Glasnik Etnografskog Instituta SANU
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The Bulletin of the Institute of Ethnography SAS (I-VII)/ SASA (VIII/) is a scientific periodical of international significance which publishes papers in ethnology/anthropology. From its inception in 1952, the Bulletin publishes the results of scientific research projects of scientists and associates of the Institute and other affiliated institutions in the country and abroad. In addition, discussions and articles, supplements, field data, retrospectives, chronicles, reviews, translations, notes, bibliographies, obituaries, memories, critiques and similar are published as well. The Bulletin was founded as a means to publish the results of research of settlements and origins of populations, folk life, customs and folk proverbs. However, the concept of the Bulletin, like that of any other contemporary scientific journal, changed over time to accommodate the social, cultural and political processes and research trends in the social sciences and humanities.
The Bulletin (GEI) is referenced in the electronic bases: DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals), Ulrich's Periodicals Directory and SCIndex (Serbian Citation Index). All articles are digitally available in a form typographically true to the original (in .pdf format). The Bulletin is also available in the same form on the website of the Institute of Ethnography SASA.
The Bulletin (GEI SANU) can also be found and read at CEEOL (Central and Eastern European Online Library): http://www.ceeol.com
Pages
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- Sinking river
- The paper examines the issue of inconstancy and academic exclusion of the term mentality, which occur despite a long history of its being studied by several scholarly disciplines and a broad usage in various public spheres. Being of the opinion that, in the academic sense, the term mentality is like a sinking river - intermittently present and absent - the authoress reminds us of dominant paradigms of mentality studies, both the ones that use the term and those that rejected it, but nevertheless addressing it from the perspective of contemporary theoretical concepts and under different names. Apart from the academic exclusion, the necessity for developing a more adequate analytical approach lies in the instrumental-associative potentials of mentality-related contents in their political and propagandist usage, as well as in their adaptability to different forms and means of communication. In the opposite case, by avoiding themes and phenomena that are not in academic fashion, we deprive ourselves of the knowledge of the academic community that creates that fashion and the apparent status quo. Similarly, in case of ceasing to question narratives on mentality properties, we deprive ourselves of the knowledge of communities that create such narratives and their interest derived from the placement of such narratives.
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- Siva zona pravne sfere - suživot običajnog prava i zakona - Jadranka Đorđević-Crnobrnja
- Diković, Jovana - Siva zona pravne sfere - suživot običajnog prava i zakona - Jadranka Đorđević-Crnobrnja: Nasleđivanje između običaja i zakona, Etnografski institut SANU, Beograd, 2011 - Glasnik Etnografskog instituta SANU
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- Slovaks in the Czech lands after 1945
- The study examines migration of Slovaks to the Czech Lands since 1945 till present days. It focuses on migration waves in post-war decades according to results of population censuses, it also describes the numbers and territorial placement of Slovaks in Czechia and it characterizes their social, demographic and educational structure, as well as their activities and change of legal status after the split of Czechoslovakia in 1993. Slovaks are not original, autochthonous inhabitants of the Czech Lands, but they came there long time before the creation of the first Czechoslovak Republic in 1918. Their migration had mainly social and economic motives. Since the early 1990s qualitative changes in character of migration started to emerge, when social reasons were often replaced by familial ones. After the division of Czechoslovakia political motives appeared as well. In 1945-1992 Slovaks lived in the Czech Lands as members of the second state-forming nation of the Czechoslovak Republic. After the creation of the Czech Republic on January 1, 1993, their legal status changed and they became the most numerous minority starting to create a new identity. Thanks to activities of nationally-committed Slovak intelligentsia Slovaks in the Czech Republic started to reflect the benefits of their status of an ethnic minority in democratic society with guaranteed laws for development of their national life.
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- Social construction of (post)postsocialist reality
- In this paper, I want to discuss the main proposition from Berger and Luckmann’s seminal book, The social construction of reality (or. 1966) - the idea that the everyday is the arena through which the social world comes into being-and to pair it with the understanding of memories and everyday life in postsocialist studies. It seems that various disciplines dealing with postsocialism sometimes treat the memories of socialism as an untheorized background of the analysis. I propose that postsocialist studies should do better by actively engaging in understanding the memories of socialism (and its aftermath) as an active force in shaping the present that should be addressed not only through the narratives of the past, but through the concept of the “everyday.” For that purpose, I deploy the contemporary Western idea of ethnography as a specific qualitative study of the present that can be a useful tool for the understanding of society and social reality in the way they are described by Berger and Luckmann. I believe that Berger and Luckmann’s account may shed new light on some of the central topics of related to the post-Yugoslav predicament (like the state, society, morality, and “normality”) and I offer new readings of some scholarly works that deal with these concepts (including my own). [Project of the Serbian Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development, Grant no. 177026: Cultural heritage and identity]
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- Social construction of reality and constructionism
- The paper discusses interpretive contention around the legacy of the Social Construction of Reality. On one hand, the book is regularly considered a founding work in the history of constructionism. On the other, Berger and Luckmann themselves vigorously opposed this view, claiming that constructionism had different theoretical origins and intentions, and was ideologically biased. The paper's conclusion is that their argument is only partially correct since their work and later constructionism share major lines of continuity, identified and analyzed in the closing sections.
