Cultural Spaces and Practices: Ethnology and Folklore Studies (2009-2013)

Contemporary research paradigms in ethnology and folklore studies reinforce the understanding of the long-term effects of historical developments between the 19th and 21st centuries (the dissolution of feudal system, the enforcement of capitalist production, industrialisation, deagrarization, migration, the period of socialism and postsocialism, the participation in global production, etc.; the changes of states and their borders – from Habsburg monarchy to the independent Slovenia and its EU membership). With reference to those changes conceptualizations of culture and methodologies changed as well. Contemporary research focuses on the spaces, the ambivalences of multiculturalism, and versatile identifications in all the segments of everyday life and in their manifestations on the local, regional, national/ state and transnational level. Namely, cultural heritage, folk culture, identity and specific cultural phenomena as unstable and “in change” categories could not be trapped into limited geographical and social spaces. Ins¬tead, we pay attention to the processual, dynamic aspects, which are evident in cultural continuity and change, vanishing of certain cultural forms, and their re-production, which we recognize in the cultural spaces of social, material and spiritual practices. Thus ethnology encounters multilevel id¬entifications and new use of cultural symbols in differently configured cultural spaces, which are more and more European and global. – New points of view discover new research challenges; they demand constant reflections on research concepts and tools, the participation of a researcher and his/ her responsibility. Openness to diversity is characteristic for all research levels: we do not reflect so much on the physical boundaries of research, fixed identities and old polarisations between them, but more on the tensions between local, global, and transnational respectively, on the transitions bet¬ween them, on the coexistence and the conflicts which arise between the traditional and new. Points of view regarding the problems and methodology are based on internal and external impetuses of scientific production (the continuity of research, inter- and multidisciplinarity, openness to the inter¬national scientific discourses); the interpretations based on empirical results search new ways to un¬derstand cultural practices (including the disciplinary one) and the dynamics of cultural processes.

Research is organized around the following topics:

1. Spaces of the discipline (comparative research on history, theory and methodology of ethnology and folklore studies);

2. Spaces of literary folklore (genre classification of the Slo¬venian literary folklore; the poetics of literary folklore; folklore between text and context; type index of Slovenian fairy tales and folktales; aesthetic structure of Slovenian folklore patterns);

3. Spaces of material culture (research on architecture, dwelling culture, nutri¬tion, economy and material culture of children);

4. Spaces of rituals and identity (Cultural practices of community; manifestations and functions of the ritual at im¬portant festive days, on »borders« and boundaries; va¬rious discourses (political, media and scientific one), namely the “discourses of distinction” and the “unifying discourses”;

5. Visual research (educational model of visual ethnography)

6. Archive of material and intangible heritage (archive of visual documentation, archive of the li¬terary folklore, archive of material culture and archive of ritual prac¬tices).

More about: SICRIS