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This article aims to identify the existence of a laughter community in Portugal in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Based on research into the beginnings of humour in periodicals published in Portugal, a corpus consisting of newspapers published between 1797 and 1835 was analysed, from the first in which humour was used systematically as a resource (Almocreve de Petas) until the establishment of the Constitutional Monarchy. With the concept of laughter community in mind, evidence was sought that it was present in the period that covers the political, social and economic transition from the Ancien Régime to modern society, having as main players writers, editors, printers, readers and listeners, in a process of production, reception, circulation and appropriation of ideas and meanings. This process, which developed in the public sphere, also played a part in forming incipient public opinion. To detect evidence of this community, clichés, jocular expressions and comic stories conveyed by the periodicals were identified. Very often they were found to have kept the same meaning they had at the time, while some expressions have survived with slight changes, and others simply no longer make people laugh.
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The following article highlights the most important endogenous aspects of population reproduction in crisis circumstances, based on demographic data on the Bessarabian Bulgarians in the 1940s. During this decade, the territory of Bessarabia sporadically fell within the borders of both Romania and the USSR, which led to the collapse of the traditional social institutions and practices among the Bulgarians living there. Led by the numerous political changes, demographic birth and death rates within a group are affected by these exogenous factors, while reflecting actual societal alterations. As a basis for the study, information extracted from the current reports of the village councils was used, or in other words – the so-called population registers. The results of the data processing are presented in a diachronic comparative perspective regarding the history of the Bulgarian communities in Bessarabia. This approach allows for analytic clarifications of the scale and nature of the famine in 1946-1947. The average daily mortality rate was found to be 18.3. In general, the specificity of the demographic transition of the Bulgarian group from a traditional to a modern model of reproduction stands out. The role of exogenous causes in the final phase of this transition has been also revealed. Birth rates were reported to be gradually decreasing while mortality rates were increasing. The consequences of this transformation were visible in the next generation in the 1960s.
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Bulgarians settled in the territories of the Urals and Siberia within several waves of migration mainly in the 20th century and individually in the 21st century. They live scattered over this large territory but nevertheless manage to get together in various organizations. The article identifies the main territories inhabited by individuals with a Bulgarian identity, as well as the ways of virtual communication between them. The different models of online communication and representation of the Bulgarian organizations in the two regions, their influence on the maintenance of community life and the development of their socio-cultural activities are explored. Additional focus is placed on the role of the Internet in creating and preserving the collective memory of life in the Komi Republic and in uniting former workers and students in virtual communities. The study was conducted in the period 2019-2022 with an emphasis on the social networks Facebook and VKontakte and on-site among organizations in the cities of Tyumen, Syktyvkar, Usogorsk and Blagoevo.
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The text attempts to analyze the Bulgarian cross-border labor mobility in Komi ASSR. In the period 1968 – 1993, dozens of Bulgarian citizens worked in the Bulgarian-Soviet logging enterprises in Komi. Men, women, and families with children became part of the largest project of the Bulgarian Communist Party for work in the Soviet Union, in the taiga of the Komi people. How are the main moments of this contract policy of the USSR and the NRB unfolding, what benefits is Bulgaria accumulating and what problems are faced by the loggers who formed a memory of the work in Komi – all questions to which this article seeks answers and points of view.
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The first part of this research, published in the previous issue 3/2022 of the journal “BulgarianEthnology”, touched on the historiographical, theoretical-methodological and terminological aspects of the present study, dedicated to an increasingly discussed and developed topic in the post-Soviet space. This is the subject of the collective memory which covers the turbulent decades of the 1940s and 1950s., as well as the ongoing processes of collectivization of the property, the inherent repressions, the so-called dispossessing (dekulakization) and the deportation of whole families within the USSR, tearing them away from their places of birth,forcing them to settle down for a long time in the remote and vaguely known northern parts ofthe vast country. Hundreds of thousands of people were forcibly removed and coerced to live inisolation, to work and carry out the orders of the Stalinist regime until the very death of JosephStalin in 1953, in the extremely harsh climatically and poorly developed territories such asCentral Asia, Kazakhstan, the Urals, Altai and Siberia. Rehabilitated after that year, they wereallowed to return to their native lands, but a large number did not manage to restore their homesand property, while some could not settle closer than 40 km to the settlements they lived in priorto the deportation. Similar cases are not a rarity for the region of Bessarabia, which was brieflyunder Soviet rule in 1941 and from 1944 until 1991. As it is known, one of the largest and oldestBulgarian historical communities is located in this area, which after the collapse of the SovietUnion fell within the borders of the modern states of Ukraine and Moldova.The subject of the present study is precisely such a “small” case of dispossessed anddeported as a result of the so-called operation South Bulgarian families from the villageof Korten (or Kiryutnya) in the then Moldavian SSR, who for nearly a decade (from 1949roughly to 1959) resided in several settlements of the Bistroistotsky and Biysky districts ofthe Altai Krai, Russia. Since some of these 80 families were not allowed to return to theirnative Korten, they chose to settle in the town of Tarutino and in some of the surrounding settlements such as Podgornoe, Berezino, etc., located nowadays on Ukrainian territory, in the region of Odesa.
