Промени в груповата идентичност на трансграничните семейства от Родопите 1992-2015 г.
Changes in Group Identity of Transborder Families in Rhodope Mountains (1992 – 2015)

Summary/Abstract: This text is an endeavor to analyze the consequences of the transborder separation of families and its influence upon group cultural identity. The article is focused not only on the first and second generation of emigrants but also on the parts of the nuclear family remaining in Bulgaria (predominantly children and older parents). The analysis is based on long years of field research, monitoring, secondary analysis of free interviews and target groups responses, as well as on unpublished interviews. As a result of their cultural and religious attitudes Muslims have a hard time to apprehend the existential shock of the fact that the family is no longer based on mutual cohabitation at one place, in traditional community and environment. They also struggle with rifts in the traditional hierarchy inside the nuclear family. Muslims experience serious changes in their understanding of traditional family and its enlarged ancestral variant. For the sake of prosperity, within a time period of twenty five years, the traditional family was lost and became fragmented. With the time passing it became spatially dispersed, the social, cultural and hierarchical bonds grew thinner and partially severed. Despite the increasing scientific interest in the matter, in the year of 2015, the issue of family transformations and local social networks remains marginal and the field research results are not full and not well organized.

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