Vid Vuletić Vukasović i spasiteljska etnologija
Vid Vuletić Vukasović and Salvation Ethnology

Summary/Abstract: This article is the contribution to better understanding of the ethnographic work of Vid Vuletić Vukasović. Firstly, this article puts Vukasović within the framework of dominant ethnological theories of the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, which marked the beginnings of European and Croatian ethnology. This text is trying to analyse the idea of salvation ethnology and its impact on the rhetoric of first Croatian ethnologists, as well as to argument its universal rhetorical value in Anglo-Saxon anthropology and European ethnology. The article is following the development of institutionalization of ethnology/anthropology in Croatia and abroad, and points to the related methodological directions towards the preservation of material and non-material culture of native peoples, and to the continual conceptual attempts towards the creation of an organic cultural identification of the investigated cultures. The article emphasizes the long-term existence of the literary notion of salvation in ethnology/anthropology, and, as a consequence of that, the insistence on the strength and importance of the reconstruction of authenticity of the cultures under research. In the same time, the text outlines the concept of ethnological utopias, and searches for the common name for the static perception of the culture life, which was dominant in the early ethnographic discourse. Special attention is given to the work of Vid Vuletić Vukasović, a Croatian ethnologist, whose institutional links with the Academy of Science and Art, Zagreb, were reconstructed through his correspondence with the members of the editorial board of Zbornik za narodni život i običaje (Journal of folk life and customs). The article is also trying to establish to what extent did the conflict between Vukasović and Antun Radić, who was then the president of the editorial board of the Journal of folk life and customs, influence the bleak reception Vuletić had in early overviews of Croatian ethnology, and his professional orientation to different ethnological institutions and publishers in other South Slavic countries.

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