Individual projects
The Legitimating Figure: Women and Power, Women in Power in the Pre-Modern Times
The main objective of the proposed project is to present the figure of the woman as a legitimating figure of the power in the pre-modern times. In this époque the power was legitimized through a reference to the sacred. Thus, we can find the figure of the king-god (i. e. direct divinization of the person in power) or of the divinely chosen king (i. e. the person in power in the monotheistic religions is a bearer of a special grace due to the divine choice). We find a clear relation between the sacred and profane that is usually actualized by a woman - mother, wife or simply source of the holiness.
The classical legitimating of power in the pre-modern times is not by heritage but by election. The heritage, based on the fortuitousness of the birth was regarded too uncertainly dangerous and therefore people trusted in the choice of God or some divinity. The latter were the very holder of the power and they chose their terrestrial incarnation or lieutenant. The figure of the woman is exceptional in the establishment of the relation that served the basis of the choice. Different manners and ways to creation of this relation will be subject of study in the proposed project. The project will follow mainly two ways of the legitimizing of the power by the figure of the woman: the marriage and the birth.
The Marriage appears in two forms: 1) hierogamy - in some pagan societies, this is a ritual of royal marriage of the king with a chthonic deity of fertility that is viewed as a maintenance of the cosmic harmony and the sacred order; 2) Marriage as a form of relation between the ruler and the state (people) that appears mainly in Christianity. Birth should be presented mainly as a type of divine choice, revealed by mother's womb.
The Withering Away of the Balkan Village
From the point of view of economic history, the withering away of the Balkan village is probably the single most important phenomenon in the region during the second half of the 20th C. This is one of the main keys to explaining its long-term historical change and its political, economic, demographic, social and cultural developments.
The Balkan village was the scene of the region's most dramatic and traumatic events of the second half of the century: the two civil wars in Greece and Yugoslavia, mass exodus, collectivization, the imposing of three different socialist systems of agriculture and finally - the European common agricultural policy
The agrarian question is central to the explanation of Balkan communism, of its rise and fall, as well as of the so-called transition. Industrialization has generally been emphasized to be the main engine of the Balkans' transformation. In this project I argue that its more important and far-reaching result was the profound and traumatic change of the village.
In a more general way what happened to the Balkan village and villagers was not something extraordinary. After all isn't the quintessence of modernization the gradual withering away of the village? But the gradual, century-long process in Western Europe gradually was accomplished in the backward South Eastern Europe by various versions of state socialisms in the course of a generation only. It is the speed, the scope and the ruthlessness unusual even for the standards of Eastern Europe that make the agrarian transformation of the Balkans in the second half of the 20th century so unusual.
The fate of Balkan peasant and peasantry has been in the center of attention for an army of scholars of various disciplines: anthropology, (rural) sociology, history, demography, agrarian economics, human geography, etc. If fiction and films are added, one could argue with only slight exaggeration that this is the most discussed issue of the region's recent development.
This project, which most broadly is focused on analyzing the course and the consequences of the crash transformation of the Balkan village in the second half of the 20th century, takes a different approach. It stands out against the sea of similar scholarship by its time span (the second half of the 20th C. and the beginning of the 21 C.), scope (the Balkan region), genre (economic history) and methodology (comparative, interdisciplinary)
Bordering the Balkans
"Bordering, ordering, othering" (Henk van Houtum and Ton van Naerssen) insightfully synthesizes border politics. The project articulates three of its main characteristics: the ambition of this new field to express and to affirm itself as one of the leaders of the spatial turn in social sciences; the determination of borderland studies to address the crucial concepts of power, sovereignty, de/re/territorialization, difference, alterity; the constructivist pathos of this new vision, in which the borders lose their geographical grammar and political solidity, and become competition and fights for meaning, signification, and power.
All three are crucial for the analysis, situated at the crossing of the overproduction of borders, on one side, and the overproduction of representations, meanings, imaginaries of boundaries, on another; of the effacement of borders by the globalisation, on one side, and the construction of new ones, on the other side. The objective of the study is to analze the Balkans as an intensive whirlpool of politics of bordering, ordering, and othering. The project aims at analysisng the de/re/constructions of borders at four interconnected levels: the political and intellectual discourse, as well as the the representations. The art as a bridge builder - (mis)used by politics and artists - is the fourth level.
