Engendering Song: Singing and Subjectivity at Prespa Albanian Weddings by Jane C.SugarmanReview by: John KolstiSlavic Review, Vol. 58, No. 1 (Spring, 1999), pp. 216-217Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2673018 .

Accessed: 12/06/2014 17:19

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserveand extend access to Slavic Review.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 194.29.185.230 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 17:19:44 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

216 Slavic Review

Engenderting Song: Singing and Subjectivity atPrespa Albanian Weddings. Byjane C. Sugarman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. xix, 395 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Glos- sary. Index. Photographs. Figures. Maps. Musical examples. Discography. $65.00, hard bound. $29.95, paper.

Lake Prespa is in the southwest corner of Macedonia, its shoreline shared by Greece and Albania. The Prespa District, hardly larger than the lake itself, has a mixed but predomi- nantly South Albanian (Tosk) population. Sunni Albanians (the "locals") live together with Shi'ite Bektashi families whose origins are in Kolonje, South Albania, with Mace- donian Christians, and with Turkish- and Slav-speaking Muslims. Jane Sugarman's well- researched, penetrating, and wide-ranging study brings to life the polyphonic singing that marks the weddings of a small pocket of South Albanian Muslims in Macedonia, whose wedding festivities the author examines as points "in an ongoing process through which community members actively constitute, reinscribe, challenge, or incrementally rene- gotiate the terms through which they are connected as a community" (3). Polyphonic singing-with its lead singer, support singer, and those who serve as drones-works to block conversation among participants at different ritual points in the week-long celebra- tions. Yet, at the same time, the author concludes, it effectively challenges members of the extended families involved, all of whom are expected to sing at the appropriate place and time, to continue to define themselves and their community. "It is this dialectic between singing and subjectivity, as it unfolds in the course of wedding celebrations, that is the fo- cus of this study" (4).

To Sugarman's credit, her focus is never blurred. Instead, it is continuously reinforced as she moves back and forth between 1979 and 1988, between members of the host family and guests, between Macedonian villages and North American cities, and as she analyzes even the subtlest changes in the participants' repertories and styles of singing, in the pair- ing and ordering of the singers by generation and sex, and in their sense of self-identity and community expectations, as well as the preservation and perpetuation of the Prespa "system," always in the context of the ever changing social, economic, and political reali- ties affecting personal attitudes and family loyalties. As she moves from the more tradi- tional, patriarchal settings in the Prespa District to the abrupt changes in the New World challenging family cohesiveness itself, Sugarman's innovative interpretive approach also remains focused on her need to "give particular attention to the renegotiations of mean- ing that are currently taking place among diaspora families within and through musical performance, and to the ways that musical practices may address, or mask, societal ten- sions" (26). She outlines the segments of weddings attended and recorded that will be ex- amined in the following seven chapters, beginning with the singing at the groom's and ending with the taking of the bride. She begins by analyzing the particulars of Prespa singing (chapters 2 and 3), and of the wedding ritual (chapter 4), moving on to an analy- sis of the social context of the singing (chapter 5), and from the community "to a more critical examination of the ways that singing structures that experience and engenders those who sing" (38). In chapter 8 the author turns to how Prespare are forced to restruc- ture weddings and singing in North America "so as to explore a range of new forms of subjectivity" (38).

In chapters 2-8 the reader is guided through the "Prespa system" of weddings and singing. Sugarman supplies diagrams of seating arrangements, introductions to the singer- participants, two photo galleries of the participants, the social etiquette observed, texts- and sources-of the polyphonic songs sung, their structural outlines, song notations, and, finally, a CD that allows the reader to listen to weddings in progress. While the more theo- retical sections of the chapters help join the seven scenes presented, linking some of them with wedding customs among non-Tosk neighbors in the former European provinces of the Ottoman empire, and in Muslim cultures of the eastern Mediterranean and even Indo- nesia, a rereading of the sections that focus on the singing, as Sugarman advises, helps ex- plain why these pockets of Muslim South Albanians join in singing with the two soloists as they do, and in the accompanying line dancing behind the lead dancer and support dancer as they do.

Sugarman's model anthropological study, the result of years of meticulous research

This content downloaded from 194.29.185.230 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 17:19:44 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Book Reviews 217

and field work among the Prespare, appeals not only to the ethnomusicologist but to any- one interested in the reinventing of individual, group, and national identity over time both in ancestral settings and in gurbet, "the practice of venturing abroad in search of work," and indeed in the creating of a new life and identity.

JOHN KOLSTI University of Texas

Mynule Zarady Majbutn'noho: Zhinochy Rukh naddniprians'koji Ukraiiny II polovyny XlX- pochatok XXst., storinky istorii. By Liudmyla Smoliar. Odessa: Astroprint, 1998. 408 pp. Notes. Illustrations. Tables.

Despite the somewhat poetic title (which can be translated as The Past for the Sake of the Future: Women's Movement in Eastern Ukraine in the Second Half of the Nineteenth to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century, Pages of History), this work provides a solid schol- arly and comprehensive presentation of organized women's activity within the context of social, political, economic, demographic, legal, and cultural factors in all Ukrainian areas of the Russian empire. Women provide Smoliar's focus, but the major value of the book goes beyond women's organizations. The richness of the material, the comprehensiveness of the approach, the evidence of the breadth of historical issues posed makes this a work on society in Ukraine, its relations with the local and the central government, and its interaction with all imperial organizations. By documenting the vast array of women's or- ganizations-philanthropic, self-help, anti-prostitution, educational, as well as women's clubs-Smoliar offers evidence of the viability of a network of community organizations that constitute a civil society. Smoliar has carefully studied a trove of rich primary sources from the central and regional archives of Ukraine, most hitherto totally unexplored, to supplement the information available from the equally rich published literature. Her pre- sentation of the work of the all-Russian women's movement, especially of the women's Congress of 1908, breaks new ground in both Russian and Ukrainian history. Each chap- ter, including the work of the women in the seemingly fully studied populist movement, provides the reader with new information and previously unknown personalities. The in- formation is drawn from police archives, minutes of regional organizations, some corre- spondence, memoir literature, and available secondary sources.

The introductory remarks lucidly place the development of women's organizations and feminism in Ukraine within the European context and serve to familiarize the reader with basic concepts in women's history. Smoliar's theoretical framework, while demon- strating intimate familiarity with current feminist discourse, flows from her rich archival and factual sources. She provides her view of what types of women's activities were evident from her-perusal of the sources and suggests a typology to reflect the historical develop- ment of women in the area.

The careful study of archival and other historical sources enabled Smoliar to create a comprehensive picture of Ukrainian society in the Russian empire, without the often ar- bitrary divisions into what constitutes Ukrainian national movement and what should be included under the rubric of society in the empire. Smoliar repeatedly provides implicit evidence of how false this particular dichotomy is. While her chronological reach is from 1860 through 1917, a fair amount of her material includes the period of the 1830s and 1840s. Thus, for instance, the members of the Cyrillo-Methodian brotherhood, largely known for their political programs, also developed interesting views on the education of women that eventually proved effective in helping organize enlightenment programs throughout Ukraine. The specifically Ukrainian Enlightenment Societies (Prosvita) are placed within the overall context of community life in Ukraine, and thus their popularity can be better understood than when they are situated exclusively within the context of the spread of national consciousness in Ukraine.

In her discussion of the rise of the modern democratic movements in Ukraine, Smo- liar, again drawing upon her sources, provides an integrated picture of the interaction of

This content downloaded from 194.29.185.230 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 17:19:44 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions