Endogamy between ethnicity and religion. Marriage and boundary construction in Voyvodovo (Bulgaria), 1900–1950

Abstract

The article explores the concept of endogamy from the viewpoint of boundary construction in social anthropology. The author summarizes scholarly accounts of endogamy that conceptualize endogamy in terms of ethnicity, race, locality, or language. She argues that to determine an endogamous group, we should proceed from the actors´ point of view and ask what criteria the actors themselves consider as culturally meaningful. On the example of marriages of Czech- and Slovak-speaking Protestants in the Bulgarian village of Voyvodovo in 1900–1950 the author shows what these marriages and the actors´ perspective reveal about the character of the us/them boundary. The data are based on a long-term anthropological fieldwork using mainly participant observation, interviews and the genealogical method, along with the analysis of the local parish registers for the period 1900–1950. The inhabitants of the village that has been habitually represented a ‘compatriot village’ in the scholarly literature are depicted as constituting their identity more on religion than on shared ethnicity. The results of the research suggest that the villagers preferred people of the same religion as marriage partners, without any regard to their ethnicity or language. The author argues that the study of marriage rules should follow the same principles anthropologists have widely applied to the study of ethnicity: i.e. to focus on the differences people consider to be significant in constructing the boundaries between groups rather than to assume objective criteria delimiting endogamous groups.

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