/ 1968
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RITUAL TIME OF THE BELGRADE BOOK FAIR

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The author analyzes the Book Fair as a peculiar modern festival with specific ritual elements. Out of complexity of its temporal discourse this cultural event derives its specific structure which provides for its symbolic-ritual potential.

Modern festivals inherited their ritual-symbolic forms from the former, mostly religious ones. Ritual elements of contemporary happenings are breaking a chronotop of everyday linearity. Modern festival also brings about a new understanding of social cohesion. While potentials of renewal and affirmation of a community as a whole were inherent to the old model of ritual and festival, the contemporary festival out of the field of social dispersion establishes cohesion of a micro group.

In the contemporary cultural-political discourse the need for ritual persists as an archetypal necessity, as a mean enabling community to reaffirm and renew itself. The fact that modern festival lacks capacity of totality facilitating a social community to identify with it as a whole, significantly relativizes this archetypal normative.

The relativization of contemporary festivals, their invisibility on the universal level has to find its counter-balance somewhere else if they are to remain a genuine social need. The point of balance between the former totality of festival and ephemeral character of the contemporary one has been found in specialization of the latter. The Book Fair is a kind of normative communitas organized within a social system, and demanding a certain degree of social control.

/ 1968
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FALSE IMAGES

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/ 1968
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CREATIVE WORKERS – STARS OF MEDIA CULTURE

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Thanks to its economic potential, creative industries are considered the most promising form of enterpreneurship today, but also in the future. Development of creative industries is largely influenced by the position of creative workers, which, it appears, is defined by media culture that is oriented towards stars. Creative persons have never been famous as today. Even the artists who do not possess a top-class talent, have the opportunity to be in the media and present their creative work. The fact that creative workers are exposed in the media could have positive effects, related primarily to the possibility of mass audience to become acquainted with their work.

/ 1968
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THE LIMITS OF CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

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/ 1968
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URBAN ANTHROPOLOGY

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/ 1968
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HOW MUCH DO WE USE DIGITAL LIBRARIES

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This paper seeks to highlight the spectrum of electronic services offered by modern libraries, and the need for the creation of “digital offers” guided by the standards of library efficiency and effectiveness. When we talk about digital libraries, evaluation studies are very rare due to a number of reasons. Usage is just one of the criteria to evaluate digital libraries, and it includes usage patterns, usage statistics, and user studies. The ultimate goal of the evaluation of digital libraries is to determine to what extent and in what manner they affect the processes of learning, education, cultural development, research, preservation of national heritage, collective and personal identity. As the world is still expecting reliable criteria for evaluating the digital library, the positions from which we are waiting make all the difference. In Serbia, an environment that didn’t manage to introduce all the possibilities provided by the Internet, either in terms of e-government, e-commerce, or of e-education, libraries have launched major digitization projects and stepped in front of the needs of our society which is not ready/educated/trained/used to digital resources. The way out of this situation must be sought in strengthening of the information society, of its technical and technological, legal and regulatory assumptions, and also those assumptions related to information literacy of citizens, their awareness of how human knowledge is organized, how to find the right information and how to use it effectively to improve the quality of one’s own life.

/ 1968
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PERFORMING HIP-HOP – ETHICS, COMPLEX ACTING, AND TUPAC SHAKUR IN JUICE

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Hip-hop is inextricably linked with moral reflections as they relate to the often dire state of young men surviving in economically-ravaged communities in America and throughout the world; young men who are often forced to resort to criminal activities and other morally-ambiguous actions for both survival and perseverance. As a culture that is perpetuated globally through media outlets which profit from the images that are trafficked, the ethics of the said media outlets must be measured in an attempt to gauge complicity in the often dangerous performances that hip-hop offers. This study attempts to understand the politics, aesthetics and repercussions of the performative aspects of hip-hop.

As an art form, hip-hop creates socially-charged implications with regards to performance. However, in the complex performance art that is hip-hop, what is real? Rarely is there a boundary between life and art in hip-hop and that is because hip-hop is as much a way of life as it is an art form; the question then becomes, what is the tension between hip-hop art as performing and producing social and ethnic codes, or reflecting pre-existing ones? As the most influential and highest-selling hip-hop artist of all-time, Tupac Shakur presents an important case study for the performative aspect in hip-hop, particularly through his first starring role in a movie: Juice (1992) by Ernest Dickerson.

Hip-hop and the media that channels it have created a most dangerous performance art, and the “juice,” or respect, that one struggles to earn must often be paid for at the expense of lives. A space is created for this dangerous performance art by way of ethical slippage. In order to extricate itself from this dubious situation, hip-hop must resist rampant commercialization while providing a site that is conducive to the uplifting of the downtrodden. It must renew and celebrate its sense of ethical purpose.

/ 1968
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PROFANE CULTURE IN MODERN WORLD

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