Suchergebnisse

Gerald W. Creed analyzes contemporary mumming rituals in rural Bulgaria for what they reveal about life after socialism -- and the current state of postsocialist studies. Mumming rituals have flourished in the post-Soviet era. Elaborately costumed dancers go from house to house demanding sustenance and bestowing blessings. Through the analysis of these rites, Creed critiques key themes in postsocialist studies, including understandings of civil society and democracy, gender and sexuality, autonomy and com.

Gerald W. Creed analyzes contemporary mumming rituals in rural Bulgaria for what they reveal about life after socialism -- and the current state of postsocialist studies. Mumming rituals have flourished in the post-Soviet era. Elaborately costumed dancers go from house to house demanding sustenance and bestowing blessings. Through the analysis of these rites, Creed critiques key themes in postsocialist studies, including understandings of civil society and democracy, gender and sexuality, autonomy and community, and ethnicity and nationalism. He argues that these events reveal indigenous cultural resources that could have been used both practically and intellectually to ease the postsocialist reconstruction of Bulgarian society, but were not.

AbstractFollowing the 20th anniversary of Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, this article extrapolates how attention to actual notions of community might redirect his important intervention. It suggests that locally and culturally specific ideas about collectivity shape the experience and expectations of national‐level projections. To demonstrate this outcome the analysis focuses on Bulgarian mumming—spectacular winter rituals in which threatening masked figures transverse villages to banish evil and bring good fortune. While these rituals clearly reinforce social solidarity, they represent a local notion of community in which conflict, both intra‐and interethnic, is elemental and constitutive. This image of community does not demand consensus or homogeneity when imagined on a national scale. Such variations in community notions may help explain the diversity of national experiences increasingly documented by ethnographers.

▪ Abstract  This review inverts the idiom "family values" to show the value of the family. It grounds this value in family economic activity but advocates an interactive approach in which cultural commitments to the family influence economic and political outcomes. Historical and ethnographic research on the family is mustered to illustrate the interaction and then combined with theories of capitalism and nationalism to account for the resonance of the family values discourse. A final section reviews the potential dangers of family-focused research.That tradesman who does not delight in his family will never long delight in his business. D. Defoe

Draws on 1987-1998 ethnographic research in the Bulgarian village of Zamfirovo to expand on previous work on the threat of transition for agrarian arrangements & identities by encompassing motivations basic to socialist "survivals" & "revivals." Varied perceptions of perestroika held by the villagers are related, revealing that attitudes toward socialism tended to shift depending on its political & economic utility. Those formerly critical of the Communist Party used socialist ideological arguments against the new reforms if they perceived them to be nonbeneficial. How villagers tried to preserve institutions of symbolic & material importance, especially the cooperative, is described, as are efforts of the Union of Democratic Forces to liquidate cooperatives under the mistaken belief they would be supported by the population. Instead, feeling that their work & identity were threatened, the villagers sabotaged government land redistribution by voting socialist, indicating that rural socialist sentiment was as much a product of the transition as a legacy of the socialist past. 20 References. J. Lindroth

Fields of Wheat, Hills of Blood: Passages to Nationhood in Greek Macedonia, 1870‐1990. Anastasia N. Karakasidou. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.334 pp.

When Bulgarians elected a parliament dominated by the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) in their first, free postcommunist election, they were considered the mavericks of eastern Europe. As Misha Glenny critically points out, "Bulgaria bucks the trend" was a recurrent phrase in English-language reports of the 1990 contest. But four years later, after an intervening non-socialist government, a second socialist victory seemed to be following trends set in Lithuania, Hungary and Poland. In a front-page article inThe New York Timesseveral months before Bulgaria's 1994 election, the east European trend towards embracing ex-communists is described as beginning in Lithuania, with no mention of Bulgaria's earlier socialist victory and its continual socialist electoral strength. Then, following the election, theWashington Postreported that the results "brought the fourth former Communist Party to power in Eastern Europe,afterHungary, Poland and Lithuania."

Argues that many Bulgarians perceive postcommunist decollectivization as a variation of communist-era collectivization, based in part on conversations with residents of the village of Zamfirovo. Many parallels between collectivization & decollectivization are identified: both were state attempts to enforce new agricultural arrangements; both used similar methods, including the threat of force & economic coercion; both enhanced state control; both politicized agriculture; & both were used to achieve multiple goals. Collectivization was, simultaneously, a way to address agriculture's economic problems, a mechanism of central control in rural areas, & a symbol of communist transition. Decollectivization prior to Oct 1992 was, simultaneously, a way to address agriculture's economic problems, a means of weakening communism's rural power base, & a symbol of postcommunist transition. Since 1992, however, the importance of anticommunism to the transition has declined. As a result, the interpretation of decollectivization as a reprise of collectivization is no longer apt. 24 References. E. Blackwell

In terms of who is benefiting from change.