and identity issues in southeastern europe - bonini baraldi

Audiovisual Media and Identity Issues in Southeastern Europe


Edited by

Eckehard Pistrick, Nicola Scaldaferri and Gretel Schwrer

Audiovisual Media and Identity Issues in Southeastern Europe, Edited by Eckehard Pistrick, Nicola Scaldaferri and Gretel Schwrer

This book first published 2011

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright 2011 by Eckehard Pistrick, Nicola Scaldaferri and Gretel Schwrer and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or

otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-4438-2930-7, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-2930-4

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface ........................................................................................................ ix Steven Feld

Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Eckehard Pistrick

Part I: The Field, the Senses and the Media

A Tool for Research, a Source for Identity Construction: Considerations and Controversies on the Use of Audiovisual Media........ 14 Nicola Scaldaferri

Noisy Images, Colourful Sounds: Representing the Senses of the Carnival Body.................................................................................. 37 Panayotis Panopoulos

From Research Materials to Collaboration Representing Three Generations of Serbian Musicians ............................................................. 51 Lorenzo Ferrarini

Filming and Screening the Gypsy Funeral Wake: Between the Representation of Sorrow and its Effect ............................... 75 Filippo Bonini Baraldi

When Local Cultural Politics, State Television and the Anthropologist Meet........................................................................................................... 86 Marica Rombou-Levidi

The Medialised Field Reflections on the Experience of Reality and the Experience of Media ................................................................... 109 Eckehard Pistrick

Table of Contents

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Part II: Constructing Southeastern Europe through Sounds and Images

Images of Folk Life in Wartimes: Austro-Hungarian Volkskunde and Photography of Southeastern Europe................................................ 130 Christian Marchetti

Multipart Singing CD Booklets as Artefacts of Bulgarian and Corsican Musical Identity....................................................................................... 149 Yves Defrance

Picturing Public Space: Ethnicity and Gender in Picture Postcards of Iraklio, Crete, at the Beginning of the 20th Century ............................ 171 Aris Anagnostopoulos

How we became what we are: Notes on a Photographic Exhibition in Northern Greece .................................................................................. 192 Antonio Maria Pusceddu

Family Photographs in Socialist Albania: State Photography and the Private Sphere ............................................................................. 210 Gilles de Rapper and Anouck Durand

Bulgarian Folk Music in National Television-Audiovisual Forms of Identity Construction........................................................................... 230 Veselka Toncheva

Questioning Socialist Folklorization: The Beltinci Folklore Festival in the Slovenian Borderland of Prekmurje .............................................. 238 Ana Hofman

Locating Local Identity in Photography The Case of Mirdita, Northern Albania ..................................................................................... 258 Andreas Hemming

Why was Iordan not Interested in Pictures of Dancing Gypsies? A Bulgarian-Romani Music Festival and the Discourse of European Civility............................................................................. 273 Eran Livni


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The Visual between Norm and Excess: Towards a Political Iconography of Postsocialist Serbia......................................................... 291 Daniel uber and Slobodan Karamani

Coda: Balkanising Taxonomy ................................................................. 312 Nela Milic

Contributors............................................................................................. 326

FILMING AND SCREENING THE GYPSY FUNERAL WAKE:

BETWEEN THE REPRESENTATION OF SORROW AND ITS EFFECT1

FILIPPO BONINI BARALDI

During the first month of my fieldwork in a Romanian Gypsy community, both parents of one of the greatest musicians of the region died of old age within a weeks time. The family organised the funeral celebrations and Gypsies came from the neighbouring villages for the funeral wake. Even though all this happened just after my arrival in Ceua, my hosts gave me permission to film the events.

