This is an ethnography of a Bulgarian village that spans over a decade and straddles the period in which eastern Europe experienced the repercussions of the fall of the Berlin Wall. However, it should not be mistaken for a book that is relevant to only Bulgarian specialists, nor even to only scholars of eastern Europe -- the material in this book should be compelling for reading for anyone concerned with politics and culture in Soviet-style socialist societies wherever in the world they may be found. Kaneff positions her ethnography squarely within the rapidly growing literature of postsocialist studies, meticulously referencing the works of such scholars as Gerald Creed, Gail Kligman, Martha Lampland, Katherine Verdery, and Ruby Watson, sometimes reinforcing their conclusions, but often as not challenging them. The book stands on its own alongside these precursors as a significant contribution to the ethnography of socialism.
Kaneff's main concern in this book is the politics of the past, but her analysis is oriented around three interrelated permutations of the past: history, folklore, and tradition. In her introduction, she painstakingly constructs an argument about how in the socialist period local communities -- such as the village of "Talpa" featured in her ethnography -- became skilled at using the past as a "tool" to gain a favored position with regard to the state center, and thereby receive preferential treatment in the distribution of valued resources. She works with the concept of "democratic centralism" to explore the ways in which the socialist state balanced the need for hierarchical leadership with the need for broad-based participation by people at the local level, and shows how Talpians used their relationship with the past to develop a particular "inflection" of this prescriptive structure and bypass the bureaucratic hierarchy. Kaneff thereby demonstrates that "·contrary to the findings of others·state ideology was relevant at the local level, at least in Talpa" (p.7).
Kaneff argues that tradition, folklore, and history stood in a hierarchical relation to one another under state socialism, and furthermore occupied different social spaces, access to which was available only to certain people. History stood at the top of this hierarchy as the most highly valued manifestation of the past; commemorations of history took place in state sanctioned public spaces, chief among which was the Chitalishte, the library/cultural center found in every town and village (and which scholars of Soviet socialism will recognize as the Bulgarian version of the Dom kul'tury, i.e. House of Culture). Moreover, certain events in history were more important than others, such as the founding of the socialist state in Bulgaria on 9 September 1944 after the overthrow of the fascists. History was politically potent if a village could establish that it had a role in important historical events.
Tradition was the domain least valued by the state, seen as irrelevant to the development of socialism; traditional celebrations took place in private spaces, such as the home, or in public spaces "with nonhistorical significance," such as the tavern. Rather than reinforcing the national unity of the state, tradition was local and therefore fragmenting, and because it was personal, rather than political, it was seen as subversive, particularly to the extent that it was rooted in Orthodox Christianity. Kaneff describes traditional practices as an "alternate code" that "were a potential critique to socialism and a means of resistance." Finally, folklore stood as an intermediary between tradition and history, the state's answer to tradition. Folkloric practices were extracted from the private spaces of everyday life and "recontextualised" in public spaces that could be subjected to state surveillance, such as museums, shops, and stages. For the politically ambitious, tradition was a dangerous domain, but folkloric practices could actually signal movement away from the "backwardness" of tradition and toward a progressive socialist future. Kaneff sees folklore as a "deliberate means by which the state appropriated tradition for its own hegemonic purposes.
Kaneff begins the book with a painstakingly constructed theoretical introduction, in which she lays out these components that make up the politics of the past in Bulgaria. This is followed by a chapter titled "A ÎModel Village'," in which she uses a key event in 1987 -- when Talpa was awarded the prestigious title of Îmodel village' -- to explore relevant issues of class relations, morality, and identity. The rest of the book is divided into three sections, structured around these three concepts of history, tradition, and folklore; each section consists of a brief introduction followed by two chapters. The real substance of Kaneff's ethnography is found here, and the reader will become engrossed in the lives of Talpians as Kaneff skillfully fleshes out their lives. These chapters also contain a good deal of substantive material on the cultural practices of villagers, such as funerals and holiday celebrations. This is the stuff of "folklore studies," but Kaneff treats it very differently than career folklorists; she acknowledges the vast literature on Bulgarian folklore, but feels that the scholars who produced it failed to recognize the extent to which folklore was a socially constructed process.
Kaneff's ethnography is finely detailed and engaging. Any doubts the reader may have about the relevance of Kaneff's tripartite framework to the local community she studied are dispelled as she demonstrates convincingly through her ethnographic examples that these are not merely analytical categories coming out of her own head. Moreover, Kaneff might legitimately claim to be doing "native" ethnography, since her fieldsite was the village of her own ancestors. Kaneff does not claim this privileged position, however; instead, she gives us a very sensitive and frank account of how she reconciled herself to the role her kinship relations would have in the process of conducting fieldwork. She also deals deftly with issues of representation, acknowledging her own informants' sophisticated understanding of the potential power she wielded through her observation of them and her capacity to report on this.
While Kaneff's overall analysis of the interrelation of history, tradition, and folklore is quite apt, as a specialist on indigenous peoples, I found her arguments regarding tradition to be particularly illuminating. "Tradition" has become a tremendously potent concept for all concerned with indigenous peoples, from scholars to practitioners -- consider the amount of fervor raised by such phrases as "traditional culture" and "traditional knowledge." Yet I find critical analysis in this area to be lacking, especially in studies of societies under state socialism. Kaneff's exegesis of the pathway from tradition to history through folklore provides answers to many "riddles" concerning, for example, the Soviet state's glorification of the traditional culture of the very peoples it denigrated as representing primitive backwardness. Kaneff rightly acknowledges that the antagonism between history and tradition is bound up in a dualism between linear and cyclical time, where the socialist state valorizes linear time as the ultimate fulfillment of the Marxist-Leninist temporal development program. Interestingly, in so doing she shows the similarity between the projects of state socialism and state capitalism, in that both are essentially teleological projects. At the same time, Kaneff gives us one of the most sensitive ethnographic treatments of traditional practices that I have seen, without mystifying or romanticizing the tradition that produced the practices.
Weaknesses in this work are hard to find. Kaneff is a bit timid about making claims for the broader applicability of her arguments where she has no first-hand evidence, although in many cases she rightly could -- her tradition-folklore-history framework certainly rings true for the Soviet context. Kaneff is a cautious scholar, and argues her points meticulously -- sometimes almost to the point of seeming repetitive; readers who pick up the book in anticipation of her ethnography may feel impatient as they work through the first two introductory chapters, but will be richly rewarded in the subsequent chapters.
The technical execution of the book is outstanding; endnotes follow each chapter, and these are incidentally not "fluff" -- important corollaries of her argument are found there, and in fact, in many cases the material could have been included in the main text. There are several black and white photos grouped after Chapter Two; while it is clear they are meant to illustrate the "model village" event described there, they might have been more effectively distributed throughout the text. A useful list of abbreviations and a brief glossary are included, and there is an appendix that contains the excerpts from speeches made at an important socialist-era event (the 9 September celebration), as well as a typical eulogy to complement her analysis of funerals in Chapter Five. The index is well-constructed and thorough.
Kaneff incubated this material for a long time before presenting it in the form of a monograph. The result is a remarkably insightful ethnography of socialist-era Bulgaria informed by a deep familiarity with the issues and arguments of postsocialist literature on eastern Europe. Kaneff's treatment of socialism is fair and dispassionate, and her respect for her subjects is abundantly evident. This would be a fine example of ethnography to share with graduate students and advanced undergraduates.