engleski

The Production of Peculiarity and Dignity: A Short Overview of the Public Practice of National Minorities' Folk Music and Dance in Croatia

Thesis that performance is not only a flux of existing community, but that communities are also produced by the performance is most obvious in the field of public practice. Multilayered representations and notions through which communities recognize themselves and others are constructed through it, influences of social, political and historical changes are refracted through it, as well as relations of knowledge production and power between majority and minority. Public practice is a field where differences in multicultural and multi- ethnic societies have been produced and/or promoted, contributing in that sense to the protection of minorities. The paper firstly outlines what kind of dominant community was created in public practice of folk music and dance in Croatia from the second half of the 1930s, when the first, and from the first half of the 1950s, when the second of two contemporary canons of folk music were formulated, and then pays attention to the issue of how national minority communities fit into or relate to these canons. Special emphasis is given to the representation of national minorities at the central, most distinguished festival of authentic folklore in Croatia - International Folklore Festival in Zagreb during the period of Yugoslavia (1966-1990) and in independent Croatia (from 1992), as well as to some issues which emerged in preparation of the festival in 2003, dedicated precisely to the folklore heritage of national minorities in Croatia.

national minorities; public practice; traditional music and dance; Croatia

ISBN 1-904303-37-4