Taja Kramberger (born 11 September 1970, Ljubljana, Slovenia) is a Slovenian poet, translator, essayist and historical anthropologist from Slovenia. She lives in France.
Biography
Early life and education Kramberger was born in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Kramberger spent her childhood (between the ages of four and eleven) in the seaside bilingual old-Venetian town of Koper near Trieste. She finished four years of primary school there (Pinko Tomažič Primary School), and then moved with her family to Ljubljana. There she completed primary and secondary school at Bežigrad Grammar School.
Kramberger completed undergraduate studies in history at the University of Ljubljana. She obtained her PhD in 2009 in history/historical anthropology at the University of Primorska with the thesis Memory and Remembrance. Historical Anthropology of the Canonized Reception.
Academic career Kramberger took a position as a postgraduate researcher at the Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis (ISH) in Ljubljana. There she founded the anthropological journal Monitor ISH. She moved to Koper-Capodistria and was involved in establishing the historical anthropology program from undergraduate to postgraduate level in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Primorska.
Besides in literature and historical anthropology, Kramberger continues to be engaged in civil actions, and confrontations against clientelism and corruption in the scientific domain in Slovenia. In May 2000, together with Sabina Mihelj, she co-directed a large public manifestation with a cultural program in Ljubljana against the corrupted politics of the Ministry of Science and Technology. In 2004, she fought against the illegal takeover of the institution ISH. She insisted on publishing all crucial documents, personal testimonies of the takeover, and reflections of the events from the perspective of the people who finally left the ISH from indignation with their ex-colleagues.Publication was realized as a special red number of the journal Monitor ZSA, vol. VII, no. 1-4, 2005. A review of the red number was of the published in the weekly Mladina In 2010 she again was an active militant against the total neoliberalization, venalization, and degradation of the university as an autonomous institution and against the decomposition of its fundamental scientific disciplines at the Faculty of Human Sciences Koper, University of Primorska.See footnote 1.
The same regressive social changes occurred simultaneously also in the literary field in Slovenia. In 2004 writer and translator Iztok Osojnik, as a director of the Vilenica International Literary Festival, was ousted from the position of Vilenica's director of the Slovene Writers' Association (SWA). She was among the tiny minority who supported him against mostly state-implemented and state-maintained elite and all-regime-supported writers and authors. Meanwhile the majority of writers remained quiet – also around two then ardently debated subjects of growing nationalism and humiliation of women writers and translators in the frames of the SWA.Polemics around the new economically and politically accommodated leadership of the SWA, which lasted the whole summer and autumn of 2004, was published in the review Apokalipsa, no. 84/85, 2004. After that Kramberger distanced herself from the SWA network. She writes and translates literature by her own vocation and ethical standards.
Since living in France (from 2012) she also stepped out of the SWA with an open letter in December 2014 (denied by all Slovene mass-media and suppressed by the president of the SWA) representing only herself and her apatrid chair in Paris. As she writes in one of her poems: Nothing remains./ But life is still here,/ and it speaks the guerrilla alphabet. (...) I am without home,/ I belong to / the invisible community of the banished./ Remove the ethnic adjective / from my name.Taja Kramberger, Z roba klifa (From the Edge of a Cliff), 2011, CSK, Ljubljana, 'Pesmi odhoda/Poems of Departure', III, tr. by Špela Drnovšek Zorko.
She was an initiator and for ten years editor-in-chief of Monitor ISH-Review of Humanities and Social Sciences (2001–2003), in 2004 renamed to Monitor ZSA-Review for Historical, Social and Other Anthropologies (2004–2010).Last two numbers of Monitor ZSA are available here and here Between 2004 and 2007 she was president of the TROPOS-Association for Historical, Social and Other Anthropologies and for Cultural Activities (Ljubljana, Slovenia).
She publishes monographs in the areas of epistemology of social sciences and historiography, history and historical anthropology of various subjects for the period from the 18th to mid-20th centuries. She is also an internationally acclaimed writer. Kramberger writes literary books, literary studies and essays. She translates texts from all these fields from English, French, Italian, and Spanish into Slovenian.
Kramberger earned scientific and literary fellowships abroad at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales and in Paris, at in Budapest, from in Ottensheim, Austria, from in Canada. She also publishes scientific and literary articles, essays and translations. She participates in international scientific and literary conferences, research projects, and is a member of professional associations and organizations. Kramberger has helped to organize international conferences, for example Territorial and Imaginary Frontiers and Identities from Antiquity until Today, accent on Balkans (2002 in Ljubljana) and the international scientific conference of the Francophonie (AUF) titled /History of Oblivion (2008 in Koper).
