This paper analyzes narratives of personal experiences of addiction, with a focus on the processes through which addiction is recognized and named in everyday life prior to entering institutional treatment pathways. Drawing on qualitative research based on 20 semi-structured, in-depth interviews with participants undergoing the rehabilitation phase of a treatment program at the Clinic for Addiction Disorders, Institute of Mental Health, the study examines the role of culture-specific knowledge in the development and recognition of addictive disorders. At the center of the analysis is the question of how individuals, before encountering expert or medical discourse, come to identify certain patterns of behavior as "pathological" and certain substances as "addictive." The paper argues that such processes of recognition are not solely dependent on formalized expert knowledge, but are significantly shaped by culture-specific knowledge produced and transmitted through everyday narratives. These narratives form informal epistemic frameworks that circulate within families, peer groups, and broader cultural contexts, enabling individuals to interpret and articulate their own experiences. By focusing on early encounters with addiction and psychoactive substances, as well as on the formation of the category of "the addict," the analysis highlights the importance of embodied experience in the habituation of behavioral patterns that are later labeled as addictive. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which individuals come to perceive their relationship with substances, or forms of impulse dysregulation, as "pathological," thereby shaping their lived experience. Addiction is understood as a socially mediated and embodied phenomenon, based on the concepts of embodiment and enactment. The gendered dimension of addictive experience is further examined from a critical feminist perspective, with attention to the ways in which normative expectations shape both the experience itself and its interpretation. Finally, the socially constructed image of "the addict," subsequently internalized by individuals, is analyzed from below, that is, from the perspective of those with lived experience of addiction. The paper underscores the importance of culture-specific knowledge about psychoactive substances and addiction in shaping the processes of the development, recognition, and treatment of addictive disorders.
This paper examines the formation and early development of the Sabor narodnog stvaralaštva Socijalističke Republike Srbije, widely known as the Leskovački sabor, within the broader cultural and political framework of socialist Yugoslavia. Focusing on the first eight years of the festival’s existence (1972–1979), the study analyzes how the manifestation functioned as a representational model for staging, disciplining, and redefining traditional music under socialist cultural policies. Drawing on archival materials, committee reports, and contemporary scholarly reflections, the paper explores the tension between the proclaimed preservation of “authentic” folk expression and the processes of modernization, standardization, and ideological instrumentalization. By interrogating concepts such as authenticity, authority, and cultural ownership, the study reveals how the Leskovački sabor simultaneously enabled visibility for working-class performers and contributed to the transformation – and at times fragmentation – of traditional musical expression in Socialist Yugoslavia, while it reveals how authorities reformulated musical performance, which brought it to its reductive, intervened, and disciplined forms of representation. At the same time, sabor, in its traditional sense, served as a model for the younger generation, who learned musical performance from older participants at festivals across Yugoslavia.
This article examines the Serbian proverb Naljutio se pop na selo, pa odsekao sebi kurac (“The priest became angry with the village and cut off his own dick”), conventionally interpreted as describing a person who acts against their own interests to their own detriment. I argue that the meaning of the proverb is more complex than such an interpretation suggests, as it points to a cultural model of sociality, that is, to a culturally specific conception of the principles governing interpersonal relations within a human community at the most general level. The three principal elements of the proverb, the priest, the village, and the dick, should likewise not be understood literally, but rather as metaphorically employed cultural representations of the micro-social community, its leaders, and the public expression of what should be regarded as their sociocultural personas, whose semantic synergy gives rise to a cultural lesson about how people should or should not behave in their interactions with the people they live with, namely, with the members of their own community. The key analytical expression in the proverb is “became angry”. It depicts the relationship between the community leader and his sociocultural environment and explains the action that this relationship has brought about. This notion integrates the cultural representations of the village, the priest, and the male sexual organ into a coherent semantic structure that conveys a distinct cultural message. Cooperation within a community, understood as goal-oriented activity, need not be directed exclusively towards material objectives. It may also possess a moral dimension, in the sense that it may insist on socially desirable forms of behaviour, and this is precisely what the proverb postulates. This saying concerning the village, the priest, and the self-removal of his own sexual organ is devoted to inaćenje (defiant behaviour), specifically, to its absurdity and even its harmfulness as a mode of sociocultural interaction. The proverbial priest represents an aberrant individual whose conduct deviates from the moral standards of the community, as manifested in his poor relations with its members, all of which is contrary to the principles of sociality and functional coexistence within a social setting. Inaćenje, for its part, constitutes a means of the self-production of an individual into a socially aberrant person. By cutting off his own sexual organ, the proverbial priest not only ceases to be a priest and, as such, can no longer lay any claim to leadership within the community in any sense, but also excludes himself from the community. In this respect, the message of the proverb is also that individuals who engage in inaćenje, that is, those who do not respect the opinions of others, acknowledge no justification other than their own, believe themselves always to be right, and generally exaggerate their personal importance within a social environment, are socially undesirable members of the community.
