TRANSFER ZAPADNIH I ISTOČNIH MUZEOLOŠKIH KONCEPCIJA – ETNOGRAFSKI MUZEJ U BEOGRADU U SOCIJALISTIČKOM PERIODU

The Ethnographic Museum in Belgrade is deeply founded on Romantic ideas from the end of the 19th century, but, like the whole society, in the middle of the 20th century found itself in a whirlwind of ideological upheaval – socialism was introduced as a social, economic and political order that was supposed to fundamentally change people’s cognitive systems and the view of the world they had created. All previous activities of the Ethnographic Museum aimed at documenting and codification of national identity (Serbs above all) were to be adapted now to the codification of new social ideals, among which the concept of brotherhood and unity of ethnic groups and national minorities was one of the dominant ones. The research of how the relationship with folk and traditional culture was built in the Ethnographic Museum shows, comparatively with other large ethnographic museums in Yugoslavia, that it is more about ethnic and identity segregation and particularization than about building a new, artificial, Yugoslav identity. This paper presents how in the museum paradigm is conceptualized ethnographic and ethnological research of culture and identity, primarily of the majority people in Serbia and Yugoslavia. It is noted that this research did not follow schematic evolutionism and historical materialism as a theoretical-methodological approach officially proclaimed by the state and which often appeared as dominant in the museums of Eastern Europe, but remained ethnographic and ethnological in the classical term and with other methodological limitations. The approach to culture was to some extent reminiscent of the ethnographic approach that was cared for in the USSR. It is also notable that the Ethnographic Museum was only partially a social agent for producing knowledge that codified an ideologically conceptualized relationship with the concept of the people. For the most part, it was about ethnographic “documenting” culture using museum objects as a testimony to that culture and its processes, which is modelled on museum approaches in Western Europe.