ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on the everyday practices and strategies which Bulgarian people employed to manage their lives. It looks at the stock of common-sense knowledge ordinary people had to have to cope with socialist everyday life. For the management of everyday life, man uses as a resource a number of behaviours, strategies, and institutions that have – over time – proven to be effective. The sociology of knowledge considers culture as a system of shared meanings and common-sense knowledge enabling the individual to organize his daily experiences and to manage everyday life. By doing this, it provides a good approach to the study of everyday culture at the micro-level of concrete individual or collective behaviours. In order to accommodate to the obvious discrepancies of 'real socialism' and to lead a life that offered at least some degree of security and comfort, the villagers developed new practices and strategies in the 1950s which soon became everyday routines.