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Published in folkloristic periodicals in ex-Yugoslavia until the year 1990: Part one.

The Ensemble of Folk Dances and Songs of Serbia "Kolo" was founded in 1948 in Belgrade, on the initiative of the Committee for Culture and Art of the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia. The task of the Ensemble was to artistically interpret and present the so-called folk artistic creativity, which predominantly encompassed various folklore creations of the rural population, on stage, in the country and abroad. Although seemingly simple and folk-oriented, the art of traditional dance choreography has clear ideological and politically important messages of the then state leadership embedded in it foundations, intended to be spread among the Yugoslavs, but also beyond the state borders. The ensemble was supposed to present a desirable and appropriate image of Yugoslavia in its performances. The aim of this paper is to reconstruct the formation of the “Kolo” Ensemble and the process of constituting the art of traditional dance choreography, taking into account the socio-political and historical context of the Second Yugoslavia. In addition, the paper approaches the deconstruction of the intention of choreographers and artistic directors, in order to reveal the ideological messages embedded in the artistic expression. The basic assumption in this paper is that dance troupes and traditional dance choreographies are strongly connected to the ideology and cultural policy of the nation-state. In this regard, even when choreographers and artistic directors create programs without direct political-ideological objectives, their decisions always rely on the socio-political context and the dominant ideologies within the state. The theoretical framework of the work is based on contemporary anthropological discussions about the concepts crucial for the interpretation of the material, primarily referring to the concept of ideology, understood in the Althusserian sense, but also to the ideas of the combination of state ideology, cultural policy, and dance with the aim of presenting the dance troupe with a desirable image of the nation-state. The methodology of the work consists of a combination of two approaches: classical anthropological, qualitative and archival research. Qualitative research includes conducted in-depth semi-structured interviews with 15 dancers who worked in "Kolo" in different time contexts, while archival research included reviewing the documentation of the "Kolo" Ensemble, the Archives of Yugoslavia and the personal and family archives of the dancers.

In the paper we define, elaborate and illustrate what language documentation is, firstly by focusing on the global context where the large number of vanishing languages warrants such an approach in applied linguistics, and then by narrowing our scope to the local context of the Republic of Serbia, which itself has a certain number of endangered and vulnerable languages and language varieties. Indicating the discrepancy between official records found in world catalogues and databases (UNESCO’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger, Ethnologue, and The Catalogue of Endangered Languages (ELCat)) and the situation in the field as described by researchers familiar with the local context, we investigate the experiences of a team of researchers currently working on documenting Aromanian, Banat Bulgarian, Vojvodina Rusyn (Ruthenian), Judezmo (Ladino), Romani (Gurbet and Arli varieties), Megleno-Romanian and Romanian (Bayash and Vlach varieties) as endangered and vulnerable languages and language varieties in Serbia. Using interviews as a method for collecting data, conveying the researchers’ experiences in the field and their ways of dealing with various issues that come up in the process of language documentation, we have singled out two broad fields of topics. The first one tackles methodological challenges encountered prior and during field work, whereas the second focuses on ethical issues that necessarily must be resolved due to the participation of human subjects. In terms of the first group of topics, we have focused on research design (considerations involved in the project preparation), sampling (usually relying on researchers’ previous experiences more than on official records), personal involvement (often inevitable, but researchers do present strategies that help them maintain objectivity), and establishing first contact and recruiting informants (which also relies on previous work in the community). As for the second group of topics, that concerns ethical issue, the researchers have discussed the ways of getting informants’ consent for research and how they explain the importance of language documentation for that particular community and its members. Additionally, it addresses the issue of compensation that sometimes occurs, where informants expect either material or other kind of reward for helping out the research team. The paper also discusses how researchers deal with various sensitive topics that may range from personal issues to political opinions, and finally, the ethical responsibility that the researchers have towards the community they are studying in terms of giving something back and providing a sustainable relationship towards the language in question. We conclude by positioning the process of language documentation in the wider field of social studies, indicating its importance not only for sociolinguistics but also for the sociology of language, sociology of ethnicity and other related disciplines.

The aim of this paper is to contextualize briefly the emergence and development of Bitcoin as well as to offer an anthropological analysis of one such "algorithmic utopia" known as Bitcoin. Bitcoin was officially "born" in 2009. Its foundation was laid by the so-called white paper titled "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" (2008), authored by Satoshi Nakamoto, a pseudonym for an individual or a group of individuals. In essence, the intention of its creator (or creators) was to solve the technical problem of so-called double-spending of money, aiming to avoid reliance on a third party or institution (such as a bank) and the consequent loss of privacy for its users, with the help of an algorithm called blockchain. Although Bitcoin can be viewed in continuity with movements such as crypto-anarchism and cypherpunk, whose roots trace back to the 1980s of the twentieth century, and although it is not the first cryptocurrency nor the first alternative to fiat money, Bitcoin is indeed the first cryptocurrency to have attracted broader attention in both public and academic discourse. This paper will shed light on the context in which Bitcoin was born and popularized, and will endeavor to defend the assumption that the popular imagination behind the Bitcoin currency is technoutopian. Finally, this paper will seek to demonstrate that the algorithm at the very core of Bitcoin is perceived not only as the fulfillment of an Enlightenment dream of a method itself as a non-cultural and supra-historical guarantor of objectivity (as the one) removed from politics, economy and ideology but also as a democratization method applicable to them all. Apart from the mentioned above, the paper concludes that Bitcoin is seen as the fulfillment of a modernist dream of efficient, formal, predictable, depersonalized bureaucracies in the context of the diminished legitimacy of centralized, hierarchically structured, sluggish, fallible, and abuse-prone economic and state institutions. The focus of trust shifts to technology: to an algorithm seen as self-regulating, efficient, free from ideology, subjective interests, and potential abuse, almost divinely infallible, decentralized, and democratic system that provides a group of individuals not only with the necessary tools to achieve their freedom and privacy, deprived from control and regulations, but also as a tool for reforming the political and economic system.

The paper discusses a specific intersection of the politics, celebrity, and digital culture. In the last few decades, more and more people from the entertainment realm entered the world of institutional politics trying to leverage their popularity. Thanks to the media, they manage to transfer their celebrity capital, namely accumulated media visibility and recognisability (Driesens 2013) into the political sphere. In the beginning, they improve their visibility with the help of mass media that place their personas and private lives in the focus of public attention. However, with the digitalization of the media, the popular-political landscape has changed (Marshall 2020), so today they have dispositional new bases for practising personalized politics, i.e. imposing their personality instead of political party programmes. In this paper, attention is directed to former American president Donald Trump, president of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and Miroslav Škoro, who was a candidate in the presidential, parliamentary, and local elections in Croatia. Although there were obvious differences between these three celebrities mentioned before entering the political arena, their later use of social networks vividly shows how they built their political/pandemic persona in the evolving mediatization of politics.

The paper examines the extent to which it is possible to displace English as a functional communication tool from its culturally rich British contexts and associations. Starting from the analysis of the relationship between culture and language, the study discusses the ties between British culture and English in the context of its emergence as a global means of communication. In addition, the paper refers to developments in language pedagogy to outline the role of British culture in contemporary English learning. The conclusion is that reducing English to a mere culturally neutral container for information is not beneficial for educational outcomes, as outlined in the two principal reference documents for foreign language learning, the CEFR and ACTFL. A joint literacy in English and its culture will not foster undesirable individual acculturation but contribute to the development of intercultural competence among learners from diverse backgrounds who bring their own negotiations with British culture.

The aim of this paper is to analyze the articulation of cultural trauma of coming-of-age as depicted in the novels City of Pain and City of Sin by the young Romani author Meti Kamberi. The common feature of these two novels is that they both explore the traumatic childhood and coming –of-age experiences through the main protagonist’s point of view, suggesting that they either belong to the genres of autobiography and bildungsroman. Both novels are examined from the ethnic/minority bildungsroman perspective, with a particular focus on the personal experience narrative of coming-of-age of a Romani minority member in post-socialist Serbia as described in either of the two. Through illustrative examples, this paper demonstrates that the literary and artistic creations of minority populations can be a valuable ethnographic source for investigating their self-representations. The pages of these novels represent a space for articulating ethnic as well as racialized traumas, caused by both personal and transgenerational experiences of discrimination, stigmatization, and marginalization of the Romani population in this region. The thematization of life between two worlds, the dichotomy between the community of origin and the mainstream society, is a key characteristic of the Romani bildungsroman.

