Hunters arrived in Ottoman-held Herzegovina from Dalmatia after 1815. With its mild winter, Herzegovina was regarded as unspoiled, full of birds and animals. After the Habsburg occupation in 1878, scientific research, specimen gathering, and the care of urban spaces increased. Paradoxically, at the same time, animals were being hunted, and some were in danger of extinction. Several Habsburg public intellectuals were both defenders of the environment and specimen gatherers or hunters.
The focus of the article is on working relationships between humans and horses in Vienna’s Fiaker industry. Based on ethnographic research, the author shows that these horses are not merely tools, but working partners with their own agency. Analysis reveals that interspecies working practices are both intimate and political, connecting the past with contemporary challenges, and raising questions about tradition, animal welfare, and the role of animals in the urban environment.
The study aims to elucidate the relations between animals and children within the educational context of Bosnia and Herzegovina (1878–1918). Drawing on archival documents, textbooks, articles, and feuilletons, it examines the attitudes toward animals promoted both inside and outside the classroom, with particular attention to animal death and the envisioned relationship children were expected to develop with it. More broadly, the study situates these findings within the framework of school education in Habsburg Bosnia.
This paper explores human-pigeon relations in Habsburg and post-Habsburg Hungary. During the First World War, pigeons functioned as both a symbol of peace and a tool of warfare used for communication. Moreover, the birds had their role in post-war irredentist and modernist politics. The paper also foregrounds the social aspects of pigeon breeding, ranging from the elite circles of competitive shooting, to organised animal protection and the intimate domestic bonds in households.
The introductory article reflects on the development of animal history and its absence from the otherwise vibrant study of Habsburg history. It highlights the need to integrate nonhuman animals into historical narratives, especially during the long 19th century – a period of profound changes in human-animal relationships driven by capitalism and its impact on the environment. This era saw shifts in animal breeding, scientific discoveries, biodiversity, pet keeping, zoos, and the rise of animal welfare movements, to name some.
The article researches the influence of nationalism on shaping livestock classification and the concept of animal breeds. Analyzing 19th to 21st-century animal husbandry literature from Carniola and Styria, it demonstrates how agricultural experts researched the origin of certain groups of livestock to legitimize the conception of native national breeds. The study reveals the integration of animals into the process of nation-building and thus signals a modern redefinition of societal relationships with the animal world.
This article examines programs of breed selection in the 19th-century Habsburg Monarchy. Throughout the century, imperial rulers and members of agricultural societies cooperated to promote the selection and circulation of specific groups of cattle. In the scope of broader visions of development for an “agricultural state”, such schemes highlight how agricultural improvers used issues of husbandry to shape, from below as well as from above, a combined process of economic growth and empire-building.
Članek obravnava manj raziskani vidik dela Franceta Marolta – njegove zvočne posnetke na direktno rezanih gramofonskih ploščah z 78 vrtljaji na minuto. Avtor v članku analizira kontekst Maroltovih posnetkov ziljske ohceti, predstavlja zbrane metapodatke in obravnava uporabljeno tehniko snemanja. Posnetke umešča v zgodovinski okvir raziskovanja ljudske glasbe na Slovenskem in v širše Maroltovo delo ter prikazuje preplet njegovih umetniških, raziskovalnih in pedagoških dejavnosti.
The article investigates the utilization of ethnic classification by human geneticists in Hungary, with a particular focus on the Roma minority. Drawing on qualitative expert-interviews, it analyzes how historically situated social imaginaries inform the production of genetic knowledge. The study explores how human genetics constructs heritable disorders as ethnic diseases, exposing the epistemological and ethical tensions inherent in translating sociocultural difference into biological terms.
This article examines the historical development and terminology of Latvian infant amusement verses within an international framework. The author traces the evolution of the genre through preserved materials and offers comparative insights into similar traditions in other European countries. The article then focuses on instances of violence and other controversial motifs that appear in such verses, offering a critical perspective on their reception in both historical and contemporary contexts.
