Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.31664/zu.2024.114.04
A Discursive Analysis of 1950-1990 Articles on Croatia’s “Non-European” Ethnographic Collection: A Contribution to Digital Art History
Martina Bobinac
orcid.org/0000-0001-8366-8150
; Institut za povijest umjetnosti, Zagreb, Hrvatska
Abstract
This paper aims to follow the change in discourse that occurred around the “Non-European” Collection of the Ethnographic Museum in Zagreb in the 20th century. The dataset for this research was created by applying OCR in Python to newspaper articles and articles from other specialized journals in the time span of forty years on the topic of “non-European” artifacts and art from the archives of ethnographic museums in Zagreb and Split, which were then examined through natural language pro¬cessing. By studying the articles, a shift in the perception of the “Other” in the Croatian public and cultural sphere over time is reviewed. The paper follows the assumption that this shift had, among other, to do with Yugoslavia being one of the founders of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) since many of the collection’s artifacts originated from member states of the NAM. Yugoslavia’s standpoint towards the Global South as friends and allies and its ef¬forts to implement an anti-colonial discourse is visible through a change in words chosen to describe the afore¬mentioned collection in the articles of the period. These altered narratives also coincide with similar shifts in some of Europe’s biggest colonial museums that stemmed from an attempt to highlight their newly acquired anti-colonial standpoints.
Keywords
Non-Aligned Movement; Yugoslavia; anti-colonial discourse; colonial discourse; natural language processing; digital art history
Hrčak ID:
323483
URI
Publication date:
1.7.2024.
Visits: 0 *