Мистерията на идентитета: сходства и различия в Словения и Папуа – Нова Гвинея
The Mystery of Identity: Similarities and Differences in Slovenia and Papua New Guinea

Summary/Abstract: In this short paper I have tried to address some broad and very important issues regarding human preoccupation with the continuous construction and persistent search for authenticity of their personal and collective identities. For this purpose I compared the Slovenes (within two different contexts) and their new nation-state with the Ambonwari, a small-scale community from Papua New Guinea. The conceptualisation of a nation-state, where one can witness an obsession with national language, national symbols, national culture, and so on, is quite different from a conceptualisation of a village cosmology, where one can witness a local “obsession” with paths, stories, practices and relationships. The former is much more abstract and less personal than the latter, though every nationalism wants the nation-state (along with people, land, activities and relationships) to be personalised. Once people perceive their national identity as being personal they also become far too much familiar with people, relationships, habits, places, things and concepts, as if they would have owned them. Once the security, stability and seeming permanence of daily routine is broken, however – and this has recently occurred in Slovenia and other eastern European nation-states – people begin to feel insecure, unstable, and scared within unfamiliar and unpredictable process of social change which becomes the base for re-examination of the past, invention of tradition and discrimination of “others”.

• Details
• Contents