Традицията като средство за оцеляване в условията на икономическа криза в България
Tradition as a Means of Survival in the Conditions of an Economic Crisis in Bulgaria

Summary/Abstract: The grave economic recession in Bulgaria since 1990 and the process of restitu¬tion of farm lands has been the backdrop against which new phenomena have come into being, which are of interest from the point of view of the ethnology of passage. Subject to investigation in this article are the manifestations of informal economics and re-traditionalising in the post-socialist period. The prehistory of these phenomena can be traced to the practice of "the auxiliary farming", offi¬cially encouraged by the state during the socialist period (particularly after 1973). People living in villages and small towns supplemented their incomes by produc¬ing fruit and vegetables and raising farm stock (mostly to meet their own needs, and in most of the cases without farming being their main occupation). A consid¬erable part of the Bulgarian people have been "part time farmers". Now (during the past ten years) a trend has been observed (most clearly manifest among fami¬lies at the age of retirement), whereby they secure their food staples by home pro¬duction. It has been a function of the dwindling public consumption. The most primitive technology and implements have been used in the re-traditionalising of farming. The main farm implement has been the hoc. In fact, this type of "subsis¬tence" farming is more primitive than private farming prior to the Second World War, because now most of the people have neither any farm machinery, nor the "live force" of draught animals. Apparnеntly, this is a matter of a reversal to tradi¬tion as a means of survival in the critical situation, and of the persistence of the rudiments of the "closed natural economy" characteristic of feudalism. From the point of view of the desired modernisation, these are regressive socio-economic trends. On the one hand, re-traditionalising helps the physical survival of quite a few social strata; on the other hand, it is no driving force of economic progress. No doubt, however, it is an alternative of survival. From another point of view, a reversal to certain forms of tradition can also be considered an activation of the inner reserves of a system; a manifestation of the mechanisms whereby the latter resists its own destruction.

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