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Accepted Paper:
Lifestyle migration to a Bulgarian village:
a long-term personal project aiming to form and reframe a variety of identities
Petya Dimitrova
(Sofia University)
Paper short abstract:
I describe lifestyle migrants’ practices and representations concerning their identities and the identity of the village where they buy a property. The paper critically examines three different types of lifestyle migrants’ identities.
Paper long abstract:
This paper draws on a recently collected ethnographic study within a community of lifestyle migrants established in the village of Zhelen, 50 km away from Bulgaria’s capital Sofia. A common perception among inhabitants is that acquiring a property in Zhelen means starting a long-term personal project on changing and developing both the property (and even the village) physically and the owner’s lifestyle and identity. In order to understand the values and motivations behind this claim, I describe peoples’ practices and representations concerning their identities and the identity of the village itself. The paper critically examines three different types of lifestyle migrants’ identities:
(1) the identity of the civic person who eagers to learn about traditional rural lifestyle from the local community and live according to it;
(2) the identity of the civic person who eagers to introduce contemporary civic concepts and practices in the village;
(3) the identity of the civic person who views the village as an ‘empty’ territory and focuses mostly on her own project and not on the village and the community.
The central research question is what are the characteristics of these identities and how are they dependent on the identity and the standard image of the village itself and of living in rural areas in general.