Приятелство и приятелски коалиции. Приятелството като модел на социалните отношения
Friendship and Friendly Coalitions. Friendship as a Pattern of Social Relations

Summary/Abstract: It is the purpose of this work to characterise friendship as a principle of organisation, mobilisation and functioning of the social networks in Bulgaria under socialism and postsocialism. During this entire period, social relations have been in a process of incessant transformations. For that reason, the investigation of friendship is a step towards getting to know the changes in the social and in the interpersonal relations, moreover knowing that the latter have been underinvestigated by the Bulgarian social sciences.Within this context the specific objectives of this paper are: to formulate the characteristics, typology and cultural forms of friendship in a Bulgarian environment; to follow how friendship compares with the other types of interpersonal relations in Bulgaria (ritual kinship, neighbourliness); to outline the functioning of the friendly coalitions at the place of work; to chart the functioning of the friendly coalitions in the time of leisure.In tackling these objectives, the methods of investigation have been dominated by the striving to combine oral information (autobiographies and autobiographical interviews) with data contained in written sources. In writing this work I have used about forty interviews, taken within the frameworks of the FOROST project, from 2001 to 2004, mostly from representatives of the intelligentsia in Sofia. The state archives rarely contain data about phenomena like friendship. To make up for this, I have studied unpublished written autobiographies, published memoir literature, written diaries, kept at my request by thirteen women in the course of 15 days in 2002, as well as some essays by university students. Finally, I studied all the 73 autobiographical narrations as well as the forum, prompted by these narrations in the special Internet site, devoted to the memories about socialism in Bulgaria.

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