Trump,Montenegrins and the third world war

Thanks to President Trump's controversial interview in which he described the Montenegrin people as very aggressive, suggesting that Montenegro could be the cause of a third world war, this small Balkan nation got more attention than it had ever had before. Effectively, Trump exaggerated a historical stereotype of Montenegrins and based his comment on Montenegro's political behaviour from several centuries ago when they developed a warlike ethos. How this awareness of Montenegro's aggressive nature as a warrior people made its way to Donald Trump and how exactly he thinks Montenegrin bellicosity could be the cause of a third world war, we can only speculate. Montenegro has fewer than 700,000 inhabitants. The Montenegrin army counts some 1,800 soldiers. Most of the soldiers in active service see the job as a secure source of income, not a chance to prove their combat skills. Montenegro is therefore most unlikely to be the source of aggression itself. Starting from President Trump's statement regarding Montenegro, in this article, the author problematizes the historical roots of Montenegrin traditional masculinity, the reasons why the question of NATO membership still provokes controversies over Montenegrin identity and the position of Montenegro in contemporary geopolitics.     

GIS-based modeling of drought and historical population change on the Canadian Prairies

This article describes the development of a GIS-based model of historical drought and population change in western Canada, designed to support qualitative field research into drought adaptation and migration. The model combines digitized census data and recently available modeled historical climate data at a 10 km² grid cell scale and can be used to generate maps of ‘hotspots’ where historical declines in rural populations may be associated with extended periods of heat and lack of precipitation. The results suggest a promising avenue for expanding and refining GIS-based modeling of historical human–climate interactions to support qualitative research and to potentially serve as a stepping stone toward forecasting future risk areas of drought-related migration in continental dryland areas.     

‘New face of Serbia’ at the Eurovision Song Contest: international media spectacle and national identity1

The aim of this paper is to examine the construction/recycling of national identities primarily through the participation of Serbia (and Montenegro) at the Eurovision Song Contests 2004–2008. First, the performances of this country's representatives at the Eurovision Song Contest will be examined, emphasising the aspects that contribute to the popularity of the songs chosen to represent the nation and the state. All those elements reinvent a picture of the past in its lived totality, managing to reawaken the sense of the supposedly idyllic national past associated with them. In this manner of (re-)creating identity, the recycling of memory and imagined tradition, but also references to European cultural, media and political spheres, have great symbolic weight. The second part will offer a discourse analysis of media coverage of the performance of the country as a host of the Eurovision Song Contest. It is shown how the notion of ‘the new face of Serbia’ is supposed to balance different, sometimes even confronted cultural markers present in concurrent identity strategies in Serbia.     

Of love and national borders: the Croatian anthem ‘Our Beautiful Homeland’

Croatia became a UN member only in 1992, after the violent break‐up of Yugoslavia. Its anthem is marked by historically founded ambivalences as to the nature and territorial extent of the nation in question. This article offers an interpretation of the current version of the anthem and an analysis of the narrative and imagery of the nineteenth‐century poem from which the anthem originates. Three of the anthem's four stanzas speak about the Croats’ love for their homeland and their people and of the steadfastness and immortality of their love; the remaining stanza extolls the beauty of the homeland. By addressing the homeland's rivers and the sea directly, its singers appropriate this geography and so demarcate the borders of their much‐loved homeland. The anthem thus asserts Croatia's unity (against potential pretenders) and its unbreakable ties with its people. In contrast, the original fourteen‐stanza poem ‘The Croatian Homeland’, written in 1835, is a paean to the Croats’ ties to nature, their simple life and bravery – the romantic virtues of pure national souls. On their path to anthemhood, the four stanzas drawn from this poem have undergone significant modifications and additions, the result being a song that is doubly reassuring: it reassures the singers first of the people's love for themselves as a people, and second that this love is the means by which the ‘natural’ territory of the homeland is maintained.     

