Paper short abstract:

Approaching Bulgarian villagers' narratives through Turner's (1982) frameworks of "social drama," "liminality," and "anti-temporality," this paper explores stories about objects as narrating time and stress. It also places discourse on post-socialist nostalgia in a liminal and anti-temporal realm.

Paper long abstract:

Collected from exploratory fieldwork conducted in 2008, this paper takes a look at how elderly villagers in a region of northwestern Bulgaria narrated tales of continuity, change, and time through material remains around them. Using concepts of time and narrative as creative social construction and emotional experience, such stories can take varying analytical turns through academic theory, personal story, and lived "reality" in much the way Turner exemplifies how the four-part acts of "social dramas" are embedded in histories (1982:246-248). The academic turn chosen here, deals with how villagers offered tales about a stolen bell, abandoned houses, and derelict roads to illustrate conditions affecting the community in its current time and place. In telling these stories, however, present narratives also included individuals' responses to questions on the village's past and its possible future. Some of the academic literature dealing with narratives in post-socialist areas explores such stories in terms of the complexities of memory or nostalgia (see for example Wolfe 2000:206). In this case, it is suggested that these stories could also be treated as Turner's "symbolic types" ultimately serving as "rituals of affliction" in response to stress (1982:250; 253 Turner on Handleman's symbolic types; Turner 1975). As such, the interplay of Turner's (1982) "anti-temporality," "social drama," and "liminality" is explored through these narratives and nostalgia itself. The paper also examines narratives not only through a cultural/social anthropological lens, but also through one that incorporates the archeological record of a specific place, its space, and its material world.