Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.5673/sip.61.2.1
Cultural Centres and the Paradigms of Modern Cultural Policy in Croatia
Nikola Tomašegović
orcid.org/0000-0003-3885-1591
; University of Zagreb, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Department of History, Croatia
Kruno Kardov
; University of Zagreb, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Department of Sociology, Croatia
Abstract
The article analyzes the concepts of cultural centers within the framework of modern paradigms
of cultural policies in Croatia over a longer period of time. As we show in this paper,
diverse purposes and concepts of cultural centers have reflected, on the one hand, concrete
contextual frameworks, and on the other, specific cultural policy goals formulated by different
political and social actors. Cultural centers are formed both as spaces of dissemination and as
spaces of production, and therefore unite the tensions and contradictions embedded in their
structural position between cultural policies and production of culture from above and cultural
action and production of culture from below. In the initial period of the formulation of modern
(bourgeois) national politics and culture during the Illyrian movement, cultural centers
had a pronounced dissemination function, but a very limited reach. In the period from the
turn of the 20th century until the first years after the Second World War, the question of mass
politics and culture came into focus and the key organizational models of cultural centers were
developed, which were based on the goals of various political actors, from cultural and civic
associations, through mass movements, and up to the increasingly prominent role of the state.
This development ends with the nationalization of the cultural sphere and the transformation
of cultural centers into a means of transmitting state culture. From the 1960s, with the
introduction of self-management, the role of cultural centers has been redefined in accordance
with the ideas of cultural democracy, but that role, paradoxically, has not been retained in the
cultural policies of the new multiparty system. In the transitional and post-transitional period,
a dual system of cultural centers develops, on the one hand, public cultural centers reduced to
the position of transmitting culture and imitating traditional cultural institutions, and on the
other, socio-cultural centers established and managed by civil society organizations in culture
based on the ideas of participation, sharing, and recognition of diversity.
Keywords
cultural center; socio-cultural center; house of culture; Croatia; cultural policy; democratization of culture; cultural democracy
Hrčak ID:
308948
URI
Publication date:
18.10.2023.
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