Kultura
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The Kultura Journal is an international scientific journal for the theory and sociology of culture and cultural policy, which follows culture in the widest sense of the word where science, education and all human activities are taken as its integral part.
It was started in 1968 courtesy to the efforts of Stevan Majstorović, founder of the Centre for Studies in Cultural Development, with the objective to encourage integrative, analytical and critical interpretations of the modern cultural phenomena.
At the time of its establishment, the Kultura Journal was unique in the domain of intellectual thought both in terms of its concept and its design. Since the first issue, i.e. over the fifty years of its existence, Kultura has been and has remained open to creative ideas from the country and the world, as seen from the texts of important foreign authors and contributions from professionals coming from the cultural centres of former Yugoslavia, as well as domestic authors who offered new ideas and approaches to culture. The recognizable design solution of the logo of the journal and its cover page were created by the artist and calligraphist Božidar Bole Miloradović, for the very first number.
As of 1971, the issues were edited thematically, which has been dominant practice to this date, with the aim of enriching certain thematic fields in our cultural and scientific community.
The first Editorial Board of the Kultura Journal consisted of eleven members, led by the Editor-in Chief Stevan Majstorović and Trivo Inđić, as conceptual instigators of the journal which heralded a new orientation in the intellectual field. Members of the Editorial Board were: Slobodan Canić, Dragutin Gostuški, Vujadin Jokić, Danica Mojsin, Mirjana Nikolić, Nebojša Popov, Bogdan Tirnanić, Milan Vojnović and Tihomir Vučković. Over the five decades of the Kultura Journal, editorial boards changed several times.
Kultura is issued every three months (four times a year) and its printing has been financed by the Ministry of Culture and Information of the Republic of Serbia since 2001. With support of the competent ministry, all numbers of this journal, from the first to the last issue, were digitalized in 2009. As a result, a DVD containing digital form of the journal, was available with the issue No. 129, titled "Electronic libraries". A few years later, in 2013, Kultura switched to the Cyrillic script, with an important note that it still published in Latin script those authors from the region who originally use Latin script(Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia). With the issue No. 140, on the occasion of marking the 45th anniversary of the Kultura Journal, a special USB was made available, with all the texts from the numbers 1-137. The web page of the Centre for Studies in Cultural Development contains all the texts ever published in any issue of the Kultura Journal over half a century of its existence.
The Department for Registration of Journals of the Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development of the Republic of Serbia, the Kultura Journal was registered in 2005 (when categorisation of scientific journals started) marked as category P53. In 2010,it was registered as category M52 in the group of journals for history, art,history, ethnology and archaeology. At the beginning of July 2012, the journal advanced to the category of national interest, by Decision of the Ministry of education, science and technological development of the Republic of Serbia (M51).
Kultura is regularly deposited with the Repository of the National Library of Serbia, and since 2010, it has been included in the Serbian Quotation Index, where the texts published in Kultura can be found in full digital form. As of 2011, the texts i.e. scientific articles, apart from the regular UDK (universal decimal classification) also carry specific DOI (Digital Object Identifier) codes, that allow for their greater visibility and international indexing under international standards. In the meantime,electronic version of the journal was started i.e. the first steps were made towards electronic edition by CEON (Service for monitoring, measuring and valorisation of scientific journals) through Aseestant electronic editing programme. This has contributed to the quality of published articles, as the editorial board now have at their disposal adequate programmes for text checking in terms of correct citation sand listings of references as well as prevention of plagiarism.
Kultura is regularly delivered to the National Library of Serbia in Belgrade, Belgrade City Library,University Library "Svetozar Marković" in Belgrade, Library of Matica Srpska in Novi Sad, Library of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Belgrade, Library of the Rectorate of the University of Arts in Belgrade, University Library in Niš and University Library in Kragujevac. The Kultura Journalis regularly received by numerous interested institutions of culture (libraries, theatres, museums, culture centres) as well as individuals. The Journal nurtures professional exchanges with many similar institutions and magazines in the country, region and in Europe (Montenegro, Croatia, Slovenia,Hungary, Bulgaria, Germany, Switzerland and other countries).
In addition to respecting scientific rules and standards for publishing scientific papers, Kultura has not lost the curiosity or the freshness of an avant-garde magazine dealing with both eternal and very actual topics.
Pages
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- 'Galateo' on manners
- The rules of civility (the popular books on manners) may serve as reflections on the principles that shape everyday life of a society, offering codes of conduct to its members. Such was, possibly the first such modern book, Giovanni della Casa's 'Galateo' of 1558, in which the author dealt with the bad habits that were to be overcome if one wished to be considered a gentleman. 'Galateo' did not represent a set of propositions meant for successful service at a princely court, such as Castiglione's 'Cortegiano'. It was written, instead, as a set of rules, which one was to follow as an active and civilized member of a republican society. 'Galateo' focused on those models of conduct that represented basis for the definition of civility which understands the existence of cultural habits that are still considered positive and welcome, focusing on politeness, respect and consideration for others we are so much in the need of today.
