Ботев: глобализацията на кръвта
Botev: The Globalization of Blood

Summary/Abstract: The paper uses examples of the patriotic tattoos of Bulgarian soccer fans in order to analyse the different regimes of traditional and non-traditional nationalisms. The traditional verbal nationalism is usually based on texts of poetry, literature, historiography and public discourses of patriotic propaganda; due to its verbal qualities, although isolationist and ideological, this discourse also opens up a space for disputes, critique and intellectual reflections. Recent forms of populist visual nationalism reproduce, on the contrary, the national identity emblems as self-evident, obligatory and indisputable. In its turn, tattooing engraves national symbols onto the bodies of the soccer fans, transforming the latter into corporeal signs of a fatal patriotic destiny. The paradox of this new visual-bodily culture, racist and xenophobic as it is, remains hidden in its double belonging. Far from being emblems only of the closed national visual canon, patriotic tattoos circulate simultaneously as images of a commoditized global lexicon; despite their isolationistcontent, their visual form belongs to the “society of spectacle” and to its fashionable cosmopolitan tattoo culture.

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