“PRIVLAČNOST ‘ISLAMSKE DRŽAVE’ REZULTAT JE STRAHA, BIJESA I NEIZVJESNOSTI ZBOG NEPRAVDE I NEJEDNAKOSTI ŠIROM SVIJETA”

Author(s): Ziauddin Sardar,Harun Karčić / Language(s): Bosnian / Issue: 69/2017

Ziauddin Sardar (1951) is a Muslim scholar and a writer of Pakistani origin. His fields of interests include Muslim thought, studies about the future, philosophy of knowledge and science and other cultural studies in the widest sense. He is the author of numerous books, essays, articles, discussions as well as columns and television programmes. So far he has published or edited, on his own and with other co-authors over 35 books of great significance. The following are the most prominent of these: The Future of Muslim Civilisation (1979), Islamic Futures: The Shape of Ideas to Come (1985), Postmodernism and the Other (1998), Orientalism (1999), Why Do People Hate America? (2002). The British magazine “Prospect” listed him amongst the 100 most influential public figures of the Great Brittan. He recently stayed in Sarajevo responding to the invitation by The Centre for Advance Studies where he held a workshop titled: Navigating Postnormal Balkans: A Hands On Futures Workshop and Polylogue. Dr. Harun Karčić, a representative of The Centre for Advance Studies discussed with him a number of issues including the identity of Muslims in Europe, radicalism, the attitude of Islam regarding natural sciences and postmodernity.

“Small Places, Large Issues”: Between Military Space and Post-Military Place

Author(s): Elo-Hanna Seljamaa,Dominika Czarnecka,Dagnosław Demski / Language(s): English / Issue: 70/2017

The contributions to this special issue suggest that the process of making sense of the Soviet/Russian military presence in, and its consequences for, “small places” and their inhabitants is very much an on-going process closely connected with national memory politics and various interpretations of past and current “large issues”. What may be deemed shameful or painful and silenced, or overlooked at the national level, focused on generalisations, is conspicuously present at the local level and needs to be dealt with for successful self-identification to take place.

“Such is life that people get old and change”: Gendered Experiences of Ageing Bodies from Older Persons’ View

Author(s): Zdenko Zeman,Marija Geiger Zeman / Language(s): English / Issue: 4/2016

Ageing/aged bodies reflects gender norms and power relations. The paper is based on analysis of four focus groups realized in homes for older and infirm persons with participants older than 65 years. Old age and ageing are not gender neutral phenomenon – perception, experience, interpretation and strategies of managing of ageing/aged body are gendered. For participants tidiness and cleanliness are most important despite gender. Dominant interpretations of focus groups’ participants reflect traditional understanding of gender roles, gender ideals and internalization of gender and age stereotypes: physical appearance is more important to women than to men; beauty and physical attractiveness are reserved for youth; female sexuality is interpreted as burden, obligation and source of pain for women; menopausa is interpreted as beginning of declining; male ageing bodies were interpreted in functional terms. Negative attitudes toward all types of surgical interventions on face and body are dominant and in this aspect participants reject socio-cultural pressures for youthful and glamorous looking in old age.

“That was a joke, you should laugh!” – Tour Guides and the Performance of History in Budapest, Hungary“

Author(s): Kristina Uzelac,Saifullah Nasar,Macario B. Lacbawan, jr. / Language(s): English / Issue: 27/2015

The turn to performativity in the social sciences has spawned a new wave of scholarship that considers tourism as a performative process. However, the manner through which scholars understand tourism as performative drama is limiting. A fundamental critique of dramaturgy stems from its inability to account for performance as a chain of emergent social processes. Using the case of free walking tours in Budapest, Hungary, we argue that treating tourism as a performance is an act of fusion that culls its technique by deploying dominant cultural codes, materiality and humor. Performance hinges on an attempt to fuse various elements in a dramatic presentation. These elements include the (1) unsettling presence of the audience’s feedback, (2) the lingering memory of previous performances, (3) the deployment of cultural codes, (4) the mundanity of the material means of symbolic presentation, and (5) the use of linguistic play through humor. We conclude this essay by elaborating other dimensions that could possibly open up more discussions on tourism as a performative phenomenon.

