APOTROPAIC TEXTILE PRACTICES IN POSTPARTUM RITUALS OF THE DINARIC HIGHLANDS: THE RED THREAD AS BOUNDARY OBJECT BETWEEN FOLK MEDICINE AND ORTHODOX CANON
APOTROPAIC TEXTILE PRACTICES IN POSTPARTUM RITUALS OF THE DINARIC HIGHLANDS: THE RED THREAD AS BOUNDARY OBJECT BETWEEN FOLK MEDICINE AND ORTHODOX CANON

Summary/Abstract: A red woollen thread tied around the wrist of a newborn, or worked into the swaddling, belt, or headcloth of a woman in the forty days following birth, is among the most widely reported protective devices in the ethnographic record of the Dinaric highlands and the wider Slavic Orthodox world. It is also absent from the canonical texts of the tradition within whose ritual calendar it operates. The postpartum period is the object of a precise ecclesiastical framework — the prayers of the first day, the eighth-day naming, the fortieth-day churching of mother and child — and the red thread appears at no point in that framework, being neither prescribed nor forbidden. This article treats that absence as its central datum rather than as an incidental gap. Working from the published ethnographic and lived-religion literature on the Western Balkans and the wider Slavic area, and from the comparative literature on amulets, charms, and the materiality of magic, I argue that the standard boundary-object model, which explains an artefact's circulation between communities by its interpretive flexibility, misdescribes what is happening here. The original contribution of the article is the canonical vacancy thesis: the red thread circulates between folk therapeutic practice and ecclesiastical practice not because the two communities read it differently but because one of them has issued no reading at all, and this normative silence is a structural condition rather than an oversight. From the thesis I develop a three-tier typology of ritual objects by institutional status — canonically incorporated, canonically proscribed, canonically vacant — and derive a falsifiable prediction: vacant-tier objects should display higher persistence under secularisation and biomedicalisation than objects in either of the other tiers, since their retention incurs no doctrinal cost and their abandonment yields no doctrinal benefit. The article is conceptual and comparative; it advances no claim resting on new fieldwork, and the concluding section specifies the fieldwork that would be needed to test the prediction properly.

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