Page 349 - Kotnik, Vlado. 2018. Medijske etnografije: K antropološki imaginaciji medijev in komuniciranja. Koper: Založba Univerze na Primorskem
P. 349
Summary
The book Media Ethnographies: Towards an Anthropological Imagination
of the Media and Communication is an integral presentation of six distinct
studies, which were developed in the period between 2007 and 2017.
The first study When Television Goes Skiing: An Anthropological
Study of the Cultural Transformation of the Past Sporting Practice into a
Media Spectacle of the Nation portrays the well-known Slovenian narra-
tive about the development of skiing from a past “indigenous” Slovenian
practice to a flagship televised sport through the perspective of a spectacle.
The study emanates from the assumption that skiing, despite the histori-
cal, technological and cultural transformation in Slovenia, has a specific
constant which serves the Slovenian community with its spectacle func-
tion throughout the past centuries. The text, following the arc of the trans-
formations of skiing as a specific cultural practice, puts forward some of
the elements that particularly manifest this feature of the sport, such as the
modern Valvasorian reflection of the old-fashioned Carniolan skier, that
becomes the object of substantial national concern in the 19th century. In
the 20th century and with the development of modern competitive skiing
in the climate of visual culture and the media, especially television, was in-
tensified when the image of such a skier sensationally arose among epic tri-
umphs of the modern professional skiing phoenixes, which should enable
“spontaneous” national identification of Slovenians as a skiing nation. By
means of several analytical procedures and methods, such as ethnograph-
349
The book Media Ethnographies: Towards an Anthropological Imagination
of the Media and Communication is an integral presentation of six distinct
studies, which were developed in the period between 2007 and 2017.
The first study When Television Goes Skiing: An Anthropological
Study of the Cultural Transformation of the Past Sporting Practice into a
Media Spectacle of the Nation portrays the well-known Slovenian narra-
tive about the development of skiing from a past “indigenous” Slovenian
practice to a flagship televised sport through the perspective of a spectacle.
The study emanates from the assumption that skiing, despite the histori-
cal, technological and cultural transformation in Slovenia, has a specific
constant which serves the Slovenian community with its spectacle func-
tion throughout the past centuries. The text, following the arc of the trans-
formations of skiing as a specific cultural practice, puts forward some of
the elements that particularly manifest this feature of the sport, such as the
modern Valvasorian reflection of the old-fashioned Carniolan skier, that
becomes the object of substantial national concern in the 19th century. In
the 20th century and with the development of modern competitive skiing
in the climate of visual culture and the media, especially television, was in-
tensified when the image of such a skier sensationally arose among epic tri-
umphs of the modern professional skiing phoenixes, which should enable
“spontaneous” national identification of Slovenians as a skiing nation. By
means of several analytical procedures and methods, such as ethnograph-
349
