Շագոյան Գ., Յոթ օր, յոթ գիշեր Հայոց հարսանիքի համայնապատկեր

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Summary

This book provides a broad review of Armenian wedding customs since antiquity to the innovations and changes of this day, the 21st century. The work describes an orderly sequence of wedding rituals from the choice of the bride to the post-wedding ritual visits of the newlywed. The ritual descriptions alternate with scholarly analyses of individual wedding episodes. These sections of the text are designed, first of all, for the academic community and are italicized to make reader orientation easier.

The book consists of four parts: part one is concerned with the age of consent among Armenians at various epochs and in various ethnographic groups; part two is dedicated to the pre-wedding rituals; part three considers the marital “week” proper, and part four is focused on post-wedding rituals.

The word “week” is conventional as any attempts to fully reconstruct wedding rituals, the summary of available written accounts and the author’s own field materials attest to the fact that the duration of a wedding ranges from one evening to 40 and more days. In each particular case, wedding ritual duration depends on numerous factors, say, the social status of the bridegroom’s and bride’s family, the distance between their homes, weather conditions, etc. Nevertheless, the book title reflects the most common folklore definition of the wedding: “seven days, seven nights”. The latter, on the one hand, conveys the mythological perception of the wedding as a complete temporal cycle, as a metaphor for “everlasting feast and fest” and as a sacred precedent (cf. the seven days of Genesis). Hence, this formula describes the essence of wedding rather than its duration: the sacramental creation of a family, of a new familial “world”.

The second part of the title: “a panorama of the Armenian wedding” specifies that this book does not portray the generalized image of the Armenian wedding but numerous versions thereof. The book does not pretend to outline an integrated national version. Vice versa, this research is intended to dispel the stereotypical belief that such a version ostensibly existed but disappeared in the depth of centuries. This book presents a broad range of various rituals and ritualistic groups who consider themselves and, therefore, their wedding to be Armenian. That is why the sum total, a panorama of all the options can be representative of the Armenian wedding, instead of a single version or a reconstruction of a consolidated version.

If under “Armenian” we mean unified national culture (i.e. the one functioning within one state), then only modern “Armenian wedding”, currently taking shape as

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national, can become its part. This type of a wedding incorporates numerous elements of the globalized “white wedding” based on the British royal marriage ceremony dating back to the 19th century. Actually, to date the British royal court is a leading trendsetter in wedding fashion. Suffice it to recall the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton in April 2011 viewed on TV by 2 billion people. Next morning, after the broadcasting of the ceremony, the Chinese newlywed got married in wedding clothes imitating those of the British royal couple. Modern communication technology enabled us to witness the wedding globally.

However, the reason for the singular contagiousness of the British wedding shall be found in the distinctive features of the country’s history and governance. Initially, it was a wedding trendsetter since as a marine empire it controlled the strategic communications and was capable of immediate influence. Nowadays, its primacy is determined by monarchy generating genuine princes and queens, and hence the genuine royal wedding. The point is that in any wedding context there is a universal royal symbolism (the royal code), which enables all the mere mortals once in a lifetime to play the role of the king and queen (cf. the Armenian form of addressing the bridegroom and bride as “king” and “queen”). Hence, any couple’s wedding is associated with the royal one. Therefore, the royal weddings of actual royalties can serve as examples for emulation by mere mortals.

Not only modern high-tech communications but rather the global markets that in many respects predetermine the outward appearance of the modern “national” wedding serve as effective mechanisms for the propagation of the “white wedding”. Even the emergence of specific local rituals on the national level takes place through the same global market mechanisms. For example, the red-green shoulder ribbons unknown in the white wedding are symbolic in many Armenian regions, and are presently offered by wedding salons as mandatory accessories for the suit of the modern Armenian bridegroom.

