Seminar in Regional Ethnology, Anthropology and Folkloristics

Work in the seminar is based on guided reading of articles and variety of current and older literature, in accordance to the topics or the area of particular seminar. Main activities are guided discussions and independent student presentations of their own research as well as consulted reading. Each student prepares and defends a seminar work in the range of 30.000 to 60.000 characters with spaces. Each study year mentors or leaders of the seminar acquaint the students with the specific topic of the seminar and accordingly provide them basic literature, which they discuss about within the seminar.
In the first semester the student presents the topic of his or her seminar work, which is followed by a guided discussion, and by the end of the semester he or she prepares and submits its disposition.
The seminar relates to the following established fields in the study program of ethnology and cultural anthropology: ethnology of Slovenia, ethnology of Europe and ethnology of non-European countries (Africa, Asia, America and Oceania and Australia), folkloristics.
Students get acquainted with the research on selected topics related to specific regions (especially Slovenia, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe or Slavic countries, the Balkans, various areas and cultures in Asia, Latin America, (North) Africa). They also learn about the research in the field of narrative folkloristics. Key ethnological and anthropological research on a certain region is in the foreground of the seminar, as well as it is to learn about the contemporary phenomena that characterize this region (for example neocolonialism, mobility, migration, nomadism, developmental programs, constructions of the Balkans as the Other). Students also get acquainted with the diversity of the practices, concepts and forms of specific phenomena (such as kinship, family, marriage and inheritance systems) and at the same time with the basic conceptual tools for their analysis. They acquire knowledge about different types and usages of ethnological sources which originate in more or less distant past or are emerging today, as well as they learn about the variety and specificities of regional cultures and ways of life.

Navaro-Yashin Yael: The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity. Durham in London: Duke University Press, 2012. COBISS.SI-ID – 88043523,

Each year separately those who lead the seminar prepare the list of literature - individually for each student and according to his or her chosen topic of the seminar work.