Vjeran Katunarić is a professor of sociology at the University of Zagreb. His books and research articles deal with subjects as different as the socioeconomic position of migrant workers, women and society, the decomposition of society, recent theories of nation and nationalism, and culture and development. He was guest professor in the USA and Sweden, and a cultural policy expert of the Council of Europe.

 1. Considering your own experience, what would be your main advice to the young researchers who plan to pursue a career in the field of cultural policy?

Research under governmental auspices (funding, infrastructure) gives you a sense of security for some time, although not a sense for a mission. Also, it gives you an opportunity to turn research into a part of your academic career (in political science and alike). However, one should be prepared not to expect too much, if anything, as regards the impact of your research results of the current policy. Very often, research serves as an alibi rather that a departure for the policy, especially if you propose some changes in the policy makeup, which collude with interests of the policy stakeholders. On the other hand, pursuing a career in the NGO world might be more exciting and a sense of a mission being stronger. However, this does not take long and a lot of time and effort is spent on finding new opportunities for doing research. Also, sponsors or donors very often insist that you make your project or results known to media in order to gain as much publicity, which is an additional difficulty. To make properly a research career outside government or academia is pretty much uncertain outside the US (as far as I know). However, for many young researchers this (uncertain) outlook is becoming a must and they will probably get through and make a road through the forest.

2. What was the worst professional advice which you might have heard throughout your career?

To follow current policy ideas, often sound-biting, yet poorly explained (e.g. “privatization of most cultural goods is the solution”), for the sake of being agreeable to “important people” in the relevant places. For example, I was in a position (in 2002) to propose some strategic concepts for cultural policy and cultural development in Croatia in 21^st century. Let me mention just one of them which provoked a bitter reaction on part of some established national cultural institutions. It was the concept of the “post-national Croatia”, designating a need for diversifying macro-collective identities beyond ethnocentric and nationalistic assumptions which predominated in the era of ethnic conflict and war, yet becoming highly dysfunctional in the post-conflict era and in the context of Croatia’s approaching to the EU. Some comments labeled such approach as anti-Croatian and allegedly made in conspiracy with foreign powers interested in disintegration of the country. Was this a “professional advice”? In a way it was because the commentators belong to a nationally reputed circle of writers. Nevertheless, this is not my point. It is not also that I want prove that I was right eventually, because today’s Croatian cultural scene is more pluralistic, and “post-national” in a way, than ever before in the transition era. My (counter) advice to young researcher would be “segui il tuo corso…” (Dante), i.e. follow your own course, keep with your own ideas (these are given to you by Muses and not by alarming Sirens of the narrow political interests), and do not trade them in exchange for conformity that can indeed make you more tranquil, but less bright.  

3. Who (or what) motivated you the most by now in your research work?

Successful efforts of some artists and local policy makers in combining global with local influences, thus transforming commercial and sacrosanct into a cultural product useful and enjoyable to people of various interests and tastes.  

Globalization exercises a strong pressure on peripheral countries and their cultural production. As a result, local cultural production easily splits into factions which are equally non-creative, although “productive” in their own ways. One faction is zealously conservative and traditionalistic, prone to self-closure. The other is open to copy everything from abroad in a colonial manner, without making any original contribution to the flow of the imported patterns (except translating it into national language – this cultural “production” resembles mostly to what you can by in shopping-malls: a lot of imported products with hardly readable labels in the domestic language).   Thus, the most creative cultural production must combine local flavors and global impacts in a way that it is not seen yet, which is of good artistic (and scientific and technological) quality, and is able to create its own audiences or markets larger enough for to generate further production as well as workplaces. In Croatia, there are actors in classical and folk music, literature and visual arts, and among scientists and engineers, who motivate cultural research with a hope that globalization for smaller peoples and languages represents an asset and not just liability. Still, the number of such good doers is not big enough, there is no critical mass yet, that their efforts would bring about a cultural change which will make the peripheries loci of an alternative cultural development, alternative to cultural developments in the core countries. I think that NGO-sector can contribute mostly to such an alternative development.

4. What still keeps you in the cultural research field?

Mostly my upcoming teaching courses (Classical and Contemporary Theories of Culture) on an international MA study in the University of Zadar, which necessitate periodical insights into current cultural policies and practices. Also, an international PhD in the sociology of regional development (same university) will be launched in the upcoming autumn, which involves the study of regional cultural development as well and to which I will join some of my research in ethnic relations in the former Yugoslavia. And also: some of my strategic concepts developed several years ago, such as “culturally sustainable development”.

5. What are you working on now and what’s next?

I am writing a chapter in a volume concerned with knowledge society in Portugal and Croatia, and also a study on the history of the Croatian Visual Arts Society, which encompasses six different eras. Next is writing a book on alternative paths of modern development, in which culture plays different roles, from legitimizing a power politics or an economic change to more creative and autonomous roles (the book will complement my course in Historical Sociology as well).