The development of the Internet and digital technologies has influenced the ever- greater migrations of printed content to the digital sphere (blogs, online media, Internet portals, social networks), which has also brought with itself changes in readers’ habits and in the concept and format of texts as wells. Music press is no exception in that respect. In the context of South European states, these processes coincide with the period of political, social, cultural and economic transition, giving rise to the development of numerous regional and local specific forms of popular culture. The existence of the SFRY as a shared state enabled the creation of an authentic cultural space, which continued to develop even after its disintegration. This paper endeavors to shed light on one segment of that local authenticity through an analysis of music press. The aim the authors of this paper aspire to achieve is the presentation of the development path of the printed media in the first place inthe Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, then in Serbia, as well as the reconstructions of the modality of the transformation of this media in the transition period from an anthropological perspective. The wish is to identify the perception and significance of music as a local culturalphenomenon through the qualitative analysis of the archival material and the available Internet sources as well, then to trace the cultural changes that have been going on over time as a result of global and local social and cultural turmoil. We do not refer to press only as the medium which has an informative role, but rather as the medium that reflects the local community’s attitudes, simultaneously constructing narratives on popular culture that are incorporated in our everyday life.

The paper presents the results of a field study of transhumant pastoralism which was carried out in June and July 2022 on the Zelengora, Volujak and Lebršnik mountains, on the Morine plateau, i.e. in the areas of the municipalities of Ljubinje, Nevesinje, Kalinovik and Gacko (Republic of Srpska-Bosnia and Herzegovina). The goal of the research was to determine the present state and development trends of transhumant pastoralism in the areas of eastern Herzegovina at the beginning of the 21st century. The paper gives an overview of the previous (ethnological) studies of transhumant pastoralism, and then presents the methodological procedures used in this research. The ethnographic section summarizes interviews with interviewees and field guides. The observed problems, both those that were talked about by the interviewees and those that were independently observed, were jointly expressed in the separate section as development trends that describe and at the same time shape the current state of transhumant pastoralism in the studied area. The problems in question are: the transformation of pastoralism into an individual economic strategy, and in some cases a form of personal leisure; changes in the directions and manner of livestock routes; the persistence of the basic production technology, along with the modernization of its individual elements; the weakening and dissolution of elements of the traditional cultural idiom; legal changes in property rights and the method of making compensations for rights of use; multiple consequences of war; increasingly pronounced neoliberal economic relations and withdrawal of the state; strengthening of personal motivation to engage in pastoralism; growing interest in zoological, ecological and climate topics. In almost all of the aforementioned trends, it is possible to recognize adaptation to the risks that come with changes in the environment, both natural and social. These are changes in the economy, demography, social relations, climate and ecology. The interviewees found ways to more or less successfully manage the mentioned risks.

Agricultural policy is one of the key public policies and has a significant impact on farmers as well as on the population living in rural areas. The policy comprises various development goals and represent the starting point for the adoption of regulations that have a direct impact on agricultural producers and their lives. The paper first analyzes the current agricultural policy in Serbia. The second part of the paper is dedicated to the Common Agricultural Policy of the European Union, followed by an analysis of the level of harmonisation of the agricultural policy and regulations of the Republic of Serbia with the Common Agricultural Policy of the European Union. Bearing in mind that the Common Agricultural Policy is currently undergoing transformation and that the implementation of new measures is expected from 2023, it is analysed how this change will affect Serbia in the coming years, given that the new Agriculture Strategy is to be adopted as the current one expires in 2024. The paper specifically analyzes how measures for environmental protection and climate change will affect the lives of the rural population. Introduction and implementation of new and increasingly complex measures, such as new ways of agricultural production, soil cultivation, reduced use of pesticides and artificial fertilizers, as well as greater representation of organic production bring significant benefits to the environment and contribute to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and to climate change mitigation. Until now, farmers have been expected to change their former traditional approaches to agricultural production, among which the burning crop residues stands out as important for the environment, and in the future the greater demands will be placed on farmers, especially having in mind climate change mitigation and adaptation measures. As the paper concludes, the key role in this process must be played by the farmers themselves, who are expected to change, often traditional patterns of production and living in rural areas.

The unbreakable bond between language and scientific thought has incarnated into a special way of using general language, which we call language for specific purposes. It is thanks to this language that articulation of observations, conceptual and semantic constitution of scientific fields and exchange of new knowledge are possible. Language for specific purposes is not a new system of signs, rather it uses all the linguistic resources contained within general language, from which it is inseparable. Its peculiarity lies in the frequency and the specific ways of using lexicon and morphosyntactic structures, especially the ones which help it approach the ideal of precision and brevity of expression. In the first part of the paper, in addition to the detailed definition of the concept of language for specific purposes, we analyze which language is necessary for scientific purposes, whether or not scientists understand one another and if there are any universal characteristics of language for specific purposes. The second part of the paper is devoted to a smaller study with the goal of questioning some general traits of the language of archeology, performed on a group of abstracts originally written in the Serbian language.

The paper critically examines some of the conclusions of the historian Andreas Roth concerning the activities of Johann Albrecht von Reiswitz in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and the occupied Serbia. It is stressed that biographies or studies aiming at biographical representation require a clear theoretical-methodological framework, situating the actors into relevant social structures. Instead of picturesque details, abounding in traditional biographies, it is essential to analyse the protagonist through various social orderings in which he acted and to which he adapted. Following this principle, the inconsistencies and contradictions apparent in Roth’s book are pointed out. Contrary to his opinion, in this paper it is argued that the work of Reiswitz cannot be ideologically and practically separated from the activities of the Military-Administrative Headquarters, or the organization Ahnenerbe. None of Reiswitz’s actions took place outside of the general ideology of Nazism, where personal professional advancement was linked to the cumulative radicalisation of the regime. Here it is demonstrated that he not only was ambivalent towards the crimes taking place around him, but was also actively involved, through his collaboration with SS Ahnenerbe, to justify the newly established order in the occupied Serbia. Roth leans upon the authority of some private testimonies, but instead of de-mystifying them, he contradicts his own previous conclusions.

The paper reviews previous studies of slavery in the Central Balkan provinces concluding that the issue was marginal and has received very limited research attention. It also attempts to outline possible future directions for investigating archaeological evidence suggestive of an enslaved population. First, it explores funerary contexts that indicate the interments of slaves in a few urban necropolises, aiming to stimulate further discussion of similar cases. Similarly, the paper revises several architectural examples that may have been associated with slaves, mostly from imperial estates and residences, but also from one fortified metallurgical complex. Although the views expressed here are hypothetical and tentative, the purpose of the paper is to emphasize the importance of keeping the topic open and trying to improve our analytical and methodological tools for dealing with it.

This paper discusses a segment of a study that took place between 2012 and 2015, which examined the then-existing ban on the sale of alcoholic beverages in commercial establishments at night in several Serbian cities, including Belgrade, Kragujevac, Novi Sad, Šabac, and Zrenjanin. The research also looked at how the media represented the ban from 2006 to 2013 and analysed data obtained through a questionnaire completed by 22 individuals from Belgrade in 2023. The study examined various aspects of the ban, including its role in the context of spatial power operation, which is discussed in this paper. The researcher began with the assumption that the ban on the sale of alcoholic beverages at night in commercial establishments could be interpreted as a way of purifying public space, through which one social group establishes dominance over others in society by controlling public space. This is achieved not only by excluding members of specific social groups from the specified place, but also by excluding socially inappropriate practices deemed typical for those groups. The ultimate goal is to organise public space so that it reflects dominant societal values and achieves dominance for the group that tends to represent those values. The restriction was seen to be targeted at preventing members of the lower classes and young people, as members of the aforementioned classes, from occupying public space. It also had the broader aim of prohibiting the purchase and problematic use of alcoholic beverages late at night, a practice identified in the aforementioned socioeconomic strata, where it was perceived as a possible source of disruption, violence, and a threat to upper-class citizens. The decision was an attempt to increase the safety of the higher classes by limiting the ability of members of the lower classes and youth to purchase alcoholic beverages at night, as well as through spatial segregation. Although not explicitly stated, one of the effects sought by this decision was the prohibition of alcohol consumption in public places among the aforementioned social groups. The purpose was to instil a sense of security in the community and to project an image of moral order in society. It represented a mechanism for the higher classes to assert their authority in society and to establish their class identity by spatially separating themselves from the classes with which they were placed in a relationship of opposition. Thus, public space was created to reflect the values advocated by upper-class citizens, such as order, self-control, moderation, and decency, which aided their dominance in society.

