Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.15176/vol52no202
Strategies of Irreconcilability: The Cvijić-Tomašić Complex in Contemporary Croatian Media Reality
Katarina Luketić
; Zagreb
Abstract
The article presents an analysis of common narrations about mentalities and identities in the Balkans, which have been perpetuated for a long time in the public sphere, and have acquired the status of general truths about “Us” and “Them”. The article focuses on the controversy regarding the mentality/identity irreconcilability between Northern/Western and Southern/Eastern Croatia that broke out in the high-circulation, mainstream media in 2009, which can be traced back to earlier texts by the same and other authors and can be seen in their later texts. The public controversy was caused by a series of texts by an influential journalist, whereby Northern/Western Croatia was attributed positive characteristics such as progressive, polite, educated, hard-working, and Southern/Eastern Croatia was attributed negative characteristics such as backward, savage, primitive, lazy; thus incorporating the distinction between Europe and the Balkans, i.e. civilization and barbarianism. Such parascientific theories – in this case presented through the framework of media spectacularization – are compilations, simplified versions of Jovan Cvijić’s and Dinko Tomašić’s theories about Balkan mentalities/identities. Referring to persistent irreconcilabilities and exaggerating identity differences is a way to reinforce narratives about preordained Balkan inferiority, constant backwardness, and being doomed to premodernity. The mental mapping of the supposedly ingrained mentality structures does not take into account the time in history or the basic hybridity of identity that developed during the long history of migrations, mutual influences and mixing in the Balkans.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
149471
URI
Publication date:
14.12.2015.
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