201 INSTITUT D’ÉTUDES BALKANIQUES DE L’ACADÉMIE DES SCIENCES DE BULGARIE CERTEL DE L’UNIVERSITÉ D’ARTOIS Nikolay ARETOV Institute for Literature Bulgarian Academy of Sciences IDENTITY, TRADITION, AND VALUES IN THE IDEAS OF CONTEMPORARY BULGARIAN HUMANITIES. PERSONAL OBSERVATIONS This paper is based on my experience with a multidisciplinary scholar’s Pro- ject on various identities in Balkan cultures. This project started, so to say, in the late years of the last Millennium and already has its short history. It can be traced in its paper publications 1 and on our web-site www.ilit.bas.bg/bi. Nevertheless, I would like to present briefly our main ideas and then I will try to sketch some conclusions on the contemporary notions on identity, tradition, and values and Balkan culture in Bulgarian humanities, which one encounters while working on and reading about identities nowadays. The project bears the ambition to serve as a base for analysis of historic and actual processes in the Balkans and to offer one more universal metho-dology of dealing with the issues, connected with identities and modern mythology. The project also seeks to introduce the actual scholar methodology into uni- versity teaching. Starting from the modern notions of the myth (N. Frye, R. Barthes, M. Eliade, J. Lotman, J. Campbell, and Cl. Lévi-Strauss), analytical psychology (C. Jung, E. Cassirer, . Erikson,) and nationalism (H. Kohn, E. Hobsbawm, E. Gellner, B. Anderson, E. Kedourie, A. Smith) it offers a definition of identity. Potential collective bearers of identity are discussed – ethnic, religious and confessional, so- 1 Cf.         (I- ), ., . “ ”, . 1: c. .   . , 2001; . 2 : c. .   . , 2002; . 4: c. . , 2003.