This paper explains the concept of kinship terminology as an analytical category in anthropology and highlights its importance. Special attention is given to the differences in approach and methodology employed in anthropology compared to comparative philology and historical linguistics when it comes to this type of research. In addition to discussing the typology of kinship terminology systems, the paper addresses current knowledge regarding two longstanding questions: 1. the relationship between kinship terminology and non-linguistic elements (principles of social organisation and kinship behaviour), and 2. historical changes and transformations of kinship terminological systems. From the perspective of contemporary anthropology, when interpreting the prevalence of different types of kinship terminology worldwide, it is necessary to consider and distinguish between two principles of grouping: the ‘principle of propinquity’ and the ‘principle of form.’ The principle of propinquity can be applied when dealing with societies that are linguistically, geographically, and historically connected. When terminologies with the same formal characteristics, including identical rules of kinship classification, exist in geographically, linguistically, and historically distinct and distant societies, the principle of form is applied, which focuses more on logical rather than historical connections between systems. While earlier studies focused on finding logically powerful and empirically efficient analytical means of classification, in recent decades the emphasis has increasingly shifted towards broader social, historical, and cognitive issues and processes. Contemporary approaches to kinship terminology aim to identify and explain variations rather than categorise such systems into one general category or another. Because what matters is not which category fits better, but rather which features can be combined in different ways to form a concrete system in the real world.

This paper gives a concise overview of two specific methods – photo-elicitation and photovoice – which originated in anthropology, but found an application in sociology as well, mostly because of the closeness of these two disciplines on the theoretical and methodological level, as well as on the institutional. This closeness is, among other things, noticeable in the highly specific academic directions of these disciplines, such as those oriented towards the visual sphere, like visual anthropology and visual sociology. The specificity of the two mentioned methods is reflected in the fact that they are based on the visual and visual materials in general, and their use is, to a large extent, legitimated by a specific social context characterised by the predominance of the visual in many aspects (representational, communicative, political, urban to mention just a few) at both the global and local levels. Despite this situation, the mentioned methods, as well as those similar to them, are still used quite ‘shyly’ in research approaches to contemporary society. This paper discusses the central features and epistemological potential of photo-elicitation and photovoice, as well as their different formal variations, especially in the case of photo-elicitation. Basically, both methods are based in traditional research approaches like classic interviews and focus group discussions. Despite this, their use represents a visible and certainly significant expansion of the methodological range. In that sense, special attention is paid to the possible advantages of these methods which separate them in a certain way from other methodological practices. In order to prevent their uncritical glorification, the limitations and disadvantages of these methods are also discussed, which should offer a more nuanced methodological picture.

This paper problematises the justification of ‘postist’ revisions of humanism. In the first part of the paper, a line of thought that persistently marks the self-perception of man is presented. It stretches from Plato, through Pico della Mirandola and Kant, all the way to existentialism and philosophical anthropology in the twentieth century. In it, man is understood as chronically deficient in their own ‘nature’ or ‘essence’, and his privileged status is built from this rootlessness. The second part of the paper is dedicated to the relationship of transhumanism and critical posthumanism to humanism. Transhumanism is found to harmoniously continue and/or radicalise the humanist project of self-creating and self-transcending man, while critical posthumanism advocates a rethinking and redescription of man in view of what are considered to have been the disastrous consequences of humanism: a transgression in relation to everything different from man by anthropomorphising it and anthropocentrically measuring it against himself. The concluding part of the paper detects a certain arbitrariness in the understanding of humanism by its critics, reminds that even within such a broadly understood humanism, critical moments have been inherited as its own content and corrective, and that announcements of radical cuts and ruptures with the humanistic tradition are perhaps redundant. It is also noted that something non-negligible has changed with the contemporary challenges of technoscience – artificial intelligence, informatics, robotics –but it is contested that this change in social history requires a cardinal rejection, change or neglect of the intellectual heritage that enables responses to it and/or a rational dispute about it. A synoptic overview of humanist landmarks and their post-humanist condemnations is suggested, which would respect the heritage of humanist thought and the right or even the obligation built into it of its critical review.

The paper considers a problem at the intersection of sociology, anthropology, law and multidisciplinary public health research - health care accessibility during a sudden social crisis. The authors test the theoretical assumptions on the example of the covid-19 pandemic in Serbia, trying to understand the specific position of non-covid patients suffering from chronic non-communicable diseases and their perceptions regarding health care accessibility during the period of the pandemic. The empirical data on which the analysis was performed was collected with the help of focus group interviews. The sample consisted of interviewees - representatives of the association of patients suffering from chronic non-communicable diseases that burden the population of Serbia the most, who live on the territory of the Republic of Serbia without Kosovo and Metohija. The analysis shows that access to health care during the pandemic was limited and that the protocols that the state and the health care system were setting up in the process did not take into account the specific needs of this socially vulnerable group of patients. This, due to the impossibility for them to go through certain diagnostic procedures in time, receive adequate therapy and/or rehabilitation, in a large number of cases resulted in the deterioration of the clinical picture of the chronic disease from which they suffer. The paper presents theoretical and practical conclusions, which aim to show how important it is to incorporate theoretical and empirical insights from the social sciences and humanities in the conceptualization and future implementation of public health protocols for future social crises in order to reduce their potential syndemic effect.

This paper is a branch of my previous research, dealing with allegorical and persuasive cartography, as an exercise in more recent theoretical interpretations of marginalized historical sources – caricatures. The introduction gives the readers an overview of the modern methodology and secondary literature. Furthermore, Giuseppe Maria Mitelli (1634–1718) is unknown to our audience. Therefore, this paper cannot deal with his immenseoeuvre, but only one example of his mastery, the caricature “An International Array of Doctors Counselling the Sultan”. This engraving is dated approximately to 1696, or slightly later, to the last phase of the War of the Holy League (1683–1699). The staging and the characters, as presented in the analysis, show beyond doubt a strong influence from commedia dell’arte in costumes and apparel, recognizing the oldest stock images of Dottore Gracian, originating in Mitelli’s Bologna, and Pantalone, who is precisely attributed to the “medico Venetiano”. This “icono-text” merges visual arts and comedy theatre with text, criticizing the Christian “nations” for their lack of unity in opposing the common foe and nemesis – the Ottoman sultan. The satire is more pronounced in the para-text, adequately written for each one of the actors, including those without the lyrics – headfirst fleeing grand vizier Kara Mustapha, and wool spinning Protestant Prince Imre Thököly, doing the woman’s and not the warrior’s task. Including the sultan, historians have plenty of material for an imagology analysis from the point of view of a witty Bolognese, well-educated and informed, placed in a hub of the baroque network of Europe, bursting with “furor geographicus” and the sound of the printing machines, street vendors, artisans, and carnivals. As any intellectual work, Mitelli’s art piece is placed within its historical-geographical, cultural and socio-political context.

Meta-ethnography is an interpretive knowledge synthesis used for synthesizing data from ethnographic studies. It compares and analyses metaphors/data, creating a new interpretation or developing a new theory. Meta-ethnography was originally introduced by Noblit and Hare in 1988, and in the past thirty-five years, acquired popularity in different disciplines. But by today’s standards, the seminal text left stages of conducting meta-ethnography insufficiently described in terms of transparency and systematicity and being open to different interpretations. This paper aims to discuss and analyse seven phases of conducting meta-ethnography and to suggest how transparency and systematicity in each phase might be enhanced. The author acknowledges that meta-ethnography is still an evolving method and concludes that suggestions made in this paper may serve meta-ethnographers not as an anchor but as a compass in planning and executing each stage.

