A contribution to the knowledge of social and family life in the area of Prusac

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to present certain segments of social and family life in the area of Prusac, based on a short-term research conducted in 2008 and 2009. The material collected in the fieldwork indicates that the area of Prusac was a well-organized local community with developed forms of social, economic and cultural life. The paper is divided into several thematic units describing social relations in the village community, family community, as well as marriage and marital relations. The ethnological-folkloristic research, or rather reconnaissance of the terrain, was carried out as part of the project “Ethnological-folkloristic characteristics of Prussia and its surroundings” which was implemented by the Department of Ethnology of the National Mu seum of Bosnia and Herzegovina during 2008 and 2009. The goal of my research was to gather information about social and family life in the area of Prusac, in an effort to get a picture of the social and family life of the residents of Prusac, viewed through the historical prism, as well as the prism of relations to general social flows. There are no written records about social and family life in the area of Prusac, and due to the scarce historical sources and a short stay in the field, it was necessary to rely on oral tradition and the statements of tellers, which had an impact on the valorisation of the collected and measurable data. In the absence of written, historical sources and relying more on oral tradition which does not go back very far, it was not possible to dwell deeper into the reconstruction of certain aspects of social life, and especially not in its entirety. The time limitation of the fieldwork played a very important role, because collection of the material itself, as well as constant valorisation of the collected data, would require a much longer stay and more direct contact, as well as inevitably a much more systematic intervention with a significantly larger amount of comparable and measurable data. Using previously published research in the area of Prusac, other published literature on family and social life, and questionnaires of the Eth nological Society of Yugoslavia (1963), I created a questionnaire with questions related to social and family life. Data collected in the field were collected using the methods of conversations with interviewees and direct observation. Most of the interviewees were elderly, born in the first half or middle of the 20th century. During my research, I stuck to a clearly defined time period - from the World War II to 2008.