ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the Bulgarian National Ethnographic Museum in Sofia after 1989, and pays particular attention to the two conflicting discourses, those of nationalism and multiculturalism, which at the time seemed to offer the museum a new future. The Bulgarian National Ethnographic Museum offers a particularly interesting case study of the changing relationship between the national museum and the nation, and the negotiation of that cultural space that lies between nationalism and multiculturalism. The chapter also focuses on the unstructured interviews with extant and retired curators, documentation in the museum's administrative archive, and articles, reviews and reports written by the museum's directors and curators. Under the communist regime there was no concern for neglected communities, but with the fall of the Berlin Wall and consequent freedom of speech and movement, the institutions found themselves burdened with new, morally determined expectations, borne out by the new democratic and tolerant state.