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The present text offers reading of an album that contains the visual history of a group of Bulgarian builders, working in the USSR on a contract. Their activity is to assure access to natural gas for Bulgaria. The album is printed as a special edition for only 130 workers. It contains their names and personal photos, images from the working process, as well as from the cultural events of the workers – folklore dances, choir formations, which are subdued to a general ideological discourse. The political manifestations are not forgotten, too – celebrating anniversaries from revolutions, March 8th (International Women’s Day), as an element of the festivity calendar of the communist societies. The album is a product of ideological propaganda, which displays the achieved communist dream by presenting the desired as real. Within this topic construction is a key element, because it refers not only to the actual building of facilities and structures but also to the social engineering – the creating of the“Socialist Man“.A second plan in the album is a large number of photos from Bulgaria, which have no actual relation to the topic of the gas pipeline and the building works. They are displaying emblematic places of heritage – monasteries, old houses and tourism – new resort and vacation storylines. These are part of the official images of the country in front of the world, displayed as achievements of the communist authority. The images, controversial at first sight, are combined within the general propaganda narrative of the album, which affirms memory within the community of the workers and creates a positive relationship. The participation in construction works outside the country is not only a manifestation of the policy of “internationalism“, but also a form of personal benefit, because the payment is different and assures access to various deficit goods, like an automobile for instance. All of this imposes the necessity for the evidence from the period of communism to be positioned within the context that caused them. They are to be examined critically since the photos in the album do not only display reality – they are not a moment shot in time but are mainly a constructed positive world of a society, which does not offer alternatives in thinking.
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The lack of material monuments of Georgian clothing prior to the XVIII cen-tury poses a significant challenge to presenting a comprehensive picture of Geor-gian costume history and comprehending the process of its development. Foreign sources from various epochs contain useful information for resolving this issue. Among them are the works of Don Cristoforo de Castelli, an Italian Theatine mis-sionary and pastor, who worked in our country in the XVII century. The goal of the present research is to determine if the seventeenth-century Georgian clothing (women’s costumes) and headgears depicted in Cristoforo de Castelli’s work con-form to reality or are merely the artist’s fantasy, what shall be done by analyzing the clothing and comparing to the relevant Georgian and foreign pictorial sources. The research is based on approved art history methods. An in-depth exami-nation of Castelli’s sketches and paintings reveals that the majority of the clothes depicted in the album have a counterpart in Georgian painting (monumental and miniature) and written monuments. Only few of them seem to be distinct, and their use is not confirmed by Georgian sources. In this regard, we should particu-larly note the entire gallery of headgears depicted in the albums, the majority of which are completely alien to Georgian tradition and have analogues only in por-traits of Muslim queens - that is explained by the influence of the Court etiquette and fashion of the eastern super-states. The research confirmed that the various clothing and headgear depicted in Castelli’s album are not a figment of the artist’s imagination, but documentary material created over time by an eyewitness-ob-server, and they reflect, like a mirror, the reality in which the author himself was an accomplice. As a result, his work is still relevant today and is one of the most reliable and important sources for the history and establishment of the process of evolution of Georgian costume.
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The study summarises Czech and partially Polish texts on medieval and early modern rituals which have been written in the last three decades. The historiographical preoccupation with rituals and ceremonies is subject to criticism, or it is related to the developments in recent European historiography. We can conclude that both Czech and Polish historians primarily focused on the rituals of the monarchy, which they viewed from the perspective of the main actor, i.e., the king, and considered them a reflection of the political power. Contrary to anthropologists, who are interested in cultural meanings and categories, historians leaned more towards a socio-historical perspective. Descriptions, which partly result in the confirmation of the main actors’ positions of power and partly in an insight into the everyday life and material culture of the power elite, are prominent in the texts. The overall result is a rather reduced reception of anthropological perspective in the analysis of ritual. The current knowledge, essentially dependent on the quality of the existing sources, could be expanded by taking inspiration from spatial studies, e.g., methods developed in recent archaeology, as the conclusion of the study shows.