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- Social policy towards the family
- Intensive development of socialist society, which started immediately after Second World War, proceeded simultaneously on two mutually conditional tracks: on material and ideological. In certain way, both were based on the critique of traditional social concept: starting from its economic and all the way to value characteristics under all encompassing parole of "modernization". The policy of transformation was mostly based on certain number of dichotomies that expressed the difference between past and preferred social forms and contents. Past, which was defined as old, regressive, conservative, patriarchal, alienated should be replaced by preferred, that is, by new, progressive, modern, egalitarian, democratic, free... The mainstay of the past was village, agrarian family, while the mainstay of the preferred was, as it appeared later, urban type family. Modernization implied economic restructuring of the state through the process of intensive industrialization and consequently, urbanization while "non-material" discourse of changes was dominated by the idea of democratization of society, that is, a specific ideology of "freedom" that had to be won on all instances of social reality. In-alienation of society was proclaimed as the highest ideal of the new order, which should be achieved by the emancipation of its members from all types of coercion-from work, through moral and up to religious coercion. Even though there is a prevailing viewpoint in scientific literature about the conditionality of social transformations by economic and technological factors and "progress", I think that it can be rightly said that this process was primarily of "spiritual" nature, that is, that its main mover and trigger was the process of atheism of the society. Development of modern society (not only in Serbia) meant in fact its de-Christianization and secularization, where "freedom" from God and "coercions" contained in the religious view of the world became precondition for accepting all others.
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- Social sciences and the humanities
- Pavićević, Aleksandra - Social sciences and the humanities: Facing the challenges of postdisciplinarity and the market. Experiences with preparing, organizing and funding scientific studies - Glasnik Etnografskog instituta SANU
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- Social status and prestige in conditions of transnational migration. Ethnographic study among the Albanians from the Republic of Macedonia
- The examination of social status in conditions of transnationalism is an important and fruitful topic since many of the social relations in which migrants find themselves involved in are paralleling or intersecting the social hierarchies and identities of both the destination and origin societies, ethnic communities and transnational social fields. It offers researchers good opportunity to examine the links between distribution of resources, expressions of power and dominance, representations of social identity, imaginaries of society etc. Proceeding from these assumptions, the article examines the dynamics of ways and mechanisms through which social status and prestige are gained, maintained and demonstrated among the Albanians from the Republic of Macedonia in conditions of transnational migrations continuing for decades. Three different domains are considered: the family regarding the inter-personal relationships; the community membership focusing on criteria of gaining and maintenance of reputation and prestige; and the Albanian community’s status claims and positioning in the Macedonian society in the context of Albanian-Macedonian relationships. The study is based on ethnographic research in several Albanian villages located in the regions of Skopje, Tetovo and Struga.
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- Social status of rural women in the focus of a developmental project
- One of the goals of the project called "The milky river", which deals with the integral development of the dairy production, is to initiate the development of the sustainable and profitable production of milk and dairy products through grouping producers and supporting their position in the society they live in. Women are more than men engaged in the dairy production chain and they have a direct view of the whole dairy production process. So it was necessary to adapt the grouping to their needs, as well as to make some practical mechanisms of their involvement in the project activities. In this way, the strategy of the project helped with offering equal chances to women and men, and by reducing the gender inequality, it also helped with making a chance for a new life perspective for women. Through interviews and by focus-grouping the data were collected which represented the first picture of the dairy production in the region of Niš, including its gender characteristics, among other things. Two years later, the qualitative analysis of the indicators of the rural women’s social status in this region in the context of the realization of the project activities, has shown that there has been an important movement forward towards the gender equality which can be attributed to the successful project implementation. Women, as an important factor in the dairy production chain, seem to be joined and encouraged. They seem to be empowered at the level of their knowledge decision making and autonomous activity taking through various forms of education, joint farmer group work, as well as through various forms of cooperation with supporting institutions and other partners within the project activity framework. The overwhelming impression seems to be that joint work and cooperation are necessary conditions for the development of any individual farmers’ production, as well as for the referent rural development which requires the support of all the available human resources. The project titled "The milky river" is a possibility for and an initiation of women to change the regional, historical experience of being marginalized. It is also a chance for women to define their needs and to promote themselves as equal economic and social factors in their society - instead of being assistants on their housing or family estate, now they become farmer-producers.
