Original scientific paper
Vladimir Ardalić about himself and others - others and Ardalić
Drago Roksandić
Abstract
One of the most prolific contributors to Zbornik za narodne običaje i život Južnih Slavena , self-taught and gifted VladimirArdalić from Bukovica, was also one of its socially and culturally most marginalized associates. His formal education was limited to three years of primary school but his knowledge, cultural memory and above all imagination acquired in the house of his uncle Jakov, the rector in Đevrske parish,
and in the company of his daughter Ljubica, released in the gifted Vladimir a creative energy that could materialize in large ethnographic and archaeological projects of Zbornik za narodni život i običaje Južnih Slavena organized by Yugoslav Academy of Arts and Sciences, or more pricely by Dr. Antun Radić on one hand, and Fr. Lujo Marin
and his Croatian Antiquarian Society on the other. Regardless of other contexts, it was this colaboration that defi ned Ardalić’s political views during his most prolifi c years. He was in both cases, among the rare, and perhaps very few associates who were “Orthodox Croats”, yet at times quite ambivalent in regard to his beliefs and behavior. Antun Radić and Dragutin Boranić, each in its own way, encouraged Ardalić’s creativity, and, at the same time, obviously could not fi nd an appropriate way to communicate with the man with whom cooperation was not simple and could be reduced to a non-binding bourgeois
convention. Ardalić’s experience points to the deeper cultural controversies in the work of the Academy’s Committee for folk life and customs, which aimed at completing the project of the “Discovery of the people” by relying on the talented “ordinary” people, while
overlooking that for its successful realization an appropriate culture of communication was necessary. The fact that Vladimir Ardalić for years, all the way untill 1913 , was one of the closest and most successful associates of Fr. Lujo Marun in Croatian Antiquarian
Society, makes the study of Ardalić even more intriguing. This is more so since Fr. Lujo Marun himself was an ingenious archaeologist with no formal education in the fi eld. with the advantages and shortcomings of such status at a time when medieval archeology in Croatia was at its beginning, and also at the time when the professional archeology in
Europe as well as in Croatia reached a remarkable level of development. In this case, the issue was of about an elite national project, but also a project in which there was plenty of room for creative amateurs, with all the good and bad implications of such a situation.
Keywords
Vladimir Ardalić and Antun Radić; D. Boranić; Fra Lujo Marun; Croatia; Croatian ethnology and archeology; Orthodox Croats; Serbs in Dalmatia; 19th and 20 century
Hrčak ID:
118053
URI
Publication date:
8.5.2012.
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