Former Fellows

Galina's project within the Modernity and Identity programme will investigate the process of (re-)constructing the medical professional and non-professional identities in Bulgaria, under the cultural framework of the Bulgarian modernization processes. Her research will focus on the imagery of folk medicine that was presented in Bulgarian medical press and in the public health legislation from the late 19th and the early 20th centuries. The main research goal is to examine the opposition between the medical men's project for a new publicity of expert knowledge, and the wise women's reality of ignorance, superstitions and resistant archetypes of "illness" and "health". This opposition will be outlined in a broad discursive field constructed by sanitary laws and reports, ethnographic works, journalistic programs, articles, and lectures of medical professionals. The project will discuss the criticism of Bulgarian physicians against the indigenous healing practices, with regard to the reorganization of the healthcare market and the populist cultural agenda of Bulgarian institutions after the Liberation (as . will thus try to shed light on the controversial process of transforming the traditional "organic community" constructed around intimately shared symbolic meanings, into a civilian public space of state sanctioned social and expert competences. From the point of view of "multiple modernities" theory the "invention" of this public space is crucial for understanding of different aspects of the "retarded modernization" and westernization, especially in the context of co-existence of diverse and competitive medical environments.