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Continuities and Changes: Interrelationships of Ritual and Social Dance Contexts in Dubrovnik-Area Villages

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 March 2019

Elsie Ivancich Dunin
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Extract

This paper discusses an interrelationship of linđo dancing that occurs in both social and ritual contexts within Croatian Dubrovnik-area villages. In February 1977 during poklada (carnival), I video-recorded maškare (masqueraders), with their house-to-house visitations, a noisy procession, boisterous and outrageous antics, heavy wine drinking and the clowning of linđo dancing. During the 1976-1977 winter season I also recorded a series of social dance events in the same villages during holidays and Sunday evening dance events when only linđo was actively danced for hours. Now that several years have passed, and a theme of this symposium (held in Skierniewice, Poland, July 1994) is ritual and ritual dancing in contemporary society, I am led to analyse the process of continuities and changes related to this winter carnival (poklada) event. This paper suggests that the continuities and changes of dancing in a “ritual” event are in correlation to the changes in the music and dancing at “social” dance events, which were in turn influenced by major socio-economic changes during the 1970s and 1980s.

Type
Articles
Information
Yearbook for Traditional Music , Volume 33 , 2001 , pp. 99 - 108
Copyright
Copyright © 2001 by the International Council for Traditional Music

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References

1 I have continued to have annual contact with this area to the present time.Google Scholar

2 At the turn of the century, this same dance was known as poskočica.Google Scholar

3 Primorje (Coast) is a narrow stretch of territory from the Ombla River, north of the Dubrovnik city to the Neum District of Bosnia-Hercegovina.Google Scholar

4 A chain of seven villages in this Primorje mountainside area—Osojnik, Ljubač, Gromača, Kliševo, Mrčevo, Mravinjac and Majkovi—are about 3 to 5 kilometers inland from coastal towns and villages, and are from 1.5 to 3 kilometers from each other. Traditionally there have been intermarriages between families in these mountainside villages. Agriculturally-based, there are terraces and stone fences that divide the small hillside cultivated plots with orchards, vegetable-farming and pasture plots for cows, goats and mules.Google Scholar

5 This particular ritual is also referred to as karneval (carnival) or maškare (masqueraders). These three terms are often interchanged depending upon the context of speech.Google Scholar

6 This observation is in contrast to the “memory” of villagers when asked about maškare. They note instances of masquerading; however, in my own annual follow-up after 1977 by asking informants if poklada maškare village visitation and dancing took place as in 1977, the answer was negative each year. I stopped asking about poklada in the mid-1980s, assuming that the event had not returned to the way it was conducted in 1977.Google Scholar

7 There are no strangers. Everyone knows each other, if not by name, at least by sight. Furthermore, it is generally known who is from which village.Google Scholar

8 In Croatia, the term “kolo” usually refers to a non-partner dance in a linked circle formation, or it refers to a total dance event where the dances are in circle formations. In the Dubrovnik Primorje area, the term “kolo” refers to linđo as a partnered dance with several figures.Google Scholar

9 Descriptions were given by Moratić and Kusalo families, July 1994.Google Scholar

10 Data from Antun Moratić, president of the Gromača village council, who is also the manager of the dom, August 2001.Google Scholar

11 Only about 100 persons could fit into the old dom.Google Scholar