Emotions Senses And Affects In The Context Of Southeast Europe

This volume focuses on emotions of people in Southeast Europe. Grief and sadness take on different forms of expression. In the era of socialist rule laughter could express political resistance; for labour migrants visiting their country of origin evokes feelings of being at home. Cities attract visitors by appealing to emotions and people try to relive times of national glory by historical re-enactments. Gossip is a means of expressing emotions, smells and rituals become expressions of remembered emotions. Emotions are a factor researchers must always take seriously, both of the people studied and their own.

The papers in this volume continue our focus on emotions of people in Southeast Europe. Grief and sadness are, of course, universal, but they take on different forms of expression. Strong emotional values are often attached to specific foods (e.g. the kurban), usually food is of great importance for labour migrants and in times of crisis. Likewise, dress can be of great emotional significance and value. Wars as well as communist collectivization often lead to emotional consequences such as trauma. Smells and tastes can become expressions of actual or remembered emotions, a fact that can also concern the researchers themselves.

The papers in this volume continue our focus on emotions of people in Southeast Europe. Grief and sadness are, of course, universal, but they take on different forms of expression. Strong emotional values are often attached to specific foods (e.g. the kurban), usually food is of great importance for labour migrants and in times of crisis. Likewise, dress can be of great emotional significance and value. Wars as well as communist collectivization often lead to emotional consequences such as trauma. Smells and tastes can become expressions of actual or remembered emotions, a fact that can also concern the researchers themselves. Klaus Roth is professor em. at the Institute for European Ethnology of Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich. Milena Benovska is professor em. of the Dept. of Ethnology and Balkan Studies of the South-West University of Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria. Ana Luleva is Assoc. Prof. at the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Studies of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences in Sofia.

This book offers original insights into cultural transformations of the sensory with particular emphasis on environments and technologies, articulating a special moment in the sensory history of urban Europe as people’s relationship with their environment is increasingly shaped through digital technologies. It is a much-needed addition to Sensory Studies literature with its firmly grounded empirical and theoretical perspectives. It provides radical and impactful food for thought on sensory engagements with urban environments. After reading the book, the reader will have a profound understanding of the original methodology of sensobiographic walking, as well as transdisciplinary and transgenerational ethnographies in different cultural contexts – in this case three European cities. The book is aimed at a large audience of readers. It is equally useful for social and human scientists and students finalizing their MA degrees or working on their doctoral or post-doctoral work, and essential reading for environmental planners, youth workers, city planners and architects, among others.

In a series of richly illustrated short essays, Hidden Galleries presents the ways in which the secret police of the communist-era and before collected and curated material religious images and objects in their archives. Based on painstaking documentation by a team of eight historians, anthropologists and scholars of religion in archives in Hungary, Romania, Ukraine and Moldova, this volume offers a rare window on the creativity of underground religious life, and its ideological representation as well as exploring the significance for religious communities and wider society today of this legacy of repression and surveillance.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com Taking its cue from the study of 'lived religion', Secular Bodies, Affects and Emotions shows how the idea of a secular public is equally marked by a display and cultivation of affect and emotions. Whereas it is widely agreed that religion is often saturated by emotion, the secular is usually treated as a neutral background serving as the domain of public, rational deliberation. This book demonstrates that secularity and secularism are also upheld by bodily practices and emotional attachments. Drawing on empirical case studies, this is the first book to ask and explore whether a secular body exists. Building on the work of Talal Asad, the book argues that the secular is not an absence of religion, but a positive entity that comes about through its co-constitutive relationship with religion. And, once we attune ourselves to recognizing its operations as grammar which structures social practice, writing an anthropology of the secular could become a new possibility.

Migrations have moulded Balkan societies. In the multiethnic empires migrations were very common, and in the modern era, economic reasons led millions of people to go abroad as overseas emigrants before World War I, as Gastarbeiter in the 1960s and 70s, or as economic migrants since 1990. In addition, many people had to leave their homes as political refugees or as victims of ethnic cleansing. But Balkan countries were and are also hosts to immigrants and refugees, and they have witnessed enormous rural-urban migrations. This volume, the first part of a selection of conference papers, focusses on historical and cultural aspects of migration in, from and to Southeastern Europe.