Projects
This project deals with the formation and transformations of the discipline of anthropology in two South Eastern European countries, Bulgaria and Greece. My aim is to explore in a comparative perspective the institutional and conceptual history of the discipline in the wider context of the establishment of the social and human sciences in the Balkans since the mid-19th century until the present day. My argument is that a comparison between two paradigms developed in the ‘peripheries’ of the ‘Soviet’ and the ‘Western’ epistemological traditions respectively could assist in overcoming the Cold War dichotomies and in giving a new perspective to the intellectual history of the discipline. I intend to follow a double methodological approach: a) an ethnographic study of academic and research institutions and texts, and b) an oral history dealing with the accounts of the social actors that played an active role in the organization and/or proliferation of the discipline in these two countries.