Institut für Geographie und Raumforschung der Universität Graz,
Österr. Geographische Gesellschaft, Zweigstelle Graz, und
Fachgruppe Geographie des Naturwissenschaftlichen Vereins für Steiermark
laden ein zum
Geographischen Kolloquium
Do. 25. April 2013, 18.00 h im Hs. 11.03
Marin CVITANOVIĆ MSc. (Zagreb)
Balkan soundscapes:
(Re)constructing Balkan identities through popular music
Zum Vortragenden
M. Cvitanović was born in 1982 in Croatia. In 2007 he graduated from the University of Zagreb, Faculty of Science with the thesis „The nation-state in the Sub-Saharan Africa” mentored by prof. Reinhard Henkel, University of Heidelberg. In the same year he started a PhD study and joined the Faculty of Science, University of Zagreb, as a junior researcher and teaching assistant in the courses „Geography of the Mediterranean”, „Environmental history” and „Principles of regionalization”. Two main topics of his research are cultural geography and land use/land cover change. In 2012 he spent a semester at the Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University. He has published several scientific articles and took part in international scientific conferences.
Zum Inhalt
The area known as the Balkans and its definition have been a problem to geographers ever since August Zeune mistakenly described the area south of the Balkan mountains in Bulgaria as the Balkan peninsula in the early 19th century. The term peninsula has widely become accepted in scientific and popular literature, even as the spatial dimensions of „the Balkans” varied with changing social and political circumstances, and its semantic burden steadily increased over the years. Through art, literature and film, the Balkans have become enriched with symbols and meanings, and through such reproduction the general perception is being shaped for a wider audience.
Such a concept is not new in geography, but the link between geography and music surprisingly has not been widely explored, even though music as a means of cultural communication has a major role in evoking the sense of a place, as well as creating it. In the last two decades over a hundred songs in the Serbian/Croatian language have been released which specifically mention the term Balkan and use it as a metaphor. This research is based on these songs and the analysis of the lyrics in an attempt to answer not the question „Where are the Balkans?”, but rather „What is Balkan?” on the mental map of the musicians and the audience of the region.