Since then, I have been confronted with these images on different occasions and contexts. In the village I was constantly solicited to show the videotapes, either by the family of the deceased or by other members of the community. Back in the academic milieu, I edited one of these tapes in form of a documentary film entitled Plan-sequence dune mort crie (Crying for the dead, 2005), which I presented in university courses, at ethnographic film festivals and conferences and on informal occasions. In this article I discuss some preliminary considerations not only on the content of the film but also on the way these images were perceived by the protagonists themselves.2

In the context of funeral wakes, the complex feelings associated with death are rooted in the sentiment of jale (sorrow, grief), a sentiment that is formally represented through ritual wailing. The acoustical features of wailing (words, melodic contour, sobs and others icons of crying, see Urban 1988), together with the mourners gestures and postures, are perceived by the audience as fundamental for getting emotionally involved. My interest here is to explore how Gypsies give meaning to the fact that this formal representation of sorrow (wailing) may have an effect (moving the audience). As I will explain, what shapes the overall meaning of the ritual is the possibility of feeling the sorrow of the other, a possibility that is locally expressed by the concept of mil (pity, compassion). In other

Filming and Screening the Gypsy Funeral Wake

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words, rather than analysing how the sentiment of sorrow is culturally represented through ritual wailing, I am interested in what stands in between this formal representation and the effect on the audience. With the notions representation and effect, I am thus pointing to an affective dimension, formally constructed and intimately felt in the context of funeral celebrations and later re-proposed by means of a visual media.3

From an Anthropology of Emotions to an Anthropology of Empathy

In all domains of research it is now widely accepted that the analysis of the way people feel should not be separated from the way people think and act: affects should therefore be explored in ethnographic research in relation to local beliefs, values and cultural institutions (see among others Geertz 1973, Rosaldo 1984, Lutz and White 1986, Lutz 1988, Leavitt 1996, Pasqualino 1998, Surralles 2003). Several authors have stressed the importance of looking at the emic concepts linked to the experience of feeling and at the words used to express them (Rosaldo 1980, Lutz/Abu-Lughod 1990). Emotions are not only subjectively felt, they are also shared with others in a culturally meaningful manner. It is therefore important to examine the nature of this sharing, the social contexts in which it occurs, and the expressive means (words, postures, gestures, objects, sounds) by which it takes place. A particular role can be attributed to music, which is in many societies a privileged social activity for emotional expression and communication (Rouget 1981, Feld 1982, Lortat-Jacob 1998, Becker 2004).

Along with the analysis of how emotions are expressed and communicated in a specific cultural context, I am also concerned with a related theoretical problem: how is the process that allows a person to understand and eventually share somebody elses affective state conceived? How does this process act upon human relations? How should we treat, when studying a specific culture, the human faculty of understanding and feeling the emotions of the other, a faculty that philosophers would call emotional contagion, sympathy, or empathy (see Rousseau 1996 [1755], Sheller 2003 [1913], Petit 2004)?4 While recent research in the cognitive sciences is moving toward some important hypotheses on the psycho-physiological nature of these processes (cf. Berthoz/Jorland 2004), an anthropological approach is still lacking. At this epistemological level, a first aim could be that of gaining knowledge on the way different cultures construct concepts to explain how personal affects may be perceived and shared by others. Besides, if such

Filippo Bonini Baraldi

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concepts do exist, a related problem would be to understand how they are translated into action and therefore in what ways they structure social relations in everyday life and ritual contexts.

Mil in the Gypsy Funeral Wake During funeral wakes, the women, linked by a blood or affinal relationships with the deceased, perform ritual wailing. This practice relies on textual motifs (in Romani, the Gypsy language), partly improvised and partly standardised, which often include the Romanian word mil (pity, compassion). The most common way in which this term is employed in ritual wailing is a short sentence in a confidential and affective tone addressed to the deceased:

1. Ioi Devla, mri draga mil! Ioi God, my dear mil! 2. C manghe tu hanas mri draga mila! Because for me, you have been my dear mil!

Here the expression my mil identifies the deceased as the dearest person for the mourner, the loss of which implies a permanent loss of mil:

3. Dar me na ma nei man mil, me na ma nei man mil puie! I dont have (a) mil anymore; I dont have (a) mil anymore, my dear! 4. Na ghilyanas tuche inc, c te alman mil varecastar! If you had not gone away, I would still have mil of somebody!

