Apie santuokos apeigų "valstybinimą" sovietų Lietuvoje

LTRemiantis etnografine bei istorine medžiaga, straipsnyje nagrinėjamos santuokos apeigos sovietų Lietuvoje. Argumentuojama, jog šie socialiai reikšmingi ritualai, žymintys gyvenimo tarpsnio kaitą, buvo autoritarinės valstybės strategiškai mobilizuoti ideologinei propagandai bei jos galios ir teisėtumo (legitimumo) stiprinimui. Partijai siekiant platesnio dominavimo, santuokos apeigos buvo kryptingai „valstybinamos“ pasitelkus sekuliarizacijos, ideologiškai neutralizuoto „liaudinimo“ bei estetinės pertvarkos taktikas. „Valstybinimas“ aptariamas kaip daugiaprasmis procesas, pajungtas apeigų dalyvių laikui ir erdvei (chronotopams) nusavinti ir kontroliuoti. Taip pat analizuojami dalyvių rezistenciniai atoveiksmiai, nukreipti prieš sovietinės valstybės hegemoniją. Raktiniai žodžiai: santuokos apeigos, sovietų Lietuva, valstybė, laikas ir erdvė, daugiaprasmiškumas. [Iš leidinio]

ENTaking marriage rituals in Soviet Lithuania as its primary object of ethnographic investigation, the article explores the ways in which these socially significant life-cycle rites were strategically mobilised by the communist state for the consolidation of its power and legitimacy. It argues that practices of usurping and controlling spatial and temporal parameters, a governance tactic referred to as ‘statising’, were central to the state’s manipulation of marriage rituals. Inspired by Katherine Verdery’s work on the state appropriation of citizens’ time in communist Romania (Verdery 1996), the article insists on the importance of treating its alter ego, space, seriously in the analysis of social life. The statising of people’s temporalities in authoritarian regimes inevitably entailed the seizure of space, and the other way around. Statising can be better comprehended and explained when investigated from a chronotopical perspective, where the categories of time and space are seen as being inextricably linked in a mutually constitutive dialectic (Bakhtin 1981). ‘The state’, one of the key organising concepts of the essay, is understood as a complex, often messy and polyvalent, process, that shapes citizens’ lives in concrete and consequential ways. Instead of thinking of the state as merely ‘an ideological power’, or a figment of the imagination, as some social theorists do (Abrams 1988; Foucault 1990; Bourdieu 2014; cf. Verdery 2018), the author takes the view that the state is ‘real’, in that, through its many agents, it has the capacity to affect the consciousness, emotions and actions of its citizens, notably by appropriating their space and time. Marriage rituals constitute a productive ethnographic site in which to examine these chronotopical practices of state domination and subjection.Begun in the late 1950s and continuing well into the 1980s, the statising of nuptial rites in Lithuania was carried out by cleansing them of referents to Catholic religiosity, and rendering them atheist. This secularising strategy entailed forcing marriage celebrations out of churches and into civil registry offices, or, in larger cities, moving them to newly constructed Palaces of Matrimony. Placing nuptial ceremonies in state-run spaces meant taking charge of their temporalities as well. ralities as well. Investing marriage initiation rituals with cultural forms considered to epitomise Lithuanian folk culture and traditions, as a substitute for the stifled Catholic belief, was yet another strategy utilised by the state in its effort to manipulate the chronotope of the socialist wedding. Revitalising and promoting so-called folk culture, as long as it was devoid of any allusions to ideologically pernicious nationalism, was consistent with Soviet nationality policy, and was widely encouraged by the state. Inclusions of Party-approved folk culture in marriage celebrations were intended to foster a socialist Lithuanian identity, as well as to make them aesthetically appealing, experientially satisfying, and more meaningful to their participants. Using historical material and ethnographic interviews with people who experienced Soviet nuptials, the article describes and analyses the statising practices outlined above, paying close attention to the ways in which they became implicated in the production of socialist space and time. The essay also contends that statising the wedding was not a monological process, where only the Party’s voice was heard. Citizens, but certainly not all, responded to the state’s relentless intrusions by resourcefully reclaiming the time and space expropriated from them.This is best exemplified in the ethnographic material at hand by the practice of incorporating clandestine church ceremonies into atheist weddings. Such ceremonies would commonly take place in remote rural churches on weekdays, allowing participants to enact them in their own time and in spaces of religious worship of their choice. Creatively inserting elements of folk culture perceived to represent alternative and more ‘authentic’ Lithuanianness into nuptials was another way of establishing a distance from the patronising and overbearing state. Instead of theorising such practices as grass-roots dissent or resistance, the essay proposes to see them as a popular mode of adapting to and negotiating the hegemony of the authoritarian state. Assembling a multiplicity of signifiers and meanings, often conflicting and seemingly incompatible, in a kind of bricolage of Soviet postmodernism (Putinaitė 2014), such weddings were at once atheist, Catholic, Lithuanian, ‘traditional’, ‘modern’ and socialist. They were both in and of the political system that produced them, rather than being external and oppositional to it (Ortner 1995; Yurchak 2006). At a deeper level, the article sheds a light on the workings of the socialist state and its chronotopical strategies of self-empowerment and legitimisation. It also gives the reader a glimpse into the ambiguous relationship between that state and its citizens. Key words: marriage rites, Soviet Lithuania, the state, time and space, pluralism of meaning. [From the publication]

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