Audiovisual Media and Identity Issues

in Southeastern Europe

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

vi

Table of Contents

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

Audiovisual Media and Identity Issues in Southeastern Europe

vii

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

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Filming and Screening the Gypsy Funeral Wake

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/AbuLughod 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

77

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:

78

Filming and Screening the Gypsy Funeral Wake

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

Filippo Bonini Baraldi

79

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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Filming and Screening the Gypsy Funeral Wake

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?

Filippo Bonini Baraldi

81

[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,

82

Filming and Screening the Gypsy Funeral Wake

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.

Filippo Bonini Baraldi

83

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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

Filippo Bonini Baraldi

85

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.