Individual projects
In autumn 1958 the Bulgarian party leadership called for an „economic leap“ and for a fulfilment of the Third Five-Year-Plan in „three to four years“. This campaign aimed for a fast development of Bulgaria from an agricultural to an industrialised country. While not resulting in a humanitarian disaster, as the Chinese “Great Leap” did, by which it was partly inspired, the Bulgarian experiment led to a huge pile of debts at international banks. The project asks for the transnational dimension of the campaign as an example for state socialist industrialisation drives. The important role of the state in 20th century socialism has led many observers (in the West) to conceive of the Soviet Union, the COMECON or other socialist states as being autarchic and the classic Cold War narratives described the Iron Curtain as being impermeable. This study draws inspiration from newer research that has argued that socialist economies were highly dependent on global developments and that the Soviet leadership – in accord with economic interests – displayed a political will to deepen integration into the world economy. The project will adopt these approaches of socialist globalisation for a study of industrialisation processes in socialist countries and the Bulgarian case in particular. Following these recent research agendas, it will not concentrate on international diplomatic relations or a quantitative integration into world markets but rather on the social – partly “day-to-day” – dimension of transgressing state borders. It will put the focus on engineers and trainees who were sent on business trips abroad to realise technology transfers, economists who engaged in international debates, foreign trade ministry officials who sought foreign markets, and industrial corporations that cooperated with external partners. The focus on the protagonists is supposed to clarify which interactions across borders (beyond Soviet assistance) were crucial for the campaign, how important transfers of development concepts and technologies from China were, what the dependency on Western technology and capital meant for the Bulgarian industrialisation effort, and which power relations these interactions implied. The results might show that these cross-border interactions were not (only) determined by a monolithic Moscow-controlled socialist bloc configuration. Instead, they also reflected global power relations – with world markets and western technology always present – and opened up a certain room to manoeuvre for the actors on the ground vis-à-vis national party leaderships, governments and “Moscow”.
Hence, our main task is to find the family resemblances in a number of different cases in which we "tell the truth"; that is, to find the typical ("primitive") meaning of performatives of the "This is the truth!" type - regardless of whether we use in them the word "truth," a derivative, a practical synonym (such as "actually," "in fact," or "indeed"), or insist on the truth with a gesture or tone of voice. Furthermore, we will treat truth-telling as an everyday performative: (1) Regardless of whether we are dealing with ordinary language, or with - actually also ordinary - usages of "truth" in the higher, institutionalized languages of science, law, religion, and so forth; and (2) Regardless of whether the truth-teller is repeating pre-given normative models and sociocultural standards, subverting them, or openly (through "parrhesia") speaking out against a given hegemonic regime of truth (Foucault 2001).
The comparison between performatives of the "This is the truth!" type and a particular type of commands - such as "Take as an example!", "Do this always!", or "Follow the rule!" - is distinctive and constructive for our analysis. It is through this comparison that we will try to find the basic meaning we are looking for: telling the truth is a practical gesture of providing an example, an instance, a sample, a model to be followed.
But unlike explicit commands, which usually indexically indicate the concrete situational circumstances as well as the speaker and addressee of the command, truth-telling hides the situational context in which such an utterance is made. Hence the need to demonstrate that truth-telling is a specific performative whose main function is to produce maximum de-indexicalization and, thereby, maximum generalization of what is declared to be true: it is a practical gesture of de-contextualizing the utterance, through which the utterance should produce an extra-contextual standard to be followed. This is the performative purpose of such utterances - their "pragmatic implication" in the sense of Stanley Cavell (1998: 9ff.).
This project builds on ethnographic work conducted among Greek technocrats specialized in EU policies. It addresses the ways in which these social agents have experienced, enacted, and mediated the political and economic project of European Integration. Particular focus is given on the issue of European funding policies, which became indeed an increasing facet of the relations between Greece and the European Union since the late-1980s. The collective memory of a past ‘generous paternalism’ and discourses on failed recipients both point to a long-scale process of moralized politics in Greece over the last decades, in which the idea of ‘free’ foreign money seems to have held a central place.
Taking into account the whole complexity and the nuances of the practice of writing letters and the cultural forms that they can reveal from this period, what specifically will be the subject of the present study is the problem of censorship and the logic of dissent in the correspondence between the Bulgarian Revival intellectuals. The empirical material that will be taken into account during the analysis are letters exchanged in the intellectual circle around Neofit Rilski, including diplomats from Bulgarian origin and artists like Michael German, Marko Todorovic, Gero Dobrovich - Mushek, Zachary Zograph, Naiden Gerov, Hristo Vaklidov, and others.
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the phenomenon of religious exile played a crucial role in defining responses to persecution, forging confessional identities, and shaping the trajectories of both Catholic and Protestant Churches. My research adopts a wide geographical perspective in order to analyse both theoretical discussions about the legitimacy of flight from persecution and the lived realities of the exile experience across the continent. A central theme of my research is that the phenomenon of religious exile had a profound impact on broader cultural debates about exile in its non-religious variants. The topic therefore has tremendous interdisciplinary potential. My contention is that a fuller, more nuanced study of how religious exile was conceptualised and practised will provide fresh insights into how early-modern Europeans, in all their idiosyncratic variety, negotiated the religious, intellectual, political and cultural challenges of their era.
The project addresses the consequences that the crisis of legitimacy of political authorities has had in public infrastructures in Greece. The project uses knowledge and tools from existing anthropological and urban studies literature on infrastructures, social change, political legitimacy and social contestation to address a process of social and political transformation via the relation among the state and public infrastructural provisions at times of crisis. The main objective of this research will be to explore the social-cultural and socio-technical modalities of political legitimacy in relation to ideas of social justice and the politics of infrastructures.
At the first level, my research deals with the image reconstruction of the Galician and Moldavian shtetls as performed by the modernist Jewish writers Bruno Schulz (1892-1942) and Max Blecher (1909-1938). Apart from integrating the motives developed by the aforementioned intellectuals in a specific Jewish sensitivity of the region (Franz Kafka has a say here as well), my aim is to assess the legacy of the two figures by comparing their main literary concepts against the background of the society of their time, eventually tracing the map of what meant to be Jewish in a small peripheral town at the turn of the century.
At the second level, my investigation intends to be a theoretical reflection about peripheral modernism, and I refer foremost to the interplay of traditional and modern in the so-called minor cultures. Apart from being clearly divided, the old and the new co-existed, followed subsequently by the attempt to re-politicize past discourses and thus to insert them in new political and cultural paradigms. Concretely, old Jewish motifs were re-politicized by Schulz and Blecher by the help of symbolic language and finally presented as exponential for a new Jewish identity.
Research will trace both the numerical and social history of cancer in Bulgaria. On the one hand, it will investigate the 'science' of cancer in the country, as it is revealed in statistics, in therapeutic attempts, and in specialized hospitals and clinics. On the other hand, research will concentrate on the social and cultural cancer narratives, especially in regards to the disease's proliferation in recent years. This research is part of a larger project that compares the cancer experience in Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria and Macedonia.