The international flow of cultural capital and an American anthropologist's experiences doing ethnography in Croatia: the insider/outsider question.
This essay is a discussion of the author's changing perspectives of his anthropological research in Croatia which comes about through the postmodern critique of theorectical paradigms as well as the fact that financial and cultural globalization has changed the subject of our research. Added to the globalization process and the international flow of cultural capital in Croatia are the recent events of the collapse of a modernism experiment in Marxism and the emergence of ethnic nationalism. The complexity of these current postmodern trends in theorectical anthropology, combined with complex current historical processes on top of a very complex history in Croatia, raise real questions about whether or not the outsider anthropologist can textualize the cultural situation here. But, a question still remains as to whether the insider anthropologist/ethnologist can textualize a cultural situation that is difficult to draw parameters around because of the international flow of cultural capital, e.g., are the younger generation really focused on localized ethnic nationalism or is this now a situation that is so internationalized that our former assumptions about local place make no longer make sense?
Bennett
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BC
Department of Anthropology, Appalachian State University, Boone, N.C. 28608, USA.
D000884:Anthropology, Cultural; D003142:Communication; D017523:Croatia; D003466:Cultural Characteristics; D006801:Humans