“The End of History” Is a “State of Emergency”

Informal Constructions, Legalisation Laws, and the Production of Permanent Crisis in Post-Communist Albania

Author(s): Gerda Dalipaj / Language(s): English / Issue: 18/2015

This article addresses an important aspect of the crisis in post-socialist Albania: routinisation. Based on the concept of permanent crisis (Shevchenko 2009), I aim to discuss how conditions that are meant to be temporal become routinised and durable. I see crisis as essentially linked with the general experience of “transition” in Albania, both concepts – crisis and transition – being envisioned as temporary periods with a beginning in the past and an end in the future. Contradictory and ambiguous imaginaries on the “transition” affect the actions of social actors, sealing the success or failure of state-led reforms. I propose to call this the agency of the transition. Based on Pelkmans (2003) critique, I approach transition as a myth with two meanings: as a false version of things and as a blueprint by means of which people give meaning to their everyday experience. I suggest that the permanence of the temporal conditions can be grasped by tracing how ambiguity, alienation, and fissure are being produced in Albanian society. On the one side, through a poetical rhetoric of the temporary, a huge spectrum of international and local actors contribute to the construction of various states of emergency that are instrumentalised politically. The end of the transition becomes a “utopian object of impossible fullness” (Hartman 2007). On the other side, the common people project their expectations of security on “transition”, anticipating the future return of the state. But the latter has been, however, corroded by neo-liberal rhetoric and policy in post-socialist Albania and by the failure of the authorities to recognise the embeddedness of economic processes (Hann 1998) and state institutions and agents (von Benda-Beckmann et al. 2006). I will test this hypothesis using the case of the legalisation process for informal buildings in Albania. Why did the Law of Legalisation, prescribed as the medicine for the malady of disorder, incite a second mass of illegal construction in Albania? The findings are based on ethnographic fieldwork in an urban peripheral part of the town of Elbasan and a critical examination of Albanian public discourses and literature on the topic.

“The Tokay is much more superior to what you sent me last year under that name” – Thomas Jefferson and His Hungarian Wines

Author(s): Csaba Lévai / Language(s): English / Issue: 06/2015

Thomas Jefferson was an ardent patron of American viticulture. As an admirer of any kind of good quality wine, he purchased an enormous quantity from the wine producing countries of Europe: France, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Germany. It is not so widely known that he also had Hungarian wines in the cellar of his beloved Monticello. In this essay I will investigate the problems of how, when and why the third president of the United States felt the need to purchase wines from such a distant and, from the American perspective, relatively unknown land.

“The Year Replaces the Year.” Udmurt Spring Ceremonies among the Non-Christian Udmurt: An Ethnographic Analysis of Contemporary Ritual Life (on Materials from Varkled-Böd’ya Village)

Author(s): Eva Toulouze,Nikolai Anisimov / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2018

The authors had the opportunity, during their fieldwork, to attend spring rituals in Varkled-Böd’ya village. The week before the Great Day (Bydjynnal, coinciding with Orthodox Easter) is a dense ritual week: there are young people to be initiated, boys first and girls at the concluding ritual, who thus become adults; there are evil spirits to be chased away from the space of the living; there are kin relations to be reinforced through reciprocal visits, prayers and ritual deeds. These four rituals are the focus of this article, which provides an ethnographic account as well as a general analysis of the critical dimensions observed.

“These Days, when a Belgrader Asked: ‘How Are You Doing?’, the Answer Is: ‘I’m Waiting’.”

Everyday Life During the 1999 NATO Bombing

Author(s): Elisa Satjukow / Language(s): English / Issue: 19/2016

On the evening of the 24th of March, 1999, the first air strikes hit multiple targets in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The “Operation Allied Force” had begun. The air raids lasted for 78 days. During this time, everyday life in the Serbian capital was reshaped by the bombardment. This not only affected the infrastructure of the city, but turned its inhabitants’ days and nights upside down. People were helplessly waiting for the war to end. But simply waiting cannot fill a day – waiting for the next alert, for the electricity to come back on, for the bombs to stop falling – was not enough to fill the long days. Suddenly the normally busy urbanites found themselves confronted with new tasks and had to create new routines. The Milošević regime was aware of these needs. It used the “state of exception” (Agamben 2004) to further and deepen its own propagandistic imperatives of national unity and to advertise the necessity of the “war of defence” within the nation. The state started to offer a wide range of events that not only entertained its citizens but also created forums for them to meet and to “unite” against the enemy. Beyond the state-prescribed cultural events, numerous efforts sprang up throughout the city to maintain a social and cultural life. This paper will tell of the diverse ways in which the people of Belgrade spent their time between and during the air raids.

