The paper analyses visual and textual representations of Austro-Hungarian heritage on the website of the tourist board of the town of Pula (Croatia), in the north-eastern Adriatic region of Istria, ...and the role of this heritage as a symbolic resource for constructing a tourist-oriented urban identity. Analysing the way heritage is represented and mobilised in tourist-oriented discourses can reveal certain ideological positions related to local, regional or broader political, social and cultural values and identifications. In spite of a strong tendency in the dominant narrative of Croatian national history of representing Austria-Hungary as a despotic empire which suppressed the rights of newly self-conscious nations, this period is now being re-evaluated in a more positive light. Results show that this heritage is mainly associated with ideas of 'Europeanness', 'cosmopolitanism', 'modernity' and 'urbanity', with a distinctive lack of references to the political conflict and socioeconomic issues of the period. This is interpreted in the context of a post-socialist re-orientation toward Western Europe and a 'nesting orientalist' distancing from the negatively connoted Balkans and (South-) Eastern Europe.
The present paper seeks to explore the awareness and knowledge about past cultural diversity of young people in four Croatian cities (Pula, Rijeka, Zadar and Zagreb) with rich multicultural ...historical legacies. It is based on the results of a survey obtained from 631 high-school students in these cities. The survey focused on students’ awareness and knowledge of plural cultural heritage in their respective cities and their ideas about what should be valued and how. It also included students’ attitudes and beliefs about current diversity issues and intercultural values, which enabled the researchers to explore the association between their knowledge of heritage and their intercultural attitudes in more detail. The results obtained indicate that both the degree of awareness of past diversity and acceptance or rejection of intercultural values varied by specific spatial, historic and current socio-demographic contexts of the cities. While the overall findings suggest a comparatively strong association between heritage and intercultural values, some of them indicate that appreciation of past cultural diversity may also co-exist with current anti-multicultural attitudes. This has implications for education policy and strategies in facing the challenges of a decline in socio-political support for intercultural values in both Croatia and a wider European context.
The paper describes the strategy of an interdisciplinary project on the patterns of transnational interactions and mobility that shaped intercultural dialogue in the south-eastern periphery of the ...late Austro-Hungarian Empire. Methodologically, it is structured around three interconnected analytic levels of institutions, associations and everyday life, that are mutually constitutive, and the exploration of three dimensions characterizing social spaces: social practices in different domains of life, symbolic system (focusing on language) and the use of artifacts, or material life. Based on secondary sources, the imperial naval port of Pula is analyzed within the methodological frame that goes beyond methodological nationalism.
Historical legacies of past migrations and linguistic practices have an impact on the concerns about current migration and mobility processes, reminding us that mass migrations are not a new ...phenomenon. Mass migrations from the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the late 19th and early 20th century to North America present an interesting subject in view of regulating moving speakers and their languages and their reception in the new country. Using discourse analysis of historical data from contemporary newspapers and other sources, the paper explores practices of inclusion and exclusion of Slavic speakers on the ground of social prejudice and legitimized ethnic and racial segregating practices. The results show that paradoxically, immigrants coming from the multilingual empire who were admitted (about 80%) after restrictive procedures, in the end faced the demanding issue of enforced linguistic and cultural assimilation in order to become accepted as loyal Americans. We use these pieces of historical memory of mass migrations as a resource to understand the present attitudes and policies toward migrating people, and their languages and cultures.
The calculation of aggregate linguistic distances can compensate for some of the drawbacks inherent to the isogloss bundling method used in traditional dialectology to identify dialect areas. ...Synchronic aggregate analysis can also point out differences with respect to a diachronically based classification of dialects. In this study the Levenshtein algorithm is applied for the first time to obtain an aggregate analysis of the linguistic distances among 88 diatopic varieties of Croatian spoken along the Eastern Adriatic coast and in the Italian province of Molise. We also measured lexical differences among these varieties, which are traditionally grouped into Čakavian, Štokavian, and transitional Čakavian-Štokavian varieties. The lexical and pronunciation distances are subsequently projected onto multidimensional cartographic representations. Both kinds of analyses confirm that linguistic discontinuity is characteristic of the whole region, and that discontinuities are more pronounced in the northern Adriatic area than in the south. We also show that the geographic lines are in many cases the most decisive factor contributing to linguistic cohesion, and that the internal heterogeneity within Čakavian is often greater than the differences between Čakavian and Štokavian varieties. This holds both for pronunciation and lexicon.