Her research fields are: epistemology of historiography and social sciences, historical anthropology, contemporary history from the Enlightenment to the mid-20th century, transmission and politics of memory/oblivion, intellectual history and cultural transfers in Europe, anti-intellectualism, dimensions and representations of the Dreyfus Affair in Slovenian social space and in Trieste, mechanisms of social exclusion, extermination, genocide and Shoah/Holocaust studies, anthropology of sex and gender, constitution of (national and transnational) literary fields in Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries, studies of province and provincialism as a specific socio-historical phenomenon.
Since October 2012 she has lived in France together with her husband Drago Braco Rotar, professor of sociology, historical anthropology, translator and a renowned public intellectual in Slovenia and Yugoslavia – who during the 1980s and early 1900s established many key institutions in Slovenia and led them for years, including the now classical green translation edition Studia humanitatis, the first private postgraduate school ISH-Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis, Faculty of Graduate Studies in Human Sciences, where he designed and launched the program of historical anthropology).
History, historical anthropology
Conceptualization of the collective memory and its distinctions from remembrance and history
Kramberger introduced collective memory studies based on the into Slovenian universities.
In 2000–2001, she wrote an extensive introduction to Maurice Halbwachs' Slovenian translation of . In this introduction, she pointed out the conceptual difference between memory () and remembrance (). The editorial board of the Slovene Halbwachs translation had unilaterally, despite both the translator (Rotar) and the introductory writer (Kramberger) protesting, decided to translate both and into , which means remembrance. Despite this, some researchers, including Marija Jurič Pahor and Samuel Friškič, were able to grasp this difference, which was also related memory and history.
Critical reflexivity of the Slovenian historiography Kramberger has also started with the extensive categorical critical reflexivity in the field of history in Slovenia, and has released many angry reactions in the history field, but mostly she left the historians – unable to confront their own shadows from the past – silenced. Although polemic, which would definitely clarify the discipline's past erratic wanderings and amnesias and an almost total theoretic oblivion in the field of history in Slovenia, is not a usual tool of scientific communication in these regions, it is nevertheless clear that Kramberger has opened (among some other researchers, such as Drago Braco Rotar, Rastko Močnik, Maja Breznik, Lev Centrih, Primož Krašovec, in a small, theoretically much less pertinent part also Marta Verginella and Oto Luthar) an important segment of future debates, which are needed to elucidate some of the neglected and spontaneously transmitted chapters of the Slovenian (distinctly ethnocentric and Sonderweg) history.
Representations and aspects of the Dreyfus Affair in the Slovenophone World
Kramberger was also the first Slovenian historian to write about various dimensions and echoes of the Dreyfus Affair in the Slovenian social space during the affair and later. She has opened up a complex theme of anti-Semitism neglected and only partially elucidated in the Slovene history. She connected this exclusive phenomenon to the categories and imaginary and specific discursive practices. Introducing a research seminar at the undergraduate level, she exposed how anti-Semitic discursive formations can mobilize people and public opinion in countries with few Jewish people. She demonstrated how, even in social spaces with a scarce population of Jews, strong mechanisms of social exclusion nonetheless operate smoothly – often even more aggressively and viscerally than in bigger countries. In the framework of this theme she directed – together with her students in 2007–2008 and 2008–2009 – an ample exhibition on the Dreyfus Affair (1894–1906), showing its entangled and differentiated European , its highly important civic extensions, and its specific reception in the continental Centro-European spaces of Slovenia and Trieste. The latter two were mostly based on spontaneous, normalized and career-promising anti-Semitism, though not at all innocuous. The exhibitions were set up and shown to the public in Koper (2008), Trieste (2009), Maribor (2010) and Murska Sobota (2011).
Kramberger has written numerous critical articles on various aspects of Slovenian history and cultural life, but also on broader European history and culture, e.g. the Spanish Civil War, different models of the Enlightenment in Europe and the recurrent Enlightenment features in the works of Anton Tomaž Linhart, epistemic divergence between the Enlightenment's and Historismus's paradigms of historiography, anthropology of translation, the history of university and the formation of university habitus Habitus, literary and cultural fields Pierre Bourdieu ( in the 1930s in Slovenia (by then partially covered by the administrative unit of Dravska Banovina) and on the role of women in the constitution of these fields, etc. For years lecturing a course on social and anthropological aspects of women's history and gender constructions, she translated Michelle Perrot's classic work Women or the Silences of History into Slovenian.Original Les femmes ou les silences de l'histoire, Paris: Flammarion, 1998. In Slovene translation Ženske ali molčanja zgodovine, KUD Police Dubove, 2016.
Bourdieuian studies in the frames of Slovenia
She is partly connected to the Bourdieuian perspective and apparatus in social sciences. She has written about Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant, translated some of their texts (as a guest editor of the journal Družboslovne razprave, no. 43, 2003), and in 2006 edited a monograph titled Principles of Reflexive Social Science and for a Critical Investigation of Symbolic Dominations () (in Slovenian, together with Drago Braco Rotar). She held lectures – among other subjects – on Bourdieuian approach, instrumentarium and methodology at the University of Primorska in Koper.
Literature
Poetry