Abstract
This introduction to the collection opens up the conversation between historians and anthropologists about the practical significance and social meaning of spiritual kinship. By discussing the key findings of five anthropological studies—in Italy, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, and Moldova—we point to resemblances and differences. We examine common structural elements of the spiritual kinship system and the religious and material meanings involved. We find differing symbolic logics as well as different intensities of godparental practices, which can be described as a geographical, east-west gradient. Speaking broadly, the more to the east a place is, the more thriving the practice. In explaining the variation, ethnographic insights suggest that long-term differentiating trends are important, and also contemporary historical factors—substantial economic and political changes since the mid-twentieth century.
The five articles in this collection are based on fieldwork and archival research in central and southeastern Europe and are concerned with the ties that arise from the ritual sponsorship of baptism and marriage—generally referred to in the anthropological literature under the headings of “godparenthood” and “compadrazgo” (literally co-parenthood). They have been worked up from papers that were originally presented at a workshop on “Contemporary Ritual Kinship” organized by the Economy and Ritual Group at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. The societies differ in their recent history: four formerly communist countries with rather different policies toward religion and one Italian locality. They also differ in their longer-term religious background and in their traditional patterns of godparenthood. In three cases—Bulgaria, Transylvania (Romania), and Moldova—the predominant religion was Orthodox Christianity; and in one of these, Bulgaria, godparenthood followed the “Balkan” pattern described by Hammel. 1 The fourth is a Protestant village in Hungary, with a godparenthood system that in some ways resembles other parts of northern Europe. The fifth is a village in Carnia, northeast Italy, whose system most closely resembles the “standard” Catholic model discussed in most of the anthropological literature. Finally, the societies differ considerably in the way godparenthood has developed in the last few decades.
Taken together, the papers raise a number of important issues, both of recent history and of anthropological theory, which we will outline below. First however, we will briefly introduce the papers themselves.
The Articles
The article by Bea Vidacs, Blood Is Thicker than Water, is an in-depth ethnographic study of changes that occurred in godparenthood over the last thirty years. Vidacs did anthropological fieldwork in a Protestant community in southeast Hungary during 1980–1981 and returned in 2009–2010 combining this with quantitative questionnaire-based research. She was able to document transformations in spiritual kinship practices associated with economic modernization. Before the 1970s, godparenthood networks were widely extended, and for the most part, unrelated godparents were chosen, especially from the circle of friends of the father of the baptized child. Vidacs describes the period as thriving in communal life. Godparents were needed to populate extended networks of collective labor, whether the labor was building new houses or preparing a lavish wedding with 400 guests or digging a grave for a funeral. Later on, during the seventies, godparenthood suddenly shrunk and turned to relatives, siblings taking on the role almost exclusively, a trend that continued and deepened in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Vidacs suggests that the explanation lies in the high rate of migration to towns and cities. The circle of ritualized best friends from boyhood shrunk, collective labor declined (to the point that by her second fieldwork in 2009–2010, everyone completely relied on paid labor), and people who remained in the village were instead using godparenthood to strengthen the bonds to their departed siblings.
Monica Vasile’s paper, The Gift of the Godfather, shows the thriving variety of practice in Romania. The paper places at the center the practice of gift-giving and examines in detail what is being given, how it is given, and what meanings people attach to the act of giving. We see a variety of ways that gifts are reciprocated, and special attention is given to the monetization of the gift. Evidence extracted from ethnographic archival data suggests that the turning point when money became standard gifts was in the early 1970s, a period of increased modernization and prosperity within the Romanian socialist era. Money as gifts can suddenly polarize relationships, making some especially burdensome, infused with negative notions of debt and obligation. Today, people experience uneasiness and difficulty in dealing with cash gifts and the use of money is couched in divergent narratives, either as a corruption of social relationships or as a proof of generosity, effort, and care. Interestingly, in some areas of Romania, godparenthood is understood as a one-off ritual act at the moment of baptism or wedding and does not constitute a proper relation. After the ritual ceremony, the supposed bond falls into total oblivion on both sides, with little expectation of visits or exchanges.