The term mil suggests an affective projection of a person towards another, an emotional disposition that implies two referents: somebody has mil for/of a person with whom he/she has a strong affective relation.5 In the context of ritual wailing, this relationship is not unidirectional the mourner may have mil for the deceased but it functions in the opposite direction as well. The textual motifs take in this case the form of a rhetorical question addressed to the beloved, whose death is denounced as a lack of mil towards the mourner, who is left alone in their sorrow and grief:

5. Na has tuche mil mandar c mighes man corcorri? Dont you have mil for me that you leave me alone?

Moreover, such textual formulas do not only connect affectively the mourner to the deceased and vice-versa, they may be used to include other members of the family in the ritual discourse:


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6. Na has tuche mil amendar mamo? Dont you have mil for us, my dear?

7. Na has tuche mil lestar, c coles na ma nei les caginon? Dont you have mil for him, that now he has nobody?!

Finally, the mourner may explicitly address her discourse in the direction of the people present in the room men and women of all ages, which I will here call the audience who become in these way witnesses of the strong affective relationship that she has with the deceased person:

8. C lesche na has mil mandar, c mighel man cade ando urito! He doesnt have mil for me, that he leaves me here in the ugly[life]!

Such formulas pronounced in respect to a specific melodic line and accompanied by specific sonic cues (sobs, a harsh timbre of the voice), gestures and postural attitudes formally represent the sentiment of sorrow associated with the loss of a member of the community. This ritual duty is fulfilled by the neamuri (relatives) of the deceased, primarily women, independent of their actual sentiments.

Apart from the neamuri, who are in charge of organising the ritual and ensuring its emotional texture (Wolf 2001), many other people attend the funeral wake. The event is public and generally open to anyone who brings bread, wine or spirits. It mobilises the Gypsies of the neighbouring villages, for whom it is an occasion to meet friends, to drink and play cards. The size of the audience is dependent upon the social status of the family; usually very few gaj (non-Gypsies) are present. Along with being a good occasion for diversion from the normal rhythm of life, the strini (strangers, in reference to those who are not directly concerned by the grief of the neamuri) expect an intimate experience of sorrow that may arouse them to tears. This valorised emotional experience is partially linked to the desire to remember the deceased of their own family. The funeral wake is in this way characterised by a constant tension between the desire to reactivate a personal sentiment and the demand to participate in a communal and shared experience of sorrow.

A short anecdote may illustrate what I mean with the emotional expectations of the strini. At the occasion of the death of a man in the village, a woman who did not have close family relations with the deceased came to attend the funeral wake. She spent some time sitting on the bench near the coffin. Suddenly, she protested vigorously because the persons present in the room were talking too loudly and nobody was crying for the dead. The neamuri (relatives) where not fulfilling their role


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of constructing, through ritual wailing, the sentiment of sorrow that makes possible the fulfilment of the audiences emotional expectations: a sentiment that is regarded as crucial for the success of the funeral wake. The difference in roles and attitudes among neamuri and strini is made explicitly clear in the expressions used when referring to two different ways of crying. Gypsies of Ceua, when referring to the ritual wailing, say rovarav din ando bari mui (literally: to cry [the dead] with a big mouth, i.e. to cry at the top of ones voice), which is opposed to an intimate way of crying, of tears without words, called rovav an mande (to cry in himself/herself). While the wailing din ando bari mui, in order to be convincing, needs to be performed in a precise manner, the an mande is the spontaneous, intimate form of crying and is an experience that everyone can sympathise with.

What is important here is that Gypsies not only define two ways of crying but that they also explicitly conceptualise the affective process that ties the formal representation of sorrow (to cry with a big mouth) to its intimate effect (to cry in himself/herself). Looking at images of Gypsies from Ceua allowed me to understand that this empathic process is understood as an experience of mil: the mourner, while declaring her mil in the wailing, is at the same time constructing the mil of the audience.

