Projects / Programmes
Imagining the Other: construction of Otherness in the case of immigrants (refugees, displaced persons, asylum seekers)
| Code |
Science |
Field |
Subfield |
| 6.03.02 |
Humanities |
Anthropology |
Social and cultural anthropology |
| Code |
Science |
Field |
| S220 |
Social sciences |
Cultural anthropology, ethnology |
anthropology of ethnicity and nationalism, anthropology of landscape, sedentarism, migration studies, racism
Researchers (1)
| no. |
Code |
Name and surname |
Research area |
Role |
Period |
No. of publicationsNo. of publications |
| 1. |
15173 |
PhD Alenka Janko Spreizer |
Humanities |
Head |
2002 - 2004 |
273 |
Organisations (1)
Abstract
The proposed research project presents an anthropological study of the processes of constructing the Other on the territory of the present day Slovenia. It is designed mainly as an ethnography of the processes of constructing a cultural and ethnic difference within the Slovenian national territory with special regard to the period after the 1991 and the escalation of racism at the end of the year 2000. The project will focus on the fields of delineation of 1) people who have migrated to Slovenia in the period of the former Yugoslavia, 2) people who presumably intent to migrate to Slovenia or use its territory as a transit stop. Some of the paramount research questions posed are when, how and in which contexts the categories of strangers, refugees, immigrants are being formed and in which contexts the concepts are being manipulated by different actors (i.e., local and national policies, local inhabitants, political elite) particularly with regard to the territory, space and landscape. Employing ethnographies, especially life stories and participant observation methods will serve to analyse the differences in interpretations of migrations in the period of the former Yugoslavia and from the Slovenian independence on. The processes of social exclusion of “other” populations will be scrutinised with special attention to the question of how the so called “autochthonous inhabitants of Slovenia” are appropriating the territory that seemingly belongs to them “naturally” as their own, what kind of initiatives of social exclusion are being assumed and based on which arguments. The proposed research will study the ways of different actors interpreting a cultural and ethnic difference between “us” and “them”, what strategies of excluding the other are they using and in which cases the strategies of argumentation are based on racism or are confluent with it. The research will also deal with anthropology of politics with special regard to the national politics that regulates the issues of refugees, asylum seekers, displaced persons etc. The project will study the epistemological questions of migration and sedentariness, of strangeness and autochthonous as are dealt with by social anthropology. The folk theories (by the so called autochthonous Slovenian inhabitants) of foreigners, displaced persons, immigrants and refugees will be collected along with the folk theories (by immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers,) of the so called autochthonous Slovenian inhabitants that use their own sedentary ideologies that may manifest in hatred towards foreigners, in order to take the right to manipulate a certain space by claiming their Slovenianness while their arguments are explicitly racist.
