Българският комунизъм. Дебати и интерпретации
A presentation of “The Bulgarian communism. Debates and interpretations” – research papers collection, edited by Mihail Gruev and Diana Mishkova
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A presentation of “The Bulgarian communism. Debates and interpretations” – research papers collection, edited by Mihail Gruev and Diana Mishkova
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The primary objective of the study is to find and describe the narrative code of calendar verbal rituals, defined as an unalienable word of the living present. The term narrative code determines a system of rules that has a crucial impact on defining the principles of selecting and combining the elements of the story, i.e. heroes, space, time and plot. The sources for the analysis are verbal rituals excerpted from the ritual and customary practice Vodice (epiphany) in Macedonia. The analysis demonstrated a strong dependence of intratextual narration (i.e. the story creating a work of verbal folklore) on extratextual narration (social and religious). Using the following theories: 1. the memory of religious groups (Maurice Halbawchs), 2. collective and cultural memory (Assmann Jan, Astrid Erll) and 3. commemorative ceremonies (Paul Connerton), has shown how the foundational scenes of extratextual social (change in status) and religious (defined role in the festivities) narration are present in the ritual and customary practice of the Feast of Epiphany.
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This study represents the first part of an analysis focusing on Aktionsgruppe Banat and its members’ endeavors to reconstruct their pre-1989 common past. Based on memory sources, this first part illustrates that the members of this non-conformist group have not recently recalled their experience under Romanian communism in order to turn themselves retrospectively into dissidents. Instead, they have jointly conveyed the memory of a “collective author” with a unique identity in Ceauşescu’s Romania. As the present study argues, this uniqueness derives not only from the different ethno-cultural origin of the group members, but also from their specific literary program and indeed atypical political convictions.
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When Norman Manea left Romania for Germany in 1986, he was already an established Romanian writer. Two years later he immigrated to the United States of America and ever since he has published ten more volumes. He is currently living in New York, teaching literature at Bard College.Manea’s fiction and non-fiction books published in the United States relate closely to the concepts of history, memory and totalitarianism. The year 1986 was a turning point in his writing. Whereas America gave him the chance to reach a new fiction level, his biography became a crucial source of inspiration for his work.His whole literary trajectory during his exile represents a process of memory incitement, of self-discovery at different ages; by narrating himself, the author bears witness to the violence and destruction caused by both forms of totalitarianism – Nazism and Communism. Using language as an ally to anamnesis, Norman Manea descends into his own past and rediscovers his identity. His memories represent the raw material for a literature that brings together stories of three fundamental experiences: Nazism (with its dehumanizing corollary, the Holocaust), communism (with the White Clown’s perverse pleasure in “order and discipline”) and exile, with language displacement.
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The text discusses the accounts given by the so-called “Lebanese”, as those Poles who at some point of their lives found refuge in Lebanon call themselves. The accounts were recorded in Poland, Great Britain and Lebanon. “The Lebanese” explained the motives that drove people or their families forced to leave their place of stay when taking decisions regarding new destination. Also, the text describes in detail the impressions of the narrators from the new places they found themselves in and how they coped in new reality (on the example of Great Britain and Poland which was a Communist-ruled country at that time). The text aims to familiarize the audience with this subject, about which not much has been said so far.
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This article presents preliminary findings of the oral history project on the subject of the soldiers of the People’s Troops of Poland. Testimonies of ca. 40 “People’s Poland” veterans were recorded (giving more than 2000 hours of audio recordings). These soldiers fought on the Eastern Front, participating in, among others, the battles of Lenino, Budziszyn, and Berlin. The article describes the interviewed group and defines the method applied when conducting the interviews. It also gives a short account of how the interviewed were conscripted into the People’s army. The main part of the article is devoted to pointing to the similarities in the veterans’ accounts. These common elements include interspersing a personal narrative with a broad historical context, underlining that in their individual actions during the war and after it they encountered situations from which there was no escape, using the propaganda expressions dating back to the times of the Polish People’s Republic, and the feeling of being omitted (as a whole group of veterans of the People’s Troops) from the sphere of historical memory after 1989. In the last part of the article, plans for a monograph based on the project are presented.
