Former Fellows

Project Outline

In the period after 1918, a public debates on eugenic ideas was initiated in Bulgaria, falling in the framework of what was perceived as an interwar cultural crisis. It encompassed a large number of ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ eugenic measures with regard to healthcare, marital and sex hygiene, criminal justice, professional legislation and education. Though the most radical projects for ‘hygienisation’ of the nation were never put into practice, the Bulgarian eugenics discourse nevertheless carried a considerable rhetorical burden, and certain eugenic initiatives were partly institutionalised after the First World War.

The study aims at examining the cultural relevance of the eugenic argumentative strategies and practices in Bulgaria, in the way they were developed by adopting and emancipating Western bio-political models from the beginning of the 20th century until the 1940s. It explores the Bulgarian eugenic projects as versions of a multiform hygienic utopia, which, in turn, implied a more general project for national identity.

The research focuses on the temporal modes of a medicalised crisis of modernity and identity, transcribed as ‘degeneration’, i.e. an ‘illness’ of the ‘national organism’. It addresses the culture which the Bulgarian eugenics discourse reflected, the past historical times which it (d)evaluated, and the utopian national future which it projected. In lines with it, the analysis attempts to clarify the system of strategies and techniques for ‘naturalising’ the culture-historical continuities, applied by the eugenics discourse. It hopes to ‘map’ the symbolic register of the so-called ‘degeneration stigmata’, and question the cultural reasoning behind the selective readings of the ‘morbid’ national past, which tended to ascribe different historical periods to the decay of the ‘national organism’.

Finally, the project examines how the ‘regeneration’ of the ‘degenerated’ people was conceptualised as a target result from the synthesis of ideological visions and expert practices, i.e. of national integration theory and the instruments of state bio-politics.