Erasmus + KA220-HED Project, September 1, 2024 – August 31, 2026 The DigiArcheoSpace project aims to modernize the higher education by providing educational materials and modern tools for documenting and presenting the cultural heritage in...
Research projects
Island Ethnographies – Island Heritage and Environmental Futures as Drivers of Island Community Development (BAŠOTOK)
Island Ethnographies – Island Heritage and Environmental Futures as Drivers of Island Community Development (BAŠOTOK) The BAŠOTOK project is dedicated to ethnographic research into Croatian islands’ inhabitants’ experiences of islandness. The project’s aims are to...
The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography Today (EPP)
The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography Today (EPP) With this project, we return to the notions of poetics and politics of ethnography inscribed in the foundations of contemporary anthropology, now focusing on questions of the role of science, knowledge exchange,...
Traditional Culture in the Digital Environment: Development of the Reference Center for Intangible Culture (TKuDOR)
The project is a continuation of long-term scientific research that is the fundamental activity of the Reference Center for Intangible Culture at the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore. Utilizing the latest technological advancements and the development of digital...
Bestiary of Croatian Ethnoculture. Interdisciplinary Foundations (BESTIA)
Bestiary of Croatian Ethnoculture. Interdisciplinary Foundations (BESTIA) Through systematic processing and valorization of existing animalistic data found in seminal works of Croatian ethnography and folklore from the 19th and 20th centuries, such as the "Zbornik za...
Precarious Culture and the Future of Work (BURA)
Precarious Culture and the Future of Work (BURA) Starting from the definition of culture as a way of life and finding that in the conditions of global capitalism, precarity as a phenomenon largely characterizes and as a concept best defines not only the work and...
Infrapolitical Practices and Changes: From the 1990s to Lived Futures (INFRA)
The project focuses on exploring clandestine or poorly visible work and life practices that reflect or have the potential to reflect on more visible and explicit social and political levels. We use the concept of infrapolitics as a common denominator for various...
Normality and Discomfort: Folkloristic and Interdisciplinary Approaches (NORMANEL)
The project is directed towards the normalisation of discomfort in culture, which has emerged as a general state of individuals and collectives after the first cracks and ruptures in the grand humanistic narratives, and has intensified due to new civilizational...
What kind of cities do we want? Contemporary transformations of urban visions, practices and ethics (URBAN)
The focus of the research project lies in the processes of multiple redefinitions of urban identities and ways of life in Croatian cities under the influence of various global and national trends and policies (deindustrialization, development of new and creative...
Music and Dance Traditions (TRAPLEGLA)
By observing music and dance as intangible culture, the cycles of research continue and expand, relying on two Institute’s projects, “Ethnochoreological Themes: Origins, Concepts, and Complexity of Dance” and “Heritageization of Traditional and Popular Music in...
Digital Aestheticization of Fragile Environments
Across diverse European environments, one can readily observe that the ways in which people engage with their surroundings have changed dramatically. In the mountains and in the forests, along riverbanks and seacoasts, it is hard to find anyone who is not tapping on...
Urban Futures: Imagining and Activating Possibilities in Unsettled Times (FUTURES)
Bilateral Croatian-Slovenian research project 2020 - 2023 This urban ethnological/cultural anthropological project is dedicated to in-depth research of future-making in selected Croatian and Slovenian cities. Future-making refers to comprehensive...
Cultural Animal Studies: Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Traditional Practices (ANIMAL)
The project Cultural Animal Studies: Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Traditional Practices (ANIMAL) starts from the beginnings of cultural animal studies and current animalistic outreaches in Croatia, accomplishments of cultural-animalistic...
The record industry in Croatia from 1927 to the end of the 1950s
Project supported by Croatian Science Foundation, 2020-2024 This project is the first instance of a systematic scholarly approach to the topic of record industry in Croatia. It focuses on the period from 1927 until the end of the 1950s,...
The European Irregularized Migration Regime in the Periphery of the EU: from Ethnography to Keywords (ERIM)
Project supported by Croatian Science Foundation, 2020-2024 The European migration regime and irregularized migration movements, including those along the Balkan route that crosses Croatia, among other countries, are key contemporary phenomena that...
Research programmes
Legacy of the 1990s Discourses and Everyday Life
We launched the project “Legacy of the 1990s: Discourses and Everyday Life” in 2019 with the idea of researching the 1990s as the decade (we call it a “zero decade”) in which many processes that still determine Croatian society took shape. These...
Urban processes and identities
By continuing the decades long orientation of the Institute’s research projects to urban environments, the platform Urban processes and identities establishes a systematic research of the city from the ethnological and cultural anthropological...
Transformativeness and perspectives of work in posttransitional Croatia: concepts, symbolism and effects
This project is focused on the anthropological concept of work and devotes its theoretical and fieldwork research to themes such as: work culture in conditions of strikes, unemployment, precarity and unpaid salaries; unemployment and the culture of...
From the old writings to the new orality
The starting point is Jan Assmann's articulation of a controversy which still generates polemics. The increased interest in the European cultural heritage, tradition and, consequently, genres of oral literature, is the outcome of the loss of...
Intangible culture and digital humanistics
The intention of the project is to continue the fundamental research of traditional culture and culture of contemporary everyday life through the prism of the relationship between the intangible culture and digital humanistics. Contemporary social...
Cultural animal studies: an animal and a human – interdisciplinary analyses and multifaceted cultural practices
The project deals with interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary investigation of cultural animal studies in literature, folkloristic, ethnology and cultural anthropology, while studying different aspects of the relationship between...
Culture of nutrition and the ethnology of everyday life
The research into the culture of nutrition in the midst of contemporary social changes attempts to find links and offer synthesis of research that is taking various directions, to promote the anthropology of nutrition as working knowledge and...
Croatian migratory themes from an anthropological angle: emigration, remigration and immigration
With this research platform, the theme of migration is broadened in comparison with research done to present, because it captures not only internal and external migratory movements of Croats (historical and contemporary work (e)migration, remigration...
Heritagization of traditional and popular music in Croatia in historical perspective
“Heritage music” and “music as intangible heritage” are the terms that are just entering the scientific discourse, i.e., they are in the process of their initial articulation. The main aspects are the connectedness to UNESCO’s programme of intangible...
Ethnochoreological themes: origins, conceptions and dance complexity
The research of dance and dance forms continues with the foundational ethnochoreological studies of the roles of performers and mediators in the explanation of cultural, gender, group and various spatial (such as institutional, non-institutional,...
Island ethnographies – contributions of ethnology and cultural anthropology to island and Adriatic studies
Work on the project envisages further questioning of the contributions of the ethnographic method and ethnological and cultural anthropological interpretations to the understanding of lives of human communities on islands. We will explore within this...
Ethnography of refugees: the Croatian context
The project came into existence as our response to a call we heard and as our duty to observe and understand the current refugee movements that brings refugees across Croatia to the countries of Western and Northern Europe. The continual...