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Jorge Carrión’s novel Membrana represents itself as a leaflet for the “21st Century Museum”. This intriguing premise produces in the contemporary reader a state of cognitive estrangement, as she needs to contemplate his present as the past. However, Carrión’s repertory of disconcerting strategies does not end here. His narrator is a female artificial intelligence that uses plural pronouns to identify herself (or themselves). Coming to terms with this machine will be the main purpose of the exhibition’s visitor, forced to make sense of an entangled history created by someone with a different sense of time, different ideas about cause-effect relations, and a different understanding of what truth is. This article’s aims is to describe the mechanisms used by Carrión to build the algorithm’s voice while exploring its political and epistemological possibilities.
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The history of the fantastic character is enunciated through the prophet Ezechiel’s vision (The Old Testament, Iezechiel, 1:13) from the Bible, and it is considered a product of the primitive fantasy, where the attributes of the characters who take part in the development of the events, are of visual order: The appearance of these beasts resembling the form of some burning coal, and of some torches of fire; fire was running among the beasts, and rays and thunders were springing from the fire. We can also discuss about fabulous characters, endowed with superanatural powers, which can control the magic, the same way as are the elves and the wizzards, good or evil, according to the conception in which their existence would be based on an archaic magic, appeared at the beginning of the world. The supernatural characters present distorted and contradictory natures, unstable, immoral, but also manifest correct, dignified and positive features and they follow the story’s heroes, on their way to triumph. This crisis at the personal level, which the majority of the characters pass through, represents the beginning of the affirmation of the fantastic. The overcoming of the blockage, the finding of the convenient solutions, the solvation of the limit-situations, is the key to the antifantastic. Some characters activate the fantastic’s function: The devils and vampires, in all their hypostases, the fairies and the wicked fairies, the gnomes and the elves play this part through excellence fantastic. Regarding the delimitation of the principles between good and evil, in the case of Middle Earth, we can distinguish between the positive and negative characters, the evil and destructive orks and the kind hobbits, some of whom may or may not know the redemtion. The wizzards of a story can be negative characters, as well as positive ones (Saruman vs Gandalf, Lord of the Rings, filmmaker Peter Jackson, 2001-2003). With the exception of the evil characters, the others are put on a trial and risk an interior transformation. by approaching the evil (Sauron himself was once a spirit of beneficence, as a result we can compare him to Lucifer, the fallen angel). The demons, the harmful spirits, the gods, the vampires, the ghosts, the werewolves and the monsters are archtypes of the imagination, which we can encounter frequently in the fantastic stories or in the popular beliefs. The clear distinction between good and bad represents a permanent topic of the differences from the moral and spiritual points of view in the story, which centres and influences the whole action of the narration.
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The object of observation is criminal jargon from the 19th century. The description concerns lexis belonging to the thematic field religion. The text shows little known (or even unknown) historical vocabulary of the environment. The author focuses on presenting the etymology of the collected words. Some remarks on the origin of words have the character of hypotheses and are a pretext for further discussion. The author excerpts linguistic material from Słownik mowy złodziejskiej by Antoni Kurka (1896) and Szwargot więzienny by Karol Estreicher (1903, this publication gathers vocabulary from Estreicher’s works published several decades earlier). The author evaluates the stability of the vocabulary and the development of the lexis – he compares the 19th-century material with notations appearing in the later work Żargon mowy przestępczej by Wiktor Ludwikowski and Henryk Walczak (published in 1922).
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In the article, Anna Musioł, by referring to the assumptions of Marian Massonius’s doctoral dissertation and taking into account the assumptions of his several smaller works, considers Massonius’s approach to the Kantian system of critical philosophy. Analyzing, inter alia, the problem of analytical and synthetic judgments, and a priori synthetic judgments, Musioł addresses the issue of the possibility of pure mathematics. She considers the problem of time and space and analyzes the ways of presenting Kantian antinomies and the theory of cognition developed in the context of idealism and realism as well as the realism of time and space. Additionally, Musioł focuses on the problem of Massonius’s moderate agnosticism and his scientific approach to philosophy. Finally, she proposes an answer to the fundamental question, Why did Massonius, like the early neo-Kantist Liebmann in 1865, challenge a return to Kant (Zurück zu Kant!) and advocate as necessary the development of a critical formula of the a priori forms of the mind?
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The paper addresses the potential to challenge the dominant narrative of the official memory of the Transition period in Bulgaria through live archives. The specific website, Lost in the Transition: history in photos, is studied as an example of live space for memory reconstruction that could provoke authentic reflection about the recent past and provide a shared space for reflexive dialogue in the contemporary Bulgarian society. This dynamic process can result in a critical attempt to better understand the period and cocreate a liberating and empowering narrative.
