Prošlost i tuđina - prema dijalogu Bratanića i Levi-Straussa
Past and Exotic - Towards a Dialogue Between Bratanić and Levi-Strauss

Summary/Abstract: Although a severe dispute by Branimir Bratanić with "ahistorical" methods of thought in ethnology and anthropology at the beginning of 1970s, combined with a common view about the incompatibility of certain traditions of thinking and analysis of the subject in primarily German character of the development of Croatian ethnology, definitively reflected as a loss of advantages that some European disciplines have bequeathed through a fertile dialogue with structuralism and semiotics since 1960s, a postmodern point of view introduces a new approach in rethinking an international dialogue of disciplines. By dying out of the model center/periphery determining a necessary propagation of ideas and theories and applications of center discourses in a bricolage of peripheric disciplines, characteristics of certain social and historic contexts are more and more evident as legitimate factors with relative autonomy, that is identity of scientific traditions. A starting point is a cultural definition of science as a discourse, lively and contradictory historical, social and linguistic tissue, based on which it is possible to reconstruct, a never realized dialogue of Branimir Bratanić with Claude Levi-Strauss, a dialogue which carries paradigmatic characteristics of a historical controversy incorporated into the development of European ethnological science, the controversy about historical or universal character of its subject. Since recently a very productive dilemma in Croatian ethnology, which is summarized as a question of the relationship of ethnology towards an ethnic character of its subject, is one of the peaks of those epistemological icebergs whose upper image today tends to such a rearrangement which will respect more difference than similarity, in-determination than analogy. That what will prevent fragmentation and discrepancy is found in a hope of almost infinite opportunities of dialogue, a point at which differences are not reduced but can communicate. This text starts from Bratanić's hints that the Levi-Straussian concept of universal unconscious character of human culture provokes rather a discursive antipathy than that we are dealing with methodological irreconcilableness of so called historical and anti-historical principles of interpretation and understanding of culture. Behind "signal" concepts of scientific discourses and different definitions of their aims, which are here thrown light upon as fundamentally defined by a position of a scientific subject and a model of writing, one finds, moreover, a similar thought about an essential character of cultural phenomena and elements, about a "primeval meaning" of their origin and a destructive action of civilizing processes.

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