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Despite the increasing relevance of Open Science (OS) in the European research landscape, very few publications have addressed the analysis of its role within the European rail context. To this effect, the present paper aims at contributing to shed light on the topic by setting the cornerstone for a differentiated analysis of OS in this sector. In order to do so, the analysis is divided into 2 main sections. The 1st provides an overview of initiatives and experiences regarding OS, which have been recently carried out in the sector. The analysis of initiatives and scientific publications has shown that Open Data (OD) is the area attracting more attention and with more potential for expansion mainly due to the commercial interest of the data. As expected, the use of Open Tools (OT) is common but, interestingly, a growing interest in the development of OT in the sector has been detected. The creation of Open Standards (OSt), developed by specific rail stakeholders’ groups or by coalitions of different stakeholders is increasing in the last years. Amongst the OS areas analysed, Open Access (OA) and Citizen Science (CS) have shown less progress. However, tendencies toward an increasing interest in these areas within the sector has been also detected. The 2nd section aims to uncover the issues or barriers preventing a wider spread of OS specifically in the rail sector and suggest regulatory avenues and actions to overcome them. The identified issues revolve around 3 topics: the lack of initiative on behalf of the European Union (EU) to a) engage other stakeholders beyond the field of research, and b) leverage untapped OS potential in sector-specific situations, which could contribute to its development; and finally, the absence of a sector-specific OS framework. The establishment of such a framework could have a significant positive impact in OD, which is the most appealing area and thus contributing to the uptake of OS as a whole in the sector. In view of such issues, the present paper suggests the establishment of: (1) a European Rail Open Science Policy Platform in order to create a forum-like space in which to align the stakeholder’s positions, and (2) a Joint Rail Data Action Plan to design an OS governance framework, with the aim to ensure the usability, quality, and reliability of data. After identifying the state of OS in the rail sector and the uncovering of several issues that are hindering its development, this paper concludes that the constant further monitoring with regards to needs, challenges and interests (or lack of such) of the different rail stakeholders is key to ensure the continuous development of OS.

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 presents a simulation of the Project Portfolio Management (PPM) model usage in evaluation and selection of modernization projects of Serbian Railways. Performance review of the selected projects is conducted in regards to the strategic goals of the company, which have been established during the process of strategic planning. The project selection model is methodologically set up as a two-step selection model. The number of portfolio projects is narrowed down by ranking their importance in regards to the success of the modernization program (benefits, risks, and resources), which is followed by the ranking of the projects on the basis of their contribution to the realization of previously chosen liquidity and rentability goals, which are always a challenge when it comes to railway companies. This selection procedure is simulated by applying the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), a mathematical model of linear programming, embedded in the software package “Expert Choice”. The simulation results show that, in this way, it is possible to achieve a considerable drop in the amount of necessary financial resources for the realization of modernization projects, which is also the main contribution of this paper. This proves the efficiency of the PPM concept application as a modern model of strategic management. The showcased model of project portfolio selection can find a significant usage among the current processes of railways restructuring, especially in financing of the projects of public–private partnerships.

Freight transport represents a very dynamic and competitive market with high requirements for reliability, lead time, cost, flexibility and visibility of transport service. Rationalization of transport service, reduced travelling time and reliable delivery times represent the main prerequisites for lowering the costs and increasing the efficiency of entire transport chain. These performance indicators actually represent the main factors affecting the shipper’s mode choice. Improvement of these factors could be achieved by improved coordination between rail and non-rail-related stakeholders involved in freight transport service planning and realization. Since this solution requires a multi-stakeholder collaboration, it is needed to evaluate the interests of each of them in order to derive a preferred set of indicators, which will facilitate a collectively accepted solution and value alignment of all involved actors. In this paper, the preferred set of indicators was selected by using the DEcision MAking Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) model technique integrated with the Analytic Network Process (ANP). DEMATEL is applied to analyse the causal relationships among the relevant dimensions and among the criteria within each dimension. The causal relationships are then used in ANP for determining the weights of the criteria. An empirical case study based on implementation of information sharing platform in rail intermodal transport chain is presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Based on this study the attributes that belong to reliability (“departing / arriving on-time”, “cancelled services”), lead time (“idle time”) and investment cost (“organizational culture”, “business process redesign”) dimensions represent five the most critical factors for obtaining a collectively accepted solution. This effective evaluation model enables policy makers and stakeholders in transportation / logistics to understand and conduct appropriate actions towards fulfilling the objectives for greener transportation. First published online 2 April 2021

The dominant approach of the international community to the subject of our research and teaching is to instrumentalise cultural heritage safeguarding within stabilisation and development programs in post-conflict regions. Since the turn of the Millennium, cultural heritage safeguarding has been among the crucial instruments used by the international community, especially in post-conflict regions, for: reconciliation and peace building; development of a common sense of belonging; promoting mutually respectful dialogue in culturally complex societies. Many international organizations, such as the UN, the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities, NATO, the Stability Pact for South Eastern Europe, the World Bank, the United Nations Development Program, the Council of Europe, and the EU, promote the management of ethno-political conflicts as their priority. Their agendas follow the principles of a) the overall relevance of cultural heritage for society and b) the importance of social networks for peace-building and peacekeeping in post-traumatic contexts. Instead of opposing this peace and development oriented paradigm from either anti-realist or nationalist perspective, we can recognize it, apply it and use it to improve the social status of social sciences and humanities in Serbia. Anthropological and critical heritage studies-based criticism of UNESCO-driven, state-governed ICH safeguarding fails to comprehend that standard academic constructivist analyses of a community’s key symbols of identity are offensive from the native’s point of view. Our typical analyses unwittingly confuse, annoy or even insult a great majority of the wider public who view/perceive collective identity as something given, inherited and real analogously to the objects and processes of the physical world. Consequently, our theoretical work counterindicates both peacekeeping, stability-building efforts by the international community in post-conflict regions and the goals of critical social science (which it nominally represents). Hence, a novel approach is required, one prioritising heritage stakeholder inclusion (and not our theoretical or ethnoreligious commitments). It is precisely the studies of nationalism and its consequences which forbid us to think of heritage as something useful, a counter-intuitive method for achieving fundamental anthropological goals. As communities regularly perceive their identities as objective and real, and see a critical social theory approach to their customs and traditions as confusing, non-academic, illegitimate or even offensive, I here propose a shift from constructionist criticism, standard in anthropology, to realist instrumentalism, typical of ethnology, in order to boost ICH safeguarding potential for achievement of both social and disciplinary-specific goals.