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The main objective of the paper is to examine the three “mythico-ritual scenarios of the Wolf ” in Chechen culture: the lycomorphic mythical Ancestor, actualization of a primordial event and military initiation. Elements of these scenarios may be observed in the song Аварское село by the contemporary Chechen bard Timur Mutsuraev. The military initiation presented in the song re-actualizes the Chechen myth of the She-Wolf. The phenomenon of the wolfish identity of the Chechens and their struggle are analyzed in the context of Sigmund Freud’s category of das Unheimliche (the uncanny).
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Marlen Haushofer’s novel, The Wall (Die Wand), published in 1963, elevated the author to fame, winning the admiration of readers and critics beyond the German-speaking world. As a result of a twist of fate she can neither grasp let alone understand, the heroine is cut off from the external world by an invisible obstacle – the titular wall. Behind it, human and animal life dies away, literally. She is the sole survivor of the catastrophe. From then on, she has to live in complete seclusion, left to her own devices and to fend for herself. Her only companions are a small group of animals giving sense to her existence. The sense of responsibility she feels for those living beings, her care for them, and the total isolation and sense of hopelessness become the determinants of her everyday life. This paper aims to present the main character’s uncommonness of daily living conveyed by the title and caused by an unexpected disaster. It seems important to investigate the protagonist’s attempts to reconstruct her own social space, where human interactions are replaced by interactions with animals. It is no less important to investigate her survival strategies, which are based on the strategies she had known before the disaster. The character has to take on a new role in a new reality that turns out to be a kind of reflection of her previous social role. This paper attempts to review the established social rules which had to become devalued to a certain extent when the character was faced with a radical change. Haushofer’s work can also be interpreted as a parable of the present time, in which fear of what is unknown (a disaster, a war, a pandemic) determines the way that the individual lives day by day. This paper is based primarily on the source text, namely M. Haushofer’s The Wall, and the analysis in this paper refers to feminist discourse, ecocriticism and animal studies.
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The subject of this analysis is what the life conditions of farm animals in the Polish People’s Republic looked like and how they were reflected in professional discourse. My main aim is to show how good practices in husbandry were understood before the rise of the notion of animal welfare. As I demonstrate, their evolution was strictly linked with rhetorical changes in the discourse. I delineate the main material-discursive historical shifts that shaped further breeding practices.
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The study is in the field of зsychogerontology/psychogeriatrics, but it is in touch also with a range of humanitarian sciences. The study on self-evaluations, values and mental health has been cross-sectional and longitudinal. 708 persons (341 men and 267 women) aged 70 to 98 years, constituting a 20% random sample of the population 70 and over from 45 villages near Sofia were studied in 1971–1972. A test of self-evaluation of the personality and its social coherence is used along with nine psychological cognitive tests, an interview and a comprehensive medical and psychiatric examination. The group studied is homogeneous in ethnic, social-cultural and migration respect. In addition to the cross-sectional appraisal, a longitudinal assessment has been performed in intervals of 3, 5, 10, and a maximum of 16 years. Finally, an attempt at time-lag examination of old people 70 and over from two of the previous villages was performed in 2008, i.e. 36 years after the initial study – in different social and political conditions.
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The present text, the first parts of which are published in the previous two issues of “BulgarianEthnology” journal, presents the last, concluding part of an ethnological study conducted within the framework of an IEFSEM – BAS project and dedicated to an important and current problem in the post-Soviet space. It is about the ‘big all-Union’ topic of repressions and deportations in the former USSR, illuminated on the basis of the ‘small’, private example of a Bulgarian settlement in the Bessarabia region. The purpose and tasks of the study are aimed at revealing the main aspects of the collective memory of those deported in 1949 as a result of the collectivization in the then Moldavian SSR of 80 Bulgarian families from the village ofKorten (or Kiryutnia) and of their residence for about ten years in the Altai region of today’sRussia. The research is the result of the field ethnographic expedition conducted in the summer of 2021 in the town of Tarutino, Odesa region of Ukraine, where after the death of Y. V. Stalin and their subsequent rehabilitation, some of those people settled down to live, returning from the far northern lands in Bessarabia. However, those declared by the authorities as kulaks are not allowed to settle closer than 40 km from their native village and they choose as their newport the former German colony – well-known for them before the so-called lifting, i.e. before deportation, a market and business centre with the old name Chokrak.The main object of study in the first two and in the present last part of this text are the trajectories of memory about deportation, about forced migration and about the return from exile, i.e. for the return journey from Altai again to Bessarabia. The analysis text, built almost entirely from the author’s own field materials, aims to reflect the main points of reference, the accents in the memories, through which our interlocutors nowadays present and empathize with the events that took place in their childhood and youth years.
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