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

In this paper, I discuss the importance of the classical sociological thinkers for the development of cultural sociology programs. Based on this, the paper problematizes the specific position of one direction of cultural sociology and its “strong program”, and in that context, re-actualizes the contribution of classical theorists in understanding the interference between the cultural structures with the material/utilitarian and the political/ideological structures of the social world. It is primarily based on the analysis of Durkheim’s and Weber’s place in the sphere of cultural sociology, and the need to supplement the cultural sociology program with theoretical understandings of these thinkers, but also with the thinkers of modernity in general. Therefore, the paper seeks to offer a picture of a broader contribution of the “classics” to the understanding of cultural sociology, as well as the need to reconstruct certain aspects related to the cultural sociology program. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this text, I discuss the sociological understanding of the self and its immanent connection with the individual identity. Basic concepts and interpretations are presented which are relating to the attempt to understand the development of the self as a social construction from the perspective of certain classical and contemporary sociological considerations. The central part of the paper focuses on the analysis and problematization of the self and individual identity as the authentic social subjects or participants, as well as on the analysis of their connection with particular political ideologies. In the end, the text shows how the reflection on the self and individual identity cannot be separated from the reflection on identities and dichotomies that may result from it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this text, I will discuss the nation as a specific social construction and its position within the contemporary form of social organization. In this context, the topics will be the central determinants of the methodological nationalism as a framework for the explication and understanding of social reality in terms of the classical tendency to amalgamate it over the components of territorialisation and naturalization with the nation as a socio-political creation of a modern and contemporary world. On the other hand, the text discusses the position of methodological globalism and its characteristics and tendencies, and seeks to highlight how contemporary forms of social organizing and political legitimization in the form of the state, although largely under the influence of globalism and globalization, are constructs of what is being labelled with the phrase of immanent nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the paper, I analyze the conceptual and contentual definition of selfhood, its individual and collective component, and its modernist objectivity within ethnic and national identities. As a concrete historically shaped and determined creation, personal selfhood is subject to the dialectic of social reality which in the era of modernity obtains its sociopolitical merit within the nation and its institutional analogue - the national state. On the other hand, postmodern tendencies change the image of selfhood as a coherent and permanently anchored being by focusing on the phenomena of decentralization, fragmentation and heterogeneity. The central thesis of the paper is that the postmodernist image of social reality and the related image of a fragmented personal selfhood cannot eliminate the influence, intensity and efficiency of nations, national identity and nationalism, and in itself is unable to eliminate these modernist determinants from the components of postmodern / post-national individual and collective identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the analysis of Gellner modernist theory of nationalism and its orientation towards specific components that are generated during the period of European modernism which enabled the construction of the nation as a socio-political constructs of that time. What will be shown is that Gellner's conception of nationalism cannot be interpreted in the context of the discussion about “battered metaphors” which lost its use value in the era of modern social organizations, and that nationalism is not merely an instrumental activity which becomes meaningless after the completion of the process of creating homogeneous national states. The paper aims to show how Gellner's insights and methods of objectifying the nationalist project in the era of modernity can be read as a useful matrix of immanent nationalism as a broader socio-cultural and sociopolitical phenomenon that shapes the national states, multi-national communities, “super-nations” and other state entities of the contemporary world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

In this paper I analyze specific character of the ethno-symbolic interpretation of nations and nationalism and the importance of art, religion and myth in the constitution of the modern nations. The paper focuses on ethnosymbolism, its relations to modernism, the importance of ethnohistory in constructing, reproduction and the perpetuation of the idea of nation and the special significance of symbolic resources in the genesis of the nation. The main thesis is that art, religion and myth didn't only have an instrumental character but influenced in a structural terms on constitution of the ethnohistory and nationalism in such a way that the cultural, socio-political and economic assumptions of the development of modern nations were formed more effciently, more intense and more resonantly on a level of individual and collective consciousness of the national elites and what we may term "popular nationalism". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I consider the relation between Dorothy E. Smith's critical sociology and Durkheim's understanding of society through Randle J. Hart and Andrew McKinnon's text entitled as Sociological Epistemology: Durkheim's Paradox and Dorothy E. Smith's Actuality in which these authors favour the reflections of this theoretician as a more objective, direct and actual form of description of the social reality compared to those offered by Emile Durkheim. Special attention is given to their critique of Durkheim's dualism and their reference on intersubjectivity and consensuality of reflexive sociology which does not see the social world in the binary form (individuality-sociability). Main thesis of this paper is that the analysis of these two sociologists have neglected Durkheim's own insights on this issue, and that, on the other hand, some of the critical remarks related to Durkheim's sociological position can already be read in the works of his contemporaries within the classical sociological discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this text I present two theoretical and research paradigms that shape the nature and meaning of phenomenon of nation as an socio-political phenomenon and nationalism as the most significant and the most puzzling political ideology of the contemporary world. Also, I will refer to authors who, with their theoretical positions articulate key presuppositions and conditions for the origins and development of nations and nationalism, with the special review of on Anthony D. Smith and his ethno-symbolical perspective. The aim is to prove that ethno-symbolism more effectively explicates an "inner world" and inner motifs of nations and nationalism and that nationalism implicates its relations to modernity that are crucial for a continuous theoretical, political and practical implication in the contemporary age. Also, a critical reflection is directed towards stressing the ethnical dimension which to some extent appeals the concept of ethno-reductionism as a form of essencialisation of social world and its constellations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this text I consider some of the fundamental characteristics of Rorty's neopragmatism, whence can be revealed Rorty's criticism of all essentialisms that find their "common premises" in what Rorty calls metaphysics. By tending to provide more flexible and less ambitious philosophical projects Rorty suggests an alternative mode through which philosophy is able to correspond with science and other modes of human self-assertions in one multidisciplinary, interactive, dialogical and anti-exsclusivistic sense of meaning in order to achieve more effective and concrete orientation and a practical means of "coping with reality." Finally, I tend to emphasize how the vocabulary of metaphysics and the metaphysical construction of reality is deconceptualizing itself, to refer to the fact that the naming of the vocabulary of metaphysics as a "dead metaphors" is at least a problematical one. Quite the opposite, this text aims to indicate an equal significance of all forms of "final vocabularies" in one incommensurable, non-hierarchical and multidimensionally structured world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]