The results of theoretical and field research into a) the state of protection of minorities' intangible cultural heritage, and b) the evaluation criteria for social sciences and humanities in the Republic of Serbia, indicate a clear and concerning correlation. Seemingly paradoxically, social sciences and humanities in the Serbian language are in an equally unfavorable, undervalued position as is the cultural heritage of minorities relative to that of the majority population's. Analysis suggests that, although they mostly do not perceive themselves in this way, Serbian social sciences and humanities scholars are a vulnerable social group in the sector of science and higher education, in the same sense in which ethnic minorities and communities are in terms of government cultural policy. The paper, based on the conclusions of an analysis of selected cross-study findings of field and theoretical research over a number of years, also proposes how the existing vulnerability factors can be eliminated and future ones prevented, particularly through cooperation between these two, often mutually opposed groups.

In this paper, railway passenger flows are analyzed and a suitable modeling method proposed. Based on historical data composed from monthly passenger counts realized on Serbian railway network it is concluded that the time series has a strong autocorrelation of seasonal characteristics. In order to deal with seasonal periodicity, Seasonal AutoRegressive Integrated Moving Average (SARIMA) method is applied for fitting and forecasting the time series that spans over the January 2004 – June 2014 periods. Experimental results show good prediction performances. Therefore, developed SARIMA model can be considered for forecasting of monthly passenger flows on Serbian railways.

This paper looks at the current situation of the institutional practice of safeguarding the intangible cultural heritage (ICH) in terms of the idea, put forward in anthropological literature, about the need to establish an inclusive ICH register for the entire territory of the Republic of Serbia, and a separate one for the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina. In view of the principles of the Unesco Convention for the Safeguarding of the ICH and the accompanying Operational Directives for its implementation, the ethnic attribution of heritage, proposed as a solution to the problem of underrepresentation of minority heritage in the state register, is analytically shown to be possible, yet insufficient. Although neither Unesco methodology nor global cultural policies present an obstacle to the creation of parallel registers, the existing Safeguarding Network, as well as the problem of underrepresentation of minority identities, would not be resolved in a way that would not at present demand excessive theoretical and moral concessions from anthropology, and particularly from applied ethnology. An analysis of the disharmonies between the theoretical apparatus of anthropology, the practice of applying ethnology within the safeguarding system, the legal framework for the protetion of ethnic minorities, and the results of qualitative research among minority communities, suggests the need for further mutual adjustment between science, the administration and the non-governmental sector through intersectoral collaboration.

One of the most famous enterprises within the British search for the so-called Northwest Passage in the nineteenth century, the Franklin expedition, was described in the novel "Terror" (2007) by American writer Dan Simmons, as well as in the TV series based on the book (2018) of the same name. What the expedition became known for was its disappearance in the Arctic wastelands despite – for its time – the most modern technological equipment, as well as the fact that its command staff consisted of experienced researchers. Simmons' presentation of the circumstances that led to the collapse of the expedition was based, to a certain extent, on the scientific knowledge about it, collected from the first searches for the expedition to this day, but also on the cultural idea that was formed first in Great Britain, and then in Canada and the United States, during that time period. As the essence of cultural communication produced by the novel and the series, we see the inability of civilization as a source of fear – or horror – before the socially ontologically uncertain position that people are brought into, when they are displaced outside their original sociocultural context and find themselves in conditions in which norms of that context can be contrary to the measures that are taken for the sake of physical survival. This given fear is of cultural origin: its root is in a situationally generated idea that it is possible that the reality is different from the one which is being defined by the social order and cultural norms, namely the rules, that make our world known and subject to human control, are not fully applicable. The boundaries of this fear are permeable for those things which a person is not able to face successfully on the basis of his/her innate abilities and cultural development.

The aim of this paper is the assessment of innovations impact on European railways efficiency. In order to achieve sustainable transportation development, the key challenge is modal shift from road to rail, and development of single European transport market. Innovations in the railway transport sector contribute to the higher efficiency of transport services and promoting a more competitive and resource-efficient transport system. In the first stage of this study, efficiency scores are obtained through the use of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), and the ranking of 23 railway companies for the time period from 2009 to 2013 is conducted. In the second stage, factors representing technological and organizational innovations are introduced. Using different statistical tests the impact of these factors on railways technical efficiency (TE) is analyzed. Results showed significant impact of innovations on efficiency level of railway companies. This paper considers most recent time period, thus enabling observation of current trends in European railway transport market. Innovations observed in this study represent key elements in the field of technological development and the structural organization of railways, with the aim of achieving sustainable European rail transport system.

In the context of the forthcoming reactivation of the Serbian Ethnology and Anthropology Association and the normalization of the work of professional associa- tions, as well as their occasional adoption of their ethical codes in Serbia, we are analyzing the Code of ethics of the wolrd’sargest professional anthropological associ- ation – that of American Anthropological Association (AAA). Starting from the as- sumption that ethic codes are not "pure" moral algorithms of what is desirable/correct, but that they are laden by "hidden" theoretical and methodological assumptions, whether by their direct authors, or on the level of the tacit disciplinary knowledge, we are examining what can Serbian ethnological/anthropological community learn out of the genesis, structure, function and critique directed at AAA Code of Ethics. We are also considering the thesis that such codes could be approached as legitimizing narra- tive practices, not unlike those of magic, through which the discipline is attempting to transform itself from the status of fluid and generally socially unrecognized (and even obscure) occupation into a generally recognized, formally licensed and respecta- ble profession. We suggest for anthropology in Serbia to construct its professional sta- tus by forming an alliance with applied ethics offering the services of customization of ethic codes to other professions, through cultural analysis of moral decision-ma- king, instead of legitimizing itself by a contradictory code of ethics, burdened with hollow magic principles and theoretical and methodological issues.

We explore Bennet’s suggestion that an entire sub-disciplinary tradition within applied anthropology, namely the action anthropology, was built on specific methodolo gical algorythm, "means-as ends", derived from pragmatic logic of discovery and adapted to ethnographic research. Following the founder of the interdisciplinary reflective methodology John Dewey and his unifying logic of scientific discovery, social criticism and pedagogic-activist oriented research, Sol Tax intended to establish the tradition of action anthropology, which saw both its peak and ending in the illustrious The Fox Project. Our aim, apart from the critical recapitulation of the methodology used in the Fox Project, logical-methodological analysis of Dewey’s logic of discovery applied to anthropology, and the reinterpretation of the general point of this episode from disciplinary history, is to analyze the implications of this research option for future anthropologic research.

In this study, I suggest that reflexivity in anthropology can be viewed as a coordinative definition that helped anthropology survive its three crises – the crisis of ethnographic representation, the crisis of scientific realism, and the crisis of anthropological authority. In addition, reflexivity, in a specific sense, can be taken as a substitute for experiment, a subsititute even better than comparative studies, and can thus help fulfill the long dream of consolidating anthropology on firm scientific grounds (a dream I believe is, though, no longer necessary). This text should be understood as a part of a series of studies that strive towards the methodological formalization of supposedly formalization-resistant concepts of postmodern anthropology. In reality, reflexive anthropology became postmodern science only by admitting to be experimental art, but the question is who would understand and, more importantly, finance and apply this concept? The incorporation of reflexivity into the core of anthropology enabled it to finally achieve the status of science, in the most conservative and general methodological sense. Therefore, the anti-postmodern frustration present in some relatively recent debates, examples of which we can see in this volume, is neither methodologically nor pragmatically founded. Reflexivity can only be useful, not harmful to the discipline, even from the standpoint of traditional, problem-applicative concepts of method. The only remaining assignment is to reformulate it so it could be applied by methodological traditionalists as well.

