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"Although the essays explore different events from various historical periods in individual countries, the authors are animated by a common denominator: opposition to rigid isolationism, preserving space for a creative dialogue, and opposition to political manipulation of national identities."
--"Multicultural Review"

"Todorova kept her authors engaged with each other and with the current scholarly literature on memory, history and nationalism. Their efforts to create such a rich and diverse volume must be commended."--" American HIstorical Review"

Balkan Identities brings together historians, anthropologists, and literary scholars all working under the shared conviction that the only way to overcome history is to intimately understand it. The contributors of Balkan Identities focus on historical memory, collective national memory, and the political manipulation of national identities. They refine our understanding of memory and identity in general and explore and assess the significance of particular manifestations of Balkan national identities and national memories in the region.

The essays in Balkan Identities grapple with three major problems: the construction of historical memory, sites of national memory, and the mobilization of national identities. While most essays focus on a single country (e.g. Croatia, Romania, Turkey, Cyprus, Albania, Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece, Macedonia), they are in dialogue with each other and share an opposition to rigid isolationist identities.

Illuminating and challenging, Balkan Identities demonstrates the ever-changing nature of a troubled and culturally vibrant region.

Although the end of the Cold War was greeted with great enthusiasm by people in the East and the West, the ensuing social and especially economic changes did not always result in the hoped-for improvements in people's lives. This led to widespread disillusionment that can be observed today all across Eastern Europe. Not simply a longing for security, stability, and prosperity, this nostalgia is also a sense of loss regarding a specific form of sociability. Even some of those who opposed communism express a desire to invest their new lives with renewed meaning and dignity. Among the younger generation, it surfaces as a tentative yet growing curiosity about the recent past. In this volume scholars from multiple disciplines explore the various fascinating aspects of this nostalgic turn by analyzing the impact of generational clusters, the rural-urban divide, gender differences, and political orientation. They argue persuasively that this nostalgia should not be seen as a wish to restore the past, as it has otherwise been understood, but instead it should be recognized as part of a more complex healing process and an attempt to come to terms both with the communist era as well as the new inequalities of the post-communist era.

"These lively essays make for the rare collection that is greater than the sum of its parts. Bookended by a substantive Foreword and Afterword, they upend the standard 'diagnosis of nostalgia' found across the former Soviet bloc, refuting the popular conception that Eastern Europeans are somehow haunted by the past, and illustrating the repertoire of contemporary post-socialist cultural politics at its most sophisticated." . Bruce Grant, New York University

Although the end of the Cold War was greeted with great enthusiasm by people in the East and the West, the ensuing social and especially economic changes did not always result in the hoped-for improvements in people's lives. This led to widespread disillusionment that can be observed today all across Eastern Europe. Not simply a longing for security, stability, and prosperity, this nostalgia is also a sense of loss regarding a specific form of sociability. Even some of those who opposed communism express a desire to invest their new lives with renewed meaning and dignity. Among the younger generation, it surfaces as a tentative yet growing curiosity about the recent past. In this volume scholars from multiple disciplines explore the various fascinating aspects of this nostalgic turn by analyzing the impact of generational clusters, the rural-urban divide, gender differences, and political orientation. They argue persuasively that this nostalgia should not be seen as a wish to restore the past, as it has otherwise been understood, but instead it should be recognized as part of a more complex healing process and an attempt to come to terms both with the communist era as well as the new inequalities of the post-communist era.

Maria Todorova is Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her publications include Bones of Contention: The Living Archive of Vasil Levski and the Making of Bulgaria's National Hero (2006), Balkan Identities: Nation and Memory (2004), Imagining the Balkans (1997), Balkan Family Structure and the European Pattern: Demographic Developments in Ottoman Bulgaria (1993).

Zsuzsa Gille is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of From the Cult of Waste to the Trash Heap of History: The Politics of Waste in Socialist and Post-Socialist Hungary (2007), and co-author of Global Ethnography: Forces, Connections and Imaginations in a Postmodern World (2000)."

Maria Todorova's book is devoted to the 'golden age' of the socialist idea, broadly surveying the period in and around the time of the Second International. It critically examines the promise for an alternative socialist utopia from 1870 to the 1920s. Todorova brings in the experience of the periphery in a comparative context in the belief that the margins can often elucidate better the character of a phenomenon, and de-provincialize it from essentialist notions. In doing so, The Lost World of Socialists at Europe's Margins moves beyond the traditional historiographical emphasis on ideology by looking at different intersections or entanglements of spaces, generations, genders, ideas and feelings, and different flows of historical time. The study provides a social and cultural history of early socialism in Eastern Europe with an emphasis on Bulgaria, arguably the country with the earliest and strongest socialist movement in Southeast Europe, and one that had a unique relationship to both German and Russian social democracy. Based on a rich prosopographical database of around 3500 biographies of people born in the 19th century, the book addresses the interplay of several generations of leftists, looking at the specifics of how ideas were generated, received, transferred and transformed. Finally, the work investigates the intersection between subjectivity and memory as reflected in a unique cache of archival materials containing over 4000 documentary sources including diaries, oral interviews, and unpublished memoirs. A microhistorical approach to this material allows the reconstruction of 'structures of feeling' that inspired an exceptional group of individuals.

Die Arbeit untersucht in drei experimentellen Studien mit induzierten Praferenzen, wie prazise Contingent Valuation, Discrete Choice- und Conjoint Analyse unter verschiedenen Bedingungen die Zahlungsbereitschaften fur Umweltguter erfassen. Die Studienergebnisse bieten Orientierung bei der Methodenwahl unter Berucksichtigung situationaler, motivationaler und persoenlicher Faktoren. Studie 1 befasst sich mit der Genauigkeit der o.g. Methoden unter dem Einfluss hypothetischer und realer finanzieller Anreize und vergleicht die drei Methoden umfassend in Bezug auf die sog. hypothetische Verzerrung. Studie 2 widmet sich dem Einfluss von individuellen Geld- und Risikoeinstellungen auf die Genauigkeit der ermittelten Zahlungsbereitschaften sowie auf die Hoehe der hypothetischen Verzerrung in den Methoden. Im Zentrum von Studie 3 steht die Genauigkeit der Methoden unter dem Einfluss von Anreizen fur strategisches Unterschatzen und UEberschatzen.

"If the Balkans hadn't existed, they would have been invented" was the verdict of Count Hermann Keyserling in his famous 1928 publication, Europe. Over ten years ago, Maria Todorova traced the relationship between the reality and the invention. Based on a rich selection of travelogues, diplomatic accounts, academic surveys, journalism, and belles-lettres in many languages, Imagining the Balkans explored the ontology of the Balkans from the sixteenth century to the present day, uncovering the ways in which an insidious intellectual tradition was constructed, became mythologized, and is still being transmitted as discourse.
Maria Todorova, who was raised in the Balkans, is in a unique position to bring both scholarship and sympathy to her subject, and in a new afterword she reflects on recent developments in the study of the Balkans and political developments on the ground since the publication of Imagining theBalkans. The afterword explores the controversy over Todorova's coining of the term Balkanism. With this work, Todorova offers a timely, updated, accessible study of how an innocent geographic appellation was transformed into one of the most powerful and widespread pejorative designations in modern history.