Ivana Spasić

The Universality of Banal Nationalism, Or Can the Flag Hang Unobtrusively Outside a Serbian Post Office?

Ivana Spasic in her chapter examines the concept of banal nationalism from a perspective embedded in the contemporary Serbian society as an instance of global semi-periphery. Such a vantage point helps detect three different, and sometimes divergent, meanings of the “banality” of banal nationalism: the geographical, the substantive, and the cognitive. It is argued that Billig’s failure to deal in a more systematic manner with this ambiguity, as well as with other dimensions of banal nationalism that are bound to vary across national contexts, detracts from the concept’s ability to travel beyond its original location of the advanced, democratic West.

Knowledge Production at the Semiperiphery: A Gender Perspective

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Croatian Language Standardization and the Production of Nationalized Political Subjects through Language? Perspectives from the Social Sciences and Humanities

The paper discusses some aspects of linguistics as a science, concerning the opposition of scientific descriptive and unscientific prescriptive approach. It also discusses certain aspects of nationalism in language and outside of it.

Standardizacija hrvatskog jezika i stvaranje nacionaliziranih političkih subjekata kroz jezik? Pogled iz očišta društvenih i humanističkih znanosti

The paper discusses some aspects of linguistics as a science, concerning the opposition of scientific descriptive and unscientific prescriptive approach. It also discusses certain aspects of nationalism in language and outside of it.

Strategies and tactics in social space: The case of Serbia:

The aim of this article is to bring together quantitative and qualitative methodologies in order to examine, within a broadly Bourdieusian theoretical framework, connections between positions in social space and strategies agents deploy in their everyday life. The data are derived from a study of social structure in today’s Serbia, combining survey and interviews with selected respondents. Strategies are conceptualized as a continuum ranging from a more sustained and cumulative, or ‘strategic’, pole to the unsystematic, ephemeral ‘tactical’ pole, as suggested by Michel de Certeau. On the basis of interview data, four types of life strategies are identified (individualist reactive, individualist proactive, collectivist reactive, and collectivist proactive). These strategies are presented through their generic practices and the typical habitus of the agents, along with individual portraits as illustrations. In conclusion, some theoretical implications are derived from data analysis, including departures from Bourdieu’s model.

„Fieldwork in philosophy“: Geertz and Bourdieu in dialogue

Unlike the standard view that Clifford Geertz and Pierre Bourdieu embody contrary social scientific paradigms, it is argued that they share a whole set of similarities in terms of theory, research practice, and scholarly ethics. After briefly presenting the details of their encounter in the early 1970s, the authors identify the following points of their implicit and unintended convergence: 1) blurring of interdisciplinary boundaries, 2) work in North Africa, 3) relation to important predecessors, 4) commitment to fieldwork and rejection of ’grand theory’, 5) postpositivism and anti-postmodernism, and 6) reflexivity. At the same time, irreducible differences between the two are noted, marking the outer limits of this kind of comparative analysis. Finally, it is argued that Geertz and Bourdieu missed the opportunity to enter a genuine dialogue and learn from each other lessons that may have helped them improve their respective scholarly projects.