In this article, from an anti-essentialist and anti-primordial view of normal science in anthropology, argumentation is being developed against an essentialist foundation of multiculturalism, as an imprudent legal transplant and as a mode of developing/survival of ethnocratic professionalizing of ethnicity and identity politics, through the example of a symptomatic article 64 paragraph 2 of the Constitution of the Republic of Serbia. The Constitution radicalizes multicultural policies, treating ethnic, confessional and other contingent arrangements as natural kinds. Treating the cultural-historic categories, for example, ethnicity or religious identity as natural kinds in public policies like the Constitution, leads to a situation where the contingent, interactive arrangements in the cultural reality receive an aureole of a given, indifferent and permanent states, which potentially generates and deepens social conflicts which it intends to absorb, forestall or regulate. After referring to the proven comparatively-historic contraindicated aspects of multicultural policies and a shorter analysis of the above mentioned example, the author argues for deepening of the productive interdisciplinary cooperation of professional jurists, professional anthropologists and other experts in the fields of social sciences and humanisties, in a mutual effort for further de-primordialisation and de-essentialisation of public policies in Serbia.

Drawing on the explanation already offered for the confusion of positivism with realism in the epistemological imagination of the author and founder of postmodern anthropology, the paper analyzes the moral implications of dealing with problems characteristic of the philosophy of science by literary-theoretical means. The transdisciplinary migration of "realism" from literary theory to social science methodology has produced a whole new history of anthropology. The history of pre-postmodern anthropology constructed in this manner can be said to fit the register of some sort of comparative-cultural theory of retroactive moral judgement, complementing postmodern anthropology as a general theory of writing by political subjects, so that the theoretical-methodological dilemmas of postmodern anthropology do not constitute proof of the legitimacy of a holistic interpretation of the discipline’s founders’ intentions, but rather lead to neo-pyrrhonic, formalistic endeavours to uphold, by respecting academic trappings, the academic authority of the discipline whose subject, method and purpose, as a rule, even colleagues from adjacent departments for various reasons fail to understand. In the paper, evidence for this is derived from Clifford's writing of Malinowski, and the moral implications of the unfortunate analogy between the writing of political subjects and the writing of disciplinary founders are followed through. The paper then goes on to explain that the critique of the possibilities of misuse, particularly through political instrumentalization, of anthropological fictions as evidence of Others did not have to come at the cost of sacrificing the semblance of continuity in the establishment of anthropology as a proper academic discipline.

Појам „музика“ треба посматрати као синестезички концепт: утисци о њој не преносе се искључиво чулом слуха, већ и чулом вида, а њено дејство може се посматрати као интелектуално и емотивно, као однос према одсвираном или изреченом у тексту песме, али и према самој појави или наступу музичара, извођењу музичког дела и томе слично. Другим речима, музиком не саобраћамо само тако што је свирамо и слушамо, већ и тако што је схватамо – у смислу културног и друштвеног феномена. Они који користе на такав начин схваћен концепт музике не морају бити ни музичари пошто се друштвено и културно разумљиве и релевантне поруке могу пренети и једноставним емитовањем одређених музичких аудио или видео записа или путем заузимања става према неком музичком делу. Музика представља медијум изражавања социокултурне другости у западној цивилизацији, барем од средњег века наовамо, али представља и начин произвођења те другости. Под произвођењем другости подразумевамо „откривене“, то јест свесне и намераване појединачне чинове употребе музике као синестезичког концепта у сврху преношења културне поруке о одређеној врсти другости у датом социокултурnom kontekсту, а која за непосредну референцу узима пошиљаоца такве поруке. Циљ нам је да представимо механизам произвођења другости на такав начин, разматрањем примера који се тичу различитих врста музичких дела (рокенрол, филмска музика, класична музика итд.), различитих врста другости (онтолошка, политичка, етничка итд.) и различитих социокултурних контекста из ближе и даље прошлости, као и из садашњости.

Битно својство дела једног од најутицајнијих писаца научне фантастике прошлог века, Филипа Киндреда Дика, јесте испољавање различитих искустава стварности од стране једног или више актера – стварање утиска код читалаца да се може говорити о више различитих равни постојања у оквиру јединственог наративно задатог референтног оквира. За разлику од претходних аутора који су се бавили овим проблемом, не тумачимо их у смислу паралелних или алтернативних онтолошки равноправних стварности, већ као онтолошки различита егзистенцијална исходишта која ће се, наративним разрешењем, у највећем броју Дикових дела слити у једну социјалну раван. Не улазећи у књижевне и уметничке аспекте дела, оваква анализа открива њихову до данас непрепознату културну поруку – социјално-онтолошки солипсизам, релевантну за разумевање не само двадесетовековних већ и савремених социјалних утопија.

In this paper, the possibility and potential benefits of implementing discriminatory policies in rail freight transportation are analyzed, with the aim of revenue maximization. A regular, cyclic, single train service with fixed composition and capacity is studied. The problem is decomposed into discrete time periods. Transportation requests arise randomly over time, and the decision of either accept or reject a certain request has to be made. The problem is formulated via dynamic programming, and the deterministic approximations of the problem are used in order to formulate booking limits and bid price policies. Results obtained are compared with those of standard first come – first served policy, which is implemented by the Serbian railways. Although not acceptable in all contexts, the proposed aggressive policies demonstrated promising benefits.

Konferencija održana u Beču 24-25.11.2016.

U članku se sa antiesencijalističkog i antiprimordijalističkog stanovništa normalne nauke u antropologiji razvija argumentacija protiv konstitucionalizacije multikulturalizma, kao nepromišljenog pravnog transplanta i kao modusa razvijanja/opstanka etnokratske profesionalizacije etniciteta i politike identiteta, na primeru simptomatičnog člana 64. st. 2 Ustava Republike Srbije. Ustav radikalizuje multikulturne politike, tretirajući etničke, konfesionalne i druge kontigentne aranžmane kao prirodne vrste. Tretiranje kulturnoistorijskih kategorija, na primer etniciteta ili konfesionalnog identiteta, kao prirodnih vrsta u javnim politikama poput Ustava, dovodi nas u situaciju u kojoj kontigentni, interaktivni aranžmani u kulturnoj stvarnosti dobijaju oreol zadatih, indiferentnih i trajnih stanja, što potencijalno generiše i produbljuje društvene sukobe koje je namerilo da amortizuje, predupredi ili reguliše. Nakon upućivanja na komparativno-istorijski provereno kontraindikovane aspekte multikulturnih politikâ i kraće analize pomenutog primera, autor se zalaže za produbljivanje plodne interdisciplinarne saradnje profesionalnih pravnika, profesionalnih antropologa i drugih stručnjaka u polju društveno-humanističkih nauka, na zajedničkom zalaganju za dalju deprimordijalizaciju i deesencijalizaciju javnih politika u Srbiji.

