Contradictories of inherited cultural pattern and contemporary intellectual elite in Serbia

Abstract

The theoretical basis of this paper is the notion of cultural pattern, or cultural model (Linton), or habitus (Bourdieu). Understood as a system of continuous and transferable dispositions, including all previous experience, it acts in each moment as a matrix of perception, evaluation and act. The cultural pattern of social groups and individuals in Serbia in the last 100 years had been created during a long period of time and cannot be changed quickly, nor easily. During the 19th century we had been trying to get rid of so-called Turkish legacy, mixed with patriarchal cultural pattern, without enough strength to complete the creation of civil and European cultural pattern in all areas of social life in the first decades of the 20th century. In the middle of the last century we were caught into a rigid ideological cultural pattern called social, i.e. communist consciousness. Today we speak about getting rid of communist legacy. However, things are not so simple as they look like. Contradictories of inherited cultural pattern consist of presence of lots of layers of old cultural patterns. What is the role of the intellectual elite in Serbia today? Which cultural patterns does this elite follow? These are the main questions the author is trying to answer.

Keywords

• cultural pattern
• cultural model
• intellectual elite in Serbia