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- 'Live!' rock performance and how to understand it
- The article is focused on rock concerts and music events of popular music in general. It was inspired by the need to express thoughts and doubts arising from author's personal experiences and reading of the available literature. It takes into consideration all the most important aspects of the topic: today's importance and the role of rock concerts, issue of authenticity in rock performance, problems of audience - performer communication, similarities to the events in theater before and after the emergence of rock music.
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- 'Sonderkommando' photographs as a disobedient act of seeing
- In his book Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz, Didi-Huberman indicates that the four photographs in question were taken as a counterweight or in spite of something. They show the activities of the Sonderkommando, whose task was to escort other Jews into gas chambers, as well as to dispose and burn the corpses that were left behind. In the dual role of the victim and the perpetrator, members of this unit, in spite of the ban and the danger they were in, had created four photographs showing their own activities inside the camp. Throughout the work, different modes of being in spite of characteristic of the aforementioned photographs are separated and explained with regard to whether they relate to the need for, production or reception of photographs. They were created in spite of, but also based on, the inconceivability of the situation they portray (photographs as evidence), in spite of the prohibition of photographs (obstacle in production) and in spite of the representational framework or representability of humans obstacle in reception. Inconceivability brings us to the notions of evidence, truth, but also power, representability, prohibition and rules. Based on the representability of the photographs and the notion of cultural memory, we considered the possibilities of the photographs representing Judith Butler's disobedient act of seeing. It will be shown that an emergence in spite of as Didi-Huberman would say, or a disobedient act of seeing in Judith Butler's words, is readable more through the way the images are made, than through what they depict. Unlike the usual "allowed" war photographs, they are specific proofs of the prohibition against which they are made.
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- 'What cats have to dream about'?
- Relying on recent theoretical work in the field of critical animal studies and ecocriticism, the paper discusses several fantasies across different media and genres (a comic book series, a young adult novel, and an animated film), whose common characteristic is a critical stance towards anthropocentrism, also known, tellingly, as "human exceptionalism", "human supremacy", and "human chauvinism". The selected corpus consists of Neil Gaiman's "A Dream of a Thousand Cats", Hannah Moskowitz's "Teeth", and Hayao Miyazaki's "Princess Mononoke". Dissimilar as they are, these fantasies share common thematic concern with the relationship between the human and the nonhuman - primarily animals - as well as commitment to challenging the notions of natural, just and desirable human supremacy over all other forms of life. In the selected works, human exceptionalism is challenged by unmasking human exceptional brutality at its root, and, perhaps more unnervingly, by the exploration of the fundamental kinship between human and nonhuman animals. Although these popular fantasies do not voice explicit or simple ecological messages, due to the abovementioned concerns, they function as ecocritical texts as well. In the context of the global environmental crisis, it is in this ecocritical potential that some relevance of fantasy arguably lies.
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- (De)falsification of Scottish history in John Mcgrath's The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil
- McGrath s purpose in staging the political play based on Scottish history was primarily to expose and de-falsify the destructive clearance pattern that had remorselessly been repeated in the last three centuries, but was officially depicted as progressive and developmental for the Scottish region. Although the 'brutal' methods of the Highland clearances from the eighteenth and nineteenth century had definitely remained in the past, McGrath posed an important question of whether the phenomenon of clearances had actually been dispensed with in the twentieth century. The theoretical framework of the paper relies on the acutely relevant critical insights of Rich, Dawson, Farber, Brown, Innes, as well as McGrath himself.
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- (Lack of) culture in digital age
- Digital language is the language of young generations; they process information very differently from previous generations. There is sufficient evidence to confirm that the impact of digital technology on youth is unjustly neglected and that the educational institutions and the authorities have a serious commitment to research this area. There is no education without communication, but what kind of communication is necessary for educational system in digital age? In the time before the advent of electronic mass media, the teacher was the most important for providing information about the world; he/she was responsible for setting up a student's system of values as well as society norms. The digital age has brought skills such as assessment, analysis, access, participation and creativity, necessary for solving everyday problems. The global phenomenon of 'digital natives' is discussed in a critical analysis and with special attention to their ability to learn in a traditional education system.
