Kultura i civilizacija. Polivalentnost, suživot, “susreti” i sukobi

The notions of culture and civilisation are ever more interesting both to the scientific community and to a wider audience. Irrespective of one's profession, political, religious or any other affiliation, culture is the milieu of social life where one lives and dies. In modern times, being born in a culture and living in it, one is more and more interested in other people's cultures and distant continents. This is aided by various sources of information, the media, fashion, travel, global policies and global cultures (civilisations). One is born into a culture and affiliated to it, and thus affiliated with a particular civilisation that includes the relevant culture. As selected experiences of many generations and thanks to the processes of acculturation, ethno-culturation, hybridisation, trans-culturation and many others, cultures are polyvalent, polyphonic and polychromic, and yet they all maintain their distinctive regulators that separate them from others. Cultures are thus full of common elements, and yet they are different. They meet, communicate, give and receive cultural elements, but also offer resistance, particularly in forceful acculturation, assimilation, cultural disdain, pronounced animosity and different negative emotions, political gerrymandering, overpowering and subjugation, thus engendering conflicts, usually armed, when cultural conflicts reach a certain 'boiling point'. They are indeed the key factors for mobilising ethnic conflicts, which happen locally across the world. According to his own word's, Huntington's 'clash of civilisations' is a global conflict. It is not a specific armed conflict, for example, between Western Christian civilisations and Islam, in a sense that the entire Western world is at war with Islamic countries. It is primarily a conflict in terms of opposition on the 'verge of animosity', or a 'simmering' conflict caused by cultural differences, interests, ideologies and faith. Second, it is an open conflict reflected through support for certain ethnic groups of a particular cultural circle, acting as a party to a particular local conflict. Conflicts often start in a confrontation of symbols, i.e. the cross – the crescent and the star, a flag with one symbol against a flag with another, a religious salute, a call to prayer, etc. Let us just recall the hatred caused by the flag of the BiH Army, which was, in fact, a flag dating back to the Medieval Bosnia, displaying the coat of arms of the ruling Kotromanić dynast