Да заседаваме заедно. Местните съвети във видинския санджак като области на хибридизация (1864–1877)
Sitting Together: Local Councils of Vidin County as Domains of Hybridization (1864–1877)

Summary/Abstract: Focusing on the administrative council of Vidin County in the third quarter of the nineteenth-century this paper examines a set of political practices where local agents and appointed officials negotiate within a set of bureaucratic roles, defined in idealized forms through rules and regulations issued by a central government. Analyzing the interaction of local agents with the administrative and judiciary institutions of the modern Ottoman state reveals the political nature of local administration, and suggests that Vidin’s local administrative council and its practices, in the period analyzed in this study, might be perceived to constitute a hybrid platform for Ottoman governmentality. Agents with different institutional roles (such as state appointed officials or local notables) or national „identities“ (Bulgarian or Turkish) engage in hegemonic negotiations within this platform. In this period the Ottoman state tried to to establish a dynamic administrative structure that functioned in communication with but separate from the judicial structure at the local level. However, the prominent local notables operating in both the administrative and judicial councils formed the hybrid space between judicial and administrative institutions that the modern Ottoman state was aiming to separate. Through re-election, these local notables served in the councils for extended periods and allowed the local judicio-administrative sphere to serve as a platform for the hybridization of state and society. The information available about some of these council members indicates that they retained their prominence even after the collapse of the Ottoman administrative structure. In that sense, the local notables outlived the empire in the region as agents of a new Bulgarian governmen-tality. Surviving the crisis of the Ottoman traditional social structure, these agents were able to integrate themselves into the emerging modern social structure and be a part of Ottoman/Bulgarian governmentality despite the political turmoil in the region. Regime change, coming with the collapse of the Ottoman administrative structure in the region, did not lead to a dramatic rupture in the local socioeconomic institutional structure.

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