This paper is a critical reflection on Covid-19 management strategies adopted in Odisha, a state on India’s east coast. The unprecedented scale and magnitude with which the pandemic affected the entire world was the cause of great uncertainty and collective anxiety. Managing it at the level of the entire nation state with great diversity of race, language, ethnicity, class, caste and culture has posed a great challenge for policy makers and administrators. Policy ethnographies have often relied on the Foucauldian idea of biopower and biopolitics to elucidate the governance practices in nation states with different rationalities. The present paper is an attempt to examine various policy measures adopted by the government of Odisha and how they have been affecting various institutions and everyday life. Using an ethnographical approach, the paper attempts to examine various policy initiatives and the way they get operationalized on the ground giving rise to a kind of governance practice indicative of affirmative biopolitics in the way power is exercised to direct human life and engage citizens for a secure future.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that the impact of a systemic crisis depends very much on the prevailing level of inequality in the society concerned. This paper shows how the affordability of food was reduced dramatically for millions of people due to income loss in the wake of the pandemic, and the consequences this had. An analysis of the political economy of crisis then illustrates how economic inequality acts as a massive amplifier of disaster impacts on disadvantaged individuals and populations. Environmental degradation, across a broad spectrum from climate change to biodiversity loss, acts similarly as an impact amplifier in this and most other crises. Economically disadvantaged people are more immediately exposed to the impact of ecological degradation or may be forced to disregard the need for nature protection, which means the two factors are also mutually reinforcing. Inequality literally kills people, the more so in this century of worsening multidimensional crises. The paper argues that inequality on this scale is not just immoral but undermines human security, even for relatively privileged population groups, as well as threatening the stability of international relations. Addressing inequality, and especially inequitable policies in the food producing rural sector which acted as a major safety net for the poor during lockdowns, is thus the best pathway to mitigate future crises and their impact on food security.

The paper comparatively explores the projects of Gaia and the planet as the new images of the Earth, proposed by Bruno Latour and Dipesh Chakrabarty respectively. With critical emphasis placed on the political theology of the apocalypse present in both projects, the paper draws broader implications of such a geospiritual turn in the Anthropocene debates. Whereas the introduction gives a glimpse into the problem of the Anthropocene, the second section explores Latour's reinterpretation of the “Gaia Hypothesis” in the anti-holistic key through the critique of modernity, theory of agency and novel methodology of geotracing, designed to unravel the organic transactions and links of the so-called critical zone. The third section discusses Latour's geophilosophical experiment of building the mythical prototype of the Earthlings, as a special kind of ecological sensitivity, and points out the problem of setting up science as a new earthly religion. Section four focuses on Chakrabarty's concept of the planet, which revolves around the “discovery” of the deep history of the planet, a confrontation with anthropocentrism and the “shallow” history of human formations, but also the insertion of radical climate uncertainty into everyday life and restoration of planetary habitability. In the fifth section we explain in more detail the problem of scale that arises in Chakrabarty's work, that is, the question of how to open sensibility for such a cumbersome set of entities as the planet is. Expressing a relative distrust of science, Chakrabarty prefers to opt for theological awe, which, we claim, is difficult to achieve precisely in a planetary context. In the conclusion we look briefly at the concept of resilience as a potential complement to these views.

This paper deals with the general question of what a segment of sociocultural reality in the capital of Tasmania looked like over the time span from the emergence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in China up to Australia's lockdown in mid-March 2020, or more specifically, what took place in direct, daily contacts between people, in the meeting or clash of coexisting incongruous behavioral norms – the “old” (habitual up until then) and the “new” (modified due to the crisis) patterns of interpersonal behavior. In this period of health and social crises, which is here termed liminal, shame was generated. It arose as an emotional reaction to the discrepancy between the thinking, feeling and behavior of interviewees and the thinking, feeling and behavior of members of their social environment, a discrepancy that became apparent in the course of their mutual interactions and whose object was a different emotion – fear. The fieldwork was conducted in mid-2020 in Hobart, in the form of semi-structured interviews with several immigrants from the states of the former Yugoslavia. As it was aimed at studying their fear, and only in second place their feeling of shame, in this paper I have limited myself to a narrative interpretation of the origins and object of shame, with the intention of, on the one hand, highlighting the principal factors in the construction of shame and, on the other, examining what it was in connection with fear that aroused shame in the given context. It was noted that, among other things, shame was culturally generated in the given interactions which occurred within secondary relationships and specific environmental contexts and, still more broadly, as part of the crisis caused by the general spread of the virus, and that, as the object of shame, fear emerged as an inappropriate emotion, initially in the sense of the disproportion between the intensity of fear and its object (i.e. the threat posed by the virus).

The entering of the Serbian economy into a more markedly neoliberal phase after 2008 has been accompanied by attempts to implement the concept of the entrepreneurial economy into a national economic policy, thus creating the conditions for the emergence of an altered way of cultural conceptualization of the entrepreneurship phenomenon, and also for a change in the way in which the phenomenon of entrepreneurial failure is conceived. This paper analyzes “stories of failure”, typical narratives that technological entrepreneurs present as part of so-called Fuckup Nights, events organized in Belgrade as well as in a number of other cities around the world. The educational, propaganda and autodidactic function of these stories, which seek to bring about a change in the social perception of the phenomenon of entrepreneurial failure, is realized within an interpretative framework delineated by the discourse of the neoliberal system, which circulates a certain kind of implicit knowledge regarding the way that the surrounding reality and socially desirable roles assigned to subjects are defined. The way in which the phenomenon of entrepreneurial failure is conceived is linked to the paradoxes stemming from the concept of the entrepreneurial economy which, existing within the dominant neoliberal discourse, emphasizes the use of both innovativeness as an economically grounded concept and of creativity as an intrinsic, universal human quality, which is shaped by the mechanisms of culture but also in accordance with the demands of the current economic policy, with the aim of preserving the now already weakened neoliberal system. Through these concepts the modes of functioning of various types of entrepreneurial enterprises are examined, those involving elements of startups as well as entrepreneurial enterprises launched as part of the business processes of established technological companies. Starting from the assumption that the process of technological innovativeness functions both on the level of thought processes and the level of social interactions, that it involves the activity of the innovative as well as of other aspects of creative intelligence in individual subjects who engage in interaction on the level of the technology companies they work for on the one hand, and on the other, with consumers as a source of unrefined stimuli for the reconstruction of existing frameworks or their surpassing, with the aim of successfully (re)creating a certain product. By looking at the causes of failure in Serbian technological entrepreneurship, the paper points to the importance of the concepts of creativity and innovativeness in the narrative semantic structure of the analyzed stories, as well as to the heuristic potential of those concepts for the anthropological analysis of ideas and practices related to the phenomenon of contemporary Serbian entrepreneurship, which is connected to the characteristics of the process of Serbian transition in the period after 2008, which is referred to in the paper as the “mature phase” of the second transition.

The paper presents the work of the French School of Anthropology of Ancient Worlds, which was developing intensively among the researchers gathered around the Centre Louis Gernet in Paris, named after the pioneer of this approach. This epistemological turn in researching classics is the consequence of the intersection of the classics, history, anthropology, sociology, archaeology, and different critical theories. The shift does not only refer to the change of methodologies, but also to the change of researched themes and phenomena, which are regarded in the concrete socio-political and cultural context. The most important representatives of the first generation in the Centre were Jean-Pierre Vernant, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Marcel Detienne, and Nicole Loraux. Their work has been translated into other languages, while the Centre was a lively place of intellectual dialogue and innovative approaches to antiquity, especially during the 1970s and the 1980s. Extremely interesting dialogue and influences also appeared beyond the borders of France, so the paper will turn briefly to the reception of the school in the Anglophone world, but also in the former Yugoslavia, with the intention to shed light on certain intellectual trajectories in the exchange of ideas.

This paper examines diverse conceptions of homosociality in pre-modern and modern societies, and discusses how these conceptions are politically, socially, culturally and spatially constructed and transformed throughout history, particularly during the modernization processes of the mid-19thcentury. Concentrating on two significant homosocial spaces, men’s coffeehouse and women’s section of the Ottoman-Turkish baths, it aims to demonstrate how homosociality is spatialized through the dissolution of the public/private dichotomy, as well as constructions of functionality in pre-modern Ottoman society. The paper follows a historical interpretative research methodology. Based on data derived from the second-hand sources available in the literature, the privatized public, complex, homoerotic and multi-functional characteristics of these homosocial spaces and their extensions towards and reflections on the Ottoman urban neighborhoods are critically analyzed and interpreted. The dissolution of the public/private dichotomy in these spaces also exemplifies the Foucaultian concept of heterotopia. The paper concludes that these traditional spaces and their modern versions demonstrate the constructedness of both gender categories and patriarchal structures.