U studiji istražujemo sugestiju da je čitava jedna poddisciplinarna tradicija u okvirima primenjene antropologije – akciona antropologija – koristila sasvim specifičan metod "sredstava-kao-ciljeva" izveden iz pragmatičke logike otkrića i prilagođen etnografskim istraživanjima. Po uzoru na Džona Djuija, rodonačelnika interdisciplinarne reflektivne metodologije koja je za cilj imala da objedini logiku naučnog otkrića, socijalnu kritiku i pedagoško-aktivistički orijentisano istraživanje, Sol Teks je svojevremeno pokušao da zasnuje tradiciju akcione antropologije, koja je i svoj vrhunac i kraj doživela antologijskim Projektom Foks. Cilj nam je da, osim kritičke rekapitulacije metodologije korišćene u Projektu Foks, logičko-metodološke analize Djuijeve logike otkrića primenjene na antropologiju i reinterpretacije opšteg mesta ove epizode iz istorije metodoloških ideja u disciplini, analiziramo implikacije ove istraživačke opcije za buduća antropološka istraživanja.

Povodom knjige Senke Kovač, Marsel Griol i naučna preispitivanja na kraju dvadesetog veka. Beograd: Muzej afričke umetnosti, 2007, 128 str.

Ovom monografskom studijom predlažem da refleksivnost posmatramo kao koordinativnu definiciju koja preživljava postmodernu antropologiju i njoj svojstven sistem tri krize – krize etnografske reprezentacije, krize naučnog realizma i krize autoriteta antropologa. Osim toga, u jednom od specifičnih značenja, antropološku refleksivnost predlažem da rekontekstualizujemo i kao zamenu za eksperiment, bolju od komparativnog metoda – kao konačno ispunjenje davnog sna o antropologiji kao nauci (koje nam, doduše, više nije potrebno osim zbog samoreprezentacije). Studija je jedna u seriji tekstova koji za cilj imaju da rekonstruišu i metodološki formalizuju tobože formalizaciji nepodložne koncepte postmoderne antropologije. Refleksivna antropologija postala je postmoderna nauka zato što je priznala da je eksperimentalna umetnost, samo, ko to razume i ko to želi da finansira i primenjuje? Antropologija je putem postepenog inkorporiranja refleksivnosti u neupitno disciplinarno jezgro konačno postala nauka, u najkonzervativnijem opštem metodološkom smislu, pa anti-postmoderna frustracija u debatama oko Milenijuma, obnovljenim i u ovom časopisu, nema ni metodološkog osnova, ni pragmatičko opravdanje. Refleksivnost nam koristi, a ne šteti, čak i iz tradicionalnog pogleda na teorije i problemski-aplikativnog pogleda na metod, samo je vreme da je konačno formulišemo tako da mogu da je primene i metodološki tradicionalisti.

U kontekstu predstoćeje obnove rada Etnološkog i antropološkog društva Srbije, i normalizacije rada profesionalnih društava, kao i povremenog usvajanja njihovih etičkih kodeksa u Srbiji, analiziramo etički kodeks najveće antropološke profesionalne asocijacije na svetu – Američke antropološke asocijacije (AAA). Polazeći od pretpostavke da etički kodeksi nisu "čisti" moralni algoritmi poželjnog/ispravnog postupanja, već da su obogaćeni/opterećeni "skrivenim" teorijskim i metodološkim pretpostavkama, bilo njihovih neposrednih autora, bilo na nivou prećutnog znanja disciplinarne zajednice, analiziramo šta sve srpska etnološka/antropološka zajednica može da nauči iz geneze, strukture, funkcije i kritika upućenih etičkom kodeksu AAA. Razmotramo i tezu da su etički kodeksi antropoloških asocijacija legitimacijske narativne prakse, poput magijskih, kojima disciplina pokušava da se iz statusa fluidnog i društveno uglavnom neprepoznatog (pa i opskurnog) zanimanja transformiše u opšte priznatu, formalno licenciranu i uglednu profesiju. Predlažemo da antropologija u Srbiji, umesto da se ispraznim magijskim formulama nevešto legitimiše kao profesija putem uspostavljanja teorijsko-metodološki opterećenog etičkog kodeksa čija je primena kontraindikovana, izgradi profesionalni status tako što će, u savezu sa primenjenom etikom, ponuditi usluge kastomizacije etičkih kodeksa drugim zanimanjima, u vidu kulturne analize moralnog odlučivanja.

Postmoderna antropologija nije imala ni priliku da elaborira svoj krajnji domet i ključni razlog postojanja u istoriji antropoloških ideja – naučno objašnjenje/moralno normiranje pisanja Drugih (koja je i sama redukovala na poprilično konzervativan projekat metodološke regulacije, naivno prihvativši igru na metodološkom terenu). Nerazumevanja u vezi s ovom hrpom socijalno-teorijskih ideja i metodoloških postupaka posebno su bila velika u slučaju samih velikih reči – nosećih pojmova discipline, poput etnografije.

In the context of transforming a part of Serbian anthropology into social theoretic management of identity, I suggest both comparative historiographic and ethnographic learning from societies with similar post-colonial experience, with the aim to include the discipline into an urgent defense of Serbia and Belgrade from further ethno-profiteering interests of elites in/from outer territories, left over on the ruins of our ill judged, resource incompatible, exaggerated or immoral twentieth century adventures. Serbian anthropology, written by anthropologists to whom Serbia and Belgrade are "homeland" by origin or civilized choice, should play the key role in the defense of Serbian citizens from the interest of elites in/from the outer "homelands", particularly by revealing the processes for which it is, as a discipline, most expert at – the professionalization of ethnicity, interactive and hybrid nature of identity, instrumental nature of tradition and the identity politics in general. Having in mind the latest attempt, a particularly successful one, conducted by the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century that the lives, health, well-being, dignity and future of persons born in and loyal to the interest of Serbia and Belgrade, in large scale, thoroughly and long term be sacrificed and dedicated to the interests of ethno-profiteering elites in/from outer territories, in this article I point to the possibility to, along with the comparative learning from the above mentioned post-colonial experiences, delicate experiences of urgent anthropology be applied as well as the rich tradition of collective research. This text analyzes the results of first such research, that represenst the initial, praiseworthy and a brave step in the wise striving to engage social sciences and humanities in a search of expert and not mythical/daily-political solutions of the key problem of the Serbian nation – that of how to settle the interests of the elites of population in/from outer territories sufficiently so that their local/regional problems or private interests can never again be treated as the national interest, nor be used as reasons for (self)destruction and(self)humiliation of Serbia and Belgrade.

