ETHNOLOGY IN THE WORLD AND US: A VIEW FROM A PERIPHERY

Abstract

Summary We' experience the world in which we live today as increasingly small and limited: mass media with numerous common visual goods; rapid transportation systems; wide-ranging ecological disasters; the power of the rich and desperation of those in debt; the migration of workforce from country to country and, indeed from continent to continent; everyday tensions stemming from asymmetrical distr bution of political/economic power — all have become part of »ordinary« people’s lives. Ethnology as a social science must develop conceptual tools in order to understand such world where global phenomena are interwined with local ones, public/political aspects with the most intimate ones, and symbolic expressions with the crudest facts of political economy. Influenced by theories of unequal (capi- talist) development, some anthropologists have developed conceptions about a world cultural system. : From our corner of the Balkans, we could try to contribute to current studies of world culture(s) by developing our own perspective on how the constellation of political/economic world power has shaped our culture(s) in the past and in the present. We could also critically revise what was written about us »from the out- side«, thus joining many efforts in reexamination and redefinition of the subject/ Jobject relationship in ethnology. As in many other European countries, ethnology in this country is of national orientation; atlempts at international cooperation in research and publication are few. University courses on peoples and cultures of developing countries are taught in indequate way, using inadequate and outdated literature — thus, the role of these peoples in the sysiem of world culture(s) remains obscure to the students of ethnology. Furthermore, historical studies of culture are often unjustifiably seen as very different from those on contemporary culture because they use different methods. In a wide sense of the term, ethnology is always historical and the questions it endeavors to answer pertain to all time periods. Being a social science, ethnology makes its relation to time theoretically explic The case cannot be reverse: that the period of time under study would define the theoretical standpoint and goals of the discipline.