Hidden Order: an Anthropological Approach to Leftist/Rightist Affiliations in Bulgaria and Greece
Hidden Order: an Anthropological Approach to Leftist/Rightist Affiliations in Bulgaria and Greece

Summary/Abstract: The question of social trust in the legitimacy of law-producing and law-implementing institutions is closely related with individuals’ experiences especially in countries with state-sponsored regimes of repression and violence. In Bulgaria and Greece, memories of past repressions, in the first case during a long-established totalitarian regime, and in the second after several episodes of authoritarian regimes, contributed to creating distrust in public authority and its legal institutions that is endemic to this day. I will focus on present political schisms inherited from experiences of radical changes, political instabilities and discontinuities. At a certain level, they explain the structural distrust towards the legal systems and the politics in these countries. In this project, I wish to approach the problematic of the hidden order and social distrust by studying a dichotomy instrumentalised at all levels of social life between ‘people from the Left’ and ‘people from the Right’. In both countries, the Left/Right denomination appears as a strategy of (re)presentation of the Self in everyday life. In this process of labelling, individuals and groups are classified as either ‘ours’ or the ‘other’s’. This approach considers the phenomenon as both a heritage of past political cleavages (family experiences of exclusion, political fights and repression) and as a collective and individual identification that confers, or else dispossesses, rights and privileges in social life.

• Details
• Contents