FAMILY STRATEGIES FOR COPING WITH PRECARISATION IN POST-SOCIALIST BULGARIA – BETWEEN RETRADITIONALISATION AND TRANSFORMATION

In the period of post-socialist transformation, precarity is becoming the new normal for Bulgarian society. The precarisation of a large part of the middle generation (people born between 1950 and 1980), which met the end of the communist regime hoping for a radical change, became a source of disappointment and led to a loss of people’s hope for a better life. In this article, I address the issue of how people of this generation experienced and reflect on the changes in their lives due to precarisation and what their coping strategies are. My thesis is that the precarisation of one or more family members causes uncertainty for the present and the future of the entire family household. In this situation, individuals act according to their own coping skills and their personal and family financial, social and cultural capital. In many cases, the choice of strategy is motivated by kinship ties and the best interest of the family. Focusing on the family reveals it, on the one hand, as a resource for coping with precariousness through family solidarity and assets. On the other hand, it can also represent field of tension, demanding navigation between the positions and perceptions of its different members. The analysis of the ethnographic material suggests that there is continuity as “traditional” strategies for coping with precarity, familiar from the era of state socialism, are updated – a process I define as retraditionalisation.