Jennifer Cash’s article, Risking Debt for Honor, shows that in Moldova, godparenthood is undertaken out of a sense of debt to society. Paying this moral debt is a worthy action that brings honor to the godparents. But in a system that appears to place as much emphasis on gift-giving as in neighboring Romania, they may need to take on a substantial monetary debt in order to meet the expenses involved. Godparenthood can thus be a chancy endeavor, as vulnerable as any other human affair, and Cash shows the magnitude of this financial risk. The expenses and corresponding debts sometimes become so large that they can only be repaid by emigrating to work abroad. Potential godparents are often anxious to avoid or postpone taking on the role. And to mitigate risks, couples on the receiving end often prefer to choose “relationships from the heart” or close relatives over godparents who have good material prospects. However, due to high rates of refusal, sometimes complete strangers are chosen. Thus, rather than being planned and strategic, godparenthood choices are often based on scarcity of option and hazard.
Bulgarian Ritual Kinship (Kumstvo) by Petko Hristov gives an overview of godparenthood in Bulgaria over the last 100 years. Unlike the other societies covered in this collection, Bulgarians adhered to a model, described by Hammel, 2 in which godparenthood is inherited down the line in the male kin group. Emically, godparenthood is understood and respected as a “tradition,” as it is in other parts of eastern Europe. Hristov describes many of the customs involved and discusses academic theories concerning the origin of the institution. In Bulgaria, attacks by the socialist state on religious practice seem to have been harsher than in the Hungarian, Moldovan, or Romanian cases. In conjunction with the impact of economic modernization and urbanization, this resulted in high rates of abandonment of religious rites of passage and of the godparental relationships that they entailed. Nevertheless, godparenthood survived in memory and in secret practices. After the end of the socialist period, godparenthood began again to be celebrated. Although this was mainly on a dyadic basis, there were also some signs of a revival of the earlier model of godparenthood as an ongoing relationship between families.
Patrick Heady’s article, Priests and Midwives, starts off with a riddle, how can we understand the contradictions between the theory and practice of godparenthood? From his observations in the village of Ovasta (region of Carnia, northern Italy), “although internally consistent,” godparenthood “seems to float free from the rest of social life.” The concrete practical manifestations of godparenthood seem to be oddly insignificant in Ovasta compared to importance that local people attach to it, so Heady suggests we might look for its role elsewhere than in the immediate intricacies of everyday life, that is, to look at the symbolic and the ideological. He suggests that sacralized ties are not just another addition to the web of dyadic relationships but are connections between individuals and collectivities, creating local solidarities. Thus, he points to a similarity between godparenthood and descent-based segmentary structures described by Meyer Fortes in the case of the African Tallensi 3 or by Edward Evans-Pritchard in the case of Nuer. 4 Both systems provide a cognitive model, a way of conceiving the individual as a part of a wider group, providing background support to systems of authority and cooperation.
The Conversation between Anthropology and History
With this collection, we hope to contribute to an ongoing conversation between historians and anthropologists about the practical significance and social meaning of spiritual kinship. Although very fruitful, this conversation has had a rather odd history. In the article that virtually founded the anthropological study of spiritual kinship, Mintz and Wolf 5 drew on historical material on the origins of godparenthood as a folk-Christian institution—only to ignore these origins and meanings in an approach that treated the dyadic tie of co-parenthood as an abstract sign, whose social content could be defined by the partners involved and used strategically to construct either equal or unequal relationships and to build systems of collective solidarity.
For a period of about forty years—from the 1950s to the 1980s, this anthropological approach proved highly productive, and toward the end of that time was also taken up by historians, becoming what is now a flourishing research tradition. In recent years, historians of Europe have devoted a large number of studies and collective works to godparenthood, concentrating mostly on western Europe. A remarkable contribution to the field has come from the members of the network Patrinus, coordinated by Vincent Gourdon and Guido Alfani, which unites historians with anthropologists and other social scientists sharing a strong interest in the topic. 6
In the meantime, however, or in fact rather earlier, anthropologists had taken the discussion of god-co-parenthood in a number of other directions. Both Pitt-Rivers and Gudeman challenged the contention that ritual kin relationships could be treated as empty signs—arguing instead that the religious meaning (for Gudeman, 7 the need for purification, and for Pitt-Rivers, 8 the transmission of grace) was taken seriously by the people concerned and therefore should be taken seriously by analysts as well. The spiritual power of the relationship depended on its being seen as a disinterested gift from the godparent to the child and to the child’s parents (thus anchoring the co-parental relationship in something purer and therefore more durable) than mere self-interest. Although Pitt-Rivers and Gudeman acknowledged that the relationship might be initiated and used strategically, they concluded that the need for perceived disinterest limited the extent to which godparenthood could be co-opted for patronage or other utilitarian ends.