The paper offers an alternative interpretation of the genesis of the literary turn in anthropology, as an "interim solution" in the context of the ideological incorrectness of radical anti-colonial theories in a liberal democracy. Critical anthropology in the 1960s and 1970s drew considerable inspiration from reformational currents in neo-Marxist sociology and social philosophy, arousing ideological opposition among the numerous participants of methodological debates. This opposition would prove crucial for their subsequent modest development. This activistic ideological ballast actually slowed down the development of potent externalist analyses of the social determination of anthropology and academe in general, leaving room for studies of ethnographic writing. Anticipating, in terms of themes and trends, "nonmethodological" solutions to methodological problems, it had a direct effect on the substitution of poetics and contextual reflection for methodological regulation. Thus, paradoxically, extremely externalistically oriented analyses, which attempted to merge ethical, political and methodological debates, reduced the methodological focus of the disciplinary community from issues of research objectivity and the reliability of ethnographic records to issues concerning style and the writing of anthropology. In this context, debates on relativism, realism, representation, authority and reflexivity, typical of 1980s postmodern anthropology, have become a socially acceptable alternative to the critical and neo-Marxist anthropology of Afro-Americans, feminists or of the otherwise oppressed/studied when they in turn become nativistic anthropologists. The "literary turn" in postmodern anthropology is generally interpreted as an externalist critique of traditional ethnographic realism, offering an ethical and political interpretation of reflexivity as per se more correct than traditional positivist ethnography.

Annual meeting of the Croatian Ethnological Society, Zagreb 2014.

Keeping in mind the present transcendence of the national/democratic dichotomy and the recent turn from governmental to cultural elites in the policies of the EU and the European Council directed at the Republic of Serbia, the paper recommends a new field of application of ethnology and anthropology, based on previous analyses and modifications of identity policies of the EU. The foundation of the baseless idea of Europe as a framework in which national identities and cultural heritage are weakened and even disappear will be considered, and the fact that the EU is the largest global consumer of identity will be pointed out, along with the possibilities this brings to the domain of maintaining the national identity and cultural heritage of the citizens of Serbia. Ethnologists and anthropologists can participate in this process not only professionally, as researchers, or privately as political actors, but also in the domain of the application of science, helping culturally legitimate elites recognize that the protection of national identities and cultural heritage within the confines of an international budget is a lucrative, sustainable and efficient way to maintain interpretative sovereignty, especially in times of crisis for national budgets. Seeing as trained ethnologists and anthropologists are professionally trained for consulting in the domain of identity issues, they are in the unique position to point both sides in the process of European integrations toward the huge potential within further redirecting of incentives toward culturally legitimate elites.

The recent rhetoric of the "end" or "failure" of multiculturalism in Europe and beyond came as no surprise to anthropologists. Moreover, the statements made by leading politicians of key European economies seem as though they are based on the decades old anthropological critique of the consequences of the failed implementation of multicultural policies in Europe and on the global level. It is as though the messages we have been getting over the course of the last few years – that multicultural policies are contraindicated, that they weaken the contacts between cultures, rob individuals of the right to change and chose their identities and strengthen intra-cultural mediators of power, with patriarchy, violence against women and children, leaving school, religious fundamentalism and even terrorism as main consequences – are being read by politicians from anthropological analyses of abuses of collective "cultural" rights. The paper considers the nature of this similarity between the discourse of politicians and anthropologists with a special emphasis on the status of "Islam" in them, and discusses whether it is congruence or mere coincidence of stances toward minorities, immigrants and cultural differences, as toward the regulations which were tasked with protecting this diversity as a fundamental European value which today, at least at the rhetorical level, seems to be fading.

Taking into account recent critiques of "underdevelopment", "positivism", "methodological backwardness" and other failings attributed to socalled "American Anthropology" by some of the authors from the Belgrade Structural-semiotic School of Anthropology of Folklore, I analyse the context in which colleagues and students may be tempted to explain common sense political connection between polyphone ethnography, neo-romanticism and nationalism as counter-intuitive history of the discipline. I already pointed that the important transformative differences in the attitudes towards structuralism between European anthropologists, especially Belgrade Structural-semiotic School of Anthropology of Folklore and so called "American Anthropology", are the consequence of a pure coincidence – the fact that French structuralism and French poststructuralism were launched simultaneously at the American interdisciplinary intellectual scene ("Theory") at the same conference. This ironic concurrence would not be much more than one entertaining episode for students, historians of anthropology and historians of ideas, if there were no attempts (more and more frequent and increasingly fluently articulated) to compare different intellectual traditions as they were elements of the same unilineal evolution of the discipline. Belgrade Structural-semiotic School (further called only SS) and especially its spiritus movens and most prominent representative Prof. Kovačević started in recent years to criticise some "American Anthropology" measuring its academic "achievement" (the author’s term) in comparative perspective and taking as an analytical unit uncritically generalized traditions marked with a single term of "postmodern anthropology" on the one hand, and "anthropology" on the other. Belgrade SS School did develop globally original, although badly promoted and never fully used, battery for the synchronic analysis of the folklore phenomena, but this was done only after Leach, Needham, Schneider and representatives of ethnoscience and cognitive anthropology had already adapted Levi-Strauss’s ideas about mind and science to ethnographic phenomenology. Transformation of Levi-Strauss’s analysis and limited success of its adaptation to the analysis of phenomena that usually concern anthropology happened simultaneously with the development of the critique of structuralism as a theory of culture in the American academic scene. This proves a theory that there is at least one "Atlantic split", analogue to that in philosophy, more than it makes a relevant context for measuring of the comparative ’academic achievements’ of the specific and unconnected disciplinary traditions. Indirectly, this paper explains that Levi-Strauss’s work has contradictory functions in the history of ideas in anthropology, serving as a starting point for ‘postmodern’ neo-romantic and positivistic critique of imperial realism (in USA), as well as ‘enlightened’, realistic and anti-tribal critique of ethnology as positivistic, nationalistic and national science (in Serbia). In this paper, special emphasis is placed on the local context in which structuralism as a founding discourse of anthropology is opposed to ethnology as national prose. As such it had completely different role in comparison to structuralism in a) the history of American anthropology and b) in the history of interdisciplinary/ postmodern Theory.

