The Carniolan sausage played a significant role in the formation and development of Slovene national consciousness from the Spring of Nations onward. It was the main Slovene culinary symbol, the Slovenian culinary flag, a dish which filled Slovenes not just with calories but with pride. But what happened with this dish of immeasurable national pride and zeal during the period of the first Yugoslavia, a time of political, social and cultural change? As in the Austro-Hungarian period it remains the primary object of culinary nationalism and chauvinism – it is to a significant degree caught up in semantic conservatism. But even staunch, solid, stable national symbols as (was) the Carniolan sausage are (were) not completely conserved over time – i.e. independently of social, cultural, political, economic and many other changes.
COBISS.SI-ID: 37810477
Since its first mention in the Slovene papers in 1849, the Carniolan sausage has shown the kind of symbolic stability, continuity, and endurance that would be hard to find with other material objects identified with Slovenehood or national symbols. But even the Carniolan sausage has not always enjoyed unproblematic continuity of the same content - one that would have been preserved in the same form through time. In particular not when a time comes along that more or less turns everything upside down - a time of revolution. The article explores what happened to the Carniolan sausage in the socialist period that was marked by revolution, i.e. a period when many things which reminded people of previous times were considered unwanted. In spite of the new regime's often negative attitude towards the Carniolan sausage, it partly managed to preserve its symbolic, signifying potential. It continued to be identified, as in the times before the revolution, with Slovenehood and things "smeared" with Slovenehood. But it also started to be identified with past time or "traditions", which the "new times" often preferred to forget about or simply erase, though at times they also indulged in nostalgically sweet memories. The Carniolan sausage has several identification elements, resulting in syncretism and consequently in changes, promotion, and intermixture. The Carniolan sausage thus has not become an outdated identification element, but living, continuous communication, which belongs to several generations, participates in a variety of traditions, and has inherited several legacies. As indicated by the period of the first Yugoslavia, this does not necessarily mean that the result is harmonious or conflictless.
COBISS.SI-ID: 1747078
The layer cake from Prekmurje—gibanica—is not merely a culinary specialty. It is an immaterial culturological content moving through its physical space. The phenomenon of gibanica marks modern Slovenes at least from the 1980s onwards and was deployed as an important medium of the Slovene ethno-national emancipation and the prospect of independence. Apart of other implications, we established a working hypothesis wherein the gibanica personifies severe problems of nativeness as one of crucial implications of contemporary mono-layered societal stratification in Slovenia. Applying comparative analysis of various regional and ethno-linguistic indicators, we confirmed the initial hypothesis and, furthermore, ascertained that gibanica managed to operate not only as a regional predictor but as a social-status predictor as well. From a local class-related dessert, it evolved into a pastry of the entire population of Prekmurje only after WWII. Whereas the emergence of the recipe of the cake is not known precisely, it may be placed somewhere into the 19th century and put together with the Jewish settlement in the Prekmurje region. Today, gibanica, so much different from the layer cake of Prlekija, represents the non-negotiable boundary of the Sloveneness towards the Croatianness despite the common geographical and cultural origin.
COBISS.SI-ID: 12578637
In modern Slovenian popular culture, media, vernacular etc., the burek – an important and popular dish among numerous immigrants to Slovenia and their descendants, and also probably the most popular Slovenian fast food – is probably the handiest and most often used signifier for immigrants from the former republics of the SFRY, the Balkans, the SFRY and the phenomena associated with it. The paper attempts to describe why and how this conceptual hyperinflation occurred precisely to this folded or rolled nutritional superhero, which most likely arrived in Slovenia in the early 1960s. The meanings of burek are as well conforntated with another Slovenian nutritional superhero, that has usually quite opposite meanings – Carniolan sausage.
COBISS.SI-ID: 36474925
Two papers of Jernej Mlekuž from the book ChatyArtefacts. When artefacts talk about ourselves and other problematize theoretical and methodological bases of the project. The investigation of objects that are symbolically very highly charged can draw us very quickly into discursive analysis, leaving the question of their materiality itself untouched (that is not the aim of the project). The book ChatyArtefacts. When artefacts talk about ourselves and other consists contributions of six authors and tretas material culture as constituitive part of social relations.
COBISS.SI-ID: 33231405