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Balkan Family Structure and the European Pattern
This study, which is an updated, extended, and revised version of the out-of-print 1993 edition, reassesses the traditional stereotype of the place of the Balkans in the model of the European family in the nineteenth century on the basis of new source material and by synthesizing existing research. The work first analyzes family structure and demographic variables as they appear in population registers and other sources, and the impact of these findings on theoretical syntheses of the European family pattern. On most features, such as population structure, marriage and nuptiality, birth and fertility, death and mortality rates, family and household size and structure, as well as inheritance ...
Balkan Identities
Four main themes are concentrated on in this text, the construction of historical memories; the sites of national memory; the transmission of national memory; and the mobilisation of national identities.
Scaling the Balkans
Scaling the Balkans puts in conversation several fields that have been traditionally treated as discrete: Balkan studies, Ottoman studies, East European studies, and Habsburg and Russian studies. By looking at the complex interrelationship between countries and regions, demonstrating how different perspectives and different methodological approaches inflect interpretations and conclusions, it insists on the heuristic value of scales. The volume is a collection of published and unpublished essays, dealing with issues of modernism, backwardness, historical legacy, balkanism, post-colonialism and orientalism, nationalism, identity and alterity, society-and nation-building, historical demography and social structure, socialism and communism in memory, and historiography.
Post-communist Nostalgia
Although the end of the Cold War was greeted with great enthusiasm by people in the East and the West, the ensuing social and especially economic changes did not always result in the hoped-for improvements in people's lives. This led to widespread disillusionment that can be observed today all across Eastern Europe. Not simply a longing for security, stability, and prosperity, this nostalgia is also a sense of loss regarding a specific form of sociability. Even some of those who opposed communism express a desire to invest their new lives with renewed meaning and dignity. Among the younger generation, it surfaces as a tentative yet growing curiosity about the recent past. In this volume scho...
Bones of Contention
A historical study, taking as its narrative focus the life, death and posthumous fate of Vasil Levski (1837-1873), arguably the major and only uncontested hero of the Bulgarian national pantheon. The main title refers to the "thick description" of the reburial controversy during the final phase of communist Bulgaria, which centered on the search for Levski's bones. The book gives a specific understanding also of the relationship between nationalism and religion in the post-communist period, by analyzing the recent canonization of Levski. The processes described, although with a chronological depth of almost two centuries, are still very much in the making, and the living archive expands not ...
Imagining the Balkans
'Imagining the Balkans' examines how an innocent geographic appellation was transformed into a powerful and widespread pejorative designation. In a new afterword, Maria Todorova discusses the reaction to her dubbing of the term Balkanism and recent events in the Balkans.
Remembering Communism
Remembering Communism examines the formation and transformation of the memory of communism in the post-communist period. The majority of the articles focus on memory practices in the post-Stalinist era in Bulgaria and Romania, with occasional references to the cases of Poland and the GDR. Based on an interdisciplinary approach, including history, anthropology, cultural studies and sociology, the volume examines the mechanisms and processes that influence, determine and mint the private and public memory of communism in the post-1989 era. The common denominator to all essays is the emphasis on the process of remembering in the present, and the modalities by means of which the present perspective shapes processes of remembering, including practices of commemoration and representation of the past. The volume deals with eight major thematic blocks revisiting specific practices in communism such as popular culture and everyday life, childhood, labor, the secret police, and the perception of “the system”.
Balkan Identities
Balkan Identities brings together historians, anthropologists, and literary scholars all working under the shared conviction that the only way to overcome history is to intimately understand it. The contributors of Balkan Identities focus on historical memory, collective national memory, and the political manipulation of national identities. They refine our understanding of memory and identity in general and explore and assess the significance of particular manifestations of Balkan national identities and national memories in the region. The essays in Balkan Identities grapple with three major problems: the construction of historical memory, sites of national memory, and the mobilization of national identities. While most essays focus on a single country (e.g. Croatia, Romania, Turkey, Cyprus, Albania, Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece, Macedonia), they are in dialogue with each other and share an opposition to rigid isolationist identities. Illuminating and challenging, Balkan Identities demonstrates the ever-changing nature of a troubled and culturally vibrant region.
Restless History
Post-Stalinism – the last three decades of socialism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe – gave birth to new political ideas and social struggles, which reshaped socialist societies and forged new global imaginaries. With a focus on socialist Bulgaria, Restless History traces the dynamic polemical and social shifts that took place during this period. With anti-Stalinist and humanist visions, socialist societies rebuilt their material and social worlds around social-reproductive needs such as care, housing, education, leisure, rest, and access to culture and the arts. In the sphere of global politics, they created anti-racist, feminist, anti-colonial, and anti-imperialist solidarities ...
Eastern Europe in Revolution
In this book twelve outstanding authorities present their thoroughgoing assessments of the East European revolution of 1989—the definite collapse of communism as an ideology, a political movement, and a system of power in eight countries. All but two of the contributors focus on the revolution in an individual region or country—Poland, Hungary, the German Democratic Republic, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Albania—and each of them addresses the theme of regime transition. In Eastern Europe, of course, the transition from communism to.... has been as complex and varied as the political geography of the notorious "fracture zone" itself, and individual authors thus concentrate on different sets of problems; they tell different kinds of stories. Pointing to the enormous difficulties of systematic transformation, they measure the dangers of nationality conflict and the potential for new authoritarianism. Ivo Banac has assembled a cast with impressive credentials. Without imposing an artificial unity on a chaotic subject, their book maps out the events of 1989-90 and sets the background for figuring out where the region may be headed.