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- Some archaic traits in social life of Brskuceans
- In this paper the author has, using the descriptive method, pointed out some archaic aspects of the social life of an undeveloped and isolated village in Montenegro. By a brief analysis of the whole of its spiritual and material self-realization, it has been possible to recognize the important traits of traditional, tribal-brotherhood way of thinking and behavior. In that sense it is a noticeable proof that they survived notwithstanding the inevitable modernization of the village. The paper has involved the following four parts: The general data about the village; the social organization; the spiritual culture and customs, and finally the social processes and the ways of thinking and behavior. The intrinsic organization of living has been expressed by the hierarchical position of each family member. The position each member has taken has been less determined by the traditional elements of the rural economy and much more by the interiorization and preservation of spiritual worthiness wherein the remembering of them has given the life a peculiar meaning. The village of Brskut has been a patriarchal milieu with an accent to the epic and combatant traditions where a child has been treated as an unfinished personality, so that the parents have cherished the merited regard only to the friends and grown-up persons as well as to the friendly oriented foreigners. Proceeding from the judgment relatives tribesmen, brotherhood men and other friends are able to form of him or her of their opinion he or she has held, he or she pleased them, experiencing the child as a disturbance by which the said relationship has been thwarted. Therefore the child has been generally neglected by the customary regulations in that milieu. The brotherhood links have been solid. The members of the same brotherhood have been visiting one another, respecting one another and helping one another believing that they have been originating from the same common ancestor. The common gatherings and meetings have been organized. The solid links have been originated from the cult of dead ancestors and relatives accentuated in all manifestations of living. The essential rural cultural milieu make the churches, the home, the cemetery and the common gatherings as the lasting institutions of the social life. The author has been pointing out the deep social changes involved in electrification, urbanization and motorization having imprinted an inerasable seal into the modernization of this village. The way of the village out of the cultural backwardness and the autarchic shut up, the author has been relating to the home, the school, electricity and the asphalt road as the essential factors of the change. Unfortunately, some of these factors (the home and the school) have not contributed to the staying of the youth in the country, while some of them (the electricity and the road) have only sped up the process of their moving to towns.
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- Some issues of shaping thanatology as a discipline
- Development of death studies, choice of topics and aspects of their interpretations were influenced by many factors, both global and local. The former were related to universal processes of medicalization, bureaucratization and professionalization of death and dying, as well as to processes of general secularization of society and culture. The latter were connected with specific and dominant local social and cultural praxes, politics and academic traditions. In this paper we will point out specificities of death studies development in different academic communities. We will also open the question and offer some answers on disciplinary identity of thanatology and, at the end, we will consider possibilities and needs for introducing the discipline in curriculum at different education levels. The aim of the paper is to settle preliminary frames for future investigation; the emphasis is placed on ethnological and anthropological perspective and on English and Serbian language bibliography. [Projekat Ministarstva nauke Republike Srbije, br. 177028]
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- Son preference among the historical Sandžak Muslim population
- This paper attempts to explain parental son preferences among historical Muslim population in the Sandžak region, southwestern Serbia. The paper draws upon data collected in the course of anthropological fieldwork studies in the region. The fieldwork was performed among Muslim and Christian families in Serbian rural area of Sandžak, measuring maternal fitness in relation to several variables. The data set comes from 120 women born between 1880-1924, representing so a historical demographic data based on individual and lineage records. These data were complemented with official records from Archive of Novi Pazar, whenever possible. In this Serbian rural area, land is still considered as an abundant resource, useful in establishing a family, livestock or agriculture. In the past, in spite of yearly fluctuations in production, lands and labor constituted a stable source of wealth from generation to generation. In this study, the data include the socio-economic status of each woman, assigned according to her husband’s family economic status: land-ownership vs. landless. This represents differences in resource availability in terms of nutrition, wealth and workload among these women. As the results show, the Muslim families, on average, left more surviving descendants through sons, in contrast with their Christian counterparts. The basic research question, then, is why? Furthermore, what were the impacts of particular behaviors on reproductive and lineage success, under particular social and ecological conditions? In this sample, regarding the Muslim families, the family structure was/is traditional and stratified, characterized by a large disparity in the status of males and females. Patrilineal inheritance, the concentration of wealth and power in males and the social restriction of women all characterize even today this patriarchal family arrangement. This supports the Trivers-Willard hypothesis, especially in terms of sex-biased parental investment after birth in the form of inheritance. In this population, wealth/land was heritable and has a positive effect on subsequent offspring reproduction; therefore, the lineages that concentrated inheritance in males outreproduced those that did not. To a great extent, religion is politics in this region of the world. Social and political tensions between different ethnic groups, drawn across religious lines, are central to the Sandžak cultures and it is also relevant in Serbia. In the Islamic Sandžak, even today, the position of women and women’s roles in reproduction occupies central positions in religious, popular, and political discourse. It may be assumed that the Muslim community response to these concerns, especially when they are a minority, is a stronger emphasis on aspects of family life conducive to childbearing. Larger family sizes, greater demand for children, and territorial expansions could be the tended outcomes of these group struggles. [Projekat Ministarstva nauke Republike Srbije, br. 177028: Strategije identiteta: savremena kultura i religioznost i br. 177016: Srpsko društvo u jugoslovenskoj državi u 20. veku - između demokratije i diktature]