Mil while Watching the Film in the Village During my fieldwork I had many occasions to watch the videos of the funerals with my hosts. Sharing images was the best way for me to explain what I was doing there, since in Ceua, filming was associated with tourism and could be easily interpreted as a form of voyeuristic intrusion. It was particularly uncomfortable to film funerals, a context that I tended to initially perceive a result of my own cultural background as private, intimate and reserved to the mourning family. To my surprise, when I started to progressively gain the trust and the friendship of the villagers, some other women told me that they wished I had been there when a member of their family had died. It would have been an opportunity for them to make a visual recording of the funeral celebration. This valorisation of the visual support became for me a good occasion to somehow play a useful role in the community, doing small visual services such as taking pictures and filming events on demand. Moreover, watching with the villagers the images that I was constantly producing for my research was a good way to collect opinions and comments on what was captured by the camera.

The first time someone asked me to play the tapes of a funeral was just


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after I had filmed Plan-squence dune mort crie. One of the daughters of the woman, who had just died, insisted to show the film the next Sunday: the day was chosen in order to allow a maximum of people to come. On Sunday the television was moved outside her house, so that everyone could watch and listen. The overt, communal dimension of the nights of the wake was reproduced at the moment of its visual projection.

The daughters asked me to play specific laments, and discussions followed on how women cried and especially on who cried the most. The daughter who had organised the event clearly took the primacy of the ritual duty, taking the images (and therefore myself) as a witness. At the end of the projection, she affirmed: Now we have seen who cried the most! The comments of the audience were also focused on the way the musicians had played and on how I had filmed the event (too much attention was paid to the actors, musicians and mourners, and not enough to the audience, the strini). Finally, many people were ready to pay me for making copies of the tapes.

Obviously, the sorrow caused by the loss of a member of the family was reinforced by watching the images of the celebration of their death. Wailing was not replicated, even if the daughters repeatedly spoke the name of the deceased out loud.6 Rather, the emotional atmosphere was closer to the intimate crying as performed by the audience during the wake (to cry in himself/herself). Watching the video, everybody was taking the same emotional posture of the audience at the wake: the one of a spectator crying intimately while looking and listening to the mourners. The video cuts allowed me to observe that when other images were suddenly played (such as when people were playing cards or drinking) the shift to a very different emotional register was immediate: the same people that were crying only seconds before were now laughing and commenting the scenes vividly.7

The strong attention given to the wailing, and the consequent arousal of emotion suggests that the audience was moved to tears by the same experience of mil declared by mourners during the wake. The role played by mil in this process of emotional contagion, or affective resonance, which is active when looking and listening to somebody elses sorrow, was confirmed by another video-screening I did two years later with a friend from the village:

Looking at the mourner filmed in Plan-squence dune mort crie, in the house of Ikola (Ik.):

Ik.: This women [the mourner] never suffered for that old women [the deceased]

F.B.B.: Why then is she crying there?


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[Several seconds of silence] Ik.: She couldnt stand that old woman. This is what I know. The old

woman was always angry with her. Right when she was going to die, she was angry.

F.B.B.: Do you think that your mother would cry if she would see her [the mourner] crying?

Ik.: Yes, if she sees someone who cries, and if she has mil for her, then she cries! If she doesnt have mil she does not cry.

[We listen and look at the wailing] Ik.: This crying too, you know, should have how to say... a sense

(rost)! How can I explain it to you If you cry the dead with your heart (din inim) and you say words, then people cry too [...]. But if you dont cry with mil, then it is not possible anymore.

F.B.B.: With mil? Ik.: That woman, as we see her there [on the video], is crying with

mil, it looks like she is crying with her soul (din suflet), but I know that she couldnt stand that old woman. [][Laughing] You see, I never cried like that with a big mouth, no

F.B.B.: Why? Ik.: I am shameful, I dont know. I cry, about myself, I cry But like

that, with a big mouth no! [laughing]. But I like when they cry like that, those [women], I like it!

Crying with mil is a way to persuade others that the sentiments are really felt in the soul (suflet), in the hearth (inim). If the mourner cries with mil, the one who looks at her and listens to her, either live or on a video, will be moved by mil. The two ways of crying with a big mouth and in himself/herself are linked with the experience of mil, a concept which in the local discourse refers both to a way of crying and to the possibility of being emotionally moved by this same act.