“This Is How I Abandoned School and Began Selling Sunflower Seeds”. Work Experiences, Living Conditions, and Relations to Formal Education of Roma Families in a Romanian Town

Author(s): Zsuzsa Plainer / Language(s): English / Issue: 20/2017

The aim of this paper is to apply accounts of cultural ecological theory (coined by John U. Ogbu and others) to a case study of a Roma family in Romania whose child is a low achiever in the local school and is at great risk of dropping out. As the following sections demonstrate, cultural ecological theory can highlight the epistemological and empirical strengths of the anthropological account by exploring school inequalities in the case of socially marginalised and ethno-racially stigmatized groups. Cultural ecological theory claims that individual values and practices referring to school and education are shaped by the broader social and cultural framework of a community and linked to different types of inequalities and disadvantages typical of this community. The mismatch between the local Roma family and the educational unit, presented in the final section, reflects how experiences with schooling, the labour market, and the forced removal of locals lead to a vicious circle and are responsible for transmitting educational inequalities from one generation to another.

“Uncanny Domesticity” in Contemporary American Fiction: The Case of Jhumpa Lahiri

Author(s): Jelena Šesnić / Language(s): English / Issue: 04/2017

The argument contends that Jhumpa Lahiri’s fiction – in particular her two novels to date, The Namesake (2003) and The Lowlands (2013) – features a combination of the elements of homeliness and estrangement, domestic and foreign, ultimately, self and the other, that evokes the Freudian concept of the uncanny. Placing it in the context of the diasporic family dynamics, prevalent in Lahiri’s fiction, the uncanny effect may be seen to reside in the unspoken secrets and repressed content passed on from the first to the second generation and disturbing the neat acquisition of the trappings of middle-class domesticity. Drawing on recent models of the “geopolitical novel” (Irr), the “new immigrant fiction” (Koshy) and the “South Asian diasporic novel” (Grewal), the reading engages with the irruption of the unhomely into the domestic space, sustained by immigrant families in the face of local and global disturbances.

“We are the New Thracians”: Modern Bulgarians and the Making of Ancient Living Again

Author(s): Ivo Strahilov / Language(s): English / Issue: 04 Spec/2018

The article addresses contemporary enthusiasts’ activities dealing with the ancient Thracian heritage in Bulgaria. Alternative re-writings of the past, cult movements and historical re-enactments have been analysed in view of the creation of a popular narrative, which is being endlessly shared, experienced, re-appropriated and re-formulated online. Based on the concept of community of practice, as it has been recently introduced in Heritage Studies by Nicolas Adell, Regina F. Bendix, Chiara Bortolotto and Markus Tauschek, the focus of the paper is on possible entanglements between various academic and dilettante, professional and amateur, religious and political actors, all of which contribute to the establishment of an “edited” past.

“What is Fatmagül’s Guilt?” Ethnology at the End of the Workday

Author(s): Vanya Zhekova / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2017

The paper offers an ethnological reading of the Turkish TV series “What is Fatmagül’s guilt?” as well as a critical view on its broadcast on Bulgarian television. The central subject matter is a group rape which sets the main theme of the series: violence against women. The authors develop the theme in two main forms:physical/sexual and symbolic violence, the latter regulated and maintained by thewedding ritual. The core of the latter is the problem of virginity.Special focus is paid to the script and the way in which pre-modern culture is presented. There are examples which show that the literary text is not only a super structure over cultural facts or their basic illustration, but in many cases it conducts a dialogue with them, transforms them and even rejects them as cultural practices (the problem of guilt, the ‘besmirching’ of the woman, the first wedding night complex,the cultural meaning of the red colour in a man’s relationship with his wife, the bed,material and spiritual, etc.). The series represents a good example of creative work on and analysis of pre-modern culture.

