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- Convenors:
-
Ana Luleva
(Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Studies with Ethnographic Museum, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences)
Miroslava Lukić Krstanović (Ethnographic Institute Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts)
- Stream:
- Urban
- Location:
- A119
Short Abstract:
The panel is dedicated on the different symbolic practices and conflicitng memories on the recent past, which motivate reshaping and transforming of the cultural heritage in the city.
Long Abstract:
In postsocialist counries, urban communities includes rival memory groups. Controversial, often mutually exclusive, narratives of the past are produced. Social actors, sometimes in interchange with state institutions, engage in various symbolic practices while staging their conflicting visions of the past. Cultural heritage is reshaped, transformed and even invented in the strugle for meaning, power and economic benefits.
In which ways are urban spaces transformed and used in this process? A quarter of century after the demise of the Berlin wall, why do legacies of socialism continue to exert prowerful influence onto present agendas of postsocialist societies, in different local and national contexts? Addressing these questions, various ethnographies would be able to contribute to better understanding of the nature of postsocialism.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Rik Adriaans (University College London)
Paper short abstract:
In 2013 a protest movement was spawned in Yerevan by the transformation of a monumental market hall into an oligarch-owned shopping mall. As protesters performed folk dances in public space calling for heritage protection, counterprotesters staged controversial sounds in support of the oligarch.
Paper long abstract:
This paper looks at the uses of music and dance in a protest movement for the protection of cultural heritage in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia. In particular, it deals with the transformation of the city's central covered market, a listed monument from the Soviet era, into a shopping mall after it had been acquired by a multi-millionaire and member of parliament. After a few weeks of daily protest marches, participants in the movement 'Let's Liberate the Monument from an Oligarch' started performing folk dances to draw attention to the rapid destruction of historical monuments in Yerevan's public space. At the same time, a group of counter-protesters, supporting the monument's transformation as modernization, began to play a controversial yet highly popular genre of music, rabiz, during their gatherings. Whereas the folk dances of the former are widely thought to embody Armenia's national character unproblematically, the latter, lower-class and nouveau riche genre is the more popular music today, but widely accused of being spoilt by foreign musical influences and considered a symbol of postsocialist cutural decay.
In my analysis, I seek to disentangle the aesthetics of political contention in contemporary Yerevan by outlining how different conceptions of the nation's heritage are translated into practice in urban protests. I conclude that civil society attempts to mobilize the masses for heritage protection with an appeal to music and dance failed because of the discrepancies between elitist conceptions of Armenian culture and the popular cultural forms embedded in the everyday urban infrastructure of Yerevan.
Nikolay Nenov (Rousse Regional Museum of History)
Paper short abstract:
The text examines the urban Carnival in Rousse, Bulgaria in socialism, as a form of ideological propaganda. The Carnival is a tool to ridicule and form of pressure on the opposition-minded. In post-socialism Carnival revived as civic engagement, because is s part of the local heritage.
Paper long abstract:
This paper discusses the usage of the traditional urban Carnival during socialist period in the town of Rousse, Bulgaria. The text is focused on the transformation of the Carnival during socialism from a place for a pure merriment and controversial to the official norms of thinking forms of entertainment, to an ideological space for public propaganda. Slogans, performances and roles are subjected to a scenario approved by the socialist government that controls both everyday life and festivities. Gradually the Carnival enhances with new forms and characters in order to achieve hilarity but in the same time the event is used as a tool for mockery and condemnation of social and ideological differences and as a pressure on the citizens who differ in thinking and behavior from the official norms.
In the time of post-socialism the Rousse Carnival raises as a civil initiative and in its dynamic development it has various appearances and realizations that make the Carnival integral component of the local heritage.
The study is based on interviews, memories, and visual narratives from the time of socialism - empirical material that reveals the internal nature of the urban festivity through the discourse of the cultural anthropology.
Magdalena Sztandara (Jagiellonian University)
Paper short abstract:
The paper focuses on the practices of restoring women’s memory and heritage in three contemporary cities: Cracow, Belgrade and Sarajevo. Many of them include creating new maps from the perspective of women and performances, which contest the dominating symbolical orders in the urban spaces.
Paper long abstract:
The history of the women in the Balkans and Poland is not sufficiently represented in urban spaces due to the lack of symbols and signs with which they may identify. Cracow, Belgrade and Sarajevo are the "cities without women". Through decades, the memory about the women's history, activism and their heritage was suppressed and marginalized. It is rather difficult to find feminine streets names, whilst monuments and memorial plaques have masculine names. The city is seen primarily as men's place, where women, as well as other marginalized groups, are not present in the dominant discourse of memory and public space. Facing this reality many women's organizations and independent activists develop projects and take actions in order to restore the forgotten and unknown feminine past, describe their lives and symbolically connect them with specific spaces. One of such actions is a process of creating new maps, which introduce the women's perspective. It opens a space for women's histories, narratives by revealing the hitherto concealed stories of forgotten characters and places. Through their activities, the women want to rephrase the heritage and contest the existing maps that not only show the world in a certain way, but also reflect power relations. The activists' practices of bringing back the women from urban and social-cultural oblivion are significant in the debate on culture and politics.
