Парченце от пъзела (За социалистическото всекидневие)
A Piece of the Puzzle (On the Socialist Everyday Life)

Summary/Abstract: The article analyses problems associated with the socialist everyday life in the Bulgarian village. For the first time, as far as Bulgarian ethnological literature goes, recordings, made by a folklorist during field research in informal conversations with informants during the 1960-1980 period, have been used as source material. Since the material has not been purposefully collected, it is most varied, in terms of subject matter and regions, not selected in advance. Whenever the informants, digressing from some questions, subject to a specific investigation, have confided their thoughts and views, their life stories, revealing the socialist everyday life in the Bulgarian village. The collection of a great number of single cases, like small particles of a puzzle, paint the picture of a parallel reality. Hidden under the surface, it existed alongside the official one proclaimed. The establishment of the cooperative farms; the pre-socialist past; the attitude to religion and to the esoteric – these are individual problems, which are subjected to analysis. It has also been pointed out that the accumulation of as many recordings and observations as possible, made by ethnologists during the period of real socialism, would contribute to the more complete presentation of its essence, and will make it possibe to make comparisons and draw conclusions correlated to those, made in the wake of 1989.

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