The dissertation sheds light on the ethnological and museological practices in researching and presenting non-European cultures between 1960 and 1990, when the socialist Yugoslavia’s foreign policy, then firmly embedded in the Non-Aligned Movement, advocated the principles of international cooperation, solidarity, and friendship with developing countries. The author analyzes these practices, which until now have not received appropriate scientific attention, through the perspective of postcolonial and decolonial studies. Her insights facilitate the understanding of imperial and colonial processes, shedding light on the operation of colonial technologies that use the categories of temporal and spatial otherness and body politics to establish and maintain hierarchies between world populations. She also discloses the ways in which Slovenia was the subject of Western othering while, at the same time, it itself constructed local preconceptions of the other. The author analyzes the practice of the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the Faculty of Arts with an emphasis on non-European ethnology, and goes on to focus on the Museum of Non- European Cultures in Goričane, which operated between 1964 and 2001 as a dislocated unit of the Slovene Ethnographic Museum. She carefully examines its collection policy, which consisted of random acquisitions that complemented the existing collections, and analyzes original and visiting exhibitions organized by the museum in collaboration with developing countries. The museum discourses mobilized upon these exhibitions reflected the concurrent political and cultural tendencies in the country and maintained the continuity of ideas from the imperial period. In the second part of the dissertation, the author illustrates her previous insights with an analysis of two exhibition projects in which she was involved as a staff member of the Slovene Ethnographic Museum. She offers a reflection on more appropriate practices in presenting nonEuropean collections in Slovenia, focusing in particular on the efforts to present the broader historical contexts of their acquisition that, in turn, reveal the history and legacy of museums, as well as concern for terminological accuracy of museum narratives and presentation of nonEuropean heritage in cooperation with its bearers.
|