While Pitt-Rivers and Gudeman emphasized the religious implications of god-co-parenthood (the “god” part if you like), Hammel and Goody 9 stressed analogies with kinship. Hammel (1968) noted that godparental relationships in parts of the Balkans were inherited—taking the form of symmetric or (more usually) asymmetric exchanges between patrilineal descent lines. He pointed out that this system was formally analogous to the “elementary” systems of marriage exchange analyzed by Lévi-Strauss and argued that there was also a functional analogy in that the inherited systems of godparental exchange bound the lineages together in an enduring framework of social solidarity. If Hammel assimilated godparenthood to Lévi-Straussian “alliance theory,” Goody later connected it to the other main pillar of classic anthropological kinship studies, namely, “descent theory.” He did so by noting that the popular rituals surrounding baptism emerged during the first millennium anno Domini, at about the same time that changes in post–Roman kinship terminology indicated the abandonment of an earlier system of patrilineal kinship ties. He suggested that these baptismal relationships provided a functional replacement for the earlier patrilineal ties. He also noted that there were signs (dating back to medieval times) that the analogy between godparenthood and kinship proper was less strongly felt in northern Europe than in the Mediterranean world.
Several writers have noted analogies between god-co-parenthood and other forms of social and ritual kinship—including adoption, fosterage, milk kinship, and blood brotherhood. Like god-co-parenthood, these combine kinship imagery with a certain functional equivalence—namely, the affirmation of a degree of practical solidarity—while also including an element of choice. However, this analogy appears strongest when the relationships concerned are viewed in a particularistic way, as connections between specific individuals and families. These other forms of ritual kinship all lack a crucial component of godparenthood, namely, its universality. While people can choose whether or not to adopt or institute relationships of fosterage, milk kinship, or blood brotherhood, god-co-parenthood is not optional in the same way. Parents can (usually) choose who to invite to play the godparental role, but, at least in societies in which the institution is still flourishing, they cannot choose whether to appoint godparents for their children: they must select someone.
This brings us back to the religious significance of baptism: its role as a rite of passage, giving the individual its initial place in (Christian) society—a rite without which he or she cannot become a social person. Bloch and Guggenheim 10 put baptism in a still wider context by noting its similarities to the rituals of rebirth that are found in many cultural traditions. They argued that these rituals draw on a universal symbolic repertoire to generate ideological representations justifying relationships of unequal power. This is a version of a more general argument concerning rites of passage—and the initiator–initiand relationships to which they give rise. As theorized by Van Gennep, 11 these involve what would nowadays be called cognitive universals—a common need to understand society as a system of roles or statuses and to mark the transitions between them, combined with a common symbolic repertoire that can be drawn on to do so.
There was thus a very fruitful conversation among anthropologists themselves, going beyond the practical and strategic use of godparental relationships to include their social meanings and cognitive foundations. Some of these ideas—Goody’s in particular—drew heavily on historical literature and have in turn been taken up by historians. 12 So imagining ourselves back in the 1980s, we could say that the situation seemed set fair for a continuing and deepening conversation between the two disciplines. But then something strange happened to the conversation among anthropologists themselves. In the 1980s, the number of ethnographic publications on god-co-parenthood went into a steep decline. Since then, although some very high-quality ethnographic work has continued to be published, 13 the overall volume has slowed to a trickle—and there have been no major theoretical innovations in the last thirty years.
This abrupt decline in the quantity of work on spiritual kinship probably reflects an equally dramatic decline in the amount of anthropological research and publication on kinship in general. The reasons for the general decline in kinship research have been much discussed 14 and reflect at least in part a turning away from formal and technical approaches across the discipline as a whole. The impact on kinship was particularly pronounced, as up to that time, kinship had been the most formalized part of the discipline. Since then, mainstream kinship studies have seen a gradual recovery, starting with interpretative studies 15 but gradually extending to structural 16 and cognitive 17 work as well. We believe that it is now time for a comparable renaissance in studies of spiritual kinship and for a resumption of the dialogue with our historian colleagues. We offer this collection as a contribution to that process.
