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Opera is able to offer enchanting performance sites, in which people create and experience glamorous or ecstatic imagined worlds, but behind this picture we find a real social organization embraced by reality, which makes opera's world and its history accessible for ethnographic enquiry, historical reflection and cultural analysis. This book therefore presents the author's original anthropological study, which shows complex historical, socio-cultural, political, economic, ideological, academic and ethnographic facets of opera culture in Slovenia, including the field sites of both Slovenian national opera houses, in Ljubljana and Maribor. The study explicates how social representations of opera are produced and enacted by different social agents involved within the Slovenian national operatic habitus, and how opera is used as an idealized vision of nationhood and national identity in a provincial society.
List of contents
Contents: Opera as anthropology - Opera as ethnographic experience - Opera as provincial habitus - Opera as hegemony of 'musicological' canon - Opera as idealized vision of nationhood - Opera as invented tradition - Opera as media representation - Opera as postsocialist calculation - Opera as transnational promenade.
About the author
The Author: Vlado Kotnik is assistant professor of anthropology and media studies at the University of Primorska in Koper (Slovenia), director of the Institute for Anthropological Research in Ljubljana, and member of the European Association of Social Anthropologists.
Report
«'Opera and an anthropologist should no longer be an odd couple' Kotnik suggests, and how true that is. Opera and anthropology were made for one another, and in this book we see why. If opera is an extravagant art, then anthropologists are the connoisseurs of extravagance. Opera's preoccupations are the very stuff of anthropology: culture, taste, transgression, monsters and identities.» (Paul Atkinson, Distinguished Research Professor, School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, UK)
«This captivating book reveals an intricate social organization behind the grandeur of opera performances in postsocialist Slovenia.» (Helena Wulff, Professor of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University, Sweden)
