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The article gives a rough overview about the development of cinema in the Balkan countries in the interwar period which was characterized by a low level of economy. Especially, the countries lacked industrial infrastructure which was a precondition for a flourishing cinema life from its very beginning. Therefore, cinema played only a marginal role in the agrarian Balkan countries. It was practically confined to the urban space. The European cinema market was dominated by international US-American and German film producers. In the Balkans a domestic film production could hardly emerge. The introduction of the talkie deteriorated conditions for domestic film pro¬duction because of the increasing production costs. Cinema could only become a mass phenomenon after the period of scrutiny when industrialization enabled mass consumption, also of films, in the 1950s and 1960s.
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The aim of this article is to illuminate and explore one core set of frames, constructed and mobilized by the respective activist organizations, around the issues of in-fertility and assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) in Bulgaria. It argues that these frames are organized predominantly around the notion of “deservedness” of parenthood or, in other words, through the present and future investments of these parents (wannabe or actual) in the common societal and national enterprise. Since they have numerous resources to invest, they are citizens, deserving parenthood. In this representation, we clearly see how the individual struggle with one biological characteristic and the suffering it brings are interpreted in an economic regime of exchange, functioning in the same time as a normative order of parenthood and citizenship.
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This paper presents the research results of a part from my dissertation „Health, Disease and Hygiene: Towards Social Construction of the Citizen Body in the Interwar Period”. In the dissertation, I conducted a study of institutionalization of hygiene through law. The focus of the article is the difficult process of institutionalizing hygienist-doctors in Bulgaria from 1878 to 1939. The final form of institutionalization is shaped by the biopolitical project of the interwar period.
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Selected bibliography in the field of Bulgarian Studies published in the current year.
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Content of the main Bulgarian scientific journals for the current year in linguistics, literature, history, folklore, ethnography, archeology and art studies
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About: Steven TÖTÖSY de ZEPETNEK and Tutun MUKHERJEE (Ed.) Companion to Comparative Literature, World Literatures, and Comparative Cultural Studies. New Delhi, Cambridge University Press India Pvt. Ltd., 2013.
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In this article Sikora examines what role the writing down of the law played for the Philomath Society. She focuses on the process of formulating the law and the norms regulating communication within the group. Basing her analysis on their correspondence, protocols, successive drafts of the law, etc., Sikora suggests that the behavioural formalization constituting the Vilnius students’ secret organization was accomplished principally through a regulation of writing practices. The very process of formulating the law aimed at creating a bureaucratic disciplinal system that would guarantee the founders’ influence. Exploring the contradiction between the Society’s declared values their accepted protocol of communication, Sikora also asks in how far members would have internalized the ambivalence of their protocol.
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Selected bibliography in the field of Bulgarian Studies published in the current year
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Content of the main Bulgarian scientific journals for the current year in linguistics, literature, history, folklore, ethnography, archeology and art studies.
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This paper will analyse the identity construction processes of the migrants’ communities in the context of the European Union. Based on the fieldwork developed with the Bulgarian community settled in Castile and Leon (Spain), this article will explore the strategies of identity management in order to succeed in the integration process. First of all, we will take into account the local strategies of community development consisted on the promotion of associations. Secondly, we will analyse the way the local population reassume the global discourses of Interculturalism promoted by the European Union. Thirdly, we will consider how far these facts affect the migrants’ communities. Bulgarian community developed a wise identity management strategy that enables them to be integrated in the local society without losing their own traditions.
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This paper problematizes the relationship between the working and middle classes in socialism, which was characterized by consumer culture and state of welfare. It also tackles the extinct middle class in the post-socialist context of the economic crisis and economically defined but politically void "new" working class. The economic realization of the Yugoslav socialist model - a hybrid of planned and market economies - combined the capitalist idea of the state of welfare with the communist execution of social rights. The socialist consumer culture, "searching for welfare", established a homogenous middle class as a proof of its own social success, leaving the "working class" to be conveniently invoked only in ideological manifests of the governing nomenclature. The discussion about the capitalist restoration of the post- socialist period gives precedence to the lament over the extinction of the middle class and its high standard of living over the issues of class relations. On the other hand, the majority of the 286,075 unemployed and 15,230 of the employed who did not receive their salaries in the first quarter of 2015 are low-skill or vocational work- ers, i.e., the working class. This new relationship between the working and middle classes problematizes the socialist inheritance of transformation of the working class into the middle class, the recent phenomenon of economically defined working class without a political meaning, the post-socialist class inequality between the employed and the unemployed, and the emancipation of the worker as "the scorned subject" and his mobilization without being necessarily included in the middle-class political activism for the "general good".
