ‘the most urbanised republic’ in the then Yugoslavia. The modernisation policies of the Yugoslav federation greatly influenced the perceptions amongst the Macedonians that cities represented progressiveness or forward thinking. Alongside this, with the concentration of secondary and tertiary schooling in towns, the exodus of youth was inevitable. Many youths simply did not return, especially young women who had become settled in towns living with extended family members. The overwhelming trend today is migration of youths below the age of twenty-five with a relatively higher level of education (i.e. those that had settled in the cities for secondary schooling). The exodus of young, unmarried women is especially intense. In fact, youths are now generally leaving the country ‘in droves’.⁶

Such sojourns reinforce the objectification, or disconnect, between the modern urban and the closeness to nature with which villages are particularly associated. Closeness to ‘nature’ is presumed to reside within the village body. And yet, the extent of environmental degradation is massive and speaks to an ambiguous relationship with the natural surrounds. Both local villagers and city folk alike carelessly strew waste across ‘pristine’ natural sites. Likewise, there is a troubling level of deforestation and formal and informal felling of trees in order to see out the harsh winters, to fuel stoves, or to build frames for houses.

For villagers, there is an overwhelming sense of an imperative of both a contextual and symbolic disassociation with villageness. The nearness of nature, working the soil, and the comfort of ‘knowing everyone’ in the community cannot compete with the seemingly endless opportunities of self-realisation offered in the beyond. The obsessive concern with filing down the sharp edges of identification that come with asserting that one is ‘modern’ is engrained in the imaginary of village difference. For villagers, the city is a site of drama and theatre, of escaping and losing oneself in the masses. Cities offer endless possibilities of self-expression and individuality, of finding like-minded individuals based on choice (associations), rather than fixity (ascription). Urban sites invite the deviant, disillusioned and disappointed villagers, who assume that they are moderni people that have somehow been thwarted by happenstance of birth from the ‘natural’ place of modernity. Thus, although there is daily drama and theatre in the village too – gossip, people fighting, and crazy individuals that lighten the droning sense of nothingness – the lure of escape or losing oneself in a city or foreign lands (stranstvo) is all encompassing.

The problem with cities, however, is that there are often few opportunities and resources to enable one to make a living. Many ex-villagers also find themselves caught up in the derision of the ‘old city-settlers’ (stari gragjani) and, when living with or near ex-village kinfolk, there is often a continuity of the gnawing selski mentalitet they once sought to escape. Indeed, even where life in the village has become a distant memory of the ‘old house’ that lies decrepit and unused, many ex-villagers find themselves compelled at every turn to continue to illustrate their modernness. Being from a village requires a concerted effort at expulsion of a bodily and psychic essence, presumably over several generations. Denying that one is a ‘mere villager’ or, inversely, affirming that one is a ‘modern person’, is fruitless.

Recent village settlers in cities are often dismissed by stari gragjani, the ‘old’ city folk, whose imaginings of self rest with the idea of an absolute absence of any connection to a village. For gragjani, ex-villagers are stereotypically viewed as a particular kind of nuevo riche class who display their obsession with ‘new’ things in a manner that reinforces their villageness. That is, gragjani are particularly apt at distinguishing their own discernment in bodily carriage and refined tastes as speaking to their truly modern subjectivity. One socialite in the town of Bitola, for instance, said, ‘You can tell the villagers from far away’ (Seljanite se poznavat od daleku). Their villageness somehow continues to be embodied, whether they visit the city on market days (pazarenden), or live on the outskirts of towns in newly constructed houses built from money from animal herding or other village endeavours.

Villageness and village difference, in other words, continue to be crucial to identity constructions, whether as sites of historical significance or as the butt of collective jokes about the more ‘primitive’. Being a ‘modern’ person is grounded in the distinction between urbanites and villagers.⁷ The most readily accessible understanding of modernity is simply that it is the opposite of village (selo). The stereotypical view of village character is both wild and tame, stemming from baser sentiments, such as the sexual mores of some village girls. As one man from Bitola explained, ‘Women from Mariovo are enthusiastic’ (Mariovkite ženski se meraklivi). Alternatively, ‘You’re dressed like a Mariovka’ is often heard as a derogatory reference to garish or multi-coloured outfits as an indication of crassness or backwardness. Many gragjani even go so far as to relegate Macedonia itself to one big village, lacking the necessary refinements and appreciations of civilisation. This compels many gragjani to look further afield; that is, although villagers seek towns, many urbanites aspire to find an exit to the country. The pursuit of modernity is always in the beyond. The pursuit of the ideal beyond, of a place where modernity resides, makes for a country of restless individuals.

THE DEMISE OF VILLAGE COMMUNITAS

In most respects, organically formed village communities kept together by exchange and reciprocity, especially in terms of marriage, no longer exist. With rural depopulation there is a loss of memory of the unique histories and cultural traits, not only of individual but also whole bands of villages. Regardless, regionality continues to be a concrete form of identity that is typically conveyed in terms of dialect, mannerisms, dress codes, shared histories and complex interwoven social and kin relations. In the cultural typologies of regions, village bands play a crucial role in structuring identities and relations. One of these bands of villages is that of Caparsko Pole.

Caparsko Pole is situated approximately seven kilometres west of the southern city of Bitola under the Mount Pelister Ranges and is typically described as a ‘rich’ and physically ‘beautiful’ region. Accessible land in this mountainous region is limited and generally agriculturally non-productive or eroded (Dimovski-Colev and Pavlovski 1982: 13), but heavy snowfalls during winter, an abundance of water from the melting snow, and a relatively high rainfall in spring have enabled l...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on Translation
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. ’A Village Is for the Old and Dead’: The Disappearing Village Scape
• Chapter 2. A Kinship Frame of Mind
• Chapter 3. Marriage and the ‘Order’ of Life
• Chapter 4. The Invisible Significants: Women and the Androcentric Social Imaginary
• Chapter 5. The (Dis)Orderly Individual
• Chapter 6. The Decoupling of Time and Order: Aging Bachelors and the (Un)Productive Ethno-Nation
• Conclusion. On Being Stuck
• References
• Index