Créer les frontières ethniques : Le récit national bulgare
Ethnic Frontiers and the Bulgarian Narrative

Summary/Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to examine an essential aspect of the activity of the Bulgarian intellectuals of the 18th and19th centuries, which has remained largely overlooked in Bulgarian historiography. Our focus is on the principal moments in the creation of the Bulgarian national narrative with a view to reveal its function of establishing boundaries between “the Own” and “the Alien”, “the Other”. Special attention is given to the contribution of authors who played the leading role in the evolution of the historical thought of Bulgarians and in the complex process of the construction of models of identification. We single out the conscious effort of the Bulgarian elite to consolidate the ethnic community around the “ancestral” values and work for the creation of the “imagined community”. Our goal is to establish a pattern of identification which includes traits of differentiation, sameness and continuity, coded in mythologies, understood as an important complex of stories, bringing the essential knowledge and for this reason being repeated in a certain space, time and ritual-regulated conditions.

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