Desktop documentary is a contemporary film and media practice that self-reflexively explores technological limitations of the computer interface and its potentialities in order to create unconventional audio-visual works with elements of documentary and experimental cinema. This paper envisages the possibility of using desktop documentary methods and techniques within the context of current online education – the globally dominant model of knowledge transfer and exchange during the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, the focus of this article, in comparison to previous theoretical studies of desktop documentaries, which primarily investigated cinematic, artistic and media features of this form, is transferred from aesthetic and poetic to pedagogical, methodological and epistemological issues. Although several scholar papers have already discussed the possibility to employ desktop documentaries within the space of classrooms, their understanding of this practice was different from its contemporary mode theoretically acknowledged and creatively practiced by Kevin B. Lee, inaugurated with his paradigmatic film Transformers: The Premake. Lee’s vision, namely, presupposes a more transgressive approach towards desktop filmmaking, which entails various avant-garde and experimental cinematic and media techniques. Having as its starting point such bold methods, this article considers, analyzes and critically evaluates desktop documentary strategies and techniques relevant for online teaching: self-reflexive thought about technological limits and potentialities of online platforms; exploration of new digital aesthetics which oppose predefined digital forms; speculative discourse based on critical thought; online mode of lecture performance, etc. This paper thus opens the possibility to transpose and integrate the concepts and techniques of desktop documentary, primarily marked by avant-garde and experimental traits, into the creative methods of conducting the online teaching process – and eventually, after the termination of the pandemic, to preserve and expand them within the physical spaces of schools, colleges and universities.

This paper explores the place neoliberalism has in Foucault’s opus and the reasons he turned to studying subjectivity in the latter part of his career. We will follow the thematic, theoretical, and methodological changes in Foucault’s work and show how they relate to the social context. We will claim that Foucault, due to his political engagement, gives a political dimension to his work by putting it in the service of political goals. The article starts by researching how the social context influenced the beginnings of Foucault’s work in order to show how even then the changes in the French political scene influenced his thought. Afterwards we move on to the period after the rebellion of 1968 when Foucault was working with radical Maoist organizations. It is here that we find the first form of politicization of his intellectual work. We argue that due to the conflict between progressive French intellectuals and the “Communist party of France” in the second half of the 1970s Foucault turned to studying the history of liberalism in order to find a conceptual framework for a new non-communist left politics. This can be seen as a second form of politicization of his intellectual work and Foucault’s study of neoliberal ideas can be located here. We claim that since this research is placed at the very end of his history of governmentality it is here that Foucault found a conceptual framework suitable for a new left politics. For him this politics would be based on the pursuit of an ever greater autonomy of the individual and his subjectivity. Therefore, after studying neoliberalism Foucault turns to studying subjectivity which we understand as a third form of politicization of his intellectual work. We argue that he conceptualized the “care for the self” as a form of subjectivity which is supposed to play the role of an ethical ideal for a new left politics. The paper concludes with a segment in which we contrast our claims with the claims of other authors that studied Foucault’s relation to neoliberalism and his turn towards studying subjectivity.

During the foundation period of Zagreb’s Gradec and Opatovina, a specific architectural type of wooden single-storey residential house emerged, the so-called purgerska hiža, based on the traditional wooden architecture of the wider Zagreb area, which has been defined, for the first time in this paper, as the Zagreb traditional wooden house. Features of this house type can be recognised in brick residential houses from the 18th century onwards, both in Opatovina and Gradec, and they became a staple piece of architecture commissioned by the economically less powerful and less educated. This paper describes the prominent features of this architectural type, as well as the specificities of a more elaborate type of two-storey house that developed therefrom. Here it is shown that this type continued in the brick form long into the 19th century, and that certain features occasionally cropped up even in the 20th century. All Upper Town and Opatovina houses that can be subsumed under this type have been identified in this paper, as well as houses derived from that type, which can be considered its modifications, and they have been analysed in order to determine where the influences on this type of architecture had come from, adopting a new thesis on Zagreb as a border zone that was influenced by two ethnographic regions: Turopolje and Hrvatsko Zagorje.

The paper tackles interpretations of late-stage capitalism and characters as incomplete antiheroes in the Succession tv-series (HBO 2018-). The characters in Succesion are the members of the wealthy American Roy family, in possesion of their own, family-run media conglomerate-empire, named Waystar RoyCo. Family businesses figure as symbols and pillars of success and are thought to preserve "good family values" in the official everyday and western political discourse. But Succession breaks down this myth and glorification of family-run businesses and treats it as a model of corrupted relationships that mirror themselves onto the smaller scales – specially onto family structure as a basic societal denominator. Following this premise is the second compontent – emotional reactions generated through morally ambiguous actions undertaken by every single character in the series. The lack of protagonist in the series and the portrayal of every character as an incomplete antihero leads us to the second important premise of the paper: the tropologization of characters, where every character embodies certain broader system flaw(s). Portrayed in this manner, characters are bearers of identity traits of late-stage capitalism hegemony. By exploiting their flaws, internal conflicts and morally ambiguous acts, the flaws of the system itself are revealed to the viewers. The dynamics of corrupted and broken relationships within the Roy family lead to perceiving it as an anti-family, which mirrors the insanity and downfall of the same system. The sardonic humor and brutalistic portrayal of the lack of ethics and morals generate strong emotional reactions among audiences that result in "liking the unlikeable". This controversial "loving to hate" is rooted in the cognitive and moral distance that builds up during the course of the series, which enables the viewers to take the standpoint of moral superiority.

The paper analyzes the last Yugoslav television series A Better Life (Bolji život) the broadcast of which ended when the war had begun on the territory of the SFRY. More than thirty years after the end of the first broadcast of the series, it is still popular in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia, which is noticeable through numerous reruns, but also popularity on social networks, as well as numerous quotes from the series that are used in colloquial speech. The paper presents the content of the series and the main characters, as well as the most important secondary characters, briefly explains the then political and media situation in the different republics of the SFRY, which was completely uneven, which led to numerous antagonisms between nations, so in this context the series A Better Life was singled out as a series that was equally followed by citizens in all the republics, which was a phenomenon. In the context of today, the series is analyzed through the prism of Yugonostalgia, and the content of the series is analyzed through several themes that appear in the series: everyday life and rituals, dealing with the consequences of the economic crisis, the conflict between rural and urban among the residents of Belgrade, i.e. the so-called old Belgraders and so-called newcomers.Certain stereotypes appeared in the series, primarily gender stereotypes, that is, the roles of men and women in society were repeatedly pointed out through the dialogues. Although at the time of filming of Better Life, inter-ethnic relations in SFRY were in crisis, the screenwriter skilfully avoided national stereotypes, although they appeared in several scenes, which is also included in the analysis of the series. Although the series depicts a politically turbulent time, nowadays it is viewed almost romantically, as a chance for a lost better life and missed opportunities.

The TV series Normal People (2020) is based on the 2018 novel of the same name by the young Irish writer Sally Rooney. The book achieved tremendous popularity, particularly among younger audiences – so-called millennials – and the TV series only added new layers of popularity and identification. The success of both of these works can be explained by the skillful way in which Rooney has managed to link and intertwine the romance between the protagonists with the social context in which it is set, thus depicting the generational experience of growing up with the consequences of ay social and economic crisis. This is something that young people could identify with, not only in Ireland but also in other societies affected by the economic crisis which began in 2008, and to which many new crises have since been added (the latest one being the health crisis due to the pandemic), while many earlier ones still reverberate in people’s experiences. Seeking to examine how the globally broadcast TV series Normal People has resonated with the local reception context and viewers’ experiences, in this paper I focus on the aspect of reception of this series by its audience in Serbia, aiming to shed light on the dimension of "viewer enjoyment" in viewing practice and to address the question of the importance of this aspect of "watching TV" for the understanding of the meaning and social impact of television texts. It turned out that the initial idea of collecting material for analysis through an open invitation to participate in online research, with an essay response to the question about the reasons why they enjoyed watching the show (or not), was flawed, as the response rate was lower than expected, which resulted in the empirical "thinning" of the research, but also provided an opportunity to consider some of the problems in qualitative (online) research on contemporary issues and media texts. Exploring these methodological and epistemological problems unexpectedly became an important part of the paper, alongside the research results. The research itself pointed to a new type of viewer, namely, expert viewers, who have become experts through being active in complex technological environments in which they watch TV content, and which they use to inform themselves about it. In addition, the results indicate that the practice of bingeing, linked to the intensification of enjoyment and identification of female viewers, is very widespread. Finally, the most important themes mentioned in their comments were the themes of gender relations/sexuality and the questions of class and social inequality, along with mental health. A "symptomatic reading" of the comments of Normal People’s female viewers in Serbia reveals shared concerns and anxieties in dealing with a rapidly changing world, which is constantly being faced with crises – past ones, current ones, those that have just subsided or those that are yet to come, creating a new sense of "collective fragility", individual, economic or political.

