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Blessed Bread and “First Neighbors” in Sainte-Engrâce Sandra J. Ott Dr. Sandra J. Ott received her Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from Oxford University. Her thesis was entitled “An Ethnographic Study of a French Basque Mountain Community.” Shortly, she plans to begin additional field research in the Basque Country. Sainte-Engrâce is a French Basque mountain community located in the southeastern corner of Soule. The majority of the people, like their forefathers, are pastoralists and small-scale agriculturalists. With few exceptions, the people are bilingual in French and Basque; but Basque (the Souletine dialect) is their first and daily language. My research in Sainte-Engrâce was conducted over a period of approximately eleven months in 1976-77. Although I have written about several different aspects of Sainte-Engrâce society in my doctoral thesis, I was especially interested in a particular ritual that was based upon the institution of “first neighbours”— namely, the ritual giving of bread that has been blessed by the priest. In Sainte-Engrâce, this bread is known as ogi benedikatia, literally blessed bread. The ritual giving of blessed bread is a phenomenon that is reported to have taken a variety of forms in Western Europe. The earliest references to the practice with which I am acquainted are contained in a series of seventeenth-century tracts concerning the right of agotes, a pariah group of the western Pyrenées, to receive blessed bread in the church and the manner in which they should do so (cf. Idoate, Documentos sobre agotes y grupos afines en Navarra, 1973). Until the twentieth century and in some cases until the Second World War, blessed bread was distributed after Mass on Sunday in many different parts of rural France. The practice may also have been widespread in the Spanish Basque Country, but this can be determined only by further field research. The ritual distribution of blessed bread was not confined to Catholic France and the Basque provinces. In the early part of the twentieth century, blessed bread was given to pilgrims during their annual procession to the shrine of St. Besse in the Italian Alps (cf. Hertz, Mélanges de sociologie religieuse et folklore, 1928). In many Souletine communities, blessed bread was distributed among the congregation after High Mass until the Second World War and, in some cases, until the late 1960s. In Mauleon, one priest continues to give the blessed bread of Easter to his parishioners. In Sainte-Engrâce, the blessed bread ritual was abolished by the local priest in 1962; but neither the sociological nor the ideological importance of the ritual has been lost. The people often talk about the ritual among themselves and lament the loss of what they regard as their “most beautiful custom.” I first became interested in the ritual because it was clearly important to the community. But the ritual was especially interesting to me as a social anthropologist because it was one aspect of the institutionalized relationship between “first neighbours” in Sainte-Engrâce society and constituted a system of exchange. In Sainte-Engrâce, the ritual was traditionally performed every Sunday and consisted of two parts. The first part took place after High Mass in the church or chapel, where blessed bread was distributed among the congregation by the male sacristan. The second part was performed in the house of the female head of household (etchekandere) whose turn it was to give the bread and in that of her “first first neighbour” (lehen lehen aizoa). In Sainte-Engrâce, every household has three “first neighbours”: the “first first neighbour” is conceived to be to the right of one’s own house; whereas the “second first neighbour” (aizo bigarrena) and the “third first neighbour” (aizo hirugarrena) are conceptually to the left. The bread-giving etchekandere had a threefold obligation to fulfill. First, on the Friday preceding the Sunday on which she was due to give bread, the woman was obliged to sponsor the special Mass for the souls in Purgatory. Second, before the High Mass on Sunday, she was obliged to give two two-kilo loaves of leavened bread of wheat to the priest who blessed her presentation and consequently transformed it into ogi benedikatia. After the Mass every member of the congregation who had taken Holy Communion received and ate a morsel of the blessed bread. The bread-giving etchekandere then carried the rest of the bread back to her house, where she and the members of her household ate a portion. One morsel was burned in the hearth as “a sacrifice to God.” After the noon meal and before sunset, the bread-giving woman was obliged to give the remaining pieces of blessed bread to either the elder or the younger etchekandere of her “first first neighbour.” According to the people, this was the most important obligation of the bread-giving and was classified as gure azia, literally “our animal semen” or “our seed.” In this particular context, however, the word azia is understood in the figurative sense of “our women’s semen.” The threefold obligation of the bread-giving etchekandere was transmitted serially in a clockwise direction around the community. Only two female “first neighbours” acted as bread-giver and bread-taker on any one Sunday; and no house had more than one giver and taker. The bread-giver of a household was its “second first neighbour,” conceptually the first house to the left of one’s own; and its bread-taker was the “first first neighbour,” conceptually to the right. If new houses were built or existing ones abandoned, “first neighbour” and consequently bread-giver/bread-taker relationships were altered accordingly; but the clockwise direction of giving remained the same. People who are now at least thirty years old have a clear understanding of the principles on which this system of exchange was based: aldikatzia, which is best translated in this context as serial replacement, and üngürü, rotation. The transmission of blessed bread “from first neighbour to first neighbour” is conceived as having formed an unbroken chain of givers and takers that made a circle around the community. One by one, the etchekanderek took turns giving gifts of bread to the priest and to their “first first neighbour,” i.e. they replaced one another serially as bread-givers. The people also have a clear notion of the time it took for the gift of blessed bread for the “first first neighbour” to make one rotation (üngür bat egiten) around the community. When there were 101 households in the commune, it took as many Sundays for the echekanderek of all of the households to give blessed bread once to their “first first neighbour” and to receive it once from their “second first neighbour,” i.e. it took roughly two years for the cycle of exchange to be completed. According to the people, the ritual giving of blessed bread to the congregation served to bring the members of their society closer together, both socially and spiritually. By giving blessed bread to their “first first neighbour,” the etchekanderek of the community not only ritually reaffirmed the social and spiritual bond between their own household and that of their “first first neighbour;” by means of their ritual presentations, they are also said to have given “life” to one another. Thus far, I have found only one other Souletin community (Ossas) in which blessed bread was ritually given to a particular “first neighbour.” In all of the other villages where I made inquiries, female heads of household were obliged to give bread only to the priest for distribution among the congregation. But it was of considerable interest to discover that in every case the obligation to give bread was systematically transmitted from household to household and was fulfilled by either the elder or younger etchekandere. A task for further field research is to determine whether the ritual giving of blessed bread was systematically ordered in the same or in a similar manner in any Basque communities outside Soule. My aim now is to make a comparative study of the various forms that the ritual has taken in both the French and Spanish Basque provinces with a view to answering this question. If any readers of the Newsletter have either seen or heard about the ritual giving of blessed bread, I would greatly appreciate their sending any information about the practice to me through the Basque Studies Program. |
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