Professional paper
Marginalization – Tendency of Contemporary Urban Culture; Possible Approach
Antun Petak
; Centar za društvena istraživanja Instituta za društvena istraživanja Sveučilišta u Zagrebu Zagreb, Tomislavov trg 21/1
Abstract
The author of the article has taken as a starting point the well known general attitude present in the contemporary Marxist apprehension of the sociological study of culture, according to which the individual problems with the whole of the social reality converging in them, meaning the conditions of transformation in the way of life, in the system of socio-cultural values and mentality, should be researched. With the culture as a productive force, the everyday urban existence becomes a basic question in the conditions of total and rapid urbanization.
Constitutive component in the process of urbanization based on industrialization, seems to be the pressing out of a producer from the entire productive space, deepening of alienation. In the urban contemporaneousness, that becomes evident in the moving of social crisis from the sphere of material-productive process to the human community, in the crisis of urban way of existence with a characteristic cultural deformation in the working and leisure time, that is, in marginalization of existence.
That is how the classical understanding of the concepts marginality, marginal man, and marginal group has been overcome. In the present article, marginalization is an analytical concept for participation, that is superficial participation in social, cultural and political life of a certain social environment or community, characterized
by the regression of sociability, by the poverty of cultural needs and by the economics and individualism. In case we define culture as the way of living and the system of socio-cultural values, marginalization, in everyday life, should become evident in the context of class-social differentiation as a certain generalization of the small town mentality, as well as in the disappearing of the active-designing relationship between a man and reality, brought about by means of the mass culture.
Within such a frame the author makes an attempt to approach marginalization on the basis of data concerning the process of cultural needs and on the basis of the type of cultural self-activity of the sample of those employed, of the sample of inhabitants in one colony in one commune at the outskirts of Zagreb (Dubrava), and of the sample of inhabitants in the Central Croatia regarded as Zagreb environment. Urbanization would mean spreading of dominant culture-mass culture, in case it appeared as the spreading of urban way of life to the heterogeneous cultural traditions, the process itself, causing the arrival of great masses of migrants from heterogeneous cultural traditions.
The results of the three independent researches have shown characteristic polydeterminative causative-consequent complex in case of the specific cultural needs of traditional and contemporary mass urban culture; and besides, they have shown tendency of domination of contemporary urban culture. It is evident that we talk about the quasi-urbanization and cultural marginalization with the necessity to fight for the authentic socialistic culture.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
156277
URI
Publication date:
31.12.1975.
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