No description available.

This thesis seeks to develop an enlarged understanding of justice which reduces future conflict rather than feeding it and which seeks to ground human practices and notions of justice more firmly in divine justice. At the heart of this project is Miroslav Volf’s theology of embrace. The thesis attempts to question what this theology offers to the present day context of Croatia and Bosnia from which it emerged in the 1990s. Firstly, I draw on field work and NGO work to suggest that justice is a pressing issue in post-conflict Bosnia and Croatia, and that current approaches to justice are problematic. I draw on Volf’s work to assess the key problems and suggest that turning to his eschatological vision of justice may provide fruitful answers as to how justice should be pursued for the future. Secondly, I suggest that identity needs to be reconfigured in order that justice might be pursued. I suggest that this should occur along the lines of Volf’s understanding of identity as embrace. Identities can be reconfigured through enlarged thinking. Seeking to shape the other and for the other to shape the self is key to pursuing justice collaboratively. Thirdly, I address the theological roots of Volf’s work in examining the Trinity. I suggest that Volf’s work can offer an understanding of the Trinity which has significant implications for the pursuit of justice. I read Volf’s work as allowing for a sense of justice residing within the Trinity. I seek to draw out the ways in which human life can image the triune life of justice and the parameters of this mirroring. Finally, I propose that the type of justice I have suggested, in collaboration with Volf, means that the pursuit of justice should be centred on restoring right relationships, going beyond what is due and is a continuous process rather than discrete actions.

This thesis presents a critical overview of a supernatural being, the South Slavic vila, as she figures in the oral traditions of Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin and Serbian peasants collected in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The thesis returns to the conceptual frame of older primary texts (here titled survey studies) used by comparative scholars and updates this work with the knowledge gleaned from a century of research and theory in the fields of folkloristics and historical anthropology. These materials are presented in a distributive frequency analysis model such as those often employed by the Historical-Geographic school of folklore research, but the study is built on a foundation informed by the insights of Milman Parry and Albert Lord’s researches into the diffusion of oral traditions. These traditions are further refined by focusing on the singers, storytellers and believers who used the vila in an emic manner balanced at a nexus point between artistic innovation and traditional dictates. The data is also further contextualized with a focus on the embedded nature of these cultural expressions and a clear portrait of the contexts surrounding their collection and publication in a wider cultural sphere. The aim of the thesis is to present a comprehensive description of the vila’s role in oral traditions to serve as a primary source for scholars doing comparative or interpretive work, as well as to provide a clearer picture of the contexts of the materials to refine such research. In doing so, this thesis produces a comprehensive method and model that can be applied to other supernatural beings, repatriates oral arts back to their original purveyors by undoing academic silencing of subaltern voices and returns critical context to inherited traditions once stripped of them by romantic academic theories. / Thesis / Candidate in Philosophy