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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- The 20th century Belgrade passages
- As noted by Walter Benjamin, the spatial phenomenon of a covered glass-roofed passage, stretched between two streets and inserted inside a city block, encapsulated the extreme cultural ambivalence: by expressing repression through the ideology of consumerism and expressing freedom through the utopia of abundance. The hidden emancipatory potentials of the city passages, observed closely in a particular case, represent the subject of this paper and the analytical probe that examines the historical conditions of a particular enterprise. When the Passage of Nikola Spasić was constructed in the main pedestrian and shopping street of Belgrade in 1912, the époque of Parisianstyle arcades had already passed. Observed in this broader perspective, the construction of the Passage, according to the project of Nikola Nestorović, one of the most prominent Serbian architects of the period, was only a late echo of the Parisian 18th century invention. The comparison and contention between the three chosen, realized and unrealized, transpositions of the Passage in Belgrade, designed by different prime architects of the time, in relation to Benjamin's idea of space with emancipative potential, correspondingly point out the protean capacity and open up new alternatives in the context of contemporary production of space, particularly important in the light of a changing global culture.
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- The Serbian theatre in the social transition context
- The Beograd Center for Studies in Cultural Development conducted a large-scale research of the present-day Serbian theatre in 2009. Planned as a comprehensive overview of the present state of affairs in the Serbian theatres, the project implied data collection, a detailed analysis of operation, organization, production and ways of financing, as well as a projection of possible new and better models of functioning of both theatre system as a whole and individual theatres with the view of their achieving a better balance of desirable and possible. In the present social moment the Serbian theatres are a very important segment of research in culture due to their functions, and the need for crucial and concrete reforms of their functioning stemming from the ongoing social changes.
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- The Underground and its context
- The Emir Kusturica's film appeared in 1995 and immediately it stirred spirits. After winning the Golden Palm in Cannes, an even more inflammable debate ensued. Not only film professionals but also philosophers, culture workers, politicians joined the debate. It spilled over to the countries of the west as well, and in the meantime the film has gained popularity with the audience, which raised the stakes in the public debate. This paper partly describes the course of debate development and lays out several different viewer standpoints which, depending on the context the viewer acknowledges, open up a number of political and also cultural issues regarding history of Yugoslavia. The most accessible level is the level of melodrama, comprehensible to viewers all over the world. Also, there are issues related to communist ideology in a multinational country and the role of the Communist Party. The most intricate and also most important ones are the issues regarding the film role in the history of Yugoslavia, its ideological position and the manner in which the film was used to manipulate the masses, being the most popular, influential media available to widest public.
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- The Wollstonecraft dilemma
- The Otherness becomes a field of new opportunities of cultural policies. The leading theoreticians of economy of knowledge and creative industries introduce metaphors derived from the female experience, such as family, recipe, cooking in the masculine culture. And that entrance of female nature also enables the feminists to deconstruct the equality dilemma as negation of their own gender identity. The women-experts, heads of some of the leading Novi Sad cultural institutions, prove by their working standards that these (new) strategies of cultural engineering are not simply successful but also necessary in revitalization of institutions and definition of new relation of private and public civil principles.
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- The World Digital Library
- The author outlines the development of the World Digital Library, from the idea of its establishment, through the design and first steps, presentation of the first prototype in 2007, to its public launch in April 2009. The author also presents a short list of important digital documents of the WDL, as well as the basic functionalities of this web site. The second part focuses on the usage, feedback and participation, with special emphasis placed on building the capacity of digitization in the developing countries. The paper concludes with a list of priorities, a description of the challenges in the future and next steps.
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- The advantages of the World Wide Web for women's organisations in comparison to traditional media
- Due to the speed of communication, transmission, searching for and representing information, its global availability and simplicity, Internet and web surpass other forms of public work and activist engagement. In this paper, we point out the advantages of new media technology which can be applied by women's organisations for their presentations and political engagement in the protection and promotion of women's human rights in relation to the earlier practice of marginalisation of women present in print media, radio and television. The paper is based on the five- month analysis of 10 women's nongovernmental websites in Bosnia and Herzegovina on the one hand, and the website of the Government Agency for the Equality of the Sexes in Bosnia and Herzegovina on the other. All the aforementioned sites were regularly observed from 1st October till 1st March 2010. Establishing the websites, women's non-governmental organisations in Bosnia and Herzegovina made the first step towards the membership in the virtual world, but they still have to ''learn'' how to use and benefit from this membership.
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- The analogue and the digital and the possibilities of their use in social research
- The paper deals with the differences between the analogue and the digital and the opportunities they can present in social research. It is stated that digitization has given a strong impetus to measurement in the social sciences, by producing large quantities of specified data. This allows for a more extensive and qualitative description, explanation and understanding of social phenomena. The author has classified the data used in social research into three groups: 1) original data generated on a digital platform, 2) original analogue data, and 3) the data that is partly digital and partly analogue. The author looks at each of these three types of data, treating their potentials and limitations in terms of social research.
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- The apology of art in a Serbian film of Srđan Spasojević
- A Serbian Film (2010), directed by Srđan Spasojević, is considered in the context of the apology of art, poetics of decadence and structural-semiotic theory of modelization, with the emphasis on its ethical aspects. High stylization and modeling power of this film contrasts today's pseudo-documentary predominant form in the film.
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- The best or the most read book award
- This paper deals with the Most Read Book of the Year Award of the National Library of Serbia (1973-2004) that is the Best Book Award of the network of public libraries of Serbia (2005-2013). On several occasions since 1973 the fate of this award has been uncertain and in 2005 its frame significantly changed. The changes in the profile of the award provoked a strong reaction from the public. Every year, a question is raised as to the fate of this unique award and the reasons for its existence.
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- The classical Hollywood cinema and its modifications after 1960
- It is widely considered that the Classical Hollywood Cinema as an array of production practices, narrative and stylistic features was formed as early as by 1917, and that it remained relatively stable until the 1960s. What happened after this? The opinions of various film historians and theoreticians are not unanimous. Some talk about 'postclassical ' cinema, while the others claim that the fragmentation of everyday life has found its way to cinema as well, and that the Classical film has desintegrated under the dominance of the spectacle. In this paper we will give account of the basic characteristics of the Classical Hollywood film and explain how it functions while providing several examples, mainly based on the research of David Bordwell. We will see what was crucial for the popularity of this form not only in the US but also throughout the world. Also, we will discuss developments concerning the Classical Hollywood film during the last few decades and present different theoretical approaches, which appeared in this period and attempt to offer our comment of these.
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- The concepts of secularism and laicism
- I have recently suggested differentiation of the term 'secularism' from the term 'laicism', so they can be applied to different phenomena. According to this suggestion, the term 'secularism' would continue to denote indifference or opposition to the presence of religion in the public domain, whereas the term 'laicism' would be used to denote emphasis of the laic role in ecclesiastic affairs. While Radovan Bigović has shown openness to this proposal, Darko Tanasković has expressed a certain distance. The reasons for his distance are the subject of this text.
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- The concepts of the cultural model and the semi-intellectual
- The culture of a nation as understood by Slobodan Jovanović (1869- 1958) encompasses all aspects of intellectual life, science, religion, ethics, literature, art, politics, law, army, economy, customs and leisure. The paper presents the phenomenon of a semi-intellectual as described and understood at the time the term was invented. It points to association with the concepts used in Bogdan Popović's (1864-1944) 'theory of the parvenu'. The semi-intellectual's evolution ends with his taking over the position of the intellectual. The paper examines if the concept of the semi-intellectual as defined by S. Jovanovic is applicable to the present time.