At the turn of the millennium, Turkish television series became a global phenomenon, requiring comprehension of the broader social and historical context of their production, distribution and reception. The paper considers questions regarding their genre and points to the socioeconomic and political circumstances of their development and transformation into a cultural product with worldwide popularity and an industry with great market value. Particular attention has been given to the question of how these processes have affected the depiction of the family and family values in these series. The second part of the paper presents a case study of the series The Fall of Leaves, in which the concept of the family and family life that is offered through the plot of "the family in crisis" in the present age of changes is examined. The reception of family relationships in the series has been studied through the analysis of an internet forum in which forum members, viewers of this series in Croatia and the region, commented in 2287 posts from 2011 to 2012 on the first TV broadcast of this Turkish series.

Over the past few decades, major changes have taken place in the two most influential Western countries – the USA and the UK. These changes found political expression in Trump’s presidential victory and the triumph of Brexit in 2016. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the changed political reality in these states and explain its causes. In the first part, the author provides a theoretical framework and discusses the old and new categories to provide explanation for the changes in these states. In the second part, he analyzes the main changes in political life in the USA and UK embodied in Donald Trump and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. In the third part, he points to the basic causes of the crisis in the USA and UK that led to Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 and UK’s withdrawal from the EU. The countries that were beacons of civilized dialogue among political opponents now harbor growing intolerance, lack of accountability and ruthless mudslinging campaigns against political opponents. The radicalization of political life in the USA culminated in former President Trump’s supporters storming the Congress which left five people dead. In the second most influential state of the Western world, during the pro- remain or pro-leave the EU campaign, a British MP was killed while the politicians were stoking fears of impending wars, genocide and even invoked the politics dating back to Hitler and Napoleon. The policy of exclusiveness pursued by Trump and Brexiteers brought about the social polarization in the USA and the UK unprecedented since the Second World War. The author proceeds from a hypothesis that deep social and ethnic divisions, rising poverty, less access to higher education for broader social strata, lack of trust in democratic and supranational institutions, obsession with one’s own cultural identity, fear of large-scale immigration and domination of reality culture set the stage for the changes in political life in these countries, making it possible for Trump and Brexit to prevail. The paper provides a critical analysis of previous attempts to account for the victory of Trump and Brexit, particularly the theory of cultural backlash by which US political analysts Norris and Inglehart explain the rise of authoritarian populism in the USA and the UK. The author is of the view that following Biden’s presidential victory in 2020 the situation in the USA will not change significantly since it is not just the politicians that create the political environment but rather the social and economic situation which has deteriorated even further in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The UK has managed to avoid significant radicalization in political life since the divisions over Brexit did not follow partisan and ideological lines as was the case in the USA.

The paper discusses the activities of Mirislav Zanović, the leader of the pro-French political faction in the Bay of Kotor at the end of the 18th and the first years of the 19th century. This research indicates that the first reliable data on his pro-French orientation date back to the end of 1793. At that time, the general providor of Dalmatia, Alvize Marin, was warned about individuals in Boka, who were suspected of feeling sympathy towards the Revolution and its ideas. In October 1795, Mirislav tried to launch a rebellion, motivated by the ideas of brotherhood and freedom. This revolt was aimed at liberating certain areas on the border from Ottoman servitude. It was quelled, while Mirislav was kept in prison for some time, in Venice. He was released after the French conquered the city and sent to Budva to propagate the ideas of the Revolution and work to win over the local population. The paper also discusses its position during the first Austrian (1797–1805), Russian (1806–1807) and French (1807–1813) rule in Boka. Although the Austrian authorities harbored suspicion of Mirislav, he managed to survive thanks to the influence of his father, Count Antun Zanović, who was appointed manager of Budva. Mirislav found himself in the most difficult position during the Russian rule, when he spent some time in prison. He reached the peak of his rise in the political life of Boka during the French rule, when he was appointed to certain administrative positions in Budva. After France lost all illusions about the possibility of the survival of its government in Boka, Mirislav, thanks to good relations with Bishop Petar I Petrović-Njegoš, changed sides in 1813, denying any support to France. In the years that followed, Mirislav was relegated to the background. He spent a short time in prison in Dubrovnik, after which he was released, but was placed under surveillance by the Austrian authorities for the rest of his life.

The paper presents a comparative study of religious identity in countries that share similar sociopolitical circumstances, namely socialism/communism and postsocialism. The analysis is based on field research, and the chosen subject of study is the ethnic group of Banatian Bulgarians, whose members live on the territory of Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria. The paper suggests that different regulatory practices by governments have had different effects on religious identity, and that other social factors, such as the size of the communities and language use, are also significant. Religion in the socialist/communist period was most strictly regulated in Bulgaria, where religious tradition was disrupted, while in Serbia the traditional component of religious identity was preserved in the private sphere, and in Romania secularization was present in some social strata. In postsocialism religion has been revitalized, and data suggest that a high level of religiousness is related to the ability to use one’s first language in church, which, in our study, is the case in Romania.

The paper discusses fragments of utopian notions in South Slavic oral lyric poetry. The function of those fragments is to express aspirations for a different life, mainly regarding freedom of choice, a possibility to decide on one’s own life, and to act in order to fulfil desires – even at the cost of breaking the social rules of the community. The models of alternative worlds present in the songs in some segments correspond with reality, but above all, they offer a utopian vision of a different world as an expression of desires even when they remain unfulfilled (or impossible to be fulfilled). The utopian possibility is modelled by motives of mighty, bold, active maidens, who take the initiative, overcome obstacles, perform magical acts, use their beauty in order to fulfil their erotic desires and aspirations for a freer and more dignified life. In the end, the paper points out that the utopian desire in oral lyric songs is fulfilled in the very act of singing about an alternative world.

This paper is part of ongoing research conducted by the authors which aims to map the turbotronic scene and provide an answer to the question of what music can reveal about the broader dynamic of sociocultural life in contemporary Serbia. The paper follows the paths of the anthropology of music, already well established in Serbian anthropology. It focuses on the seemingly banal, everyday discursive practices of ordinary people, situates them in a wider framework of symbolic geographies, and suggests that turbotronic narratives belong to the discourse of the Balkan "barbarogenius". The paper shows, to use Hertzfeld's terminology, "how and under what pressure people resort to stereotypes, and even represent them directly – act them out, as it were". It answers the question of where the creators of turbotronic find binary oppositions consisting of essentialist constructs, how they instrumentalize them strategically, and how they use them in negotiating power. Our analysis shows that the following value signs assigned to the key pairs of oppositions in the discourse of the "Second Serbia" – (+) Western/European : (–) Balkan, (+) civilized : (–) primitive – have switched places within turbotronic discourse, and that the following pairs of oppositions have been added – (+) emotions : (–) reason, and (+) authentic : (–) fake. We propose that the change be interpreted as a potential reflection in the literature of the wider changes in the reception of the Ottoman heritage in Serbian culture but also in the wider region of the Balkans. An analysis of ethnographic material will show why the authors of turbotronic take the side of "the people" and "ordinary folk", why they insist on the "banished Balkan heritage", and will shed light on the function and symbolic significance that the kafana (a type of Balkan pub) assumes in their narratives. Finally, we suggest directions for future research of this analytically fruitful phenomenon.

This paper looks at how the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca (the Hajj) adapted to the novel circumstances created by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021. The pandemic has been an entirely novel and, probably, dominant liminal situation which has significantly affected the behavior of the faithful and the way in which their individual identity has been transformed, at least in the psychological sense. Following an introductory overview, which provides a brief description of the ritual process of the Hajj, the author briefly looks at the various ways of travel to Saudi Arabia from a historical perspective, as well as at new technical and health aspects which entailed the adaptation of this global ritual to pandemic conditions. Rituals are, undoubtedly, deeply connected to human psychological, but also social needs and inclinations, and help preserve functionality in dysfunctional situations such as natural disasters or the spread of new diseases. Similarly, they provide a safe zone in conditions of drastic and unwanted change. The paper therefore points out the very specific type of ambivalence which accompanies the fact that the natural human reaction at times of crisis is to "close ranks", which became extremely difficult or practically unfeasible in conditions of social distancing implemented as a measure to prevent the spread of the coronavirus in 2020-21. The conclusion highlights the fact that the latest experience with COVID-19 has had medical, economic, social, political, psychological and religious implications with long-term consequences for the organization of the Hajj.

