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The direct and spontaneous human communication evoked by important political and social events brings to life situations which are fruitful ground for artists’ activity. It is typical for every human being to seek a reason for and a way of communication and to feel the need for expressing one’s own position. These circumstances are often a most provoking factor for folklore creativity as a reaction to the actual, striking, dramatic events to happen. Such forms of folklore focused on situations and events have been intensively created after November 10th, 1989, which was a year of crucial political changes in Bulgaria. However, it is not a unique phenomenon. Retrospectively, the same kind of folklore had been already created in other historical moments of the kind in our country.
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The author analyses a rather unstudied phenomenon – the rumours, specifically, the political rumours. An attempt is made at their description, as well as at the explanation of their functional mechanisms. Special attention is paid to the rumours propagated by the mass media and, especially, to their parodies in the press, the radio, and television. There are also some brief descriptions of other forms similar to the above mentioned, such as parodies of folklore and non-folklore texts, proverbs, sayings, inscriptions and so on, as well as of some hybrid forms that have recently appeared in Bulgaria.
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The article regards one of the most widespread kinds of jokes – the ones about presidents. The author aims to find out the general and deep premise from which further on the political jokes can be studied in their historical, cultural, regional etc. variability. Thereby, the presidents’ jokes are not treated as making fun with the social and political ruling top and the possible interpretations in this respect. The stress is put on the very appearance of the ruling top in the jokes. We could speak about a cultural universal which still exists a specific mode at present. The jokes represent the basic relation between the individuals and the top of the social system. This relation is of existential significance both for the individual and for the system. In this case the narration is an act of self-identification in its global meaning – as a proof for existence, for appearance, for affiliation to the human kind. Such conclusions affirm both the functions and the content of the presidents’ jokes.
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After WWII totalitarianism domineered in industrially less developed countries and that determined some special characteristics of the interrelationship between the social system and the cultural process. The transposition of social strata after the war brought power to people who were closely related to the traditional rural culture, and that gave access for some archaic cultural patterns to the structure of political power. Thus, the following phenomenon appeared which was typologically similar to African tribalism – implantation of kinship structures into the upper stages of power, i.e. important positions were taken by the members of well-known clans (in Bulgaria, Romania, North Korea, partly in the ex-USSR and others). In a much broader social aspect another form of hypertrophy of kinship relationships and traditional cooperation was in expansion – the so called “connections”. The constant lack of goods and services, as well as the faults of the centrally planned economy, decreased the importance of money as a means of economic exchange. “Connections”, however, partly took over the functions of money and acted as tools for economic and social exchange: for instance, finding “connections” for a child to be enrolled in a kindergarten could be changed for “connections” for receiving a driving-licence. Some innate traits of totalitarianism enabled it not only to develop and deform archaic cultural patterns, but to reproduce of them as well. This is mostly valid for the binary logic – thinking through a system of binary oppositions is characteristic not only for archaic cultures, but also for totalitarian regimes. Consequently, that resulted in the ultimate polarization of the Bulgarian society that was to be observed after the democratic changes took place there.
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The ’90s were an essential period in our lives. They represented the awakening, let's say. I sit and go down the memory lane back to those awakening years. The 90s meant the Revolution… Ok, and what happened right after that? Well, I received aid transports! We got huge quantities of clothes, all tenaciously packed and wrapped in small or big cardboard boxes.
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On 14th June in the morning, around 11.30, when the miners’ cohorts, waving their bats, invaded Bucharest, I was walking down Magheru Boulevard, heading to the Union. I met two colleagues, a property man, Bordeianu and Vasile Neagoe (a coward for a fact) a production manager. They were also heading to the Union. When we reached the traffic light in front of Nottara Theatre, we wanted to cross the boulevard towards Eva shop. The miners were zealously marching on the middle of the boulevard, entirely blocking it.
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In September 1996, when I got the job here, Metro was the first supermarket in Romania. Until then there had been only … the Mega Image in Lizeanu Street. It had opened a year before. It was awfully crowded there too, people were crammed up inside because it was something new … Still, there wasn’t much difference between a supermarket and a regular grocery store. But Metro was something completely new.
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Back in 1994, during my hippie days, I would turn the city up-side-down looking for a pair of flaring blue jeans. My sis came over and said that she had found the item at the Eroilor subway station, in a second-hand clothes shop next to a pastry stand, and she also mentioned that clothes were really cheap there. When my mom saw me she almost went nuts. Fancy her daughter wearing somebody else’s clothes which on top of everything were also shabby! Yeah, but there weren’t any young people my age looking like me …
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‘The Group for Social Dialogue’ was founded in January 1990, as a group of critical reflection, organized mainly around a strong nucleus gathering together several intellectuals from Păltiniş (and around the philosopher Constantin Noica) such as Gabriel Liiceanu, Andrei Pleşu, Andrei Cornea, Radu Bercea alongside with dissidents of the communist regime such as Gabriel Andreescu, Doinea Cornea, Radu Filipescu, Stelian Tănase, Dan Petrescu. The main aim of the group was trying to lay the foundations of a civil society in Romania, society which was quasi-inexistent till 1989, during the socialist regime.
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1991 was the year when I passed and at the same time failed my university admission exam. Chronologically, because emotionally things were different, this is the short story: I had failed the admission exam for the public University and nothing else really mattered, in spite of the fact that my folks were really happy for me being a student within the private teaching system.
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We began our little frontier trade immediately after 1989. A lot of Turkish firms mushroomed around Gara de Nord, offering transport to Istanbul (there where coaches leaving every hour – you weren’t even allowed to book your place in advanced, you just went to the station and got on the coach to Istanbul). Many people went there, bought all sorts of goods from the Turkish bazaars and then returned to Romania where they would sold them. As we wanted to go to Istanbul in search of the old Byzantium, we decided to take one of these coaches because it was much cheaper and much more convenient for us.
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In evaluating the postcommunist Romanian cinematography, not the charts and paradigms prove to be relevant (being, in fact, inoperative and futile). What eventually matters is a huge - and undoubtedly unpremeditated recovering effort of the anthropological dimension: all Romanian movies after 1990 - no matter the quality!- represent a devoted mirror of the human mutations (sociological and of any other kind) that the Romanian society has undergone during the past fifteen years. From this perspective, the value of the cinema productions comes second to the interests an anthropologist can take in any of the titles appeared after 1990!
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