The international conference, honoring the 60th anniversary of the ZRC SAZU Institute of Slovenian Ethnology was extended by the 7th annual Conference of the SIEF working group on the Ritual Year. The key words that constituted the conference format were: tradition, cultural heritage, creativity, (re)production), performace, researchers, performers.
B.01 Organiser of a scientific meeting
COBISS.SI-ID: 33294893Before WW II, Slovenian ethnography displayed many common and some distinct features of “continental” European ethnography. After the war, the ideology of the socialist regime required a reorientation of academic practice in the spirit of scientific Marxism. During the first few years after the war, ethnography kept to give priority to the salvage project of traditional folk culture. A rather late critique of the ethnographic canon in the early 1960s was explicitly directed towards the contested concepts and methodologies. Although the main actor involved in restructuring traditional ethnography into a “new” ethnology was definitely leftist, his Marxist criticism was not a programmatic extension of politics or ideology into scholarship but rather a spontaneous historical-dialectical program, if personal testimonies are to be trusted. This fact questions the postulated direct ideological impact on scholarship and requests a sympathetic understanding and sensitive explanation of the social and scholarly contexts.
B.04 Guest lecture
COBISS.SI-ID: 32420653In Slovenian ethnology, the term “cultural heritage” exists in different ways, reflecting not only the character of cultural heritage but also the relationship between researchers and cultural heritage. Thus one could argue that cultural heritage in the eyes of researchers can be understood as an ambivalent phenomenon. In the near past, cultural heritage was not questioned. It was based on the content of so-called “folk culture”. The project “Register of intangible cultural heritage in Slovenia” potentially represents a platform of mutual understanding of cultural heritage regardless of different epistemological backgrounds. The significance of cultural heritage therefore does not depend only on the evaluations of researcher but also on the motivations of heritage’s creators and users. Never has cultural heritage so clearly represented a topic “par excellence” for ethnology, for the humanities in general and for society at large.
B.03 Paper at an international scientific conference
COBISS.SI-ID: 33299757