The Image of the Teacher in the Memories of Sofia English Language School’s Alumni From the 1970s
Journal Title: Martor. The Museum of the Romanian Peasant Anthropology Review - Year 2013, Vol 18, Issue 18
Abstract
The article aims at gaining a better understanding of the everyday life in an elite socialist school in Bulgaria. The text discusses why Bulgarian communist authorities not simply acquiesced to but actually supported the foundation of such a school in a society that aspired to equality and egalitarianism, and how they used the concept ‘childhood’ and adolescence in their pursuit of creating the ‘new socialist individual’. As the primary goal of the text is to shed light on the mundane, unofficial life in this socialist school, it makes use of memories of former students of the school. By analyzing these recollections the article wants to demonstrate not only how the schooling institution inculcated norms of social conduct and constructed publicly acceptable individualities, but also how the students reacted to these interventions; to what extent they subverted and resisted the dominant order. Last but not least, bearing in mind that these memories are as much embedded in the past as they are connected to the actual moment of narration, the article studies how the childhood/adolescent past of the narrators is deployed as a legitimizing resource for their meaningful and socially acceptable identity presentation now.
Authors and Affiliations
Nadezhda Velinova Galabova
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP256826
- DOI -
- Views 97
- Downloads 0
Reinventing Mountain Food Traditions and Small Farm Survival in Southern Appalachia
For over four decades, social scientists have addressed the relationship between development strategies and Appalachia’s highland cultural traditions. Historically, mountain foodways and diversified agricultural practice...
Negotiating the Mountains. Foreign Immigration and Cultural Change in the Italian Alps
Severely affected during the twentieth century by depopulation and neglect, the Alps also suffered an erosion of their cultural heritage. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, population has begun to...
A Sense of Past: Usages of Objects in Naïve Museology
This paper aims to establish a theoretical framework for the analysis of what I propose to call “naïve museums” by making reference to three actual instances of the phenomenon in contemporary Romania. All these naïve mus...
The Traditional Perceptions of Hay and Hay-Meadow Management in a Historical Village from Maramureş County, Romania
Hay is still a fundamental resource for many Central and Eastern European traditional rural communities, as this is the only type of fodder used in winter time for the indoor feeding of livestock animals. To explore its...
The Aliyah of 1949: Unpublished Migration Requests of Jews from Romania as Vehicles of Memory
In 1949, the political context of the People’s Republic of Romania and of the newly founded Israeli state formally provided a framework for the immigration of Romanian Jews to Israel, upon the opening of the Israeli Lega...