Kultura
Primary tabs
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
-
- Thematisation of social issues in digital art
- The paper explores the strategy of social engagement of artists in the digital arts. Digital art is being developed as an artistic practice that arises in the context of digital technologies and their impact on the environment. Digital art relies not only on the technical possibilities of new technologies, but also on the analysis of their impact and understanding. The development of digitization and information technology has not only opened new approaches in processing image, sound and text, but also enabled the development of cyber-space, which is developing not only as a specific area of possible actions, but also as an object of artistic analysis. Hence the digital art opens up completely new topics, such as artificial intelligence, telepresence and telerobotics, databases, Internet activism, video games, narrative hypermedia environment, social networks, virtual worlds, etc. Cyber-space has been recognized as a new environment that can be artistically shaped and in which it is possible to achieve artistic actions in response to the existing social relations. Using new media, an artist rejects both the position of chronicler and critic of contemporary society. He becomes an active factor in creating a cyber-environment, while reinterpreting models of perceiving and understanding of online communication and web media.
-
- Theological -philosophical perceptions of the key parts of the movie The Pervert's Guide to ideology
- In this work we tend to give a theological reflection on the key parts of the movie The Pervert's Guide to Ideology. Through his views on Christianity by Passions of Christ, Žižek favours a radical break out with the Old Testament's anxious perception of God, which is dismissed by post metaphysical religion - a Christianity that concentrates on agape. On the other side, Kolakovski elevates the principle of loyalty in suffering and tends to emphasize that faith is in fact irrational. According to Kolakovski, God accomplishes his triumph showing himself different that he is. Žižek points that religious fanaticism begins as religious suspension of the ethical. Rowen Williams, on the other side, thinks that without God we easily adopt pervert freedom, which presents the essence of the diabolical. According to Žižek, modern capitalism has a sort of religious structure, which is powered by absolute demand: capital must circulate, multiply and progress. Graham Ward concentrates on the vision of a postmodern city that represents a place in which all desires are concentrated and may be realized. In fact, such a cosmopolitan city is no more a place in which to find heavenly direction, but a city without the church.
-
- Theoretical approach to religious tolerance
- The paper addresses the issue and theoretical articulations of religious tolerance, overviewing theoretical approaches of various authors - starting with the period of enlightenment. In that sense, we analyze the standpoints of John Locke, François Marie Arouet, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Stuart Mill, Andrew Heywood, John Rawls, Žolt Lazar, Aleksandar Prnjat and Đuro Šušnjić. At the end of the paper we give a short summary of the 18th century Habsburg Monarchy relation towards freedom of religious beliefs, bearing in mind minority status of the Serbian community of Orthodox religion.
-
- Theory of culture
- Kultura
-
- Theory of evolution between Darwinism and Lamarckism
- The aim of this text is to trace the main lines of the interpretation of natural selection in the early phase of reception of the theory of evolution in Serbia, as well as the resistances met by some of Darwin's ideas. The analysis is directed at the controversies concerning the ideas regarding the evolutionary mechanisms, i.e. the question of natural selection and inheritance of acquired characteristics, as well as the concept of competition, which is of crucial importance for Darwinian natural selection. As a matter of fact, these aspects of the interpretation of Darwin's theory were very significant for culture in a broad sense and they can be considered as a kind of symptom of the general state of mind.
-
- Theory of the text and the new media
- As a generator of different possible interpretations and experience, a text has always been a virtual object. Convergence of critical theory and new media technologies has not produced a virtual text, but has only raised it to a higher level of the hypertext. The concept of interactivity is present not only as a relation between the reader and the text in the process of producing a meaning, but also as a physical change of the text during reading. Development of new media technologies has led to a large convergence and overlapping theory of intertextuality and hypertext. With hypertext it is possible to overcome resistance and physical detachment of the printed text. The boundary is moved between what is 'inside' and 'outside', to what is between the 'center' and the 'periphery'. Decentralizing of the text is an important characteristic of the hypertext as the 'center' moves from a stable and hierarchized structure to the reader's own interests and needs. In the center of the hypertext there is the reader, not the author. In this way, the new and revolutionary critical theories of the author, text and the reader, formulated decades ago, have found practical application and confirmation in the digitized area of the new media.
-
- Theory that exceeds film
- The film theory of Dušan Stojanović went through the process of moving away from 'the living structure of films' towards a more abstract structure of what we would today call, borrowing the term from David Bordwell - a 'Grand Theory'. In addition to the idea that film is necessarily linked to the 'illusionistic nature of the film scene', two of Stojanović's concepts are particularly important: (1) that the film system is modeled on a double articulation of language, and (2) that the viewer reaches the 'top floor' of a particular movie, its connotations and meanings, by exceeding mere denotation of frames. Some issues related to the problems of these concepts are addressed in the correspondence of Dušan Stojanović and Hrvoje Turković, the key figures of film studies in Belgrade and Zagreb, published in 1976, in the journal Filmske sveske. This paper aims to examine some of the theoretical issues raised during the discussions, in both the synchronic context (the rise of Yugoslav semiotics in the mid-1970s) and the modern theoretical environment. The whole discussion is seen through the modern lenses of cognitivist film criticism and the notion of Post- Theory, and reframed as a valuable early contribution of Yugoslav film theory to the problems later raised in these critical approaches.
