Ethnosymbolism and the Dynamics of Identity
This book is an exploration of the potential of the ethnosymbolic approach to nation and identity to act as an instrumental tool for research into the mechanisms of identity-building. Using insights and data from Bulgarian history and culture, it views the construction of Bulgarian national identity as a modern process intimately affected by circumstances which prevailed in nineteenth-century Bulgarian society, and also as a process which, for its structural and psychological prerequisites, drew upon and reworked various specific features and peculiarities of an available but always malleable and never fixed Bulgarian ethnic and cultural tradition. The development of Bulgarian national identity drew, in combination or mutual interaction, upon two main sources: namely, a process of articulating, systematising and rationalising ideas of group commonality and ethnic distinctiveness; and the mobilising and politicising effect of modern economic and political forces upon that intersubjective process. The overall means of national identity construction, in all its complexity, was achieved as a symbiosis between the historical continuity of a collective ethnic inheritance and the modern dynamics of its political activation and mobilisation.
The book combines, diachronically, the ideas and logic of social evolution with a synchronic approach that draws upon the so-called “instrumentalist” view of ethnic phenomena. It explores the cultural landscape of available ethnic notions and terms that were utilised as expressions of Bulgarian ethnic identity, but which also, in that process, reshaped all this in response to the changing conditions of Bulgarian society in the nineteenth century. As such, the book offers an in-depth investigation of how ideas of national identity were formed and changed within a modernist framework. Furthermore, it shows how ethnosymbolism, used as a tool and instrumentarium for national identity construction, can reveal the main patterns that contribute to what is defined as a discursive construction of identity dynamics.
Elya Tzaneva is an Associate Professor at the Institute for Ethnology and Folklore Studies at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Having received a BA in History from the University of Sofia, she went on to obtain PhD degrees in Ethnology and Sociology at Moscow State University, Russia, and the University of New South Wales, Australia, respectively. Her research interests include the theory of ethnicity, nation and identity, traditional family customs and fictive kinship, and the anthropology of disasters.
“This book makes an original contribution to an important debate between scholars of nationalism about the origins and characteristics of the modern nation. It has two striking strengths. The author displays an impressive command of the Western and Russian theoretical literature on ethnicity and its potential application to Bulgaria. She uses it to construct her own framework, and to evaluate and qualify the empirical findings of Bulgarian scholarship. Her major achievement, however, is the resourceful analysis of a considerable range of primary materials: philological, folkloric, printed registers, literary histories, and much more. Her deep understanding of what is at issue in substantiating the presence of an ethnic identity is revealed in her organisation of the discussion into thematic chapters, considering in turn the central components of ethnicity (names, historical memory, and language), and which component was dominant. What is particularly impressive is her capacity to draw out by contextual, as well as textual, analyses from apparently ambiguous and heterogeneous materials, how the population conceived themselves at any one time, how their concepts of individual and collective identity changed, and how old terms were infused with new meanings to provide sense of ethnic community. I do not know of any similar extended analysis of the conceptual bases of collective identities over such a long historical span.”
Dr John Hutchinson
London School of Economics
“Elya Tzaneva is an original, independent and autonomous thinker, and is well-grounded in the various intellectual traditions on which she draws and which she seeks to analyse and reconcile. She is a scholar whose presence and contributions are always constructive, stimulating and responsible. I recommend this publication most enthusiastically.”
Emeritus Professor Clive Kessler
University of New South Wales
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