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The main aim of this article is to analyse the essence and usefulness of beyond-academic usage of oral history as a particularly important part of public history. It discusses oral history as a part of public history as practised by some Polish socio-cultural institutions who concentrate on documenting people’s memories. The author focuses her attention of four centres documenting people’s accounts and their recordings collections. In her opinion, these main Polish centres are: the “Grodzka Gate – NN Theatre” in Lublin, the History Meeting House and the KARTA Centre, the “Topografie” Association in Łódź and the “Remembrance and Future” Center in Wrocław. In order to be able to fully analyse separate social initiatives in Poland, one needs to, in the first place, pay attention to the uniqueness of oral history in the post-Communist countries. Having this context in mind, it is easier to present the way this technique has been adapted to the documentary arena in Poland. First and foremost, the author is most interested in what subjects are covered within the scope of programmes run by these institutions, and what picture of the past is promoted by these institutions in today’s public sphere. She also tackles issues connected with social archive studies conducted by the institutions she is talking about. It is her opinion, that by archiving the testimonies of witnesses to history, these institutions successfully fulfil their task: they do not make their findings and knowledge a secret, they do not treat it as something only a small group of chosen researchers on contemporary history can have access to. Instead, they make it available to anyone who is willing to learn history as presented in individual witnesses’ stories. Somewhere in the background remains the question of the avant-garde and outsiders division, as towards the end of the article the author wants to present as fully as possible the place of beyond-academic oral history in Poland as compared to oral history developed by academic circles.
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The Book of Origins (hnewo tepyy) is a major ritual text of the Nuosu, a subgroup of the official Yi (Yizu) ethnic group of southwest China. The narrative, existing in both written and oral variants, is part of a living tradition, especially among priests (bimo) and folk singers, in the Liangshan Yi autonomous region in Sichuan province and nearby Yunnan province. The epic narrates the creation of the sky, earth, and living creatures through the frame of genealogies. After an age of scorching heat, life is re-seeded on earth and a descendant of the snow tribes of flora and fauna finds a bride. Many generations later this union results in the marriage between an earthling and the Sky God’s daughter. The tropes of genealogy and migration intertwine in the storyworld as clans descended from the couple seek out an “ideal place” to settle and prosper in the local environment in a pattern that resonates with other epics from the southwest and the Southeast Asian Massif.
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The aim of this study is to analyse the narratives of conscripts focused on the relationship between the army and ruling ideology between 1968 and 2004. The first part is devoted to the reflection of various forms of interaction between the army and ideology at the level of official and public discourse. The second part is focused on the mapping of specific forms and narratives related to the phenomenon of compulsory military service, including the question of its importance for conscripts. The main sources of analysis are narrative and semi-structured oral history interviews with 100 conscripts, who had experience with compulsory military service between 1968 and 2004.
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The International Yezidi Theological Academy established in Tbilisi is a breakthrough initiative in the history of Yezidism. The objective of my study is to describe the environment in which it was founded, its goals, leading figures and courses taught. The main part of the article is preceded by a brief description of Yezidism and its religious principles, which, due to the ban on writing, have been spread for centuries orally and have not been codified in writing. The following section outlines the changes that have taken place among Yezidis living in Transcaucasia, especially since the 20th century, when the ban on writing was widely violated, as well as the initiatives taken to preserve their cultural and religious identity. The latest of these initiatives is the Yezidi Theological Academy that provides Yezidis with traditional religious knowledge in an academic style.
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The paper describes the process of designing and implementing the methodological and ethical assumptions in the project “24.02.2022 5 am: Testimonies from the War”, which aims to collect accounts of women war refugees from Ukraine in Poland. The planning phase of the project, cooperation with various institutions, and the formation and management of the research team are presented, together with the rules for selecting the women participants and the research tool plus its application. There is a substantial section on the ethics of the research and its practical implications, followed by the organisational and methodological assumptions in the context of how they affect the collection of recordings. Finally, the ways in which the data are handled are described, from the perspective of digital hermeneutics — the process of research reflection on the dataset, on the participation of different people in the process, and on the shaping of an international base of refugee accounts.
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This study uses authentic interviews from field research into the Roma people of Slovakia to search for partial answers to questions concerning the functioning of collective and individual memory of the marginalised ethnic group that to this day almost exclusively leans on oral presentation instead of written recordings when sharing stories and experiences between generations. Witnesses to war-time events are dying out. Their stories need to be re-interpreted. They are too often lost, however, in the chasm of oblivion caused by ostracisation, neglected education, politics and, above all, poverty. The state has failed in the past and continues to fail today, albeit differently, by enabling the process of forgetting.
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Gölde, İncesu as it is known today, is a rural settlement in Manisa Province, Kula District. The settlement has lost its population to a large extent and mostly inhabited by elderly today. But, it has been the common living area of Muslim Turks and Orthodox Rums throughout the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century. The forced migration of Rums after the War of Independence and the following rural exodus starting from 1950s onwards resulted with a massive population loss; thus the traces of the previous common life on the built environment began to disappear. This study aims to understand characteristics of Gölde when it was inhabited by two communities. The study utilizes Ottoman archival documents, oral history studies and site survey. Well preserved built environment and oral history studies ease understanding the architectural as well as socio-economic characteristics of Gölde at the turn of the century. Ottoman archival sources are silent about architectural characteristics, but economic and social changes of the first half of the 19th century can be traced. These archival documents also help interpretation of the information coming from oral history studies. For this reason, the text does not follow a chronological order; it focuses at the turn of the 20th century and calls the archival data of 19th century for a comprehensive evaluation together with oral history studies and field survey findings.