In his explicitly theoretical works, Johannes Fabian, one of the key intradisciplinary "affinities" of the author-founder of postmodern anthropology, constructed a specific view of Claude Lévi-Strauss's structuralism, which, as reinterpreted by critical anthropologists, was to fundamentally shape the history of anthropological post-structuralism. In order to explain that the constitution of the subject of research through research itself – i.e. "the invention of the subject of anthropology" – should be accorded the status of the crucial problem of anthropological methodology, Fabian imputed to Lévi-Strauss a rigid and amateurish preconception of research in the natural sciences as inherently positivist. The opposition structuralism/poststructuralism = positivism/postpositivism thus implied was to permanently reshape discussions on realism in critical anthropology, with absurd consequences. The most important of these was the supposedly "antirealist" character of postmodern anthropology, as a direct derivative of critical anthroplogy, which, being aware that reality is created by research, was now seen to play a somehow more ethical and less repressive part in knowledge/power games. The delight at the discovery of this methodological commonplace – that the subject of research is constituted by research itself – might have been but a matter of passing interest, being itself a common enough phenomenon, had not this particular intradisciplinary exchange led to the discrediting of the entire methodological package associated with structuralism. Paradoxically, the retaining of a realistic, radically antipositivist structural method would have made possible the achievement of the cultural-critical ambitions of postmodern anthropology's research program, had not the method been ineptly contaminated by this chain of activist reinterpretation which eventually frustrated the aims it had set out to accomplish.

The paper considers theoretical and methodological problems noted during the research project “Social and cultural potentials of the Roma ethnic community in Serbia” undertaken during 2013 and 2014. These problems point to an extant yet latent tension between the anthropological and the sociological approaches to the researched reality, with special emphasis on the antirealist tradition of the former and the empiricist “realist” tradition of the latter in the Serbian academic tradition of these disciplines. The paper considers how standard issues connected to methodological aspects of this primarily sociological research project (choice of topic, creation of sample, the making of field instruments, selection of informants, communication in the field, use of field assistants, data analysis and the making of the manuscript) diffract through the prism of theoretically disputable concepts of identity, ethnicity, assimilation and essentialization, which are subject to continuing questioning in anthropological theoretical and empirical research. The experience of conducting research together displays a set of methodological defaults on the anthropological and a set of theoretical defaults on the sociological side, followed by research renunciations and interpretative tensions and frustrations that arise from them, so it can be used as a guide to understanding disciplinary differences and similarities, especially when planning cooperation on a global level as well as in the local research context. Aside from this, the indivisibility of theoretical and methodological structures and the huge influence of theory on method, as demonstrated by the research itself, is considered, with implications for understanding theoretical and methodological issues which are bigger than the two disciplines in question. It is concluded that, for pragmatic reasons, multidisciplinary research of this type must be designed to suppress the theoretical ambitions of anthropology as well as the methodological ambitions of sociology.

The article analyzes the consequences of the reductionist application of criteria typical of the natural, mainly laboratory sciences, in the process of evaluation of the results of the work of researchers and institutions in all the other scientific disciplines, mainly in the field of social sciences and humanities, in the Republic of Serbia. As an example of this trend, the analysis focuses on the absurd criteria, currently in effect, for the conducting of PhD studies in the field of social sciences and humanities, which exclude the scientific books written by lecturers and only value articles published in journals. After this, the ignorance, misapprehensions, logical fallacies and interests which might be behind these criteria are analyzed. Special attention in the analysis is given to the reduction of global to fundamental. It is concluded that the application of the criteria currently in effect leads to the loss of interpretative sovereignty, which occurs when institutions, authors, referees and editors who are highly competent experts in regional and national issues are sacrificed in favor of foreign owners, institutions, authors, referees and editors that, by and large, possess less competence and expertise in regional and national issues, and have non-scientific interests and loyalties which don’t necessarily coincide with the interests of Serbian citizens. Finally, the consequences of the ongoing ethnocidal renunciation of scientific interpretative sovereignty are considered, especially the relinquishing of interpretations of history, identity and interconnected cultural issues and social problems to nonscientific discourses in Serbian society. Discourses which inevitably fill the empty room left in the public sphere by the ever-faster extinguishing of journals and publications in Serbian and the languages of ethnic minorities.

"Srpske studije" Vol. 1 (2010), Centar za srpske studije Filozofskog fakulteta Univerziteta u Beogradu

The paper considers theoretical and methodological problems noted during the research project “Social and cultural potentials of the Roma ethnic community in Serbia” undertaken during 2013 and 2014. These problems point to an extant yet latent tension between the anthropological and the sociological approaches to the researched reality, with special emphasis on the antirealist tradition of the former and the empiricist “realist” tradition of the latter in the Serbian academic tradition of these disciplines. The paper considers how standard issues connected to methodological aspects of this primarily sociological research project (choice of topic, creation of sample, the making of field instruments, selection of informants, communication in the field, use of field assistants, data analysis and the making of the manuscript) diffract through the prism of theoretically disputable concepts of identity, ethnicity, assimilation and essentialization, which are subject to continuing questioning in anthropological theoretical and empirical research. The experience of conducting research together displays a set of methodological defaults on the anthropological and a set of theoretical defaults on the sociological side, followed by research renunciations and interpretative tensions and frustrations that arise from them, so it can be used as a guide to understanding disciplinary differences and similarities, especially when planning cooperation on a global level as well as in the local research context. Aside from this, the indivisibility of theoretical and methodological structures and the huge influence of theory on method, as demonstrated by the research itself, is considered, with implications for understanding theoretical and methodological issues which are bigger than the two disciplines in question. It is concluded that, for pragmatic reasons, multidisciplinary research of this type must be designed to suppress the theoretical ambitions of anthropology as well as the methodological ambitions of sociology.

Senka Kovač, Marsel Griol i naučna preispitivanja na kraju dvadesetog veka. Beograd: Muzej afričke umetnosti, 2007, 128 str.

Knowing culture: between constructions, meanings and representations, Zagreb 2014.

The article analyzes the consequences of the reductionist application of criteria characteristic to the natural, mainly laboratory sciences, in the evaluation of the results of the work of researchers and institutions in other scientific disciplines, mainly the field of social sciences and humanities in the Republic of Serbia. As an example of this trend, the analysis focuses on the absurd criteria, currently in effect, for the conducting of PhD studies in the field of social sciences and humanities, which exclude the scientific books written by lecturers and only value articles published in journals. After this, the ignorance, misapprehensions, logical fallacies and interests which might be behind these criteria are analyzed. Special attention in the analysis is given to the reduction of global to fundamental. It is concluded that the application of the criteria currently in effect leads to the loss of interpretative sovereignty, which occurs when institutions, authors, referees and editors who are highly competent experts in matters of regional and national issues are sacrificed in favor of foreign owners, institutions, authors, referees and editors that, by and large, possess less competence and expertise in regional and national issues, and have non-scientific interests and loyalties which don’t necessarily coincide with the interests of Serbian citizens. Finally, the consequences of the ongoing ethnocidal renunciation of scientific interpretative sovereignty are considered, especially the relinquishing of interpretations of history, identity and interconnected cultural issues and social problems to nonscientific discourses in Serbian society. Discourses which inevitably fill the empty room left in the public sphere by the ever-faster extinguishing of journals and publications in Serbian and the languages of ethnic minorities.

