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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- The Greek emigres in Czechoslovakia and their life in the 1960s
- The article acquaints the reader with the structure of Greek political emigration in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s, drawing on Czech as well as Greek archives. It follows primarily demographic, social, and cultural aspects of the emigre group that was closely linked to the Communist Party of Greece. In particular, it pursues the issue of the forming of emigre identity in the era of De-Stalinisation. The article is concerned with social developments in the emigre group and their gradual integration into the Czechoslovak society of the 1960s. It pursues the complicated process of building a new identity, the national and linguistic structure of the emigre group, its standard of living and employment, their educational system, the process of the formation of their own intelligentsia, and generation issues. Individual topics are examined on a socio-cultural level in the context of political developments in Czechoslovakia and Greece.
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- The Serbs in Slovenia
- The breakdown of the former Yugoslavia has resulted in formation of new independent states while the former co-citizens and constitutive people have found themselves in new roles. Some have become a majority while some have become a minority, with an aspiration to affirm the status in the public sphere. As a country with a large numbers of immigrants from the former Yugoslavia, Slovenia is facing a challenge of the confirmation of ethnic pluralism within its borders, along with solutions and appropriate places for 'new' minorities (the usual appellation for ethnic groups formed by the members of the former Yugoslavia, where the Serbs are outnumbering the rest). At the same time, the new minorities face a challenge of constitution foundation of their own associations, that is, formation of their own identity and public affirmation in the new context. This paper discusses these ongoing processes with a special attention to the Serbian ethnic group.
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- The Social Construction of Reality - canonical work of integrative sociological theories. Contexts, analysis, perspectives
- The paper deals with one of the classics of sociological theory The Social Construction of Reality written by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, published in the mid-sixties of the 20th century. It was a key contributions to the sociology of knowledge as well as sociological theory in general. The article outlines the fundamental ideas presented in the book, situated within related dichotomies such as essentialism versus constructivism, structure versus agency. We included a few examples of the application of their theory that was widely accepted within the academic community, even though their ideas, as pointed out by Berger and Luckmann, were often misinterpreted compared to the authorial intention. Regardless of that fact, the social constructivist theory rapidly expanded after the publication of the book, and we specify a few developments in the end of the article.
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- The Weltschmertz of transition
- The paper focuses on a well-defined social group which emerges as an important factor in social development and progress, one which is also, undoubtedly threatened in the context of postsocialist transformation. The group in question consists of young, university-educated people, of different professions and genders. The defining feature of this group as informants is their aspiration toward individualization, or rather - employment, emancipation from their families, career advancement and further specialization through work. Within the existing context of postsocialist transformation, these plans are hindered, first and foremost, by the barricade of unemployment, but it must be noted that the issues don’t disappear with finding a job, and the long-yearned-for job position often carries with it new disappointments. The aim of this paper is to present these problems from the perspective of the lived experiences of the young people themselves. Following this, the paper attempts to understand the causes of these problems and the obstacles which young people face. [Projekat Ministarstva nauke Republike Srbije, br. 177026: Kulturno nasleđe i identitet]
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- The White Angel
- The question of "invented traditions" became very popular among academics of various backgrounds, especially among anthropologists and ethnologists. It becomes almost a rule to proclaim that such and such custom or cultural element belongs in fact to "the invented tradition", made up by some power group as a means to a political or social end. Most contemporary authors faced with a problem of the invented/not invented tradition do not even try to rule out/find out what makes or constitutes such phenomena of invented/objective tradition. Therefore, we are left with a conclusion that such "invented" traditions exist in all epochs; the question of a "true", non-invented traditions is left unexplained or unanswered. Some will argue that a tradition is always a construct, while I think that the basis for such thinking is that there is no consensus among academics on what/which are the true contents of a tradition. Cutting it out and taking it out of its original context, the White Angel became an invented tradition by itself. Namely, the White Angel from the monastery Mileševa belongs to a fresco composition called "Mironosice na grobu" (female religious believers who carry an ethereal oil, to unction Christ body) whose significance and meaning can be understood only in context of Resurrection. However, cutting out of the White Angel from its original fresco composition and its mass reproduction created the invented tradition of worship of the White Angel itself. Based on a questionnaire and some media products, I came to a conclusion that most "consumers" of this invented tradition have no clue on the real and original context/content of the fresco, where the White Angels sits, and what is his role.
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- The ambivalence of colonial discourse
- In this paper J. M. Coetzee’s novel Waiting for the Barbarians is seen as fundamentally disrupting the binary logic that underpins colonial discourse. The binary constructs an image of the civilized, rational and good, and the primitive, irrational and evil on the opposite sides of a fixed border. In this novel, as well as in colonial reality, the binary dissolves into ambivalence, overlap and often complete inversion of the two opposed constructed identities. This paper analyses the novel Waiting for the Barbarians identifying as the most important themes - the ambivalence and inversion of colonial identity, which are seen as a reflex of the fear of the indigenous other. The analysis focuses on the motifs of vision and surveillance in the novel, and Lacan’s psychoanalytic notions of the gaze and the scopic drive. It is observed that these concepts figure prominently in the narrative by establishing ambivalent psychological relationships of power between the main characters, discovering ambivalence within the characters and the inversion of their constructed colonial identities.
