Imagined material culture. Reflection on the spread of the nationalism in the company of material culture

The project poses the question of the role of material culture in the reproduction of nationalism. It approaches this question by researching individual objects or groups of objects which occupy a special place in the imaginarium of Slovenian nationalism. Objects such as Carniolan sausage, gibanica cake, the Vače situla and the accordion. But such a starting point – the selection of symbolically, conceptually and discursively highly charged objects – does not mean that the project will reject the material, functional and other contextual spheres of the objects concerned. The project in fact is designed to show how this symbolic, discursive and conceptual production is complexly and inseparably connected with the material, functional and other contextual spheres of the objects concerned. Or, in the concrete language of the project itself, we want to show how the “national” is impossible without the material. This, however, is a question that is (too) infrequently posed in the humanities and social sciences.