Paper short abstract:

The aim of this paper is to show how the economic practices of coping with precarity are articulated through meanings, values and ideologies. They are seen as family strategies that are analyzed as intergenerational relations producing tensions between dependency and support.

Paper long abstract:

While over the last decade the Bulgarian public discourse has been dominated by escalating nationalism, traditionalism and idealization of distant past times of ‘traditional values’ embodied by the patriarchal family, a series of crises (economic, political, pandemic) have caused constant precarization and a sense of uncertainty among broad social strata.

The aim of this paper is to show how the economic practices of coping with precarity are articulated through meanings, values and ideologies, perceptions of masculinity and femininity, of ‘proper’ gender arrangements and family relations. Starting from the understanding that economic practices are relational and develop within certain institutional frameworks and personal relations, they are seen as family strategies that are analyzed as intergenerational relations producing tensions between dependency and support.

How do suggestions such as a ‘return to normality’ and ‘the natural essence of gender and family’, traditionalism and patriarchal order combine with a neoliberal economic order that reinforces precarity and generates the need to deal with crisis situations in the family? How does precarization affect gender arrangements in the private sphere and the public gender order? How the everyday choices of family members to cope with uncertainty are remembered and narrated? These are the questions discussed in this paper.

The analysis is based on an ethnographic study of the everyday lives of families with different social, religious and age profiles, which I have been conducting within the research project "Anthropology of Uncertainty"(2021-2024) supported by the Bulgarian Science Fund.