There is a pressing need for volunteer amateur naturalists to participate in data collection for biodiversity monitoring programmes in Europe. It is being addressed in some countries, but less so in ...others. This paper discusses the results from qualitative research using semi-structured interviews, focus groups and participant observation within nine Participatory Monitoring Network (PMN) organisations in six European countries. The paper examines the features that facilitate recruitment, retention and motivations of volunteers to participate in biodiversity monitoring, including the social and cultural milieus in which they operate. The paper concludes that volunteers place a high degree of significance on their social experience within PMNs. Successful creation and management of PMNs thus requires that similar levels of attention be paid to social aspects of the organisation as are paid to the generation and management of data.
In 1940, under Professor Niko Zupanič, the “Seminar of Ethnology and Ethnography” curriculum at the University of Ljubljana comprised comparative ethnology, prehistory, physical anthropology, ...linguistics and ethnography. Zupanič’s successor, Vilko Novak, claimed that ethnology should study “primitive peoples” as well as “common people” in “civilized countries”. Slavko Kremenšek initiated “urban ethnology” in the 1960s, but at the same time reduced it to a historicist approach. He claimed that “ways of life” and folk culture should be considered as the basic distinctive subject of the discipline. Zmago Šmitek and Božidar Jezernik expanded studies of “ways of life” through non-European examples and studies of life in extreme circumstances. They rejected the narrowness of historical and regional limitations of the discipline and reintroduced anthropological elements to the curriculum. Borut Brumen and Rajko Muršič criticized both epistemological limitations and the theoretical weakness of Slovene ethnology. They rejected differentiation between ethnology (the study of European peoples) and cultural/social anthropology (the study of non-European peoples). The author presents the gradual development of curricula in ethnology/cultural anthropology at the University of Ljubljana. He compares topics of teaching and research since their beginning and discusses perspectives of the discipline in Slovenia through an assessment of its current epistemological, methodological and disciplinary approaches.
If there are any human activities that incorporate authenticity in the very moment of their appearance (and disappearance), they are music and dance.
Whenever we speak (or write) about music, we lose ...ourselves in the opacity of the simplest words. Playing and listening to music, and the experience of dance and rapture, sound and silence, bring words to their limits: and beyond. No other magic than music can conjure its experience (see Muršič 2003).
Whatever kind of music we experience, if it has any meaning to us, we may easily become seduced to conceive it as ours. If it is
Punk Anthropology Rajko Muršič
Postsocialist Europe,
09/2009, Volume:
10
Book Chapter
There are some remarkable similarities in the production, reproduction and star-system between popular culture, especially popular music, and academia. If the criteria of success in popular music are ...record sales, attendance at concerts and the broadcasting and mentioning of hits in the media and daily life, the criteria of success in academia are monograph sales, attendance at lectures and quotations from papers. When we use the famous Web of Science (SSCI or A&HCI), we may see the similarities between music charts and lists of quotations or between inventories of recordings and bibliographies. Moreover, the vast majority of academic and popular
RésuméL’auteur présente une recherche consacrée à une scène locale de musique alternative située dans le nord-est de la Slovénie. Grâce à un suivi ethnographique sur le long terme, il montre ...l’importance que revêt l’étude de la modernité. Dans la perspective du développement de l’anthropologie de la musique populaire, il résume l’évolution sur un quart de siècle du Center za dehumanizacijo et de la scène underground de punk rock de Trate, le village du Slovenske gorice dont ce groupe est originaire. À partir d’exemples, il met enfin en relation la confrontation créative de czd avec son environnement local et, au-delà, avec les grandes transformations sociales et politiques du pays.
In 1940, under Professor Niko Zupanič, the “Seminar of Ethnology and Ethnography” curriculum at the University of Ljubljana comprised comparative ethnology, prehistory, physical anthropology, ...linguistics and ethnography. Zupanič’s successor, Vilko Novak, claimed that ethnology should study “primitive peoples” as well as “common people” in “civilised countries”. Slavko Kremenšek initiated “urban ethnology” in the 1960s, but at the same time reduced it to a historicist approach. He claimed that “ways of life” and folk culture should be considered as the basic distinctive subject of the discipline. Zmago Šmitek and Božidar Jezernik expanded studies of “ways of life” through non-European examples and studies of life in extreme circumstances. They rejected the narrowness of historical and regional limitations of the discipline and reintroduced anthropological elements to the curriculum. Borut Brumen and Rajko Muršič criticised both epistemological limitations and the theoretical weakness of Slovene ethnology. They rejected differentiation between ethnology (the study of European peoples) and cultural/social anthropology (the study of non-European peoples). The author presents the gradual development of curricula in ethnology/cultural anthropology at the University of Ljubljana. He compares topics of teaching and research since their beginning and discusses perspectives of the discipline in Slovenia through an assessment of its current epistemological, methodological and disciplinary approaches.
Postsocialist Europe Kurti, Laszlo; Skalnik, Peter
2009., 20090915, 2009, 2011-11-01, 20090101, Volume:
10
eBook
Now that nearly twenty years have passed since the collapse of the Soviet bloc there is a need to understand what has taken place since that historic date and where we are at the moment. Bringing ...together authors with different historical, cultural, regional and theoretical backgrounds, this volume engages in debates that address new questions arising from recent developments, such as whether there is a need to reject or uphold the notion of post-socialism as both a necessary and valid concept ignoring changes and differences across both time and space. The authors’ firsthand ethnographies from their own countries belie such a simplistic notion, revealing, as they do, the cultural, social, and historical diversity of countries of Central and Southeastern Europe.
