zadruga
Definitions
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
- noun A social unit of rural community among the South Slavs, associated with family links and set customs.
Examples
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The zadruga kept rituals and customs that dated back to medieval times, such as covering all the mirrors in the house when someone died or working collectively on the annual harvest.
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The families in question, however, were unlikely to be the small nuclear clusters common in western societies today; rather, Mira suggested, they were probably much more similar to the extended zadruga that she herself had grown up in.
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He advises that there should be a compromise, that the ownership of land in Yugoslavia should not be strictly individualist nor strictly communist, but that while preserving the spirit of the _zadruga_ (ownership by the community) there should also be the mobility of individual ownership.
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This is quite unlike the Russian "mir" or collective village, and not more like the South Slav "zadruga" which makes each family a community, the land belonging to all, as, according to M. Eugene Simon, it does in China.
Note
The word 'zadruga' comes from a Serbo-Croatian word meaning 'commune'.