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- (Post)colonialism in (post)communist disguise
- Travelogues about the Far East are an important part in the work of the contemporary Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai (1954), despite the fact that they went relatively unnoticed compared to the wide international recognition of his earlier books, especially his first two novels, Satantango (1985) and The Melancholy of Resistance (1989). This article deals with some cultural aspects of Krasznahorkai's non-fictitious travelogue Destruction and Sorrow Underneath the Sky (2004) in which the author/narrator gives an account on his third journey to China undertaken in May 2002. He goes there with the presumption that China is the only country in the world where a productive symbiosis of the ancient cultural and spiritual heritage on one hand and the (post)modern way of life on the other is still possible. However, as the journey progresses, his disappointment grows bigger and bigger. He realizes that in today's market and business-oriented China all the important historical sights (even the seemingly most hidden, once inapproachable Buddhist monasteries) have been ruthlessly turned into vulgar tourist-attractions. The vast majority of the interviewed subjects (mostly directors of major national cultural institutions) give irritatingly shallow and dogmatic answers to almost all the questions posed by the narrator. The only genuine and honest answers about the irreparable and tragic gap between the traditional values of the ancient Chinese civilization and the contemporary westernized lifestyle based on consumerism and comfort, come from marginalized individuals without any influence on the society or the decision-makers. Stressing the importance of these marginalized voices seems to remain one of the greatest values of Krasznahorkai's writing, along with the trademark of his earlier books - the extremely long sentences - which give his works a unique and inimitable pulsating rhythm.
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- A brief herstory of living and dying in a collection of poems Until the Next Death by Senka Marić
- Senka Marić, an acclaimed Bosnian and Herzegovinian poetess, has written a brief 'herstory' of female living and dying in her 2016 collection of poems Until the Next Death. Unlike history - seen as HIStory, meaning that history is mainly written by men - HERstory reveals a woman's side of the world through her personal story. Until the Next Death is, in many ways, an autobiographical collection, so it can be seen as a poetic memoir of Senka Marić. One of its many poetic levels is her own genesis, both as a poetess and a woman. Also, it could be seen as a lyrical novel depicting her female ontology. Accordingly, this paper analyses the concepts of female 'being' and 'not-being' in Senka Marić's book Until the Next Death, as well as the elements of autobiographisation and mythologisation of herstory, including elements of matrilineality in all these cases.
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- A contribution to the history of awards in Serbia
- In the second half of the 20th century, especially during the 1960s and the 1980s, a growing number of cultural awards, particularly literary ones, marked the intellectual field ie literary art in Serbia. Among these, a special place belongs to the prizes established and given by social-political communities on federal, republic or local levels, which symbolizes the desire of the state and its parts to play the role of a modern benefactor. One of those prizes, which used to be rather prestigious over a long period of time, was the October Award of the City of Belgrade for contribution to art and science, but since 2008 it has lost its place in the culture awards nomenclature. This paper, thanks to participation of the author in the work of the jury of the October Award of the City of Belgrade for literature and translation in the period 1977-1980, reconstructs conditions under which the award was assigned, the authors and their works nominated, as well as the controversies arisen in some cases and reactions of the public. In this period, members of the jury have assessed 77 works, mostly writers' pieces, a number of works by literary historians, theoreticians and critics, and much fewer translators. In two turns, the work of the jury was undoubtedly colored by the atmosphere of tolerance and concord in decisions on the winners, when a great role in this was played by the jury chairman, Vukoje Bulatović, the manager and chief editor of the 'Politika' daily magazine at the time.
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- A cultural monument as a resource in everyday life on the example of a Department store in Belgrade
- By proclaiming an architectural object for a cultural monument, the protection authorities are faced with a number of dilemmas concerning its preservation. The valid Cultural Property Law leaves many issues open for individual interpretations. The problem of treating the original function of the object under protection is obvious, because it is loosely defined by the Law, but also because it represents a significant aspect of the building's architectural authenticity. Among various examples from practice, a case study of the Department Store in Belgrade is highlighted. This building was constructed in the Secession style. Beside the undoubtedly high level of its artistic significance, it has an important socio historical value, primarily as a symbol of introduction of new architectural programs into the Belgrade architecture. The Department Store was the first of its kind in Belgrade. Since the time of its construction in 1907 until the beginning of this decade, its original purpose has remained unchanged. Today, it functions as a hospitality facility. In this paper, the above procedure is considered, both from the aspect of cultural heritage theories and its meanings in the social context.
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- A daring challenge
- This paper provides an analysis of how the Čik magazine, an entertainment magazine with crosswords, puzzles and games, became a kind of an informal youth magazine in interaction with its readers, and how it began to publish articles about social issues and sociopolitical problems, especially in 1967 and 1968, when it became the most popular magazine in the socialist Yugoslavia. On the basis of this example, it is concluded that the 'mass' or 'popular' culture in the socialist Yugoslavia could have been, and in certain circumstances was, a dynamic field for avoidance of domination and control, the field for negotiation, resistance and (sometimes) conflict, too. Finally, it is suggested that further research should be focused much more on the social dynamics of everyday life in socialism.