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This chapter was first presented as a paper at the conference “Area Studies in a Globalizing World,” organized by the University of Graz in June 2010. It came out in Christian Promitzer, Siegfried Gruber, and Harald Heppner, eds. Southeast European Studies in a Globalizing World, Zürich, Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2015, 61–73, and is reprinted here with the permission of the publisher.
Published as Working Paper 6.5, March 1994 by the Center for German and European Studies of the University of California at Berkeley, this text was prepared as part of the Project on Global Security and Ethnic Conflict, co-sponsored by the Institute of International Studies. An abridged version came out as “Identity (Trans)formation Among Pomaks in Bulgaria,” in Laszlo Kürti & Juliet Langman, eds., Beyond Borders, Boulder, Co: Westview Press, 1997, 63–82. Reprinted by permission of Westview Press an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The chapter looks at the ways in which a Bulgarian Muslim identity has been shaped by economic, social and political forces. The empirical material on which the study was based reaches until 1993, but I believe that the general analytical context remains valid.
This text focuses on the discourse of backwardness in a cultural milieu. Through a survey of East European historiographies, it demonstrates how different notions of temporality are employed. Eastern Europe as a whole, and the particular problem of East European nationalism, have been constituted as historical objects of study very much on the pattern of anthropological objects, employing structural models of ‘timeless’ theory and method, and bracketing out Time as a dimension of intercultural study. The text also attempts to propose a way to circumvent the trap of origins by introducing the idea of relative synchronicity within a longue durée framework, which allows us to describe a period in terms of linear consecutive developments but also as a dialogical process without overlooking important aspects of short-term historical analysis involving sequential development, transmission, and diffusion. Published first in Slavic Review 64, no 1, Spring 2005, 140–164 and reproduced here with the permission of the journal.
In the last decade, I have been leading a project (together with my colleagues Stefan Troebst and Augusta Dimou) on “Remembering Communism.” It resulted in a number of workshops, conferences, and three volumes: Maria Todorova, ed. Remembering Communism: Genres of Representation, (New York: Social Science Research Council, Columbia University Press, 2010); Maria Todorova and Zsuzsa Gille, eds. Postcommunist nostalgia. (New York: Berghahn Publishers, 2010, paperback edition 2012); Maria Todorova, Stefan Troebst and Augusta Dimou, Remembering Communism: Private and Public Recollections of Lived Experience in Southeast Europe, (Budapest, New York: Central European University Press, 2014). This chapter, using excerpts from these introductions, is mostly based on the introduction to the latest volume, reproduced with the permission of the publishers.
This article is an extension of my work in Balkan Family Structure and the European Pattern (1993/2006) in that it squarely deals with the famous Hajnal line: the symbolic demarcation line proposed by the British demographer John Hajnal which divided the geographic Europe into an area running from St. Petersburg to Trieste, and characterizing the region to its west as the zone of the European marriage pattern, and the one to the east as non-European. It argues that it is naïve to expect European family models to be confined to demography or history; instead their explanatory potential is usually harnessed for different purposes in the realms of culture, ideology and politics. The text was published in Richard Wall, Tamara K. Hareven, and Josef Ehmer with the assistance of Marcus Cerman. Family History Revisited. Comparative Aspects. Newark: University of Delaware Press, London: Associated University Presses, 2001, 242–256, and is reproduced with permission of the publisher. The volume had been published earlier in German: Josef Ehmer, Tamara K. Hareven, Richard Wall (Hg.), Historische Familienforschung. Ergebnisse und Kontroversen, Frankfurt, New York: Campus Verlag, 1997, 283–300.
Language was perceived by national and cultural leaders as the mightiest agent of unification. While it is one of the most important components of the ethnic cluster, common language was neither absolutely necessary nor sufficient to distinguish ethnicity. This chapter looks at the formation of the Bulgarian literary language during the nineteenth century and explores the parallel fate of bi- and multilingualism among the Bulgarian population. It was first written as a working paper for the project, “Nation, National Identity, Nationalism,” at the Center for German and European Studies, University of California, Berkeley, Working paper, 5.5, 1992. Revised portions of it were published in East European Politics and Societies, vol. 4, No. 3, Fall 1990, 439–450, for which permission has been received. It appeared also in Polish as “Language in the Construction of Ethnicity and Nationalism: the Bulgarian Case,” in Sprawy Narodowosciowe, Seria Nowa, 2006, 27, 7–30.
This is a new text, comparing two influential works on the Balkan Wars, written by contemporaries. I have used excerpts from my previously published article “War and Memory: Trotsky’s War Correspondence from the Balkan Wars,” in: Perceptions—Journal of International Affairs, Special Issue—From the Balkan Wars to Balkan Peace, Spring 2013, 5–27, for which I have received permission from the journal. This chapter is also forthcoming in a volume dedicated to the Carnegie Report.