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This study examines the history, language, social, and economic transformation of the Yuruks living in the Yamanlar Village located in the Karşıyaka district, where there is relatively little information in the literature despite its proximity to the Izmir city center. Information collected from the Ottoman Era cemetery adjoining the village reveals that the Yamanlar Yuruks have lived here for at least 400 years. Mount Yamanlar, where the village is located, is of great importance because of its ancient history, as it witnessed the founding of Izmir (Smyrna). The social and economic lifestyle in the village has transformed as the city expanded toward residential areas atop Mount Yamanlar. The loss of traditional livelihood practices challenged the villagers and severely influenced their customs, which might be considered valuable pieces of cultural heritage. In this study, we conducted fieldwork, during which various data collection methods and techniques were employed to describe daily life in the village. Within the scope of this study, semi-structured and unstructured interviews were conducted with the local people, and an oral historical study was carried out. With this method, we aimed to present an ethnohistorical description of the Yamanlar Village by trying to establish a balance between the analysis of both written documents and oral data to make sense of the social and economic change it has undergone and to contribute to the literature on Izmir Yuruks.
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Oral narratives and texts create an effect area from the local to the universal culture and with temporal approaches from the individual to the society. Many events, phenomenons and notions which are carried to the mental world of the society with texts, in time, become settled implementations and behaviours. In social positioning under changing conditions, the narratives and texts which include woman provides continuity. The women’s voices whose presences are shaped with the decisions of other’s and male’s thoughts are heard yet via others and men. While passing from the oral narrative to the written, reflecting women’s biological gender differences , so as to create the perception of “the other” attracts attention. The thing that take attraction is that the women in the narratives, rather than her biological gender, is exposed to gender configuration which derives from sanctions and behaviour forms approved by the society. In the narratives and works named as Rapunzel, Maiden’s Tower and Hurşidname, even before their birth, a life area which lives ordinary people is not prepared for women. Women are not allowed to decide on their bodies and lives. In Rapunzel, Maiden’s Tower and Hurşid ü Ferahşad, it is seen that men, especially the one who is closed to the woman character, is in position of decider on behalf of woman. These works mention about family and society based an asset configuration on women’s biological gender. In this work, the tale of Rapunzel who was isolated from society because of religious and cultural norms, The Maiden’s Tower legend which explains a girl’s tale to the island-shaped towerby her father fort he purpose of saving her from dangers and Hurşid ü Ferşad mathnawi which is one of the important ones in terms of text fiction are approached and compared on account of common sides on viewing women. Firstly, the fact that these narratives and works are not just a text and their contexts cause positioning of woman in the plane of family and society is introduced. These texts give opportunity to search, determine and analyze samenesses of social viewing comes from beyond centuries towards to woman even though these samenesses belong to different cultures and improve in different types.
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The Ergenekon Epic is an important narrative in which the Turks melted the iron mountain and initiated rebirth. The significance of this epic arises from the fact that it is a narrative that determines both cosmogony and the calendar and time. This narrative, which reveals the beginning of spring with symbolic elements, is also accepted as the origin narrative of the Nevruz celebration, which holds an important place in Turkish culture. It is also possible to see traces of the Turks' understanding of universalist dichotomy in this narrative. The Turks became a society that developed their own dual collective philosophies and their own understanding of "wisdom" and their way of perceiving the world was also reflected in the narratives. According to the Turks' understanding, the universe was formed by the union of Earth and Sky. This merger is also the foundation of other beings. Although Earth and Sky are opposites, they originate from the same essence. One does not have superiority over the other; they complement each other, and the harmony they create together brings forth the birth of the universe. This understanding constitutes the “universalist dichotomy”. In this study, the concepts of time and calendar are briefly discussed, and the Turks' way of perceiving time and the calendars they create are mentioned. Then, the spring festivals, which have been considered sacred and celebrated throughout world history as a calendrical practice, are discussed. In the continuation of the article, the concept of the universalist dichotomy is emphasized. Afterwards, brief information about the Ergenekon Epic, which forms the main part of the article, is provided, and its summary is presented. In the last part, the symbols in the Ergenekon Epic belonging to the Göktürks are analyzed, and the analysis is completed by considering the epic in the context of the universalist dichotomy.
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The article tells the story of the "Ratibor miracle", a rescue operation that saved dozens of Russian and Ukrainian emigrants from being deported to the Soviet Union by the SMERSH counterintelligence agency in 1945. The author, Anastazie Kopřivová, describes the historical background, the personal profiles, and the fate of the key participants of the escape from the Ratibor prison in Poland. She also explains the reasons why this event was not widely known or discussed among the emigrant community in Prague. The article is based on archival sources, memoirs, and interviews with survivors and their relatives. It is a valuable contribution to the history of the Russian and Ukrainian emigration in Czechoslovakia and the Soviet repressions against them.
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