The author’s research on Romani and Sinti musicians from north Slovenia has revealed several methodological obstacles. The author dealt mainly with deceased Romani and Sinti musicians, their absence from the archives, silence among their descendants, and anecdotal information. This paper therefore addresses methodological approaches to fragmented data, and the silence, absence, and distortion in the archival and ethnographic sources, exploring how to turn these impediments into a productive scholarly endeavour.
Vabljenje na poroko je bilo v 19. stoletju pomemben del poročnih šeg v severovzhodnem delu Slovenije, prav tako pa je bila pomembna tudi vsebina posebnih vabovskih besedil. Avtorica obravnava rokopis vabila iz Lahoncev z domnevno letnico nastanka 1836, ki je pisan v bohoričici in prleškem narečju. Članek obravnava različne zgodovinske in družbeno-kulturne kontekste, pomembne za interpretacijo nastanka, rabe in spreminjanja besedila.
The digitalization of folklore has transformed the practices of folklorists’ ethnographic fieldwork. Drawing on the experience of collecting digital family humour, the article discusses the peculiarities of digital folklore, its interconnections with oral folklore, and the ways to record and interpret it. As context is an important dimension for folklore interpretation, the analysis suggests ways to collect both the content of digital folklore and its offline contexts by combining various fieldwork methods.
The article explores how the collective and individual memories of major traumatic events in the area of the Slovenian-Italian border have impacted the identities, memories, and the living of the third youngest generation of the Slovenian and Italian national minorities. The article discusses the fieldwork findings collected in the Slovenian-Italian border region during two focus groups. Today’s generation wishes to break through a divisive legacy of the borderland past.
Heritage dissonances in contested territories are a challenge for the conservation of built heritage as they embody diverging values of the numerous communities. The restoration of the “Venetian House” in Piran (Slovenia) in 2016 provides an eloquent example through which we can observe the impact of population changes on the dynamics of (mis)recognition in heritage and highlight the potential of participatory practice in such conservation.
Focusing on Albanian communities’ overlooked musical heritage in post-Yugoslav Slovenia, this paper analyses how and why the dominant framing of Albanians has reinforced the assumption of the absence of the Albanian heritage. By comparing central and peripheral settings in examining the ambivalence towards this heritage in Kočevje and the recent process of heritagisation in Ljubljana, we challenge the notion that minority cultural recognition occurs uniformly across national space.
To whom do material and immaterial heritage belong? Can remembrance cultures be inclusive instead of cancelling each other out? This article explores possible answers to these questions in two historically multicultural cities, Rijeka/Fiume/Reka and Maribor/Marburg, in relation to their heritage of the Late Habsburg period. Drawing on original sources and recent literature in various languages, public attempts at narrating the Habsburg past through exhibitions, monuments and the like are examined.
The introductory article examines the processes of creating, using, and interpreting heritage in diverse multicultural settings. Special attention is given to exploring the creative and performative power of heritage in minority, linguistically diverse, post-imperial, post-socialist, and other multicultural environments, where heritage functions as a dynamic field of negotiation, contestation, and connection.
The paper explores the history, current state, and significance of studying the Polesian ethnocultural region, with emphasis on Ukrainian Polesia. It outlines the region’s archaic specificity and its diffuse ethnocultural field. The research relies on dialectological and typological methods, with an ethnolinguistic approach to semantic and structural unity in folklore. It has demonstrated the cultural, linguistic, ethnic, and other forms of elusiveness that complicate the representation of Polesia as a unified entity, thereby framing it instead as a multicultural and heterogeneous region.
The author develops a conceptual framework for studying community-based social innovation and intangible heritage, emphasizing the drivers of place, participation, social values, collective memories, and collaborative leadership. This paper examines the practice of autodrama, staged annually for over fifty years by the Teatro Povero di Monticchiello in rural Tuscany. From the perspective of the local population and surrounding area, autodrama is regarded as heritage, yet its social outcomes also exhibit characteristics of social innovation.
