Динамика и устойчивост на границата във възприятията на локалните общности (По материали от региона на град Златоград)
Dynamics and Stability of the Border in the Perceptions of the Local Communities (On Data from the Region of Zlatograd)

Summary/Abstract: The way in which the phenomenon of border determines the being and the cultural specifics of the population inhabiting the adjacent regions becomes nowadays increasingly the subject of scholarly research. The region close to the southern Bulgarian border around the town of Zlatograd provides for a field study of how local people interpret the border and how it affects their lifestyle over the years. The historical and cultural memory of the border population clearly reveals the influence of the dynamics or stability of the border lane as depending on the current political reality. From a freely crossable border in the multiethnic Ottoman Empire, it turned into part of the “Iron Curtain”. Today it is actaully an ambivalent reality and a “frontier in infinite globalization”. The turbulent history of Zlatograd Region unquestionably plays a key role in the formation of the local “frontier” identity of the nearby population. The combination, from the one hand, of the dual nature of the border as both separating and defining, and, on the other hand, the process of globalization and ethnocentrism turns the fieldwork in a very specific experience which needs particular addressing.

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