The paper provides a framework for understanding the role of popular science in the sphere of the culture war currently being waged in the USA, and also in other places in the West. It focuses on the instrumentalization of the TV series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey and a reading of the cultural political messages woven into this narrative. It first describes the development of popular science as a means of establishing a modernist worldview which, through popular literature, but above all through TV series, has become an integral part of the upbringing of numerous generations in the West. It points out a number of useful, but also deeply problematic aspects of using popular science in education, and underlines its inherent ambivalences. Particular attention has been paid to the mechanism by which popular science takes on the character of an instrument bringing audiences closer to relevant knowledge akin to truth. In this context the concepts of media, television, genre and formula are described, as means by which popular science is established as the vehicle for a very specific worldview. In this way, the deconstruction of the narrative pattern of the Cosmos series, created by Ann Druyan, Neil deGrasse Tyson and Seth MacFarlane, has been prepared. The key conventions of the series are highlighted, e.g. the specific way of presenting facts, the significant use of special effects, or the presence of speculations about the future, and the inventions of narratives such as the Ship of the Imagination, the Cosmic Calendar or the Halls of Extinction. All this has been done in order to show the utility value of popular science narratives in the context of the culture war that has been waged in the US for decades by, roughly speaking, proponents of liberal humanism versus conservative fundamentalists. Particular attention has been paid to defining the concepts of cultural war and hegemony, as key to understanding long-standing tensions and conflicts between creationists and humanists in the US. The paper shows how the authors and producers of the series consciously engaged in criticism of the creationist refusal to accept a series of facts relating to the process of global warming. At the same time, it looks at criticism of the series from the creationist perspective. An analysis of the culture war shows that scientific topics have been instrumentalized and suggests their profound value for every sociocultural context. The paper looks at the reading of political messages into a popular science narrative, and highlights the importance and value, but also the danger of such acts. The concluding section stresses the fact that the series Cosmos supports a certain way of thinking about the world around us, and emphasizes its utility value in promoting a specific liberal progressivist worldview.

The paper deals with the ideological and chronological issues concerning Statehood day, which is celebrated on the 15th and 16th of February in Serbia. The focus will be on the connection which is being established between the state holiday of Statehood day and Candlemas Day which is a church holiday. The paper will further deal with the problems with dating the two key events – the start of the First Serbian Uprising in 1804 and the adoption of the first Serbian Constitution in 1835 – which, according to the Serbian law on national and other holidays, form the basis for the celebrating of Statehood day. The paper will prove that it wasn’t necessary for the legislators to insist on establishing a connection between the aforementioned events and the date of the church holiday neither in the 19th nor in the 21st century. The author will also point out the significant errors in chronology: it is falsely claimed that the anniversaries of both these events coincide with Candlemas Day (in 1804 and 1835, respectively), and that it is hence unwarranted to claim that they coincide with Candlemas Day in the 21st century. It will be shown that the reason for these errors lies in the incorrect calculation and translation of dates from the Julian into the Gregorian calendar, as w Cet article traite les problèmes idéologiques et chronologiques en relation avec le Jour de la souveraineté de la Serbie, fêté le 15 et le 16 février. La question du rattachement du Jour de la souveraineté à la fête religieuse de la Présentation du Christ a été problématisée, ensuite la question concernant la datation de deux événements qui, d’après la Loi sur les fêtes nationales dans la République de Serbie, sont à l’origine de la célébration du Jour de la souveraineté de la Serbie (début de la Première insurrection serbe de 1804 et l’adoption de la première Constitution serbe en 1835). Dans l’article, l’auteur démontre que le législateur a inutilement insisté sur le rattachement des événements évoqués à la date de la fête religieuse de la Présentation au XIXe puis au XXIe siècle. L’auteur rend compte des erreurs importantes concernant la chronologie : l’on soutient à tort que les deux événements ont eu lieu le jour de la Présentation en 1804 puis en 1835 ; par conséquent, les anniversaires des deux événements sont indûment associés à la Présentation au XXIe siècle. Dans l’article est expliqué que la raison de ces erreurs tient à la transposition erronée des dates du calendrier julien en calendrier grégorien, et l’auteur soutient la thèse que l’insistance actuelle sur l’association du Jour de la souveraineté à la Présentation est idéologiquement conditionnée, qu’elle est une conséquence de la désécularisation de la société en Serbie. y is ideologically conditioned and that it is a consequence of the desecularization of Serbian society.

The fabrication of the Minoan culture is the specifically modern phenomenon, closely linked to the imperial and colonial conquest and appropriation of Ancient Greece. The Greek war of independence created an arena in which Europe could take part in the fight for its cradle. In the postcolonial key, the paper situates the fresco “Captain of the Blacks” into the context of the fabrication of the Minoan culture and the colonial narratives inscribed into it. In the beginning of the 20th century, this colonial past of the notion, known today as the Minoan culture, played a major role in the definition of the European past, present and future. The Minoan culture, as a colonial discursive formation in archaeology, has remained in the framework of the culture-historical paradigm, but beyond it as well. The paper argues that the reconstruction of the fresco “Captain of the Blacks” in the works of Arthur Evans is the consequence of the colonial racism, putting the emphasis on the colour of the skin as a racial/ ethnic category. The interpretation that the dark-skinned figures are of the African origin has rarely been questioned, but rather perpetuated as a given

The article deals with the selected examples of the scene of Abraham’s hospitality in Eastern Christian and Serbian Medieval art. The paper analyzes the meaning of the scene and looks at the examples in the old refectory of the Monastery of St. Catherine on Sinai (fig. 1), in the chapel of King Dragutin Nemanjić in Đurđevi Stupovi near Ras (fig. 2), in the Church of the Mother of God in Dragaljevci near Sofia (fig. 3) and in the Church of St. Dimitrius in Boboševo (fig. 4) near Ćustendil. As it illustrates one of the key moments of the Holy history, the scene of Abraham’s hospitality has been frequently depicted in art since the earliest times. Due to its significance, its has been attracting the attention of scholars since ancient times and has been widely studied in international and Serbian historiography in terms of iconography and meaning. Therefore, the article discusses selected examples of the scene of Abraham’s hospitality in Eastern Christian and Serbian Medieval art which are characterized by certain iconographic and conceptual peculiarities. Abraham’s hospitality is an important, ancient, very often depicted and multifaceted theme, and the teaching about it represents the fundamental dogma of Orthodoxy – in this scene the image of the Holy Trinity is symbolically recognized. The article examines the position of this scene in the painted programme of the mentioned monuments and the dependence of the symbolism of this scene on the position it occupies in the painted programme of the church. Depending on the context in which this event is depicted in art, it carries a different meaning, i.e. different nuances of meaning. Selected examples of the scene of Abraham’s hospitality are placed in a specific conceptual context through examining their appropriate programmatic and conceptual analogies and by taking into account the place of their depiction in the given monuments. In this sense, the article places special emphasis on the fresco of Abraham’s Hospitality in the Chapel of King Dragutin Nemanjić in the Đurđevi Stupovi Monastery.

The aim of the paper was to introduce the specialized press oriented towards jazz music and its practitioners that was published from 1953 to 1965 on the territory of the Republic of Serbia. The marked period was chosen for consideration since it represents the most fruitful stage in the development of the press of a specific thematic profile, but also because of the significant changes in the entire Yugoslav society. These changes, as it was possible to show, influenced the complex processes that shaped the press of the time, as well as the attitude towards this musical genre and its practitioners. The processes in question include, first of all: certain internal political movements that consistently modeled the cultural policy of the time, within which jazz attempted to obtain a favorable position; integration of the former socialist state into polarized international currents that implied the use of jazz as a means of affirming the foreign policy orientation of Yugoslav society; and the creation of the operational power of artists for self-organization and the acquisition of certain labor and social rights within the Association of Jazz Musicians. The association was founded in 1953 in Belgrade with the aim of advocating for the rights of contemporary musicians, while at the same time initiating the publication of the first newspaper Jazz: Journal of Popular and Jazz Music (Jazz. List za pitanja zabavne i džez muzike). Under this name, the journal was published from 1953 to 1954, and during the publication period from 1957 to 1958 it changed its name to Bulletin of the Association of Jazz Musicians (Bilten Udruženja Jazz muzičara). After that, in Novi Sad, in 1962, Rhythm – Yugoslav Review of Jazz and Popular Music (Ritam – Jugoslovenska revija za džez i zabavnu muziku) began to be publish by NIP Dnevnik, and later changed its name to Rhythm – Yugoslav Review of Popular Music (Ritam – Jugoslovenska revija za zabavnu muziku), under which it continued to be published until it ceased publication in 1965.

