On such varied topics as political representatives, the labor force, or the national basketball team, the public discourse in Slovenia is seeing a resurgent emphasis on the “national extraction” of the citizens of Slovenia. Frequently used in such debates are the elusive notion of ethnicity “by blood” and the image of an imaginary people that has always inhabited this region, dreaming of its own state. This need for a quickly constituted national awareness has unfortunately clouded the actual history of the region, greatly marked in terms of culture, politics, and economy by migration currents over the past centuries. Anthropologist Irena Šumi, PhD, will focus on the historical topics of how the population of present-day Slovenia was constituted, what role immigrations played in this, and how the recent diaspores were framed.
The lecture is part of a larger project New Mappings of Europe, supported by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.
