Читалище и време - институционално съграждане и обществена трансформация
Community Cultural Center and Time - Institutional Building and Public Transformation

From the Pages of the Chronicle

Author(s): Maria Kisikova
Subject(s): Anthropology, Social Sciences, Sociology, Cultural Anthropology / Ethnology, Culture and social structure , Social development
Published by: Пловдивски университет »Паисий Хилендарски«
Keywords: community center; chronicle; institutional development; historical transformation
Summary/Abstract: This text offers a viewport into the life of a community center, traced over a relatively long time span in view of the history created for our sake by the authors of the institution’s Chronicle. Creating a chronology of events and goings-on is a special kind of task, intricately connected to a keen historical awareness and a sense for the significance of the time and space we’ve lived through and in. Yet, crafting such a text is also essentially guided by administrative rules, because ever since the latter part of the 1920s, with the validation of the Law for National Community Cultural Centers and the modal statute, it was proposed that an institutional chronicle be maintained as part of the administration and documentation of the community center. In the following decades, the reasoning for keeping the Chronicle changed, but the expectation that it be maintained was still there. My approach toward the textual materials assumes the principles of established theory in the field of the social sciences, stemming from the empirical data, and building analytical models and defining schemas on this very basis. The selected research approach has met the criteria of two crucial principles of anthropological studies - specific cultural phenomena must be studied according to their inherent properties, and random comparisons (in both time and space) must be reduced to a minimum. In its final stages, the proposed research clearly reveals its insufficiency, but the latter can be compensated for by future readers and researchers who can offer different viewpoints, interpretative models, and theoretical understandings, thus adding relevancy to what has been presented here.

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