Projects
The objective of the Popular Culture in Bulgaria in the Era of Communism Project is to study the institutional structures and cultural forms that encompassed and penetrated all sectors in the "deep rear" of the "cultural home front"; to give an understanding of the ideological uniformization of everyday life and the political takeover of the life-worlds of the people who happened to live during this period.
It seeks to take a comprehensive, systematic and consistent approach to the popular culture of communism in Bulgaria, focusing on research and analysis of hitherto uninvestigated phenomena, such as the following:
1. The consensual campaign for creating "a people's culture" as the nucleus of the new official Bulgarian culture which gradually became dominated by Marxism-Leninism in the second half of the 1940s. The end of the inherited bourgeois cultural particularism.
2. The new sites of public cultural exchange as the main site of manifestation of the current socialist cultural policy.
3. "Amateur art activities" (hudozhestvena samodeynost) and "the creativity of the masses". Genre and institutional structure of the system of "amateur art activities".
4. "Bulgarian Television" and the wide TV audience - permanence of programme messages and expansion of cultural audiences. Structure of television programmes in the 1960s and 1970s and their orientation towards new, "active consumers of culture".
5. Leisure time and the problem of "the cultural recreation of working people".
6. The fashion institutions of socialism and periodicals related to their activities.
7. The problem of the so-called "intonational [i.e. sound] environment". Regulations regarding sound-recording practices and music distribution in the 1960s-1980s. Statutory regulation of the video industry in the 1980s.
8. The extreme form of the efforts to take over the life-worlds of the people who happened to live under communism - the new civil rituals.
General hypothesis:
The history of popular culture under socialism is a history of the inability of the communist ideology to deal with the unpredictable and the destructive and their effects in culture provoked by its own politically implemented and forcibly conducted utopian modernization project.