In order to understand this double meaning of mil in the context of funeral wakes it is necessary to look at a possible translation of the notion. At first glance, the word that fits best is that of pity, which, following Harpatts English dictionary is defined as:

A feeling or emotion of tenderness aroused by the suffering, distress, or misfortune of another, and prompting a desire for its relief. Compassion, sympathy.

This definition of pity, a sentiment that was for Rousseau (1996 [1755]) natural and anterior to rational thinking, a human quality from which derived all social virtues, is reminiscent of the experience of mil as lived by the strini the audience during the wake and during its medial representation. Having pity for somebody implies an action for its relief,


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an action that in a communal social setting may consist of being simply present at the wake, sharing the experience of sorrow.

The English word pity8 derives from the Latin pietas, which is the linguistic root of another term, piety, which is defined by the same dictionary as:

Faithfulness to the duties naturally owed to parents and relatives, superiors, etc..; dutifulness; affectionate loyalty and respect, especially to parents.

This second meaning of pietas, points to an act of social justice, of duty towards the relatives and the community. An attitude of piety is the one that characterises the neamuri (relatives) in regard to the deceased and the members of the family. Their culturally constructed form of wailing, din ando bari mui, is the act that realises this duty; mil is the tone given to this representation in order to be meaningful. Finally, the two concepts of pity and piety, different derivations of the same word pietas, both point to an emotional relation with the other. The two are nevertheless different: while the first refers to a sentiment caused by his suffering, the second is an act of justice restored.

Conclusion In conclusion, filming and then screening the images with the Gypsies of Ceua allowed me to better understand the clivage between actors (the neamuri, who have to express sorrow by crying with a big mouth) and the spectators (the strini, who expect to join the familys sorrow with more intimate crying) as well as the emotional process that is established during the wake. The act of mil (piety) arouses a sentiment of mil (pity), constructing in this way an affective bond between the family, the deceased and the members of the village community, a community that firmly states its distinctiveness by declaring: Gypsies have more mil than the gaj! (Bonini Baraldi 2008b).

The film Plan sequence dune mort crie is today perceived by Gypsies not only as the witness of a particular event but mainly as a proof of this emotional distinctiveness. In 2007, the Cit de la Musique (Paris) invited me to show the film in a non-competitive event, and Csnglo, the son of the women for whom the wake was held, accompanied me. Back to the village, he related to his family: In Paris everyone saw how we do funeral wakes, how we play and how we cry. We won the prize.


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References

Becker, Judith. 2004. Deep Listeners. Music, Emotion, and Trancing. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Berthoz, Alain and Grard Jorland (eds.) 2004. LEmpathie, Paris: Odile Jacob.

Bonini Baraldi, Filippo. 2008a. Lexprience de la musique instrumentale dans les veilles funraires des Tsiganes de Transylvanie. Frontires 20(2), 67-70.

. 2008b. The Gypsies of Ceua, Romania: An Emotional Minority. In: Rosemarie Statelova et al. (eds.), The Human World and Musical Diversity: Proceedings from the Fourth Meeting of the ICTM Study Group Music and Minorities in Varna, Bulgaria 2006. Sofia: Bulgarian Academy of Science, 255-261.

. 2010a. Lmotion en partage. Approche anthropologique dune musique tsigane de Roumanie. PhD Diss., Universit Paris Ouest Nanterre la Dfnse.

. 2010b. C'tait toi ma piti! Le discours pleur dans les veilles funraires des Tsiganes de Transylvanie. In: Claude Calame et al. (eds.), La voix acte. Pour une nouvelle ethnopotique. Paris: Kim, 221-228.

Feld, Steven. 1982. Sound and Sentiment. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Geertz, Clifford. 1973. Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.

Jorland, Grard. 2004. Lempathie, histoire dun concept. In: Alain Berthoz and Grard Jorland (eds.), LEmpathie. Paris: Odile Jacob, 19-49.

Leavitt, Steve. 1996. Meaning and Feeling in the Anthropology of Emotions. American Ethnologist 23, 514-39.

Lortat-Jacob, Bernard. 1998. Chants de Passion. Au Cur dune Confrrie de Sardaigne. Paris: Cerf.