The novelty of the project is in two directions: theoretical and epistemological. Balkan academia studies borders mainly in terms of national borders in relation to security, sovereignty, nationalism and ethnicity. The present study will diversify the borders, including new types - mental, symbolic, esthetic - and will shift the focus from the objectivity of borders to their construction in the interplay with power, symbols, imagineries in the dynamic processes of bordering, ordering, and othering.
The paradox of borders is that the concept emerges in the same moment as its opposite - the globalization and the ‘debordization' of the world. Vanishing of state borders, from one side, but from another side, explosion of new borders, their multiplication and diversification - biometrical, internal, functional, time borders, borders beyond borders, smart borders, symbolic boundaries...
Bordering the Balkans will be studied in two directions: overproduction of borders - state, ethnic, cultural, etc. and overproduction of constructions, meanings, interpretations.
My project, tentatively titled Between Two Patriae: Transnational Patriotism in the Ionian Islands and the Adriatic, 1800-1830, studies the last generation of Ionian intellectuals who were born and raised within a world of Venetian imperial culture that had united for centuries the two shores of the Adriatic, a world that ended during their lifetime. The collapse of the Venetian Empire and the emergence of a series of antagonistic nationalisms amounted to the dissolution of the common Adriatic space and the breaking up of its Venetian cultural continuum. The project is a story of the transformation of the sea from a bridge into a border, and of intellectuals adjusting to a changing world by repositioning themselves in a reality of rapidly shifting loyalties between empires and nation-states. It is also a story about the development of nationalisms, Greek and Italian, and of the alternative to the French Enlightenment paths taken by a portion of Southern European and Balkan national patriots.
Totalitarian (Quasi-)Translatability: The Case of 1970/1980s Bulgaria. Institutions, Mechanisms, Consequences
The idea of the project is to outline a more complete and conclusive social history of literary translation from the Bulgarian into foreign languages in the 1970-1980s. How did translation and (literary) exchange function during the totalitarian period, especially in the 1970s and 1980s when Bulgarian regime made various attempts to become more open and build an attractive image abroad. What were the mechanisms and institutions ruling these processes. What was translated and how; where were the translations distributed and to what extent. In other words, how was the communist "export canon" made and whether it was actually exported. To what extent was literature an aim and to what extent a means for cultural and propaganda policies of the late communist regime. And what are the consequences in the post-totalitarian period when the ex-communist leader Todor Zhivkov remains the most translated Bulgarian author (though with books published at home, in Bulgaria).
These problems have not been addressed by a larger research so far. The last comprehensive bibliography of foreign translations was published in 1964. The period after 1989 is in the focus of a recently published independent research. In my work as a co-author of this research, I came across many unknown facts concerning the previous 2-3 decades. The field of (literary) translation from the Bulgarian into foreign languages from the mid 1960s to the late 1980s remains fragmentary and chaotic. These were the times when propaganda machine worked in full motion, cultural projects were developed with huge financial resources and aggressive ambitions for image making of the country and the regime abroad. At the same time, the cultural export remained quite simulative, clumsy, nationalistic, and out of date - something typical for Bulgarian institutions till the present time. Yet, the popular belief that exactly the state can and should do this remains unchanged after more than 20 years of transition to market economy.
The present study deals with the relashionship between transitional criminal justice, democratization and collective memory in post-communist Bulgaria and Romania. The project argues for re-thinking and re-visiting the filters that scholars used to interpret main issues of transitional criminal justice in Eastern Europe after 1989, such as: (1) the relationship between judicial accountability and the rule of law in transitional societies; (2) the role of successor trials in re-writing history; and (3) the interaction between domestic and external actors and specific initiatives in shaping transitional justice and democratic accountability. The study explores the overall trajectory of accountability issue at and since 1989 in Bulgaria and Romania. Accountability "milestones" will be identified for each country. Legal actions will be studied in depth (the judicial framework for prosecuting communist crimes; the taxonomy of the trials and their development; the narrative about the past constructed through criminal transitional justice in each country), as well as the strategy decisions of private actors, the policy choices of institutional figures (including policymakers, justice system operatives and international actors) and the construction and negotiation of the legal opportunity context in specific accountability processes within each national setting. This comparative analysis will offer the possibility to contribute to the theory of transitional justice by revisiting the scholarship related to criminal accountability, democratization and collective memory in transitional societies. The study contributes also to an in-depth exploration of two cases (Ramania and Bulgaria), which up until now remain understudied.
