'‘IT', ‘Ricky', ’They’ Are in Charge of Our Lives': Mystic and Conspiracy Explanations of the Bulgarian Post-Socialist Transition

• In Event: Close Encounters: Seeing and Believing after Socialism in Bulgaria and Beyond

Abstract

The paper is based on an anthropological fieldwork in two Bulgarian towns with mixed population (Bulgarians and Turks, Christians and Muslims), conducted in 2011-2012. The research focused on everyday explanations of the post-socialist transition to democracy and capitalism. A large part of the explanations of the socio-political changes of the past 25 years were neither economic, biographical, urban, simply nostalgic, etc., nor what can be called rational - they were esoteric, conspiratorial, or linked to extraterrestrial power. The main actors of the political change in Bulgaria were “They”, “IT”, “RICKY”, “The Vetaralins fighting against the Mizothrones”, “Alien”, “The Great Power”, “The Black Masons”, “The Reptiles”, “Rockfeller”, “Rothschild” and last but not least “Google.” The paper seeks answers to why the intelligentsia of these towns share esoteric and conspiratorial ideas about the world order. It will place the claims and beliefs of the interviewees in a larger historical and socio-cultural context, from the pre-socialist, socialist and post-socialist period of the country. Some of the proposed explanations are as follows: Esotericism could be seen as a kind of postmodern retraditionalization in a world with dysfunctional modern institutions; as a kind of cosmic ''mobility'' for people isolated in a provincial town; as a search for explanations when the public sphere does not function well; as an attempt to reconcile dramatic events of the past - the exoneration of Bulgarians for the process of renaming Turks as Bulgarian citizens in 1984-85; as a nostalgia for a centralized power that "takes care" of people; as an overcoming of the feeling of helplessness in a situation of constant economic crisis.

Author

• Lyubomir Raychev Pozharliev, Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography (Germany)