Global technologies (including the market and digital communications) plus active migration flows level wedding differences not only in various regions of Armenia but sometimes in the Diaspora, and reduce to the minimum the differences between the rural and urban weddings. Interestingly, in the Soviet time, owing to intensive migration from the country to the town, villagers were oftentimes the trendsetters of the urban wedding, however, nowadays, it is vice versa: the rural wedding emulates the urban one.

As a result of rural influence, it has become mandatory for Yerevan weddings (and therefore, all-Armenian weddings) to practice the ritual of the “red apple” or public

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between rituals and dominant ideologies. The alteration of the latter, and more often, the socio-economic and political upheavals that follow the revolutionary changes, create a “wedding void” when during crises rituals are reduced to the minimum and after stabilization, in conformity with the provisions of the new ideological doctrine, they “recuperate” in new editions, which are oftentimes quite different from the previous versions.

It is of interest that the traditional wedding clearly reflects the struggle between pagan and even pre-pagan rituals with Christian innovations. Where material allows in the book, this division is also emphasized. However, the changes in the post-Soviet period are more striking; they differ from previous marital reforms by rapid proliferation of innovations covering nearly all the provinces of the Republic of Armenia and occupying the niche of the “fashionable tradition” in a week or a month. This is by the way the essence of “wedding mechanics”: the wedding is a most conservative ritual in the sense that even nowadays it contains the vestiges of thousand-year old rituals, and on the other hand, the wedding is the first to respond to anything that is in vogue: clothes, music, food, etc.

Out of the three types of wedding (traditional, Soviet and post-Soviet) whose material is more or less accessible for this author, it is the “traditional wedding” of the late 19th – early 20th centuries that forms the core of this book whereas Soviet, post-Soviet and some ancient reconstructions, and early medieval material is presented for comparison to demonstrate the dynamics of some rituals, main tendencies and some change mechanisms.

There are two reasons why the emphasis is on the traditional wedding. First, it represents a wide range of local cultures which can serve as a source for the design of one’s own wedding scenarios. The second reason is related to a tragic period of Armenian history, namely, the Genocide of Armenians in Turkey in the early 20th century which not only obliterated the Armenian population that lived in this territory for ages but destroyed a substantial layer of tangible and intangible culture including wedding rituals. Hence, this work aims at the reconstruction of the comprehensive picture of this untimely lost culture not quite recognized and appreciated as a loss of cultural diversity.

Some West Armenian population which crossed the border of the Russian Empire and replenished the West Armenian cultural landscape across the border, established compact emigrant villages which to some extent enabled the revival of individual areas of local cultures, in particular, local versions of the wedding (for example, in the case of the Sassoun wedding). It should be noted that the migrants, as a rule, are

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Modern service personnel have been replenished with new “ritual” experts (the photographer and video cameraman) who act not just as the best connoisseurs of various traditions and rituals owing to their participation in numerous weddings: for the “authentic” depiction of the wedding and rituals they often act as its stage directors, guiding the process of the ritual. In other words, instead of the former ritual experts who completely turned into service personnel and lost their purely ritual properties, some new actors appeared at the wedding entirely as service people and acquired the functions of ritual leaders; previously this was the prerogative of the persons with “priestly” functions. These were the clergyman and the bridegroom’s godfather (kavor) who was the most respectable and important figure for the newlywed. He was also the toast master who managed the feast. The handover of ritual expert functions from the godfather (whose role incorporates many functions of the pagan priest) and the clergyman whose participation is confined to wedding to the cameraman and photographer (the chroniclers of the wedding) goes to show more profound tendencies in the profaning of modern culture on the whole when it is more important to depict the ritual rather than appreciate it. And as a result the virtual look-alike of the wedding is created.

This book also pays tribute to the connoisseurs of visual anthropology, offering rich illustrative material of iconic images of the Armenian wedding from miniatures and tombstones to painting and sculpture. However, most illustrations consist of numerous photographs from various archives, funds and private collections, depicting the Armenian wedding in the 19th and 20th centuries, and a smaller number of photographs of contemporary weddings.

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