“Why labelling matters”: on social construction of Roma / Gypsies in Europe

Author(s): Tatiana Zachar Podolinská,Daniel Škobla / Language(s): English / Issue: 4/2018

Decision makers, governments, national policymakers, European institutions and as well as many scholars, not to speak about the general public, operate with the term “Roma/Gypsies” as if it was a fixed appellation for a monolithic ethnic group. Policies of the Council of Europe, EU strategies for inclusion of Roma, different position papers and other texts and documents label various groups of people with various social positions in society under one roof. Political parties, government and inter-government representatives across Europe often operate with the term “Roma” ignoring the fact that there are various groups of people and identities around the world with different Romani, Sinti, Travellers and various other origins. Moreover, the term “Roma” as it is used in most of these documents and in mainstream political and public discourse is imbued with implications of “socially excluded”, “marginalized”, “vulnerable”, “poverty-stricken”, “dependent on welfare” and many other adjectives which consequently generate resources for strategies, proposals, measures and action plans for example for “integration of Roma” into the mainstream society. The group labelled as “Roma”, are a “convenient” and recurring target of “hard hand” policies, often serving as a populistic magnet for generating support in political preference polls of political parties of any kind.

“Working Class Gone to Heaven””: From Working Class to Middle Class and Back

Author(s): Tea Škokić,Sanja Potkonjak / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2016

This paper problematizes the relationship between the working and middle classes in socialism, which was characterized by consumer culture and state of welfare. It also tackles the extinct middle class in the post-socialist context of the economic crisis and economically defined but politically void "new" working class. The economic realization of the Yugoslav socialist model - a hybrid of planned and market economies - combined the capitalist idea of the state of welfare with the communist execution of social rights. The socialist consumer culture, "searching for welfare", established a homogenous middle class as a proof of its own social success, leaving the "working class" to be conveniently invoked only in ideological manifests of the governing nomenclature. The discussion about the capitalist restoration of the post- socialist period gives precedence to the lament over the extinction of the middle class and its high standard of living over the issues of class relations. On the other hand, the majority of the 286,075 unemployed and 15,230 of the employed who did not receive their salaries in the first quarter of 2015 are low-skill or vocational work- ers, i.e., the working class. This new relationship between the working and middle classes problematizes the socialist inheritance of transformation of the working class into the middle class, the recent phenomenon of economically defined working class without a political meaning, the post-socialist class inequality between the employed and the unemployed, and the emancipation of the worker as "the scorned subject" and his mobilization without being necessarily included in the middle-class political activism for the "general good".

“САЧУВАЈМО ОД ЗАБОРАВА”: ИДЕОЛОШКО СТВАРАЊЕ КОЛЕКТИВНОГ СЕЋАЊА

Author(s): Vesna Karin / Language(s): Serbian / Issue: 1/2014

Play and music make up the phenomenon of human expression known as dance. The performance of Serbian dances by populations from Montenegro, Herzegovina, Bosanska Krajina, Dalmatinska Zagora, Lika, Kordun and Banija (hereafter referred to as Dinarics) who had been brought to live in Vojvodina in the 20th century occurs in a completely different context and in new situations. This led to a new kind of analytical approach to dance, one focused on viewing dance in a new geographical contextual framework – in Vojvodina, at certain times and opportunities for dancing such as festivals, concerts, weddings etc. By analyzing the opposition between remembering and forgetting, Gordana Đerić arrived at the conclusion that the collective intimacy became manifest and public over the course of the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia, and that it mostly wasn't the case of the inadvertent or reckless airing of separate national intimacies, but of a planned reduction, media filtration, promotion and utilization of certain commonplace terms of mutual qualification, which were built on opposition to Others or the alleged vulnerability or defense from Others (Đerić, 2008: 10-11). The aim of the paper is to show why and in what ways the collective intimacy of Dinarics became manifest and public through the dance practices of certain individuals.