Diána Vonnák (Durham University)
Paper short abstract:
Through examining St John the Baptist Church in L'viv –functioning history museum and consecrated church at once – the talk shows how an odd, paradoxical setting inspires spontaneous engagement with the very history of the USSR it does not represent, producing a peculiar memory culture.
Paper long abstract:
The John the Baptist Church in L'viv could serve as a metaphor of memory wars in post-socialist spaces. Being the first Roman Catholic church in the city it has strong symbolic role despite its original architecture being virtually lost by now. After being used as a morgue during the Soviet period it now simultaneously functions as the Museum of the Oldest Monuments since 1993 and as a consecrated church since 2009.
The complexity of the site arises from the fact that a historically relevant building becomes a stage for a history other than its own. The exhibition uses a formal language and style resembling Soviet curation, yet it tells the story of L'viv from its Neolithic settlers to the Medieval Era, only to be disrupted by the innermost corner featuring an altar where the prayer of the faithful is muted by the voice of the museum guide. A rite in its ahistorical, seemingly eternal presence is thus being actively negated a harmless, outdated memory show, while both aspects entirely ignore the recent past of Soviet Ukraine.
Analysing a building that poses on the heritage map of the city only to disrupt the visitors' expectations I hope to show how the absence of recognition enables an implicit remembrance not through presence but absence: the hostile, yet interacting functions force visitors to stop and reflect on the potential causes of such a paradoxical space, thereby memory becomes a spontaneous performance of jokes and questions rather than a passive consumption of something staged.
Dilyana Ivanova (American Research Center in Sofia)
Paper short abstract:
This paper presents a model of the socialist urban festivity in Bulgaria, its cultural legacy. The text compares this model with contemporary forms of community gatherings of the Bulgarian diaspora in Chicago.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores the forms of urban festivity during socialism in Bulgaria and during post-socialism of the Bulgarian community in the USA. Empirical material (interviews, participant observation, visual materials and data from electronic and paper media) from the town of Rousse in Bulgaria and from the city of Chicago in the USA is used for the purposes of the study.
The text outlines the most frequently discussed in the interviews celebrations during the socialist period in Bulgaria and in the post-socialism times in the USA. The goal of this research is to present a model of the socialist urban festivity, its cultural legacy and to compare this model with contemporary forms of community gatherings of the Bulgarian diaspora in Chicago. It addresses how the socialist legacy reflects the present-day forms of the Bulgarian celebrations in the USA. Additionally, the paper discusses how the cultural heritage of Bulgarian migrants to the USA is reshaped, transformed and even invented in the struggle for identity, meaning, power and economic benefits in the host country.
Milena Benovska-Sabkova (New Bulgarian University/ South-West University of Blagoevgrad)
Paper short abstract:
It is the aim of this paper to demonstrate, in which way the transformation and invention of cultural heritage (tangible and intangible) transfigures urban space and it is used in the struggle of various social actors for control on social memory.
Paper long abstract:
This paper is based on field work in Zlatograd, a town in Central Rhodope Mountains, Bulgaria: a small town, perceived and self-perceived as inhabited by Muslims and Christians. Since 2001, the existing local heritage of historic architecture has been transformed into "Areal Ethnographic Complex": a set of ethnographic exhibitions and tourist atractions. Tourist interest in the Ethnographic complex contributed to reorganization of urban space and to formation of second urban center.
The hidden contradictions between various groups of memory have been manifested in the ambitious programme of obliterating Muslim heritage, and rebuilding four Christian chapels, planned to form of a cross in the vicinities of the town. A leading role in this project belongs to the most influential representatives of the local economic and political elite, who are Muslims by origin. Both projects aim to change the symbolic geography of the city and the adjacent area. The conviction has become firmly established among the local elite that cross-border cooperation with neighbouring Greece (from which economic advantages are anticipated) is possible only via emphasizing the Christian symbolism.
Marko Stojanović (Ethnographic Museum in Belgrade)
Paper short abstract:
In the case of redefining the role and importance of Sabac fair (Šabački vašar) as recognized parameters in the process of repositioning urban markers of identity, especially in the period of socialism, post-socialism and socio-cultural transition in Serbia
Paper long abstract:
Sabac fair (Šabački vašar) was founded in the 20th century as a cultural symbol of the city of Sabac and one of the undoubted urban markers of identity. Because of the role and importance - from the local to the entire community in the former Yugoslavia - the socialist period and the post-socialist period are successively connected two cultural events in the Sabac fair "sacred time and space". In the late sixties was founded Czivijada (Čivijada) with the concept of literary evenings, humor and satire, and in the beginning of the 21st century was founded Carnival in Sabac as a tourist and cultural manifestation. A recent survey of Sabac fair (within the implementing the Convention for the Safeguarding intangible cultural heritage) indicated that it planned to relocate the social significance Czivijada (Čivijada) primary focus on social feasts city dogmatised "pretty face" of socialism and the "new man". Carnival was created during the post-war years and is favored in the local community as a tourist and cultural manifestation that will be raised in the economic field and join the process of glocalization in the socio-cultural environment.