Professor Đurđica Petrović – a life worth living
Professor Đurđica Petrović – a life worth living

Author(s): Mirjana Prošić-Dvornić
Subject(s): Anthropology, Social Sciences
Published by: Етнографски институт САНУ
Keywords: Ethnological/anthropological historian; museum curator and university professor; with broad interests and high professional and scientific standards; a pioneer; innovator; leader
Summary/Abstract: Đurđica Petrović, Ph.D. (1927–2003), professor at the Department of Ethnology and Anthropology (1971–1992), Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade, was the first Serbian and Yugoslavian anthropological historian researching everyday life of mostly common people in Dubrovnik, its hinterland, and the Balkans in general, from the late Middle Agес until contemporary times. She based her research on all available reliable sources but mostly on archival written documents from Dubrovnik, Venice, Zadar, and Kotor, as well as on visual records representing various artifacts, from mediaeval frescos to graphic prints, paintings, and photography. Both of these sources, at the time she started using them, were novel in ethnological research in Serbia. Her entire professional career reveals her efforts to approach the study of culture, irrelevant of any specific topic, be it a material object, ethnic or social groups, religious customs and rituals, folklore, relations between rural and urban cultures, or between tradition and contemporary contents and transitions between them, inside dynamics and different outside influences, always contextualized, in historic and comparative perspective and in precisely defined time period, and never in “ethnographic present”. Her two places of employment, the Military Museum of the Yugoslav Peoples’ Army (1952–1971) and the Faculty of Philosophy (1971–1992) determined her area of research. In the former she was in charge of historic fi re- and sidearms collections, and in the latter the curriculum directed her towards Ethnology of Croatia and, for a much longer period of time, to material culture. Irrelevant of the topic, each one was researched and presented in innovative, scientifically rigorous ways, which imbued them with reputability. This article has two parts. The first one is a summary of Đurđica Petrović’s research topics and professional achievements. The second part is about her as a private person, about some of the events and experiences that made her into who she was, about her feelings and aspirations based on my memories created during our long (1971–2003) professional and personal relationships. She was a great person to have first as a mentor and then as a colleague and a friend

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