The recent rhetoric of the “end” or “failure” of multiculturalism in Europe and beyond came as no surprise to anthropologists. Moreover, the statements made by leading politicians of key European economies seem as though they are based on the decades old anthropological critique of the consequences of the failed implementation of multicultural policies in Europe and on the global level. It is as though the messages we have been getting over the course of the last few years – that multicultural policies are contraindicated, that they weaken the contacts between cultures, rob individuals of the right to change and chose their identities and strengthen intra-cultural mediators of power, with patriarchy, violence against women and children, leaving school, religious fundamentalism and even terrorism as main consequences – are being read by politicians from anthropological analyses of abuses of collective “cultural” rights. The paper considers the nature of this similarity between the discourse of politicians and anthropologists with a special emphasis on the status of “Islam” in them, and discusses whether it is congruence or mere coincidence of stances toward minorities, immigrants and cultural differences, as toward the regulations which were tasked with protecting this diversity as a fundamental European value which today, at least at the rhetorical level, seems to be fading.

Keeping in mind the present transcendence of the national/democratic dichotomy and the recent turn from governmental to cultural elites in the policies of the EU and the European Council directed at the Republic of Serbia, the paper recommends a new field of application of ethnology and anthropology, based on previous analyses and modifications of identity policies of the EU. The foundation of the baseless idea of Europe as a framework in which national identities and cultural heritage are weakened and even disappear will be considered, and the fact that the EU is the largest global consumer of identity will be pointed out, along with the possibilities this brings to the domain of maintaining the national identity and cultural heritage of the citizens of Serbia. Ethnologists and anthropologists can participate in this process not only professionally, as researchers, or privately as political actors, but also in the domain of the application of science, helping culturally legitimate elites recognize that the protection of national identities and cultural heritage within the confines of an international budget is a lucrative, sustainable and efficient way to maintain interpretative sovereignty, especially in times of crisis for national budgets. Seeing as trained ethnologists and anthropologists are professionally trained for consulting in the domain of identity issues, they are in the unique position to point both sides in the process of European integrations toward the huge potential within further redirecting of incentives toward culturally legitimate elites.

Center for Serbian Studies, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade, vol. 1 (2010)

In his explicitly theoretical works, Johannes Fabian, one of the key intradisciplinary "affinities" of the author-founder of postmodern anthropology, constructed a specific view of Claude Lévi-Strauss's structuralism, which, as reinterpreted by critical anthropologists, was to fundamentally shape the history of anthropological post-structuralism. In order to explain that the constitution of the subject of research through research itself – i.e. "the invention of the subject of anthropology" – should be accorded the status of the crucial problem of anthropological methodology, Fabian imputed to Lévi-Strauss a rigid and amateurish preconception of research in the natural sciences as inherently positivist. The opposition structuralism/poststructuralism = positivism/postpositivism thus implied was to permanently reshape discussions on realism in critical anthropology, with absurd consequences. The most important of these was the supposedly "antirealist" character of postmodern anthropology, as a direct derivative of critical anthroplogy, which, being aware that reality is created by research, was now seen to play a somehow more ethical and less repressive part in knowledge/power games. The delight at the discovery of this methodological commonplace – that the subject of research is constituted by research itself – might have been but a matter of passing interest, being itself a common enough phenomenon, had not this particular intradisciplinary exchange led to the discrediting of the entire methodological package associated with structuralism. Paradoxically, the retaining of a realistic, radically antipositivist structural method would have made possible the achievement of the cultural-critical ambitions of postmodern anthropology's research program, had not the method been ineptly contaminated by this chain of activist reinterpretation which eventually frustrated the aims it had set out to accomplish.

The paper offers an alternative interpretation of the genesis of the literary turn in anthropology, as an "interim solution" in the context of the ideological incorrectness of radical anti-colonial theories in a liberal democracy. Critical anthropology in the 1960s and 1970s drew considerable inspiration from reformational currents in neo-Marxist sociology and social philosophy, arousing ideological opposition among the numerous participants of methodological debates. This opposition would prove crucial for their subsequent modest development. This activistic ideological ballast actually slowed down the development of potent externalist analyses of the social determination of anthropology and academe in general, leaving room for studies of ethnographic writing. Anticipating, in terms of themes and trends, "nonmethodological" solutions to methodological problems, it had a direct effect on the substitution of poetics and contextual reflection for methodological regulation. Thus, paradoxically, extremely externalistically oriented analyses, which attempted to merge ethical, political and methodological debates, reduced the methodological focus of the disciplinary community from issues of research objectivity and the reliability of ethnographic records to issues concerning style and the writing of anthropology. In this context, debates on relativism, realism, representation, authority and reflexivity, typical of 1980s postmodern anthropology, have become a socially acceptable alternative to the critical and neo-Marxist anthropology of Afro-Americans, feminists or of the otherwise oppressed/studied when they in turn become nativistic anthropologists. The "literary turn" in postmodern anthropology is generally interpreted as an externalist critique of traditional ethnographic realism, offering an ethical and political interpretation of reflexivity as per se more correct than traditional positivist ethnography.

Drawing on the explanation already offered for the confusion of positivism with realism in the epistemological imagination of the author and founder of postmodern anthropology, the paper analyzes the moral implications of dealing with problems characteristic of the philosophy of science by literary-theoretical means. The transdisciplinary migration of "realism" from literary theory to social science methodology has produced a whole new history of anthropology. The history of pre-postmodern anthropology constructed in this manner can be said to fit the register of some sort of comparative-cultural theory of retroactive moral judgement, complementing postmodern anthropology as a general theory of writing by political subjects, so that the theoretical-methodological dilemmas of postmodern anthropology do not constitute proof of the legitimacy of a holistic interpretation of the discipline’s founders’ intentions, but rather lead to neo-pyrrhonic, formalistic endeavours to uphold, by respecting academic trappings, the academic authority of the discipline whose subject, method and purpose, as a rule, even colleagues from adjacent departments for various reasons fail to understand. In the paper, evidence for this is derived from Clifford's writing of Malinowski, and the moral implications of the unfortunate analogy between the writing of political subjects and the writing of disciplinary founders are followed through. The paper then goes on to explain that the critique of the possibilities of misuse, particularly through political instrumentalization, of anthropological fictions as evidence of Others did not have to come at the cost of sacrificing the semblance of continuity in the establishment of anthropology as a proper academic discipline.