Key-words: Transitional Justice, Successor Trials, Post-communism, Rule of Law, Human Rights.
"Be Yourself, Become a Peasant": Economic Practices and Social Relations in a Bulgarian Eco Community
This project looks at a relatively new phenomenon- "downshifting" as it is practiced in a Bulgarian eco community. Like in similar movements developed in western countries, in Bulgaria in the past several years young, well educated people move to the country side to live and raise their families, leaving behind paid jobs and the comforts of city life. This movement has ideological basis in anti-consumerist and anti-capitalist attitudes, as well as in nature preserving agricultural subsistence. A lifestyle outside the ‘rat race', it is to be devoted to activities and people who bring meaning and pleasure to one's life. While "downshifting" or "simple living", as this movement is sometimes termed in the literature is studied among American and north European communities living in rural settings in south Europe or the US, there is little research on the actual practices they employ to manage economic survival in the outback. My objectives in this project are to find out what kinds of survival strategies are utilized by former city dwellers, with little or no previous experience in rural life to support themselves. How do these migrants integrate with the local community from which they differ so visibly? What kinds of support networks they create and utilize while living in rural Bulgaria? To answer these questions I propose to do field work in a community located in northwestern Bulgaria. The study will shed light on a new to Bulgaria phenomenon, while at the same time providing insights into "downshifting" movements worldwide. It can provide a better understanding of the recent arrival of anti-materialist ideologies into political and social space that carries the legacies of state socialism and has, as of present, a relatively new and brief encounter with consumerist culture and neoliberal capitalist values.
The goal of the project is to examine the art of dissimulation in early modern Slavic intellectual culture on the verge of the XVI–XVIIth centuries, to study the causes which brought it to life in Ruthenia, to show its peculiarities as well as its impact on the development of later philosophical and theological thought in Russia, Poland, Belarus and Ukraine. The observation is guided most generally by methods of textological analysis, philological critique, and hermeneutics to study and translate the early-printed sources. It also adopts a biobibliographical approach which will make it possible to reconstruct the link between the writers’ biography and their theoretical apology of dissimulation.
The focal point of the present research project will be the problem of the relation of possibility to negativity. Negativity has been linked to possibility ever since Aristotle (in Physics and Metaphysics; in Physics he even states that the problem of steresis, or privation, is another way to describe the problem of dunamis), and there is a long tradition, leading up to Heidegger and beyond that deals with their relationship. In this tradition, however, there are two dominant oppositions, which a vigorous study should overcome. The first one is the opposition between negativity and positivity; the second, the opposition between possibility and impossibility. Opposing negativity to positivity opens the way for an affirmative interpretation of negativity and in fact predetermines the meaning of negativity through the concept of negation seen as an act. This means that negativity is seen as having affirmative force of its own, which makes it affirmative. (This was the argument of Frege in his study of Negation.) Negativity is negative only to the extent that it is not an act. It is not opposed to the act (and, therefore to affirmativity), because it is not posed at all. If negativity is not an act, it should be thought of on the side of possibility, or potentiality. But in the possible it is what cannot be actualized, and therefore, what remains impossible. The impossible is not opposed to the possible; it traverses it as its own impotentiality and thus marks its internal limits. It is for this reason that possibility is never reducible to what was already conditioned, or predetermined, or pregiven.
I believe, that it is precisely the relationship of negativity and possibility that couldl help philosophy overcome the simple opposition between possibility and impossibility, on the one hand, and to grasp better the actualization which does not presuppose anything pregiven, on the other.
The task of rethinking the correlations possibility - actuality and negativity - affirmativity was already partially fulfilled in the works of Heidegger, Deleuze, Derrida, or Agamben. These debates were brought to the Bulgarian philosophical scene and developed recently by Boyan Manchev and Dimitar Vatsov. In the present project some of the positions in these debates will be reconsidered and reevaluated, and new theses will be proposed.
I believe that this research project will help rearticulate basic issues in the field of literary theory, political philosophy, sociology, critical theory.