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- The ancient Greek promiscuity
- Non-reproductive sex, including homosexuality, is a by-product: such behavior would be a consequence of selection for male sexual eagerness due to the significantly less parental investment in the past. Here we argue that the key element in restraining such behavior is ancestral: traditions that discourage promiscuity. The ancient Greece is selected to illustrate this thesis.
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- The animal body, violence and moral panic
- In April of 2010 Serbia was rocked by the news that a dog whose paws had been cut off was found in the Medakovic neighborhood of Belgrade. Miraculously, the dog was still alive, but in bad condition. The news media named the dog Mila (which, aside from being a Serbian female name, can also mean “dear one” or “gentle one”) and the Serbian public followed the story of Mila’s plight and subsequent recovery with great interest and much comment, so much so that the event became a trigger for a moral panic of sorts. In this paper I have attempted to point out how the Serbian public, with reference to the case of Mila the dog, conceptualizes violence against animals, as well as to point out that folk classifications of living creatures - such as the one which distinguishes animals from meat (see Mullin 1999) - influence the understanding and conceptualization of violence as a phenomenon. Secondly, I have attempted to uncover which elements of the event in question caused a moral panic in Serbia, and which had inhibited the development of a serious public discussion of the issue of animal suffering. In that sense, the object of this paper is twofold - on the one hand it aims to point out why a discussion of the systematic and systemic violence against animals did not occur, and on the other, it serves to point out those elements of the event which caused the panic.
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- The anthropogeographic method and its place in the development of Czech/Czechoslovak ethnology
- Modern Czech and Slovak ethnology was constituted by Karel Chotek (1881-1967) and Drahomíra Stránská (1899-1964), among others, with a notable contribution by geographer Jiří Král (1893-1975). Methodological basis for their research was the anthropogeographic method of Jovan Cvijić and inspiration by his works. In some countries this research orientation was aimed at the creation of the ethnographic atlas. In former Czechoslovakia preliminary activities were organized by D. Stránská, but political circumstances of that time prevented the finalization of the atlas. Her successors, associates of the Institute for Ethnography and Folklore of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, did not finalize this endeavor either, since the activities on the Ethnographic atlas were removed from the program of basic scientific research after 1970 (during the period of the so-called „normalization“ of political relations). Activities on the Ethnographic atlas were revived after 1989 at the Institute of Ethnology of the Czech Academy of Sciences, with the concept which was, naturally, a matter of discussions and controversies.
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- The anti-fashion transgenre - three examples of subversion from the Croatian scene
- With the three aforementioned examples - of multimedia artists Ivana Popović (1968-2016), Tajči Čekada, and Martina Križanić - I seek to document the anthropology of gender by the aforementioned anti-fashion triad dedicated to the marginal, trans-genre art field. Briefly put, the three artists demonstrate a subversion of anti/fashion as an expression of autonomy in relation to fashion heteronomies and mental uniform of the mainstream, whereby the common link between the artists - elimination of sex/gender attributes - is also notable.
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- The change in ethnic identity strategy of Germans in Subotica in the second half of the 20th century
- This paper is an attempt to place the German national minority in Vojvodina in the focus of an anthropological inquiry, the first time after WW II. The central problem dealt in the paper is conceptualization and symbolic expressions of the German ethnic identity in Subotica. The paper tries to identify the most significant symbols/markers of the ethnic identity of the Germans in Subotica, by analyzing the objective social, economic and demographic factors that characterize the German national minority in Vojvodina. The paper shads light on the roles played by the symbols/markers of the German ethnic identity in transformations of their respective strategies concerning the identity in the second half of 20th century. At the same time, the paper attempts to explain the most important modus of preservation, revitalization and public expression of the German ethnic identity in Subotica and Vojvodina.
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- The creation of a new figure in academia - the homo applicandus
- Austrian universities have become quasi-enterprises the aim of which is to produce surpluses - whatever this means. In this neo-liberal concept figures and statistics have become relevant indicators of success and fiasco. As almost everywhere, the faculty of sciences is on the winning, the humanities are on the losing side. Since universities have not become real enterprises, of course, and their surpluses in knowledge production can never be actually evaluated, the acquaintance of third-party funded research has become crucial. Exposed to the constraints of being somehow profitable, a new type of academic entrepreneur has been emerging: the homo applicandus. This new type of academic is shaped by his or her capacity to develop competitive research projects, to write smart applications, to meet application deadlines of national and international third-party funded research programs and to manage as well as to execute research projects.