The paper revises the gender aspect of media discourse in socialist Yugoslavia on the example of one of the oldest and most popular Yugoslav women's magazine "Bazar." An analysis of the textual and visual content of the 1973 edition (issues 208–233) reaffirmed the assumption that the mass media – including The Women's Press – actively participate in the construction and reproduction of both "femininity" and "masculinity", and in the depiction of desirable/expected gender relations in a certain socio-historical moment (Yugoslav socialism). In addition to the main female character – a beautiful, young, modern and well-groomed woman who is successful in all fields (at work, at home, as a wife, mother, sister, friend, worker...) – there is also an equally caring and dedicated husband and father, a modern man, successful in his field of expertise. In other words, of all the roles that Yugoslav society has assigned to women/men, the following seem to be dominant: She is primarily 1) a wife, mother and housewife, 2) a hard worker, and 3) a woman who is clearly positioned in the new consumer society, while He is 1) Pater Familias, 2) a successful businessman, and 3) a modern man who keeps up with the times. The research has shown that these (and such) "Bazar" images of a woman / man are highly harmonized with the official representation of gender in the socialist Yugoslav society – She is the embodiment of the socialist "super-woman", while He is depicted as part of the hegemonic model of masculinity. The female-male relationship is presented in the experimental media discourse in two ways. The first (socialist) model of gender polarity – the one that is in the central media plan / easily observable / clearly legible – is placed in the official narrative framework of socialism as an ideology that follows the principle of equality as the dominant matrix in social/gender/economic/family relations. In the second narrative plan, there is a traditional model of gender polarity, which is based on binary oppositions – weak-strong, gentle-rough, subordinate-dominant, dependent-independent, right-wrong – performed by the female-male couple. By analyzing the media discourse of the experimental socialist periodical, it has also been established that the narrative of one of the most popular Yugoslav women's magazines contains all three key terms (for gender reading or in the media text) – these are power, gender (in)equality and representation of meaning. Interpreting textual and visual content as a system of representation (and not presentation) of reality, it becomes obvious that despite the change in social paradigm in the years after World War II, the policy of gender representation in the context of power relations (man over woman) continued, which Yugoslav socialism – as a doctrine of equality – clearly could not (or did not want to) eradicate in practice.

It is virtually impossible to conduct a holistic study of any religious phenomenon without considering its relationship with health, healing, and the body. In the case of New Age or self-denominated "Spiritual" groups, the role of health takes on an even more prominent role, acting as a soteriology or a cultural ideal. This paper focuses on the conceptions of the body, healing, and well-being held by members of the Serbian group "Spiritual Technology," founded by Živorad Mihajlović Slavinski in 1996, and their associated practices. Through an in-depth analysis of various texts authored by Slavinski, healing practices are considered as religious practices, divided into prevention and remediation practices, along with their subsequent stages (diagnosis, treatment, and prescription). Based on an energetic view of the body, where well-being and unwellness are concepts constantly renegotiated between healer and patient, the body is understood as composed of entities, which have been classified and divided in terms of their origin and their influences on humans. This research concludes that these ritualized practices contribute to the creation of ritual bodies as well as common narratives of corporeality, health, and even a shared worldview, serving as an interpretative framework to interact with the self and the surrounding world and, therefore, playing an important role in the formation of contemporary subjectivities.

In the old Montenegrin masculine patriarchal culture, having children was one of the primary motivations for marriage. Women in labour faced significant community pressure to give birth to a male child, as evidenced by various ethnographic records and confirmed by contemporary anthropological research. Montenegro exhibits one of the most unbalanced ratios of newborn male to female babies among countries. This necessitates an analysis that integrates legal and anthropological perspectives on son preference. The article explores the socio-historical circumstances and modern expressions of the cult of the male child, followed by an examination of the legal implications of selective abortions. The legal dimension of abortion encompasses a broad normative framework, with the fundamental question concerning the boundary of legal protection in this area, i.e., the limit of state intervention in the personal sphere of individuals and citizens. The legal analysis will also include a reflection on the impact of criminal legal protection on this debate, particularly through the lens of the criminal offense of unlawful termination of pregnancy as stipulated in Article 150 of the Criminal Code of Montenegro. Considering the scope of rights to life, family, and reproduction, and recognizing that pregnancy termination motivated by sex selection is generally prohibited, yet this practice is widespread, the assumption is that the formal legal means to address this issue are limited. As this is a societal phenomenon involving sensitive legal, personal, cultural, religious, political, social, and moral issues, the paper discusses approaches for combating this practice.

The Renaissance humanist Cornelius Agrippa von Netesheim (1486–1533) left a rich body of works in philosophy, theology, biblical exegesis and occultism. The disparity and internal contradictions of this opus, as well as the ambivalent position of Agrippa on the intellectual map of the epoch, caused the reception of his work to branch out in the most diverse directions. Contemporaries from clerical and Protestant circles branded him as a heretic, whereas humanists recognized his great erudition and devotion to faith. While he considered himself a reformer of Christianity, his followers regarded him as an authority in Neoplatonic, Hermetic, and Esoteric studies. On the basis of tendentious interpretations of his writings, as well as the entire tradition of apocryphal stories that developed around his personality, the church and folk tradition of the 16th and 17th centuries constructed a representation of Agrippa as a servant of the devil. Therefore, he served as a model for the character of Faust, first to Christopher Marlowe and later to Goethe. With the strong development of science and its foundations being linked with occult teachings, in the 18th and 19th centuries the image of Agrippa as a proto-scientist appeared, e.g. in Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein. However, for the positivist science of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Agrippa was, at best, a representative of a barren branch of Western philosophical thought, and at worst, a mere charlatan or mentally disturbed person. Such a perception prevailed until the mid-20th century, when scholars from Warburg Institute in London developed new interpretations of Renaissance humanism, including Agrippa's role in it. Today's science views Agrippa as a representative of the vital religious component of humanism and as a link between ancient, medieval and Renaissance currents of thought. At the same time, in certain segments of New Age, his writings acquire the status of the "bible" of the occultism, and Agrippa himself the status of a kind of New Age guru. Therefore, the literary legacy of Cornelius Agrippa is of significance for the history of ideas, reception studies, imagology, and anthropology of religion as an exceptionally rich case study, and in this paper, we aim to trace the intricate paths of his reception in different epochs and cultural contexts.

The well-known narrative of zombies, the reanimated monsters of contemporary popular culture, can be traced back to the late 1960s, or more specifically to the release of the film Night of the Living Dead (1968) by American director George A. Romero. However, at the time of the film's inception the term zombie was already widely present in American popular culture: the cinematography of voodoo zombie, created in Haiti through magic and psychoactive substances, appeared in America in 1932, with the release of the film White Zombie, based on the travelogue The Magic Island (1929), by American missionary William Seabrooke. The paper initially points to the social and historical circumstances that led to the spread of zombies in Haiti: as the first independent nation of the Western Hemisphere, Haiti at the beginning of the twentieth century became the subject of American imperialist strategies and a threat to the maintenance of hegemony, therefore in the texts of colonial travel writers it was described as a nation of savagery, black magic, powerful voodoo cults, and the reanimated dead. Cultural and racist stereotypes that were transmitted to the United States justified the American "civilizing" mission, i.e. political and economic interventions. The role of zombies in Haiti was that of a slave, a profitable workforce, used by local urban elites, voodoo sorcerers, and colonial regimes since the eighteenth century. In this regard, my analysis highlights the ways in which White Zombie reproduces the established image of Haiti as an exotic place filled with mystery and dangers, adopts the dominant American viewpoints marked by discrimination and racism, and sets cultural norms of distinguishing between the civilized and the barbaric, whereby the white color of the skin reflects the norm of the civilized. To this end, the dialectic of slavery is emphasized in the film by the zombification of a young white woman, thus manifesting the tensions that existed between the imperialist powers and their "subjects" of enslavement, and emphasizing the unequal power relations between subordinate Haitian slaves and Westerners in high positions. Finally, the changes that have taken place over the decades of the zombie monster's development are highlighted: the zombie moves away from Haiti and approaches the modern world, and becomes a reanimated, highly infectious, cannibalistic monster of consumer society, that is, a monster of the global capitalist system.