Will they still be dancing? (1982)

Wallachian view on sexual relationships and family life as a whole, Wallachian
women were customarily pointed out as the embodiment of sinfulness. Thus,
flordevic (1912:61), in one of the accounts from the turn of the century, paints
the following picture of the Wallachian family:
"The classical type of the "wrecked" family type may be found in eastern Serbia, where
unfortunately it evolved almost exclusively in a negative direction-among the Serbs as
well as among the Romanians (Wallachians). Until recentlyI was willing to believe that the
low moral understanding in this region was a consequence of cultural underdevelopment
and backwardness, a lack of interest in things public 16 , cultural remoteness and primitiv·
ism...
The incomplete cultural interminglinghad many negative manifestations in the spread of
culture. Decadence advanced so far that one can say, that as far these mountain tracks are
concerned, the people there have returned to their natural savage state in relation on one
another, to things public, and to the state, and that the people in the lowlands have been
culturally destroyed ." As an example I will only mention that women visit taverns and
drink together with men, and it is no uncommon site to see the most shameless behaviour,
where marriages are loose, where witnesses may be purchased who wiII testify to anything
at all, where murder is part of everyday life ... In the Pozarevac region, peasant women
from these regions go out alone, with powder and rouge on their faces, among the people,
dressed in cheap imitations ofcity attire, and some go so far that they work as waitresses in
the inns in the area and regard this work just like any other job, all the while they retain
normal ties with their families in the village. When they return home, the men stand in
queue to marry them since they have saved money, and here nobody asks where the money
comes from, as long as it's there ...
The Wallachians have brought bad morals and habits with them and passed them on to
other groups, since they are an old mixture of Serbs and Romanians. Hence, more or less
the same things are also seen in purely Serbian villages. Here one can see bigamy, arising
from repulsive desire, abductions of brides, violence and barbarism as normal forms of
settling accounts. Morality has been driven to its furthest limits" (-Dordevic 1912:11; our
translation from Serbo-Croatian).
flordevic's views in 1912 on the Wallachian family met with harsh criticism
from a later generation of his Yugoslav collegues. Nikola Pantelic (1970)
dismissed f)ordeviC's "bourgeois moralizing":
"It seems as if professor -DordeviC was proceeding from his own partriarchal and petty
bourgeois moral conceptions and avoided any objective approach to the facts and to the
problems" (Pantelic 1970:248).
But even if professor flordevic was airing his own private ethical views, the
problem, accented by Pantelic, of the special qualities of the northeastern
Serbian families still remains. Pantelic has tried to undertake a scientific
examination and clarification of the causes and effects of, for intance, early
child marriage, which at that time was still practiced, a high divorce rate,
liberal sexual practices ("freedoms"), etc. (Pantelic 1970).
The Wallachian and the eastern Serbian family in general is marked by a
number of unique features, which have merited this family its own place in the
Serbian family typology, the"Timokfamily type". 17 Following Pantelic (1970),
45