Taking into account recent critiques of “underdevelopment”, “positivism”, “methodological backwardness” and other failings attributed to so-called “American Anthropology” by some of the authors from the Belgrade Structural-semiotic School of Anthropology of Folklore, I analyse the context in which colleagues and students may be tempted to explain common sense political connection between polyphone ethnography, neo-romanticism and nationalism as counter-intuitive history of the discipline. I already pointed that the important transformative differences in the attitudes towards structuralism between European anthropologists, especially Belgrade Structural-semiotic School of Anthropology of Folklore and so called “American Anthropology”, are the consequence of a pure coincidence – the fact that French structuralism and French poststructuralism were launched simultaneously at the American interdisciplinary intellectual scene (“Theory”) at the same conference. This ironic concurrence would not be much more than one entertaining episode for students, historians of anthropology and historians of ideas, if there were no attempts (more and more frequent and increasingly fluently articulated) to compare different intellectual traditions as they were elements of the same unilineal evolution of the discipline. Belgrade Structural-semiotic School (further called only SS) and especially its spiritus movens and most prominent representative Prof. Kovačević started in recent years to criticise some “American Anthropology” measuring its academic “achievement” (the author’s term) in comparative perspective and taking as an analytical unit uncritically generalized traditions marked with a single term of “postmodern anthropology” on the one hand, and “anthropology” on the other. Belgrade SS School did develop globally original, although badly promoted and never fully used, battery for the synchronic analysis of the folklore phenomena, but this was done only after Leach, Needham, Schneider and representatives of ethnoscience and cognitive anthropology had already adapted Levi-Strauss’s ideas about mind and science to ethnographic phenomenology. Transformation of Levi-Strauss’s analysis and limited success of its adaptation to the analysis of phenomena that usually concern anthropology happened simultaneously with the development of the critique of structuralism as a theory of culture in the American academic scene. This proves a theory that there is at least one “Atlantic split”, analogue to that in philosophy, more than it makes a relevant context for measuring of the comparative ’academic achievements’ of the specific and unconnected disciplinary traditions. Indirectly, this paper explains that Levi-Strauss’s work has contradictory functions in the history of ideas in anthropology, serving as a starting point for ‘postmodern’ neo-romantic and positivistic critique of imperial realism (in USA), as well as ‘enlightened’, realistic and anti-tribal critique of ethnology as positivistic, nationalistic and national science (in Serbia). In this paper, special emphasis is placed on the local context in which structuralism as a founding discourse of anthropology is opposed to ethnology as national prose. As such it had completely different role in comparison to structuralism in a) the history of American anthropology and b) in the history of interdisciplinary/postmodern Theory.

In the con­text of tran­sfor­ming a part of Ser­bian anthro­po­logy in­to so­cial the­o­re­tic ma­na­ge­ment of iden­tity, I sug­gest both com­pa­ra­ti­ve hi­sto­ri­o­grap­hic and et­hno­grap­hic le­ar­ning from so­ci­e­ti­es with si­mi­lar post-co­lo­nial ex­pe­ri­en­ce, with the aim to in­clu­de the di­sci­pli­ne in­to an ur­gent de­fen­se of Ser­bia and Bel­gra­de from furt­her et­hno-pro­fi­te­e­ring in­te­rests of eli­tes in/from outer ter­ri­to­ri­es, left over on the ru­ins of our ill jud­ged, re­so­ur­ce in­com­pa­ti­ble, exag­ge­ra­ted or im­mo­ral twen­ti­eth cen­tury adven­tu­res. Ser­bian anthro­po­logy, writ­ten by anthro­po­lo­gists to whom Ser­bia and Bel­gra­de are "ho­me­land" by ori­gin or ci­vi­li­zed cho­i­ce, sho­uld play the key ro­le in the de­fen­se of Ser­bian ci­ti­zens from the in­te­rest of eli­tes in/from the outer "ho­me­lands", par­ti­cu­larly by re­ve­a­ling the pro­ces­ses for which it is, as a di­sci­pli­ne, most ex­pert at – the pro­fes­si­o­na­li­za­tion of et­hni­city, in­ter­ac­ti­ve and hybrid na­tu­re of iden­tity, in­stru­men­tal na­tu­re of tra­di­tion and the iden­tity po­li­tics in ge­ne­ral. Ha­ving in mind the la­test at­tempt, a par­ti­cu­larly suc­cessful one, con­duc­ted by the end of the 20th and the be­gin­ning of the 21st cen­tury that the li­ves, he­alth, well-be­ing, dig­nity and fu­tu­re of per­sons born in and loyal to the in­te­rest of Ser­bia and Bel­gra­de, in lar­ge sca­le, tho­ro­ughly and long term be sac­ri­fi­ced and de­di­ca­ted to the in­te­rests of et­hno-pro­fi­te­e­ring eli­tes in/from outer ter­ri­to­ri­es, in this ar­tic­le I po­int to the pos­si­bi­lity to, along with the com­pa­ra­ti­ve le­ar­ning from the abo­ve men­ti­o­ned post-co­lo­nial ex­pe­ri­en­ces, de­li­ca­te ex­pe­ri­en­ces of ur­gent anthro­po­logy be ap­plied as well as the rich tra­di­tion of col­lec­ti­ve re­se­arch. This text analyzes the re­sults of first such re­se­arch, that re­pre­senst the ini­tial, pra­i­se­worthy and a bra­ve step in the wi­se stri­ving to en­ga­ge so­cial sci­en­ces and hu­ma­ni­ti­es in a se­arch of ex­pert and not mythi­cal/daily-po­li­ti­cal so­lu­ti­ons of the key pro­blem of the Ser­bian na­tion – that of how to set­tle the in­te­rests of the eli­tes of po­pu­la­tion in/from outer ter­ri­to­ri­es suf­fi­ci­ently so that the­ir lo­cal/re­gi­o­nal pro­blems or pri­va­te in­te­rests can ne­ver again be tre­a­ted as the na­ti­o­nal in­te­rest, nor be used as re­a­sons for (self)de­struc­tion and(self)hu­mi­li­a­tion of Ser­bia and Bel­gra­de.

In this article, from an anti-essentialist and anti-primordial view, of normal science in anthropology, argumentation is being developed against an essentialist foundation of multiculturalism, as an imprudent legal transplant and as a mode of developing/survival of ethnocratic professionalizing of ethnicity and the policy of identity, through the example of a symptomatic article 64 paragraph 2 of the Constitution of the Republic of Serbia. The Constitution radicalizes multicultural policies, treating ethnic, confessional and other contingent arrangements as natural classes. Treating the cultural-historic categories, for example, ethnicity or confessional (religious) identity, as natural classes in public policies like the Constitution, leads to a situation where the contingent, interactive arrangements in the cultural reality receives an aureole of a given, indifferent and permanent states, which potentially generates and deepens social conflicts which it intends to absorb, forestall or regulate. After referring to the proven comparatively-historic contraindicated aspects of multicultural policies and a shorter analysis of the above mentioned example, the author argues for deepening of the productive interdisciplinary cooperation of professional lawyers, professional anthropologists and other experts in the field of social-humanistic sciences, in a mutual effort for further de-primordialisation and de-essentialisation of public policies in Serbia.