This study investigated the effects of sociocultural contexts on health and the psychological well-being of immigrant adolescents, aged 15 to 18 years, originally from Bosnia and Herzegovina and now ...living as displaced persons either in Bosnia, or immigrants in Croatia and Austria. The study addresses the social determinants of health with a specific focus on five factors in the social environment that might have an influence on health status: gender, socio-economic status (SES), perceived discrimination and exposure to violence, social support and religious commitment. Dependent variables included self-rated health, a count of self-reported objective health problems and a range of indices of psychological well-being (somatic stress, anxiety, depression and self-esteem). The purpose of the study was to examine whether social risk factors have an effect on health, which factors mediate these effects on self-rated health and to assess whether these effects differ by gender Results indicate that perceived discrimination and violence are related to poor health through psychological stress as a major mechanism with stronger effects for girls in the study. Differences across the three socio-cultural contexts reveal the complexity and specificity of the relationships between analyzed factors as the association between discrimination and health was attenuated for some groups due to the protective resources of immigrants.
This study focuses on the middle school students in the Croatian region of Dalmatia. The survey was designed to examine adolescent eating behavior as it relates to body image and psychological ...well-being (self-esteem, life-satisfaction and stress) in relation to body mass index; BMI. Differences among participants in food intake were examined according to demographic variables and eating behavior (regular food intake or dieting) as well. Psychological variables were highly associated with dieting among adolescents of both genders. The adolescents who were dieting reported significantly lower self-esteem, lower life satisfaction and lower body-image satisfaction, higher rate of stress and higher rate of body mass index (BMI) when compared to non-dieters. This study confirms that a rather large percentage of adolescent girls of low socioeconomic status engage in dieting when trying to lose weight, which may seriously damage their developmental growth.
Physical, psychological and social changes that occur during adolescence can markedly affect dietary habits and nutritional health. Physical changes including rapid growth place extra nutritional ...requirements on adolescents, while culture and society require adjustments in all of the aspects of daily living, including psychosocial well-being. Adolescents become focused on the physical appearance and any deviation from the ideal figure can result in negative dieting behavior, social withdrawal, poor self-esteem and increased health vulnerability. The paper presents some of the results of an international comparative study on risk and protective factors of adolescent health and well being, related to BMI, dieting behavior and body image and their relationship to psychosocial well-being (somatic stress, anxiety, depression, life satisfaction and self-esteem). Within an ecological cultural framework, it looks at group-specific differences of Albanian and Bosnian adolescents within different socio-cultural contexts across six European countries: two EU members (Italy and Austria) and four communities in the state of socioeconomic and political transition (Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania and Kosovo). The survey collected data from 2000 adolescents between 15 and 18 years of age. The study demonstrated a strong relationship between BMI and body dissatisfaction, between body image and dietary habits, and strong effects of body image on all indicators of psychosocial health. In addition to expected marked gender differences in all countries, the obtained results indicate significant intracultural variations related to socioeconomic status as well as considerable intercultural variations due to variable influence specific social and cultural contexts.
Since languages are such powerful means of group identification, they may be considered as constitutive of communities. Attitudes expressed toward certain linguistic varieties may thus be perceived ...as attitudes held toward respective community-members. However, as attitudes are not always easily accessible, and are rarely one-dimensional but rather multi-layered, an insight into overt (publicly proclaimed) and covert (privately held) ideologies can enhance understanding of language attitudes and their meaning. This paper brings the analysis of these two types of attitudes held by adolescents in three most populated places on the island of Korcula, Croatia. The analysis is based on the results obtained by means of a questionnaire eliciting, among other things, overt attitudes toward six local, regional and supra-regional varieties, and covert attitudes toward judges' local speech and the Standard variety of Croatian. Although the results confirm some expected tendencies in the evaluation of different varieties, subsequently conducted analysis of speech recognition rates offers some valuable insights and interesting implications for further interpretation of the results.
The focus of the present study is on the interdependence of language and urban identity set within the framework of theory of practice and the concept of the right to the city. It is concerned with ...the formation of local identities in the context of a multicultural city of Pula, in the Croatian region of Istria, characterized by a substantial presence of immigrant and ethnic minority groups. The paper explores to what extent the image of the city, with its spatial and social structure, as well as socio-economic and historic context determines discourse on multicultural interactions as well as the ways those images shape a sense of identity, and how these identities are affected by interpersonal and inter-group communication. By looking into factors and processes through which different dimensions of identity become salient, specific attention is given to how power relations influence the dynamics of identity negotiation and the re/articulation of potential hierarchy of differences.
