Peter Stamatov’s research while affiliated with University of California, Los Angeles and other places

The concept of interpretive activism as a relational position and a practical accomplishment is a useful analytical tool for the study of audiences conceived not as a conglomerate of individuals but as loose networks in which the ability to construct and impose political meanings is unequally distributed. An analysis of the political uses of Verdi's operas in the 1840s demonstrates the power of interpretive activists to impose on audience co-members a political interpretation of cultural objects. There is significant variation in the ways in which these operas were used for the construction of expressive collective statements by contemporary audiences. Opera performances were interpreted as symbolic representations of different political idioms, and audiences expressed their political stance by both affiliating with, and disaffiliating from, these performances. The practices of interpretive activists, not the patriotic symbolism inherent in the operas, account for this variation in outcome. Symbolism, along with the formal properties of opera and the normative enforcement of behavior, is just one of the different contextually grounded resources that interpretive activists use for the construction and imposition of politicized interpretations of cultural objects.

The concept of interpretive activism and interpretive activists, is introduced as a media between cultural objects (Verdi’s operas) and political meanings. The multitude of political and ideological interpretations of Verdi’s operas written in the 1840s, that resulted from the differentiation between socio-political interests of interpretive activists, goes definitely beyond the traditional understanding of Verdi’s music as a convenient ideological tool used for creating pre-designed Italian nationalist sentiments of Risorgimento.

This article identifies an incipient and largely implicit cognitive turn in the study of ethnicity, and argues that it can be consolidated and extended by drawing on cognitive research in social psychology and anthropology. Cognitive perspectives provide resources for conceptualizing ethnicity, race, and nation as perspectives on the world rather than entities in the world, for treating ethnicity, race, and nationalism together rather than as separate subfields, and for re-specifying the old debate between primordialist and circumstantialist approaches.

The concept of interpretive activism as a relational position and a practical accomplishment is a useful analytical tool for the study of audiences conceived not as a conglomerate of individuals but as loose networks in which the ability to construct and impose political meanings is unequally distributed. An analysis of the political uses of Verdi's operas in the 1840s demonstrates the power of interpretive activists to impose on audience co-members a political interpretation of cultural objects. There is significant variation in the ways in which these operas were used for the construction of expressive collective statements by contemporary audiences. Opera performances were interpreted as symbolic representations of different political idioms, and audiences expressed their political stance by both affiliating with, and disaffiliating from, these performances. The practices of interpretive activists, not the patriotic symbolism inherent in the operas, account for this variation in outcome. Symbolism, along with the formal properties of opera and the normative enforcement of behavior, is just one of the different contextually grounded resources that interpretive activists use for the construction and imposition of politicized interpretations of cultural objects.

In recent years, an interesting body of literature in the social sciences has suggested an intimate connection between the institutions and process of the public sphere, on the one hand, and modern nationalism, on the other. My aim in this article is to contribute to this growing literature by considering one case of nationalist mobilization in postcommunist Bulgaria. My goals are twofold. First, I aim to summarize the development of an empirically-grounded sociological perspective on the public sphere and to demonstrate the usefulness of this perspective for the study of nationalism. Beyond that, however, my goal in this case study is to specify the conditions under which national rhetoric is an e¡ective strategy in the modern public sphere. I argue that my case study contributes to a more adequate understanding of the dynamic relationship between nationalism and the public sphere by indicating that the success of nationalist mobilization is contingent upon the ability of a nationalist public to link persuasively its claims to the universalist and democratic ideals that lay at the foundation of the public sphere. Theoretically, my starting point is the concept of the‘‘public sphere’’as elaborated by Ju« rgen Habermas. However, I emphasize two important revisions of his theory by historically informed research: ¢rst, the existence of multiple particularist publics instead of a unitary civic public space, and second, the embeddedness of publics in historically crystallized symbolic and discursive con¢gurations. Within this neoHabermasian framework I analyze the ethnonational mobilization in Bulgarian transition. I argue that this mobilization must be understood as organically connected with the processes of reconstituting the public sphere after the demise of Leninist state socialism. I view it as the emergence of a post-communist nationalist public the making of which was the result of two developments. The ¢rst was itself the result of historically structured social cleavages in post-communist Bulgaria,