Obituaries
Nils-Arvid Bringéus and Vitomir Belay passed away.
Nilsils-Arvid Bringéus | 1926–2023
The Swedish ethnologist Nils-Arvid Bringéus died in April this year, at the age of 97 years. His academic career spanned over nearly 80 years and mirrors many fundamental changes in the discipline.
There are easier and harder times to become a professor. The challenges were great when he took up the position in folk life studies at Lund University in 1967. It was a time when the entire Swedish university world was to be radically reformed. Departments were to change their teaching as well as their curricula and be synchronized in national cooperation. In 1967 it was also essential to give the subject a sharper profile. From being a small and obscure subject, students flocked to a discipline that was now renamed “European ethnology”, and directed their gaze towards both history and the present.
Nils-Arvid took on the often thankless task of reconciling local profiles, as well as letting the discipline expand to new university locations. He had to chair many conferences to reform the national teaching structure and make sure that a wide range of new course literature was created. His combination of enthusiasm, impatience and incredible work capacity played a key role in building up the infrastructure that the discipline needed to grow: Shouldn’t we have our own international journal, how do we broaden the cooperation with our colleagues in the Nordic countries and Europe, which research areas should be prioritized? He started Ethnologia Scandinavica in 1971 as a successor to the journal Folk-Liv and made sure to keep in touch with ethnology on the continent. During a period when younger generations of researchers turned their gaze towards studies of local communities and national subcultures, he took the subject prefix “European” very seriously. An example of this is the food ethnology that he developed with the help of a series of conferences and edited volumes.
Nils-Arvid’s scholarly career was based in Lund. It was there he began his studies in ethnology and theology and defended his dissertation in 1958 on the “The Bell-Ringing Custom in Sweden, an Innovation Study” by which he became an associate professor at the department. He was full professor between 1967 and 1991. He also had spells as guest professor in Berkeley, Bergen and Edinburgh.
He was constantly writing, even long after retirement. He belonged to the generation that often had a set of proofs in his pocket. It was pulled out during breakfast, travel and work breaks. When it was time to head to his beloved summer house in Kivik, the car was loaded with piles of books and bundles of excerpts. A computer cable was dangling out of the boot when the car started with a bang. Why lie on the beach when you can sit and write on the porch? Thus, the list of his publications came to comprise over four hundred titles on such diverse subjects as food and meals, traditions of the life cycle and material culture – all with the prefix “folk”. In his research he was often inspired by neighboring subjects such as church history, cultural geography and art history. With interdisciplinary zeal he wrote about new and old religious traditions, studied processes of innovation, and not least of all devoted a lot of work to folk art studies. He put great effort into mapping the discipline’s roots in the fascination with peasant life during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and he wrote many monographs about ethnological scholars. He was quite rightly awarded four honorary doctorates, three in ethnology at the universities of Bergen, Turku and Münster and one in theology at Lund University.
Nils-Arvid took on the important task of creating continuity for a subject in rapid transformation, emphasizing the need to combine historical and contemporary studies. When the time comes to summarize a long life and an unusually long research career, there is reason to ponder how a discipline and a university department would have looked without the passion for research, the energy and enthusiasm that was Nils-Arvid’s hallmark.
Gösta Arvastson, Jonas Frykman & Orvar Löfgren
Vitomir Belaj | 1937-2023
The Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, informs all our colleagues and friends, that Professor Emeritus Vitomir Belaj, longtime professor at the Faculty, world-renowned ethnologist, a scientist of great erudition and outstanding opus, expert translator of many languages, kind, dear professor, and warm and loving friend, died on August 19, 2023, at the age of 85. The funeral was held on Friday, August 28, 2023 in the Great hall of the City Cemetery Crematorium Mirogoj.
Professor Vitomir Belaj was born in the Slovenian city of Maribor on November 8, 1937. He graduated in Ethnology and German language at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb in 1961, where he also earned his master’s degree in 1966, and doctoral degree in 1979, in the field of ethnology. From 1961 to 1964 he was working as the curator at the City museum in Varaždin, after which he took the position of the curator at the County museum in Ptuj, where he stayed from 1965 to 1970. In 1970 he was employed as the assistant, in 1979 as the assisting professor, and since 1985 as the full professor at the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb.
He was elected Head of the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology for several mandates, as well as the head of the Doctoral study of ethnology and cultural anthropology. He taught at the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Department of Ethnology and Anthropology at the University of Zadar, at the Faculty of Croatian Studies, University of Zagreb, Institute for Theological Culture of the Catholic Faculty of Theology, University of Zagreb, Institute for European Ethnology, University of Vienna, and many others. He was the Dean of the University Center for Protestant Theology Matthias Flacius Illyricus in Zagreb. He was appointed the honorary title of professor emeritus at the University of Zagreb in 2009.
His research was focused on the history and theory of ethnology in Croatia, popular religiosity and beliefs, as well as on Slavic mythology. Professor Belaj was a member of the National Council for Higher Education and numerous other professional and expert associations such as Croatian Ethnological Society (president from 1973 to 1975), Croatian Society of Folklorists, Committee for archaeology and ethnology of Matica Hrvatska, Croatian Mariological Institute, Pontificia Academia Mariana Internationalis (as the associate member), International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, and others. He was the founder and the long-term chief editor of the scientific journal Studia Ethnologica Croatica and member of the editorial boards of the scientific journals Narodna umjetnost, Ethnologia Slovaca et Slavica, Etnološka tribina, etc.
He published around 200 scientific articles in many national and international journals and publications. His most important contribution to Croatian ethnology were the books: Hod kroz godinu: mitska pozadina hrvatskih narodnih običaja i vjerovanja (1998), Die Kunde vom krotischen Volk: eine Kulturgeschichte der kroatischen Volkskunde (1998), Hod kroz godinu: pokušaj rekonstrukcije prahrvatskoga mitskoga svjetonazora (2007) and Sveti trokuti: topografija hrvatske mitologije (2014, co-author Juraj Belaj). Vitomir Belaj won several prestigious awards: Annual State Award for Science of the Republic of Croatia in 1998, the Golden Plaque of the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana in 1999, as well as Lifetime Achievement Award ‘Milovan Gavazzi’ of Croatian Ethnological Society in 2007.
Through his work and his scientific and teaching achievements, professor Belaj has made a long-lasting impact on his home Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, and on the entre Croatian academia. His Department, colleagues and students, would remember him with utmost respect and gratitude.
Tihana Petrović Leš & Ivan Grkeš
