Original scientific paper
AUTOBIOGRAPHIES OF CHILDREN DISPLACED BY WAR AS THE ETHNOGRAPHY OF GROWING UP
Ines Prica
; Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Researach, Zagreb, Croatia
Maja Povrzanović
; Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Researach, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
Ethnographic reading of autobiographical utterances on the war experience and exile of children has its place between historiographic discourses and the genre and fictional features of insights of the folkloristics and narrathology. Together with the issues of the uncertain position of these texts as testimony on real events, which is the centre of attention in discussions of both orientations, here the problem which arises with the possibility of their being totally removed from reality in the rhetorical figures of theoretical discourses is also emphasised. With the singling out of individual elements in the narrative and cultural models in which the trend is
towards solution of the life story as being between the story of one's own growing up and cultural processing of historical and ideological content (naming the enemy, various interpretations of the war), here it is placed in the context of certain legitimate (political, scientific, value-oriented) interpretive patterns. With respect to the effort for consideration and embedding of direct war experience in meaningful cultural and historical stories in which there is a place for the individual, the different and even the contradictory, in which the experience of collective identity is aspectual and situational, exile folklore affirms itself as a locus offering dialectical opportunities which can also excel those discourses with legitimized evaluating positions.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
48870
URI
Publication date:
5.8.1995.
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