The World(S) Upside Down: Imagining the Balkans and the West in Elena (Northern Bulgaria) During the First Wave of COVID-19
The World(S) Upside Down: Imagining the Balkans and the West in Elena (Northern Bulgaria) During the First Wave of COVID-19

Summary/Abstract: In the following manuscript, I consider the first wave of COVID-19 in Europe as a specific context of ‘strong interactions’, to quote Claude Lévi-Strauss. These interactions ‘shook’ the imaginary connected to ‘balkanism’, as coined by Maria Todorova, in the town of Elena and its neighbouring villages (Northern Bulgaria). Thus, the highly valued symbolic indicators of ‘Europeanness’ generally attributed to the Western ‘cultural system’ temporarily gave way to an alleged avoidance of contact with a ‘West’ imagined as a threat. The Western cultural system was then perceived by the ‘left behind’ Bulgarians—i.e., the population that did not emigrate abroad—as one of the current exporters of the COVID-19 pandemic. All this led to a series of ‘identity transactions’ in which Elena’s Bulgarians openly challenged the order of civilizational classification that is socially sanctioned as being culturally legitimate and the inherent position of the fantasised ‘Western world’. I propose here to examine this ephemeral dissonance in the Balkans’ imaginary: the social technology of cultural resistance, in the sense of James C. Scott’s work, which I was able to observe in the microregion of Elena during the first wave of the pandemic (between March and May 2020).

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