We believe that there are two ways in which the papers collected here may help to take the conversation forward: firstly, by comparing a set of different systems of god-co-parenthood, and secondly, because sociological studies show that systems of spiritual kinship have undergone a good deal of change in recent decades, and the papers in this collection provide an opportunity to look at those changes from an anthropological point of view.
Rejoining the Conversation: Accounting for Commonalities and Variation
In all of the cases in this collection, we notice more or less the same “intensity” and coherence of godparenthood as a social norm or as an ideology and set of symbols to which people refer. Be it the Carnians from Ovasta, the Moldovans, the eastern Hungarians described by Vidacs, or the Bulgarians, they all deploy an elaborate vocabulary and sets of views regarding godparenthood. However, large discrepancies can be noticed when we look at the actual content and at the intensity of practice related to godparenthood relations. Setting aside the fine distinctions, the cases can be conceived as a scale going from Italy, to Hungary, then to Bulgaria and Romania, and finally to Moldova, in function of how much practical content is “devoted” to godparenthood. In this section, we try to understand these resemblances and differences “from the inside” by looking at the formal properties that structure each of the systems.
The fundamental commonality of the different systems compared here is that all the relationships arise from the sponsorship of rites of passage: baptism in all five cases and also weddings in the Moldavian, Romanian, Bulgarian, and Italian examples. The inclusion of weddings means that the occasions for sponsorship are not limited to the rituals of rebirth discussed by Bloch and Guggenheim—but need to be looked at in a more general framework of rites of passage. As Hristov reminds us, many societies entrust the management of these rituals to affinal relatives—people who are similarly linked and differentiated by kinship ties. In this way, the rites are taken out of the hands of the immediate relatives but are nevertheless controlled by ordinary members of the local community.
The situation in Christian communities (including all the examples considered here) is strikingly different—in that the leading role in all rites of passage is taken by an ordained priest. Nonetheless, some commonalities remain. Firstly, the priest is considered a kind of universal kinsman—addressed as “father” (or as “godfather” in the Carnian example)—but nevertheless differentiated by his religious status (much as initiators in other societies would be differentiated by their affinal status). Secondly, the community at large does not entirely relinquish its control: the priest requires the endorsement of members of the lay community—who in this way take on a quasi-priestly power. This is the role that is referred to as godfather in English and by the terms kum, naş, and santul in the societies reported here. As would be expected, godparents are always in a situation of ritual superiority to their godchildren. However, there is also a second relationship—the co-parental relationship between godparents and birth parents of the same child—which is ideally one of friendship and equality.
However, within this general framework, the different societies arrange things in strikingly different ways. In the Hungarian example, the only relationship between adults is that of co-parenthood, and it is encompassed by a preexisting relationship of sworn friendship between male age-mates—which is subsequently extended to co-participants in baptismal feasts. There is no opportunity here for the accumulation or abuse of quasi-priestly power—and indeed, the priestly element was so little felt that when an alternative civil ceremony was promoted by the communist authorities, Vidacs reports that the people concerned used the same god-co-parental vocabulary regardless of whether the ceremony concerned was civil or religious.
Although firmly religious, the adult relationships established in the Carnian system are also largely egalitarian. An important point here is that although the Carnian system includes wedding sponsors, these are considered to be co-parents and thus comrades rather than superiors of the married couple. Things are different in the three Orthodox societies. In the Romanian and Moldovan examples, the wedding sponsors are godparents and thus ritually superior to the married couple themselves. Some limit to their authority is implied, nonetheless, by the fact that the wedding godparents are chosen by the couple to be. Even this limitation is absent however in the traditional Bulgarian system, in which godparenthood is inherited and whole lineages are related as kumove (godparents) and kumtsi (godchildren).
These structural differences are paralleled in interesting ways by differences in the religious and material meanings of the inter-adult relationships involved. There was a tendency in studies of Catholic systems to treat these as ideally equal—a matter of mutual confidence and trust—and to attribute inequality to the intrusion of secular relationships of economic and political power, and this analysis would probably hold for the Protestant Hungarian and Catholic Italian societies considered here. However, the fact that the Romanian and Moldovan wedding sponsors are godparents, not co-parents, introduces an inescapable element of inequality into the religious relationships between adults—making it more appropriate to think in terms of unilateral blessing than of mutual comradeship. This is equally true of the Bulgarian system, but with one further addition—the kum can curse as well as bless.