„A fény a sötétség balkeze”. Transzkulturális kérdések Ursula K. Le Guin A sötétség balkeze című regényében

Author(s): József Keserű / Language(s): Hungarian / Issue: 1/2018

The study investigates the question of transculturalism in the novel of Ursula K. Le Guin ’The Left Hand of Darkness’. It focuses mainly on topics like the inner dimensions of cultures, the relationship between the oppressor and the oppressed, the non-violent forms of interference between cultures, the strangeness of ourselves, and the hybridity in social and biological sense. Through the dynamic relation of its main characters the novel by Ursula K. Le Guin shows us how an alien planet can become a transcultural site for the visitor, namely Genly Ai. At the end of the novel Genly Ai, the envoy of the Ekumen gaines not only information about the inhabitants of Planet Gethen but a new and deeper understanding of himself.

„A haza legyen minden gyermekének hazája” - A Szent István-kultusz reprezentációi Szlovákiában a két világháború közötti időszakban

Author(s): Miroslav Michela / Language(s): Hungarian / Issue: 02/2015

The study is dealing with an analysis of political and symbolic levels of the cult of St. Stephen in (Czecho)slovakia during the inter-war period. The author primarily focuses upon the manner in which this formally religious cult was transformed into a „national”. He deals with his representations in Hungarian and Slovak nationalist discourses after the establishing of the Czechoslovak Republic. Different cultural representations of St. Stephen point out to significant confessional, ideological and national narratives, which constructed the cult in the 20th century. The author highlights the fact that the principal consensus was not even arrived at within the proper „nation states” despite the efforts of Slovak and Hungarian ruling elites to enforce their unified (and mutually antagonistic) politics connected to St. Stephen. Although it is not possible to speak about the fully unified „Slovak” or „Hungarian” narrative in connection to St. Stephen’s cult, the author primarily devotes himself to the trends embodied in the power and cultural elites. At the same time he attempts to draw some attention to some micro-levels of the topic. In Czechoslovakia a relatively negative and disapproving attitude towards the cult of St. Stephen gradually prevailed as the cult was linked to the idea of enforced assimilation and practice by the Hungarian elites in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy (1867–1918). Contrary to that, the dominant part of the Hungarians living in Czechoslovakia shared same beliefs as in Hungary. However, after 1918 St. Stephen came to represent a type of transcendental guarantor that „the extraction from a national community” would not be permanent. Representations reproduced in the inter-war period and disseminated through education in schools and at home also reflect the contemporary situation to a large degree. The author highlights that the past – as a tool of political legitimation – takes on tropical meanings.

„Aż do najmniejszej kropki”: o prawie i biurokracji filomatów

Author(s): Agata Sikora / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 4/2015

In this article Sikora examines what role the writing down of the law played for the Philomath Society. She focuses on the process of formulating the law and the norms regulating communication within the group. Basing her analysis on their correspondence, protocols, successive drafts of the law, etc., Sikora suggests that the behavioural formalization constituting the Vilnius students’ secret organization was accomplished principally through a regulation of writing practices. The very process of formulating the law aimed at creating a bureaucratic disciplinal system that would guarantee the founders’ influence. Exploring the contradiction between the Society’s declared values their accepted protocol of communication, Sikora also asks in how far members would have internalized the ambivalence of their protocol.

„Beduinki na Instagramie”, czyli pomysły na wielokulturowe lekcje języka polskiego

Author(s): Magdalena Ochwat / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 26/2017

The article is aimed at answering the question of how to teach the idea of multiculturalism in the Polish language lesson, by using recent prose. It comprises a short review of school set books obligatory at the second stage of education, in accordance with the proposed reform of education. The author describes her teaching experience and evokes student ideas for Polish language education that is intended to: stigmatize the phenomenon of hate speech, stimulate the attitude of curiosity and openness of the student to what is different, and to discuss human behaviour towards refugees.

„Bezgraniczna rozrywka” Josepha Garncarza, czyli o prezentacji filmów w Niemczech przed I wojną światową (recenzja)

Author(s): Andrzej Dębski / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 03/2013

Review of „Masslose Unterhaltung. Zur Etablierung des Films in Deutschland 1896–1914” by Joseph Garncarz