Original scientific paper
A CONTRIBUTION OF TRADITIONAL EXPERIENCE TO THE SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT PARADIGM
Ivan Cifrić
; Faculty of Philosophy, Zagreb
Abstract
The author starts from the thesis that the traditional agricultural society contained in its everyday life some values which are rediscovered for the contemporary socialecological discourse by the modern society. With reference to three fields of life of the traditional and the modernised Croatian village, the author gives examples of the socialecological practice. This includes the material, social and spiritual dimensions of the society and their mutual intertwinment in the individual and the collective practice. These are activities during the yearly life cycle by which the following attitudes are expressed: man's attitude towards the production (exchange of material, threefield system, monoculture and specialisation, pulling weeds, reproduction and selection, plowing in of stubblefields, solidarity with the community), as well as the attitude towards the environment (functionality and aesthetics of landscape, environmental infrastructure, road maintenance, forest maintenance, garden and wilderness, responsible attention), and towards the settlement (house and its environment, three cemeteries, parasites and pests, local selfhelp and solidarity).
These issues are approached inductively so to point out at some structural elements of the agricultural society and traditional culture. By doing this, the author stresses the need of exploring the content and structures of the identity of rural (traditional) culture. The given examples and situations do not differentiate strictly between the traditional and the modernised village. The traditional village has disappeared, while the modernised village has retained some of the patterns of its socialecological practice.
Keywords
environment; rural identity; socialecological practice; agricultural society; tradition
Hrčak ID:
139496
URI
Publication date:
15.9.2002.
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