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This article presents contemporary sound studies by outlining its field of interest as well as its main problems and concepts. Brzostek contextualizes sound studies with discussions on media and collective memory, the dialectics of voice and power, as well as the reproduction of sound and cultural identity. This context also includes thematically and methodologically diverse studies on the media coverage of acoustic experience through electronic media (from ‘archaeological’ forms such as the Walkman or the Discman to such ‘futuristic’ forms as mobile phones and iPods), as well as studies on these media’s effect on the transformation of the acoustic environment. Brzostek presents works inspired by R. Murray Shafer’s acoustic ecology, which touch on sound in the public sphere, urban soundscapes marked by noise pollution, as well as the acoustic environments of lo-fi and hi-fi.
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Sound presents a unique subject of study, functioning in culture not only as a conveyor of meaning, but also as a sensory and affective intensity. To perform a cultural analysis of acoustic phenomena, therefore, we must take into account both the semiotic/interpretive dimension of soundedness and its bodily/material dimension. Szarecki illustrates his approach with the example of the internet site Coffitivity, which supports creative thinking by reproducing the ambient noise of a cafe. Szarecki draws on the theoretical tools of sound studies and of posthegemonic political theory to show how by arranging and controlling the sound environment Coffitivity broadens the possibilities – in time and space – of performing creative work, thus turning such work into an omnipresent component of everyday life.
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Tuszyńska confronts two seemingly distant notions, namely representation as an aesthetic category, and one type of phonography, namely musique concrète and the technology of open-air recording that goes with it. Thus she highlights a question that has been overlooked by theorists of representation as well as by musicologists. By confronting Michał Paweł Markowski’s models of representation with Pierre Schaeffer’s theory of musique concrète, Tuscyńska points to problems in representation that do not appear when we apply this concept to other artistic forms. This problem provides an impetus to examine musique concrète from a non-musicological perspective.
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Hejmej reflects on two fundamental questions: the first relates to sound (including voice) and the soundscape as a phenomenon that influences contemporary literature and its functioning in today’s media-dominated society; the second question, which builds on the first, explores the prospects of contemporary literary scholarship drawing on the anthropology of sound. Hejmej traces various scholars’ recent work in sound studies to highlight aural perception – ‘listening to culture,’ which leads him to argue for a new anthropology of the audiovisual – one that would build on analyses of both visual and acoustic space. Thus he analyses the new situation of a literature that, in today’s media-dominated world, relates to acoustic and acousmatic experiences. He proposes to treat literature not merely in terms of the written word (as accepted in traditional literary scholarship) but voice and scriptorality.
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For Dolar, voice represents the primordial or animal aspect of the human being, zōē, or naked life. Speech, meanwhile, is understood as voice endowed with meaning. Considering the problem of voice, Dolar argues that zōē rubs against bios, i.e. political and social life. Zōē manifests itself in many areas of life; the primordial voice appears in contexts such as justice, education or religion. It also represents an integral attribute of rulers and dictators, who use their voice to create laws, or who enforce those laws into life. Voice is indispensable for logos and the written word. Therefore it is inexorably linked with social life; it exists between naked life and social life, between sound and speech.
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This article analyses strategies for constructing family memory about communism in (auto) biographical texts in Poland today. Drawing on the work of Harald Welzer as well as Aleida and Jan Assmann, Mrozik asks how private memory of commitment to Communism works in the public sphere in Poland: to what extent is such unofficial memory made to agree with official memory, becoming elusive where it does not overlap. Another key question is if and how the memory of one’s own or one’s relatives’ commitment to Communism is subject transformation in the process of inter- or transgenerational migration and
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