Reinventing The Village PDF Download

Socialist- and postsocialist-era changes in Bulgarian villages disrupted intergenerational cultural transmission as well rural livelihoods. Today, pushing back against rural depopulation, a surprising number of young urbanites are relocating to villages or launching cultural initiatives in them. This dissertation explores the potential of villages for contemporary young Bulgarians unfolding in personal life projects, civic projects, and arts projects. I propose the concept of “rural revitalization” to describe this process of increased interaction with village life, motivated by a village imaginary and pointing to layered, sometimes contradictory understandings of folklore, folklife, and authenticity. Addressing the “folklife project” as a complex genre of cultural production, my ethnographic study considers the slippages between help and harm in depoliticized social initiatives, the challenges of generating new models from the grassroots, and the unexpected role of projects in facilitating mutual aid in times of crisis. The protagonists of these initiatives belong to a generation I call the "children of postsocialism": young urbanites born around or shortly after 1989 and coming of age in postsocialist, European Union Bulgaria. To repair intergenerational and place-based relationships, this generation draws on NGO tactics afforded to them by the very processes contributing to depopulation and cultural change. Indeed, the shift in NGO work from promoting transition in the early years of postsocialism to mitigating the effects of what some see as failed transition in the contemporary moment is intricately tied, I argue, to the renewed interest in village lifeways and cultural programming. The same tactics and opportunities that are enabling young Europeans to build project competencies are also providing the experiences that prompt them to look for homegrown solutions in the face of a disappointing present. Such programs—such as Erasmus study abroad and European youth networks—inspire comparison between the “east” and “west,” creating opportunities to evaluate home through a new lens. In turn, these experiences shape interventions that are a hybrid of EU-afforded and domestic action. Nowhere is this Europeanization clearer than in the rise of a grassroots cultural activist, Atanas “Nasko” Atanasov, to the position of Minister of Culture in the vanguard progressive government formed in 2021. His story attests to the growing legitimacy of grassroots initiatives as models for rural intervention and the affordances of global mobility in his generation's approach to Bulgarian belonging. I focus my analysis on three urban-rural intergenerational residency projects that pair urban youth with elderly village hosts: Rezidentsiia Baba, Selo Nazaem, and Priemi Me Na Selo. Blending rural heritage tourism, salvage ethnography, neoliberal civic engagement, and care work, these initiatives call attention to the village as a persistent presence in Bulgarian life. Curating opportunities for young urbanites to experience “authentic” or “living” folklore, however, they tend to freeze village culture into established formats of revival that are vulnerable to nationalist and xenophobic appropriation. At the same time, such projects facilitate interactions with villagers that open other possibilities. The need to adapt projects during the COVID-19 pandemic engendered collaborations based not on the staging of folklore, but on the practical value of folklife and traditional knowledge. With all its local particularities, this Southeast European case study offers insight into rural revitalization across the world. Global challenges have affected intergenerational relations and rural economies in similar ways across Bulgaria, the author's home region of Appalachia, and elsewhere. Globally mobile urban youth are deploying both neoliberal and activist formats to address the issues of intergenerational knowledge loss and rural depopulation. As their inherited rural imaginaries encounter the actuality of village dwellers and dwelling, young actors must negotiate between new and old ideas of community to respond to the entangled social, cultural, and political issues of contemporary life in the countryside.