Forefathers and Successors at the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, University of Ljubljana: Paths in the Development of Slovene Ethnology/ Cultural Anthropology
Forefathers and Successors at the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, University of Ljubljana: Paths in the Development of Slovene Ethnology/ Cultural Anthropology

Summary/Abstract: 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.

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