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Accepted Contribution:
Contribution short abstract:
The paper focuses on the Austrian ethnographer Franz Franzisci (1825-1920), who did research in a transcultural region. He described ‘Slovenian’ and ‘German’ cultural heritage as being of equal value, his studies were later unwritten by ethnologists in a sense of a nationalising (German) ideology.
Contribution long abstract:
Franz Franzisci (1825-1920), who contributed to the folkloristic article on Carniola (now Slovenia) and Carinthia (now Austria) in Die österreichisch-ungarische Monarchie in Wort und Bild (1891), made a name for himself as an ethnographer of the cultural heritage in Carinthia and Carniola. At this time, the conflict between the German-speaking majority and the Slovene-speaking population group arose against the background of the idea of homogeneous nation states (Hobsbawm/Ranger 1993). 1826 the philologist and writer Urban Jarnik noted a gradual ‘Germanisation’ of Carinthia, which until then had also been Slovene speaking.
Franzisci described phenomena of the mixed-language population that were connoted as ‘Slovene’ and ‘German’. He did not attempt to portray the cultural heritages of the ‚Slovenes‘ and ‚Germans‘ as mutually exclusive, but rather as equally valuable.
In the reception by the folklore movement after 1900, Franzisci was elevated to the ‘founding father of Carinthian folklore’ - whereby ‘Carinthia’ only meant German-speaking Carinthia. His writings were subsequently referenced in the 20th century and the Slovenian-language cultural heritage was either ignored, integrated, Germanised or constructed as ‘fallen heritage’.
The reception of Franz Franzisci in nationalising folklore shows how the dichotomy analysed in the concept of the Dispositif Carinthia/Koroška (Peball/Schönberger 2021) is constructed in a transcultural region. We dicuss how Franzisci's studies were rewritten in terms of a German national ideology and ask how we can reconstruct Franzisci's transcultural perspective. What hints of practices of in-between (Schemmer/Schönberger 2024) in the (still mixed language) region of Carinthia do we gain from such a unwriting?
Un/writing disciplinary histories: transnational, transcultural, and transdisciplinary dialogues in ethnology and folklore [WG: Historical approaches in cultural analysis]
Session 2