The reason why the kum might exercise his power to curse is rather interesting. He would do it to defend his right to exercise his functions in cases where his potential godchildren might be tempted to choose alternative godparents. He would do this despite the fact that exercising this right could involve him in considerable expense. This illustrates two connected points that do not emerge so clearly in the literature on Western godparenthood. The first—which has been noted, but not greatly stressed, in studies of Catholic godparenthood—is that the spiritual blessing of the godparents must always be accompanied by (one is tempted to say “embodied in”) material gifts. The second, which has been missed altogether in studies of Western godparenthood, is that the godchild is not the only one to derive a spiritual benefit from the transaction. The godfather too derives a benefit—the experience of embodying and transmitting divine power or the satisfaction of doing a good deed—and he is prepared to pay for the privilege.
This basic deal—which Cash describes as “risking debt for honor”—is also at the heart of the Moldovan and Romanian systems described below. The emphasis on the power of godparenthood is consistent with the structural fact that (unlike Catholic and Protestant godparenthood) it includes formally unequal relationships between adults—and the size of the gifts involved may well reflect the need to pay for the additional honor that this implies. That such a system can easily spillover into massive, and socially legitimate, patronage is demonstrated by Vasile’s ethnographic account of a village in the Apuseni Mountains. The risk arises not merely because of the underlying trade of gifts for ritual status but because all in Transylvania are free to engage in the transaction. As Hristov notes, the inheritance of godparenthood in Bulgaria effectively limited this possibility—which has emerged more recently as a result of the collapse of the hereditary system.
So taken together, the comparison of these five cases confirms that far more is involved in god-co-parental relations than the strategic manipulation of empty signs. Strategic interactions most certainly take place, but the way in which they do so is shaped in large part by the formal properties of the local system and the possibilities which this provides for blessing, cursing, and spiritual comradeship and for the material transactions by which these relationships are expressed.
Explaining Differences through Space and Time
But the different systems are not only shaped by their own symbolic logic. As historians remind us, they have also been shaped by long-term historical processes—processes that have acted differently over space as well as time. In this context, it is fascinating that the differing intensities of godparental practices—outlined at the start of the previous section—can also be described in geographic terms: speaking broadly, the more to the east a place is, the more thriving the practice. What are the historical processes that have led to this situation—and how far back should historians go when attempting to explain their origins? The east-west gradient suggests that some of these differences may date back to the division between Western and Eastern Christianity and to the later split of Western Christianity into Catholic and Protestant forms. However, some of the factors that have shaped the current situation are clearly much more recent. Most authors in this collection point to substantial changes since the mid-twentieth century and to the economic and political factors involved.
This engagement with contemporary history is another new feature of the present collection. Although earlier anthropological studies of spiritual kinship did look to history for an understanding of its origins, their own analyses were essentially synchronic. After six decades of such studies, the situation has now changed, and it is now possible, at least in theory, for anthropologists to revisit the sites of earlier studies in order to document and analyze change. Vidacs’s study in this collection is pioneering in this respect in that Vidacs actually collected comparable ethnographic and quantitative data at two different time points and uses them to draw important conclusions about processes of change.
In accounting for these changes, she is able to build on recent historical work by the Patrinus team—who have documented changing patterns of godparental choice in the centuries since the Council of Trent and have also drawn on social survey data to bring their findings up to date. This work, which has focused particularly on Italy and France, has demonstrated an increasing tendency for godparents to be chosen from among the parents’ own close relatives (Alfani et al. 18 ). Vidacs shows that the same change has occurred in her Hungarian field site and is able to demonstrate its connection to the processes of economic modernization and urbanization. In this way, she is able to contribute ethnographic insight to help understand the trends documented by historians.
Vidacs’s analysis also provides a new demonstration of the power of the Mintz–Wolf model of ritual kinship as strategic interaction—by showing that it can also account for diachronic change. At the same time, the comparison with other field sites raises questions which may not fit so easily into a Mintz and Wolf analysis. Why for instance did the same process of economic modernization lead, in Romania, to the increased monetization of godparental relationships? And why are some bold Romanians now seeking complete strangers as godparents on Internet forums?
We will leave these questions open—encouraging readers to seek potential answers in the articles themselves. We hope however to have shown that the time has now come for a double renewal: both of the anthropological tradition of god-co-parental research and of the interdisciplinary conversation between anthropologists and historians.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The research for this article was partly supported by the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle, Saale.