Culture and Boundaries: Antiquated, Useful, or Vital Concepts?
Culture and Boundaries: Antiquated, Useful, or Vital Concepts?

Author(s): Ingrid Slavec Gradišnik
Subject(s): Anthropology, Sociology
Published by: Етнографски институт САНУ
Keywords: culture; boundary; collective identity; individual identity; identification; Serbia; Slovenia
Summary/Abstract: The paper reviews two main concepts of culture and boundary – the essentialist and the anti-essentialist one – to introduce the completed research carried out within an ongoing collaboration between Serbian and Slovenian ethnologists. The published studies are characterized by the fact that they have surpassed the old disciplinary paradigm of ethnically/nationally defined ethnologies rooted in the essentialist cultural concept. Rather than within the boundaries of what is supposed to be “ethnic” or “national” they situate the research in discrete social contexts. Collective and individual cultural affiliations are not a priori subordinated to the ethnic and national identities that were employed formerly to “measure” or interpret specific cultural profiles and identifications. Moreover, these are not always delineated by political or administrative borders, as well as not inevitably by ethnic and linguistic ones. Contextual and hybrid identifications are produced in ongoing flows of people, goods, experiences and ideas in individual, familial, generational, interest-related contexts and trajectories. As such they require non-essentialist conceptualisations of culture and boundaries that are grounded in everyday practices and reflected in theorizing about the everyday.

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