Lutz, Catherine. 1988. Unnatural Emotions: Everyday Sentiments on a Micronesian Atoll and Their Challenge to Western Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lutz, Catherine and Lila Abu-Lughod (eds.) 1990. Language and the Politics of Emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lutz, Catherine and Geoffrey White. 1986. The Anthropology of Emotions. Annual Review of Anthropology 15, 405-36.

Pasqualino, Caterina. 1998. Dire le chant. Les Gitans Flamencos dAndalousie. Paris: CNRS, Maison des Sciences de lHomme.


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Pasqualino, Caterina. 2007. Filming Emotions.The Place of Video in Anthropology. Visual Anthropology Review 23(1), 84-91.

Petit, Jean-Luc. 2004. Empathie et intersubjectivit. In: Alain Berthoz and Grard Jorland (eds.), LEmpathie. Paris: Odile Jacob, 123-147.

Rosaldo, Michelle. 1980. Knowledge and Passion: Ilongot Notions of Self and Social Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

. 1984. Towards an Anthropology of Self and Feeling. In: Richard A. Shweder and Robert A. Levine (eds.), Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 137-157.

Rouget, Gilbert. 1981. La musique et la transe. Paris: Gallimard. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1996 [1755]. Discours sur l'origine et les

fondements de l'ingalit parmi les hommes. Paris: Librairie Gnrale Franaise.

Sheller, Max. 2003 [1913]. Nature et forme de la sympathie. Paris: Payot. Surralles, Alexandre. 2003. Au cur du sens. Perception, affectivit,

action chez les Candoshi. Paris: CNRS, Maison des Sciences de lHomme.

Urban, Greg. 1988. Ritual Wailing in Amerindian Brazil. American Anthropologist 90, 385-400.

Wolf, Richard 2001. Emotional dimensions of ritual music among the Kotas, a south Indian tribe. Ethnomusicology 45(3), 379-422.

Media Sources

Bonini Baraldi, Filippo. 2005. Plan squence d'une mort crie. Film, colour, 62.

Notes

1 The research on which this article is based was carried out thanks to a CNRS

(Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, France) doctoral grant. I wish to thank Kadryie Ramazanoglu for her suggestions and correction of the English version of this article. 2 This paper deals only with the reception of the film in the field. The issue of the

reception of the same images by Western audiences, an approach that raises numerous other questions, must be left for a later paper. On the film Plan sequence dune mort crie and the more general topic of filming emotions, see Pasqualino 2007. 3 The background for this research is given by my general interest on relations

between music and emotions. Specifically, the focus of my fieldwork with Gypsies from Ceua, a small Hungarian/Gypsy village in Transylvania, is to analyse the


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social contexts in which people cry along with music (Bonini Baraldi 2010a). Funeral celebrations are one of these contexts in which affects are modelled and expressed in a culturally meaningful form, specifically by means of ritual wailing and instrumental music (Bonini Baraldi 2008a, 2010b). 4 For an analysis of the differences between the concepts of emotional contagion,

sympathy, and empathy see Jorland 2004. 5 In the text of ritual crying one can observe two meanings and uses of the word

mil: (1) to be mil and (2) to have mil. Saying to somebody (in this case to the dead) you are my mil is a way to declare him/her you are the person for whom I feel the strongest mil. 6 Greg Urban was also asked to present his tape recordings to the relatives of a

dead man: One particularly striking example of this occurred in 1981, when I returned to the field after a six-year absence. I had brought back tapes from my previous visit, and, in particular, tapes of myth narrations by one man who had died in the interim. His wife and family requested to hear the tapes. The entire situation was emotion-laden for me as well as for the family. Even as the voice was only just beginning to come through the speaker, the widow began crying (pll), at first with tears and some intermittent cry breaks, but then gradually moving into the metrical z form, the lines becoming regular, albeit still interrupted by cry breaks. (Urban 1988: 394). 7 In a psychological sense this behavior can be interpreted in terms of an emotional

release. Concerning the social dimension, the wake has to be a distraction too, otherwise there will be no visitors. 8 I owe these insights into the concept of pietas to Georges Didi-Huberman, who

developed this topic in his course at the Ecole de Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris.

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