The Cultural Communication of Emigration in Bulgaria The Cultural Communication of Emigration in Bulgaria Nadezhda Sotirova LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www .rowman .com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2022 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN 978-1-7936-0473-6 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-7936-0474-3 (electronic) ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 1 Theoretical Grounds and the Case for Studying Bulgaria 13 2 Relevant Bulgarian Context 27 3 The Data Collection 41 4 Oplakvane (Complaining, Mourning) as a Communication Ritual 53 5 The Myth of the “Bulgarian Situation” (Dwelling) 69 6 The Cultural Communication of National Identity 83 7 “Blaming the State” in Discourses on Emigration 99 8 The Cultural Communication of Agency and Action 113 Conclusion 127 Bibliography 137 Index 149 About the Author 155 v Acknowledgments This book owes a great deal to a great many people. My exploration of social interaction is a product of numerous individuals’ patience in dealing with me and my never-ending questions about meaning. I am eternally grateful to all those who indulged my beginner’s steps into ethnography and pushed me to explore the intricate nuances and subtleties of Bulgarian communication resources. These patient individuals not only shared their interpretations and helped in my quest for understanding but also indulged my own learning process with unwavering support. Of these numerous people, I’d like to thank my participants, who never backed out of talking to me, for their insight and willingness to share, and despite my lack of success in always remaining completely unobtrusive during my fieldwork and avoiding prying as a fledg- ling ethnographer. I am grateful to local individuals who opened their homes and dinner tables for observation and directed me to relevant histories. I will never be able to repay my extremely supportive family for providing financial and emotional support throughout the many years of fieldwork. I am grateful to the many friends and colleagues in the United States and elsewhere for their continuous discussions at gatherings, conferences, and over wine. I would like to single out my dear friends Liene Ločmele for steering me into the ethnography of communication and offering invaluable emotional support through some of the wildest years of grad school; Brian Myers for always questioning my assumptions and encouraging self-care; and Jimmy Schryver for all the out- of-the-box questions, continuous support, and writing company. It would be next to impossible to complete an ethnographic project without such an extensive, supportive, and stimulating network. Several people, including David Boromisza-Habashi, Todd Sandel, Trudy Milburn, Donal Carbaugh, and Saila Poutiainen, have read and commented on earlier versions of this vii viii Acknowledgments work in various shapes and forms. Without their feedback and encourage- ment, this final version would not have existed. In addition to those, I am also grateful to the many anonymous reviewers for their feedback. Making my ethnographic way through Bulgarian ways of speaking, I have developed a new appreciation of the extent to which the research program, initially formulated by Dell Hymes as “ethnography of speaking,” and its further developments by Gerry Philipsen and Donal Carbaugh have shaped my own scholarly endeavors. I owe an immense debt of gratitude to Donal Carbaugh for introducing me to our wonderful EC family and for his warm support during my graduate research stumbles; Tamar Katriel for inspiring me with her writing; and the Bulgarian scholars, Magdalena Elchinova and Elena Mihailovska, for leading the way into Bulgarian fieldwork. I owe a great deal to my extremely inspiring and supportive colleagues at the University of Minnesota Morris, specifically Barbara Burke and Jimmy Schryver, who listened to my musings, provided a consistent stream of chocolate, encouraged me throughout the process, and continue to inspire me with their work ethics. You made Morris a home for me! Among the many colleagues I owe gratitude to, I want to single out Stacey Aronson for her encouragement, as well as my writing group, whose perseverance and dili- gence have helped my productivity immensely. Additionally, I am indebted to my students for their patience and insightful questions any time I brought up my own work in class. I am eternally grateful to the Humanities staff, specifically Makiko Legate, Cindy Pope, and Jayne Hacker, for their never-ending patience, attention to detail, warmth, and encouragement. I am also grateful to Alisande Allaben, Roger Wareham, the local Grants Office at the University of Minnesota Morris, and numerous other anonymous proposal reviewers throughout the years. Also, this work would not have been possible without the gener- ous research funding through the Grant-in-Aid of Research, Artistry, and Scholarship and Imagine Fund grants offered by the Office of the Vice President for Research, University of Minnesota. I am also grateful to Nicolette Amstutz, Sierra Apaliski, Melissa McClellan, Joseph Gautham, and Divya Chandran at Lexington Books (an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield) for all their works, patience, and support. These pages are dedicated with love and gratitude to my mother Neli, my father Mihail, and my grandparents, whose lived experiences and struggles were the main drive behind these pages. Introduction As part of the first post-communism generation in Bulgaria, my experience had many “firsts:” being the “first” cohort to begin our education outside the rigid Party’s standards, being the “first” cohort not to call our teachers “comrades” and read only Party-approved textbooks, being the “first” cohort to not have portraits of Stalin and Lenin in the classrooms, being the “first” cohort not to participate in Party Youth programs and summer unpaid labor, being the “first” generation to have access to media and goods from outside the iron curtain, and so on. Some were quite positive “firsts” and some—not so much: the “first” (of several) economic crisis, the “first” coupon system for basic food, the “first” anti-communist protests . . . Considering all these tumultuous and not always successful “firsts,” I had been quite lucky in some ways: with the amazing support of my family, I graduated from a prestigious language high school in Sofia, and was then accepted to a university in the United States with a scholarship. Continuing onto graduate school (being for- tunate to have access to both scholarships and financial support from my fam- ily) allowed me to scrape through the 2009 economic crisis without too much turbulence and I never had to enter the sparse job market in Bulgaria during the 1990s and early 2000s. Yet, I had many friends and family relatives who were constantly on the lookout for a job, in Bulgaria and elsewhere. Even more heartbreaking was observing the numerous family friends (my parents’ age) who struggled with venturing abroad (whether long or short-term) in order to make a living and support their families. They had to make difficult choices for demanding jobs in countries they often did not speak the language of. Similarly, my family was lucky to have found a niche for themselves in a very difficult economic situation after several years of work abroad. Every time I would visit my family in Bulgaria and every time I would discuss my home country with fellow students and friends, I found myself 1