-
- Third places
- The subject of research in this paper is coffee houses as third places. They are approached and defined from the sociological and the genealogical perspective. When observed as a spatialized history of places, genealogy provides an adequate theoretical and methodological framework for this research. The main task of such genealogy is to research the spatialization of a certain type of sociability and social capital in civil society. We have indicated broader social and historical circumstances in the genesis and development of third places as well as their contribution in the processes of developing a new type of sociability and public reasoning. The rise of coffee houses through history is contextualized: within the framework of a new type of critical public as opposed to the representative public; within the process of division between the private and public domain; as a kind of undifferentiated space/discontinuity/heterotopia that, in the social geography of the civil society, stands vis - à - vis the existing social stratums and the future spatial and class division. In conclusion we claim that, although the third places were privileged social spaces, they were not the only or fundamental places important for the genesis of rational discourse. However, third places were of key importance in the processes of forming urban institutes, development of public spaces, public speech, civil liberties and legitimacy of rationality in the societies of Western Europe.
-
- Third sex and old animals in Letters from Norway by Isidora Sekulić
- In Letters from Norway, one of Isidora Sekulić's greatest works, the author deliberates on the topic of old age in women. In Serbian literary criticism, only Bojana Stojanović Pantović and Kristina Stevanović perceived the gender aspect of the old age topic in Sekulić's work. In this paper, the issue of old age of predominantly unmarried women is interpreted, by reading the second edition of Letters (published in 1951, whilst the first one was published in 1914). As a theoretical background I used Simone de Beauvoir's The Coming of Age, I &II (published in 1970 and translated in 1986 into Serbo-Croatian). I also relied on gender aware historians in reference to the position of women in the early twentieth century. Isidora Sekulić's particular approach to the old age of women is deliberated: she focused on elderly unmarried women in Norway, pointing it out as a role model, at the same time criticizing gender roles in Norwegian society and implicitly the status of the old unmarried woman within Serbian society. Sekulić introduced the term 'third sex' in order to indicate the number and power of elderly unmarried women. The author also wrote about the old age of a dog, thus approaching the topic of ageing in a non- anthropocentric manner. Isidora Sekulić appealed for a more compassionate approach towards elderly women.
-
- Thou shall not bear false witness against
- First, the paper tries to establish a meaning of the concept of falsehood and the deriving notions. There are references to understanding of falsehood in Christianity as the foundation of the European civilization i.e. of the modern and contemporary philosophy. And while Christianity makes a clear cut distinction between falsehood and truthfulness, philosophy renders this distinction relative and meaningless (Schopenhauer). Further on, the paper portrays a relationship between Manuel Komnenos and Stefan Nemanja as given in the texts of Constantine Manasses and Eustace of Salonika. Both of them celebrate Manuel up to a point where they compare him with God. On the other hand, Nemanja is attributed epithets related to Satan. Contrary to that, when writing his father's biography, Stefan the First Crowned portrays the Emperor Manuel in good light. The consequences of the Emperor's conquests soon disappear when the Empire ceases to exist, while the Grand Prince's feats - the territorial expansion, winning independence and founding Hilandar remain. In the end, Nemanja becomes a saint, while Manuel does not. The final conclusion is that a falsehood uttered by the powerful and dominant does not last forever.
-
- Three reflections of Yugoslav modernity in the mirror of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade
- The paper examines the character of Yugoslav modernity in the socialist period, seen through the prism of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade. Starting from the presentation of three special 'visits' to this museum in the years immediately after its opening, certain characteristics of Yugoslav modernity are recognized. The main thesis is that the Museum of Contemporary Art was a specific generator of Yugoslavia's image as a modern country, and that this concept is related to the general socioeconomic conditions in the Socialist Yugoslavia. Hence the assumption that the three chosen 'visitors' of the museum - Ivo Andrić (writer), Josip Broz Tito (president of SFRJ), and Nenad and Predrag (fictional twin brothers) - reflected in its inverse mirror, can reliably testify about specificities of the Yugoslav modernity in the socialist period: about its cultural and social paradoxes, political and ideological validations and individual and collective seduction.
-
- Time of crises
- This paper analyzes a specific relationship between ideology as an anti- historical category and the narratives underlying the novel The Time of Miracles by Borislav Pekić. It highlights the key features of immutable and always the same ideological mechanisms, regardless of the contents of ideas in whose name they act. Among many ideological tools, there is narration as a primary means to produce an ideological system as an instrument of action based on the perception of community. However, narrative techniques also represent the only means that enables freedom. By forgetting about the symbiosis of ideology and narrative, the Serbian literary scene is at a narrative crisis due to its sterile wandering through the text. The solution out of the crisis is not in ignoring the ideological nature of storytelling, but in finding the right distance between the complex reality that surrounds us and the ideas that guide us.