Pletenac, Tomislav.
(2007).
From Morloks to post socialism.
In: Tranzicija i postocijalizam: antropološka istraživanja, 24. 11. 2007., Beograd.
Abstract
The acknowledgement of post socialism as a specific culture that rose upon the remnants of the political and social system of Eastern Europe and Asia, was until the 90's, a marker of Western anthropological theory, as well as its ethnographic terrain. The proliferation of such a anthropological paradigm was frequently executed undermining the local practices. They were perceived as uninformed or nationalistic, and in the case of the Balkans, even indirectly responsible for the war and ethnic cleansing. Such denial of the local discourse, on the other hand has unlocked a contradiction through which it is perceived that the socialist matrix was responsible for nationalism, even dough it was based upon class, and not a national identity. But such a paradox is a product of a more fundamental anthropological embeddedness in the Enlightenment etiquette that was built into the foundations of anthropology. Negation of the practices of others, and the introduction of "rational, better, more informed and advanced", is a precondition for the formation of the other in anthropology. Even if it seems that in the anthropology of post socialism we perceive a reinvention of such Enlightenment/colonial discourse, it can be exposed through the examples of the Dalmacija depiction by Albert Fortiss and Ivan Lovric that such development commenced long before, almost at the dawn of anthropology in Eastern Europe.
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