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GENEALOGY AS IDENTITY OF SELF: A CASE STUDY FROM RIJRAL SERBIA
Barbara Kerewsky-Halpern
Born in New York. Resides in Amherst, Massachusetts.
anthropology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
University of Massachusetts. Author, lecturer.
To a Serb it is vitally important to
answer for oneself the fundamental
questions ,,1-0 am I?" and "Fran where
have I cone?" This information or
self-knowledge, so crucial to presentation
of self to the rest of society (in
the village, the town, or the larger
world), is internalized in the head and
transmitted orally. Memory is not what
is happening here. In lSerbia we are
dealing with recollection.
This paper presents evidence that
recit'2tion of genealogy is a local
genre. A heuristic result of extensive
fieldwork in Serbian villages has been
that an epic pulse appears to course
through many Serbs, especially elder male
villagers (this taxonomy is not absolute-there
are wanen who possess the
characteristic, and younger people as
well); the importance of the knowledge of
genealogy, of self, carries over into
urban environments and across the
Atlantic, as will be demonstrated with
fragments of genealogies from Serbian­
Americans.
What I identify as an epic pulse strongly
matches the template of the classic south
Slav epic decasylIable. Vuk was the
first to describe it. A more useful
exposition for Western readers is
available from Jakobson, who analyzed the
characteristics of the epski de!jeterac
for readers of German and English.
Before turning to examples of proof that
recitation of genealogy, under conducive
contexts and when performed by particular
elders, may be a special manifestation of
south Slav epic tradition, we should
Adjunct assistant professor of
Ph.D. (cultural anthropology),
define the characteristics of the
traditional epic ten-syllable line.
Jakobson called attention to the features
of this tradition by maintaining that an
abstraction of the underlying metrics
must deal with certain rhythmic
tendencies as well as with formal
metrical constants:
1. Each line contains ten syllables:
xxxxxxxxxx
2. There is a compulsory syntactic
break between lines:
[ II
3. There is a compulsory word boundary
between the fourth and
fifth syllables:
xxxx XXXXXX
4. Syllables three and four belong
to one word unit, as do syllables
nine and ten:
xx XX XXXX XX
or
XX XX XX XXXX
5. Disyllabic word units ideally
occur in syllables one-two,
three-four, five-six) seveneight,
or nine-ten.
6. Syllables seven-eight-nine bring
the line to whe t Jakobson has