This article examines the relationship between the creative industries, popular culture, and folklore from the perspective of cultural studies through a critical reconsideration of the concept of the folkloresque. The folkloresque is a concept introduced during the second decade of the twenty-first century by Michael Dylan Foster and Jeffrey A. Tolbert to describe both the processes of creation and the products that emerge when popular culture appropriates or invents folkloric themes, settings, images, and other elements. The concept of the folkloresque not only problematizes the traditional/popular dichotomy but also enables an analysis of the transposition of folkloric elements into the worlds of popular culture, the creative industries, and the digital sphere. The article begins with a discussion of the genesis of the concept of popular culture from the perspective of cultural studies, with particular attention to its understanding as folk culture. Over time, this understanding underwent a degree of transformation and, under the influence of the theoretical work of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, came to be conceived as a space of symbolic struggle over meaning and a site of negotiation between the dominant culture and the oppositional responses directed towards it. The article then introduces the concept of the folkloresque, its three interrelated meanings, as well as its three categories - integration, portrayal, and parody, and outlines the principal connections between the folkloresque and other concepts employed in folklore studies. The following section addresses the issue of authenticity and, through a critical examination of the folkloresque in relation to the concepts of fake folklore and folklorism, proposes an assessment of the significance of the folkloresque for understanding contemporary forms of popular culture. The concluding discussion underscores the fluid character of the concept of the folkloresque and raises questions concerning its adequacy in relation to the established terminology of folklore studies.
Henry Salt (1780–1827), appointed British Consul-General in Egypt, acquired a vast number of ancient Egyptian antiquities during his service in Egypt between March 1816 and October 1827. Among them was a triple mummy case that consisted of an outer qrsw coffin, rectangular in its base with a vaulted lid, the middle/intermediary anthropoid coffin, and the inner anthropoid coffin with the mummified person inside. In 1835, the triple mummy case was purchased by Thomas Joseph Pettigrew (1791–1865), who unwrapped the mummy on May 27, 1836, before a large audience in the lecture room of the Royal Institution in London. The remains of the mummy were subsequently kept in the museum of his son, William Vesalius Pettigrew (1815–1874), at St. George’s School of Medicine, Grosvenor Place. Thomas Pettigrew later sold the triple mummy case to John Lee (1783–1866), whose collection was in its turn acquired in 1865 by William Amhurst Tyssen-Amherst (1835–1909). Following a pattern, at the auction of Lord Amherst’s collection on June 14, 1921, the entire coffin assemblage of ‘Aroeri-ao’ (also known as Ari, Asiriao, Osiri, Iri-Iri, Iri-Iri Wennefer, and Ir) was purchased by antiquarian Ernest Brummer (1891–1964), who was born in Sombor (present-day northern Serbia) to a Hungarian-speaking Jewish family. The Brummer Brothers (Joseph, Imre, and Ernest) opened their first gallery in Paris in 1906, and a second in New York in 1914. Soon after the 1921 auction, Ernest Brummer donated the inner coffin (bivalve anthropoid with back pillar and pedestal) to the National Museum of Serbia (NMS) in Belgrade. The coffin arrived to Belgrade by the end of 1921. Due to a dispute between two Belgrade transport companies, the coffin only entered NMS in September 1923, when it was added to the permanent exhibition for the following two decades. In the troublesome years following the Second World War, probably 1948 and 1949, in the newly established Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia, the coffin vanished from NMS without a trace. Its disappearance survived only in the vague recollection, described in a single sentence, of the retired NMS curator and art historian Miodrag Kolarić (1912–2001), interviewed by the present author in 1993. The coffin unexpectedly resurfaced in 2009 at the Archaeological Museum in Zagreb (AMZ), Croatia. It turned out that it had been unlawfully removed from NMS by the Yugoslav Army officer Đuka Kavurić (1903–1976) from Zagreb, an influential figure in the communist regime who was at the time authorized to confiscate the property of politically undesirable or missing persons although certainly not objects belonging to public museums. He happened to be a private collector himself, so he retained the coffin in his family’s possession for six decades. The Kavurić family sold the coffin to the AMZ in 2008, and, unaware of its previous history, the museum bought it and placed it on permanent display in 2009 (Inventory No. E-782, Figs. 1–4). The actual name of the mummified person is rather rare. The genealogy inscribed on the coffin assemblage identifies the owner as Iriru (jrjrw) a wab priest of Amun (wab n jmn). His father was Wennen-nefer (wnn-nfr), his grandfather Ankh-khonsu (anx-xnsw), his great-grandfather Hor-sa-aset (Hr-sA-Ast), and his great-great-grandfather Nes-pauti-tawi (ns-pAwtj-tAwj). All stated male family members, except for Iriru, bore the priestly title ‘God’s father of Amun’ (jt-nTr [n] jmn), as was customary among the Theban clergy. Iriru’s mother was ‘Lady of the House’ (nbt-pr), Mut-sheri (mwt-Srj) whose name also appears as Mjw-Srj. According to Taylor’s typology, the coffin belongs to type 4B (with Nut figure supporting the collar), while in the classification of Tarasenko and Elias it falls into subtype IYb (Inscribed Yellow bands edged with a blue stripe). Iriru’s Theban style coffin is to be dated to later Twenty-Fifth Dynasty, circa early seventh century B.C., around the beginning of pharaoh Taharqa’s reign. The whereabouts of Iriru’s unwrapped mummified remains, his qrsw coffin, and the middle/intermediary coffin (possibly together with associated cartonnage) are yet to be discovered.
