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Copyright of Religion & Tolerance / Religija & Tolerancija is the property of Center for the Empirical Researches of Religion and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Nasleđe is the property of University of Kragujevac, Faculty of Philology & Arts and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Socioloski Pregled is the property of Srpsko Sociolosko Drustvo and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Based on folk tales of Northern European nations, Arnold’s poems ‘The Forsaken Merman’ (1849) and ‘The Neckan’ (1853), both tell a story of human women who marry sea creatures, mermen, and replace their home on the land with the mermen’s underwater world. By crossing the boundaries between their worlds, they cause numerous problems, most significantly the tension resulting from their different religious beliefs. In ‘The Forsaken Merman’, Margaret, the merman’s wife, fearing that her soul will be damned because of her marriage to a pagan, decides to rejoin the human world on the most important Christian holiday, Easter. In ‘The Neckan’, in order to comfort his wife, the Neckan goes to the human world to find a priest who would be willing to baptise him, but he is rejected because he is a ‘monster’ who cannot be saved. The paper will examine the way in which Arnold’s poems reflect the fears of the Victorian era as well as his own anxieties. This will be accomplished by comparing the two opposite worlds of the poems – the human world of everyday activities, rules, laws, and expectations; and the mermen’s home, the mysterious, colourful, and peaceful world of sea-beasts. In addition, the paper will analyse the reversal of traditional gender roles and re-examine literary, cultural, and social stereotypes. The paper will also attempt to find a connection between the main topics of these poems and Arnold’s life and career of a poet and literary critic.

This paper approaches the topic of missing Serbs in Kosovo and Metohia by the application of the anthropological theoretical framework on waiting, which treats this waiting process as socially and politically constructed. Furthermore, it considers the role of the families of missing persons in memory praxis related to this humanitarian problem. By outlining the relevance of understanding the position of families of missing persons, it was shown that their personal stories contribute to the formation of a collective narrative, which is important to the wider community of displaced Serbs from Kosovo and Metohia. Additionally, it was concluded that the ability of this humanitarian problem to contribute to the conflict resolution, depends not only on the investigation of missing people, but also on a wider recognition of victims and the protection of their family members and organizations formed by them, which carry on the duties of establishing interethnic cooperation. The misuse of this humanitarian problem, as outlined by their families, is shown as a serious impediment to mending interethnic relations. The paper tries to give a closer look at the voices and silences of families of missing persons by showing how their waiting for investigation and information regarding the disappearances is politically structured, and at the same time charged with the promise of social change.

Nigeria is a nation with plural ethnic, religious, lingual and cultural identities that are constantlyexploited by the political class to promote their selfish interest. Although not a determinant forconflict, diversity in Nigeria has unjustifiably sparked identity-based conflicts which necessitateseparatism, insurgency and ethnic restiveness – among others, which threatens to drive thecountry to a perpetual state of fragility. This paper thence sought to assess Nigeria’s tortuousexperience with identity and identity politics with particular reference to ethnic, religious andlingual challenges. The paper furthers the discussion on identity politics in Nigeria to profferpracticable solutions. It argues that identity consciousness has overtaken national consciousnessand engendered a relationship characterized by domination, superiority and hegemony by thevarious groups. It reveals that the currency of politics is an ethnic-hegemony-rivalry sentimentthat threatens national integration. The paper reviews available literature on the subject matterfrom peer-reviewed journal articles, reports of reputable international organizations, workingpapers and newspaper articles. It concluded that identities have become powerful manipulativeinstruments in the hands of the political elites used to divide the Nigerian populace. Itrecommended the promotion of justice, equity and fairness in governance to ameliorate thechances of identity dissension and identity-based conflicts.

The paper represents a consideration of attitudes related to the national-political status of Vojvodina after the death of Josip Broz, during the (re)affirmation of the constitutional and national identity of the socialist Yugoslav federation and its constituent elements. Relying on the existing continuity of discussions about the position of Vojvodina in the Republic of Serbia and the Yugoslav Federation, temporarily interrupted due to the honoring of the personality and work of Comrade Tito, the transition process, which increasingly turned into a process of disintegration of the joint state, testifies to the increasing number of contradictions regarding the future of the status of AP Vojvodina. Arising from ambivalent motives, they soon transformed into uncompromising antagonisms that persistently insisted on their own orthodoxy at the cost of a decisive conflict. In such circumstances, all interested parties ignored the fact of an overly cumbersome and bureaucratized party apparatus, and thus the state apparatus, which had long since lost any foothold in the political will of the population. For this reason, the massing of support, in one moment, became a decisive moment of prestige that led to the final political triumph. The accompanying populist manifestations decisively influenced the specific development of democratic pluralism, which intended to make a departure from the compromised ideology of the Yugoslav federation.

Scholarly works on pipeline vandalism have paid extensive attention to empirical questions of causes and consequences. But there remains a dearth of studies on the representation of the acts of vandalism in newspapers, which is necessary for evaluating what message about the problem is being disseminated to the citizens and how that could contribute to resolving the problem or sustaining it. This paper examines the identity construction for critical social actors in Nigerian newspaper reports on pipeline vandalism. Sixteen –news samples were purposively selected from three newspapers: The Tide, New Waves, and The Guardian published between 2015 and 2019. Theoretically, the study is anchored on a combination of Fina’s (2011) identity process and van Dijk’s (1995, 2006a, 2006b) in-group/out-group description. The analysis involved accounting for the deployment of group self-schemata (van Dijk, 1995, 2005) and ideological strategies (van Dijk, 2006) in realising the three identity processes of indexing, positioning, and local occasioning established by Fina (2011). The study finds that through a combination of media identity ascription and social actors’ positive-self description in the news reports, each of the major stakeholders in the conflict assumes an identity of innocence and responsible entity while shifting the blame to others. It concludes therefore that this could be responsible for the difficulty in ending the conflict.