The Stuff of Christmas Homemaking

Abstract

The domestic burning of Yule logs on Christmas Eve is an archaic tradition characteristic of the Christian population in the central Balkans. In the fifty years following World War Two, the socialist state suppressed these and other popular religious practices. However, ethnographic research in Serbia and Montenegro in the late 1980s showed that many village households, nevertheless, preserved their traditional Christmas rituals at home, in contrast to the larger towns, in which they were practically eradicated. Even in the micro-regions, such as the Bay of Kotor, there were observable differences between more secluded rural communities, in which the open hearth is still the ritual center of the house (on which the Yule logs are burned as many as seven times during the Christmas season), and the towns in which only a few households continued with the rite (burning small logs in the wood-stove). In the early 1990s, however, a revival of domestic religious celebrations as well as their extension into the public realm has occurred. This study shows how on Christmas Eve, houses and churchyards (as well as townsquares) are being transformed into sacred places. By analyzing the temporal and spatial aspects of this ritual event, the roles that the key actors play, the actions they undertake and artifacts they use, I attempt to demonstrate how the space of everyday life is transformed into a sacred home. In the end, the meanings and functions of homemaking are discussed in a way that confronts the classic distinction between private and public ritual environs.

Emerging subdisciplines in ethnology and anthropology of Serbia: research trends at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade

“…Themes of her research include transformations of religious celebrations from the era of the monarchy, through socialism to postsocialism, the changing roles of the church, state and non-governmental organizations in organizing public celebrations of Orthodox Christmas, as well as comparison of celebration of Orthodox holidays in rural and urban, private and public settings. In addition, much attention was paid to exploring the connection between religion and politics, within the following topics: religious festivals as subversive activities in the struggle for national identity, public celebrations of Christmas as a “social drama” (in Turner’s terms) of national and local importance, symbolism in the community patron saint celebrations in the era of radical political changes, and the appearance of quasi-religious communities within secessional political movements in the time of disintegration of Yugoslavia (Vučinić Nešković 2008 , 2012d , 2015 , 2022 ). Revival of public religious festivities as a symbolic demarcation between political systems, i.e.…”

“…Literary anthropology and Anthropology of literature are novel subdisciplines in Serbian anthropology, that have been developed since the later 2000s. Experimental ethnographic writing appeared in Vučinić Nešković’s monograph Christmas in the Bay of Kotor ( 2008 ), where she explored writing in different genres to accommodate the ethnographic data collected on family, collective, and church Christmas festivities in Montenegro. Among four chapters that constitute the heart of the book, two were written as ethnographic diary, one as an ethnographic interview transcript with commentaries, and the last one as a theatre scenario.…”