The tradition of temporary labour migrations, particularly among men, has existed for centuries in a number of regions of the Balkans. The model by which men earn money somewhere 'away' or 'abroad', 1 but invariably return to their home places and families 'here', is known in different Balkan languages as gurbet, kurbet, or kurbéti and by the South-Slavic term pečalbarstvo 2 (Hristov 2008a, p. 217). Even though in the Balkans the term gurbet unifies a wide range of labour mobility patterns, these all relate to what Baldwin-Edwards (2002, p. 2) has called 'old-fashioned temporary migration', 'where the migrant's identity is closely linked to the country of origin' and remains significant for extended periods, regardless of ethnic and religious affiliation. The Balkans offers a remarkable variety of such traditional patterns: from the seasonal mobility of shepherds, agricultural workers and master builders to the temporary absences from home of crafts people and merchants (usually for one to three years, typically three 3), with the goal of gaining wealth and supporting family back home. The names of these patterns are diverse, as are their distinctive characteristics in different regions, but all share a number of features that make them an important part of what we could call a Balkan 'culture of migration', following Brettell (2003, p. 3). Migration researchers interested in the Balkans, however, confront several difficulties. First of all, there is the difficulty of uncovering the reasons for a country's different social groups' labour migrations, internally or to another country. Then
The notion of “zadruga” (named by Vuk Karadjić in 1818) was introduced in the scientific research literature, as well as in the social and political discourse, of the then young Balkan countries in the 19th century to mark the multitude of historical forms under which the “complex family organization” was known among the South-Slavic people in the region. The young Bulgarian science adopted this term in ethnographic studies of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Bulgarian scientists, lawyers, and researchers of customary law norms attempted to implement some of the features of this family model in modern Bulgarian legislation. In the period between the two world wars, the nascent cooperative movement in the agrarian sector also used the model of the “partnership” to justify its organization. This paper analyzes similar attempts to use scientific descriptions of the zadruga in the construction of various social and economic associations in Bulgaria during the interwar period. It also analyses the attempts of the new communist leaders to use the traditions of the pre-modern society in terms of communal living in zadruga through the imposition of a cooperative system, and the nationalization of the arable land in the first years under the totalitarian system following the Second World War. Part of the Bulgarian scientific community and Bulgarian ethnography has been involved in these attempts since the early 1950s.
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