In the meantime

Beginnings: Cinematography, Anthropology, and Nanook of the North For the first week of my Visual Anthropology and Ethnographic Filmmaking class at CEU, we watched Nanook of the North (1922) , a silent documentary filmed and produced by Robert J. Flaherty, following the everyday lives of Nanook and his Inuit family in the Canadian Arctic in northern Quebec. Often pointed to as “the first documentary,” the film emerged in an early cinematic moment when the boundary between fiction and non-fiction was not yet settled, even as cinema was beginning to claim a privileged relationship to “reality.” Encountering it today, therefore, can be oddly fascinating, as beyond the particular story it tells about “Inuit life”, Nanook is also an important archive of a broader early twentieth-century Euro-American epistemic project to capture and visualise “social actualities”, whether via the ethnographer’s notebook or the camera’s lens. Watching it now from the perspective of a field that has spent ...

  - - Превъртете надолу за български - - In  2021–2023 , I launched  AnthropoLogica (АнтропоЛогика) -  a podcast series on anthropology, social theory, and cultural questions in Bulgaria, produced with  Channel4Podcast (Канал 4) . The idea was to translate academic debates for broader publics, grounded in lived experience, current public conflicts, and the everyday textures of power. Season 1 brings together conversations with guests working on key topics across anthropology and the social sciences, from identity and borders to protest, gender politics, spirituality, and urban governance. Season 1 episode guide  Ep. 1 — “We are Bulgarians, but not quite: nation, identity, borders”  (Dr. Mina Hristova) How nations get made, how “we/they” categories work, and how borders shape flexible and hybrid identities - focused on the Serbia–North Macedonia–Bulgaria triple border. ( channel4podcast.com ) Ep. 2 — “Subcultural identities: July Morning, ‘Kravay’,...

I'm sharing here fragments from an interview I gave for the Bulgarian National Radio (BNR) – “The Lethargy of the Left Opens Space for Populist Protest Mobilisations” ( „Летаргията на лявото отваря място за популистки протестни мобилизации“ ), launched on the  Hristo Botev Programme – “Хоризонт до обед” , aired 14 March 2025 I was Interviewed by Yuliana Kornazheva on the protest repertoire in Bulgaria, and the rise of far-right movements in the context of a weakened left. Listen to the interview (in Bulgarian) . Below is an article published on BNRNews that summarises the main moments of the interview (for English scrow down): "Усещането за задкулисие, рухналото доверие във върховенството на правото и корупцията са фрустрации, които продължават вече 35 години. Този извод прави социалният антрополог Роберта Колева от Центъра за изследване на демокрацията. Според нея така се обезсилва вярата в демократичните принципи, а тези фрустрации се канализират в различни типове недо...

To cite:  Koleva, R. 2024 . ‘The Bulgarian Berlin Wall Is Going Away Step by Step’: ‘Standby Transition’ and the Quest for ‘Europeanness’ and ‘Democracy’ in the Discourses Around the Dismantling of the Monument to the Soviet Army in Sofia . Anthropology. Journal for Sociocultural Anthropology, 11 (2), 47–79 Abstract: The article delves into the most recent debates around the dismantlement of the Monument to the Soviet Army in Sofia, initiated  in December 2023 amidst the Russian-led war in Ukraine . Drawing upon discourse analysis , ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews  with social actors engaged in this contestation, it analyses how different clusters of  arguments surrounding the memorial reflect broader social imaginaries concerning  “Europeanness”, “democracy” and the post-socialist “transition”, spurred by the  ongoing war in Ukraine. Despite the declaration that “there is nothing to ‘transit’ anymore”, 35 years after 1989 the Monument t...

  Broken Glass, Broken Class: Transformations of Work in Bulgaria, by Dimitra Kofti [Book Review] ## BOOK REVIEW Kofti, Dimitra. 2023. Broken Glass, Broken Class: Transformations of Work in Bulgaria. Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books. To Cite:  Koleva, R. 2024. Broken Glass, Broken Class: Transformations of Work in Bulgaria, by Dimitra Kofti [Book Review] .  Anthropology Journal for Sociocultural Anthropology, 11 (2), 127–133.  “Once we were unified; now we are like broken glass”. This remark, spoken by workers in Mladost, a Bulgarian glass factory, captures the sense of sharp transformation, fragmentation, and disillusionment at the heart of Dimitra Kofti’s Broken Glass, Broken Class: Transformations of Work in Bulgaria (2023). Based on a decade-long field study, partly stemming from the author’s doctoral research at University College London, this insightful ethnography closely examines the post-socialist transformations of the everyday politics of labour in Bulg...