Archaeometric Investigation of Medieval Pottery from Excavations at Novo Brdo,Serbia

Medieval pottery from excavations at Novo Brdo, Serbia, an important mining and trading centre during the 14th and 15th centuries, was investigated by a combination of optical microscopy, inductively coupled plasma – optical emission spectrometry, Fourier transform infrared, micro‐Raman and energy‐dispersive X‐ray fluorescence spectroscopy and X‐ray powder diffraction methods in order to determine its composition and firing temperature. The samples investigated were made of medium‐ to coarse‐grained, non‐calcareous clay, by a relatively well‐controlled firing procedure in an oxidizing atmosphere. The firing temperature was estimated to be 850–950°C. The similarity between the chemical composition of the investigated pottery and the local raw clay, combined with the outward appearance and the archaeological findings, indicate domestic production. The pottery is covered with the transparent lead‐rich glaze. Iron and copper were used as colourants.     

“WITHOUT THINKERS … NO THEORIES OF THE WORLD”

Tim Crane's books Aspects of Psychologism and The Objects of Thought present a perspective on human intentionality based on internalism about mental contents. Crane understands intentionality as the defining aspect of the mental. The theory of intentionality that he formulates is similar to that of John Searle when it comes to ontological commitments, but it is also marked by a more traditional approach that retains the concept of intentional objects as its central aspect. In this review I examine the implications of Crane's internalism for the philosophy of history, by comparing his views with some well‐known arguments in favor of externalism about mental contents, such as Hilary Putnam's “Twin Earth” and Tyler Burge's “arthritis” mental experiments. Although internalism about mental contents such as Crane's is a minority view among contemporary analytic philosophers, I argue that it has significant advantages when it comes to the philosophy of history, because it is much better aligned with standard interpretive procedures in historical research. At the same time, externalism about mental contents typically results in inappropriate contextualizations and approaches that most practicing historians will find awkward. More generally, it is possible to argue that over decades, analytic philosophers’ externalist tendencies have significantly contributed to the reduced interest in their views among philosophers of history. The final section of the article reviews the implication of Crane's views on nonconceptual contents of human perception for art historiography.     

A Byzantine Shipwreck from Cape Stoba,Mljet, Croatia: an interim report

The Cape Stoba shipwreck is located on the seabed off the island of Mljet in Croatia at a depth of 21–28 m. Following initial investigation in 1975, four seasons of excavation have been carried between 2010 and 2014 by the Department for Underwater Archaeology of the Croatian Conservation Institute, joined by the Department of Studi Umanistici of the Università Ca' Foscari of Venice from 2012. The wreck‐site is evidenced by a cargo of nine amphora types dated to the 10th‐11th century AD, produced in the Eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea area, and glassware of Levantine production. The only direct evidence of the ship itself to date, is one iron anchor.     

The Cold War's cultural ecosystem: angry young men in British and Soviet cinema, 1953–1968

Using examples from postwar British and Soviet cinema, this article interprets European Cold War culture within the framework of a shared cultural ecosystem. The case study of reformist movements in 1950s and 1960s British and Soviet cinema makes clear that analogous sociopolitical and economic developments across postwar Europe inspired film heroes, narratives, and aesthetics that transcended national and ideological borders. The concept of a continent-wide cultural ecosystem elucidates how and why specific cultural phenomena—such as the figure of the “angry young man”—reflect an existence of a dynamic trans-systemic Cold War culture.     

Cuba's Cinematic Élan Vital: Cubanidad and Cubanía as Citizenship and Sentiment

This article focuses on the current shifts in expressions of Cuban national identity by considering the articulations of cubanidad and cubanía in recent documentary films from Cuba's Muestra joven. Rather than suggesting a disappearance or deterioration of national identity, these three examples of contemporary Cuban cinema evidence a more fluid, sentiment-based articulation of Cubanness that can be considered the island's élan vital. This analysis of representations of the ongoing transformation of Cuba deploys theories and terms conceptualised by Georg Sorenson in The Transformation of the State: Beyond the Myth of Retreat (2004) in order to posit how cubanidad is aligned with the modes of citizenship (the official), which is a sense of Cubanness defined by a rationality that may be imposed, while cubanía is affined with a sentiment fuelled by intuition (the personal). Thus we propose that just as the Muestra joven embodies the current vacillation and movement of Cuban cinema between citizenship and sentiment, so deMoler (Muestra 2004), Model Town (Muestra 2007) and La Época, el Encanto y Fin de Siglo (Muestra 2000) indicate a process of reinterpretation and rupture in a context of flux instead of rigidity.