Bastards of Utopia, the companion to a feature documentary film of the same name, explores the experiences and political imagination of young radical activists in the former Yugoslavia, participants ...in what they call alterglobalization or "globalization from below." Ethnographer Maple Razsa follows individual activists from the transnational protests against globalization of the early 2000s through the Occupy encampments. His portrayal of activism is both empathetic and unflinching-an engaged, elegant meditation on the struggle to re-imagine leftist politics and the power of a country's youth. More information on the film can be found at www.der.org/films/bastards-of-utopia.html.
Drawing on the new ways of reading and studying ancient and early medieval sources, this book explores the appearance of the Croat identity in early medieval Dalmatia.
Based on extensive research on the ethnolinguistic and racial ideas of leading Croatian nationalist intellectuals, this book provides a detailed analysis of race theory in one of the Third Reich's ...lesser known allied states, the Independent State of Croatia.
"Only unity saves the Serbs" is the famous call for unity in the Serb nationalist doctrine. But even though this doctrine was ideologically adhered to by most of the Serb leaders in Croatia and ...Bosnia, disunity characterized Serb politics during the Yugoslav disintegration and war. Nationalism was contested and nationalist claims to homogeneity did not reflect the reality of Serb politics. This book provides a comprehensive analysis of Serb politics and challenges widespread assumptions regarding the Yugoslav conflict and war. It finds that although Slobodan Milosevic played a highly significant role, he was not always able to control the local Serb leaders. Moreover, it adds to the emerging evidence of the lack of importance of popular attitudes; hardline dominance was generally based on the control of economic and coercive resources rather than on elites successfully "playing the ethnic card." It moves beyond an assumption of automatic ethnic outbidding and thus contributes toward a better understanding of intra-ethnic rivalry in other cases such as Israel/Palestine, Northern Ireland, Nagorno-Karabakh and Rwanda.
Medieval Jewelry and Burial Assemblages in Croatia analyzes the Croatian archaeological heritage from the 8th to the 15th century, consisting mostly of jewelry (earrings) findings from cemeteries. ...Stratigraphy is used to establish horizons and phases of material culture, as well as the structure of the burial chambers. All in comparison with materials from neighboring regions of Europe.
In Amoral Communities, Mila Dragojevi? examines how conditions conducive to atrocities against civilians are created during wartime in some communities. She identifies the exclusion of moderates and ...the production of borders as the main processes. In these places, political and ethnic identities become linked and targeted violence against civilians becomes both tolerated and justified by the respective authorities as a necessary sacrifice for a greater political goal. Dragojevi? augments the literature on genocide and civil wars by demonstrating how violence can be used as a political strategy, and how communities, as well as individuals, remember episodes of violence against civilians. The communities on which she focuses are Croatia in the 1990s and Uganda and Guatemala in the 1980s. In each case Dragojevi? considers how people who have lived peacefully as neighbors for many years are suddenly transformed into enemies, yet intracommunal violence is not ubiquitous throughout the conflict zone; rather, it is specific to particular regions or villages within those zones. Reporting on the varying wartime experiences of individuals, she adds depth, emotion, and objectivity to the historical and socioeconomic conditions that shaped each conflict. Furthermore, as Amoral Communities describes, the exclusion of moderates and the production of borders limit individuals' freedom to express their views, work to prevent the possible defection of members of an in-group, and facilitate identification of individuals who are purportedly a threat. Even before mass killings begin, Dragojevi? finds, these and similar changes will have transformed particular villages or regions into amoral communities, places where the definition of crime changes and violence is justified as a form of self-defense by perpetrators.
Expelling the plague Zlata Blazina Tomic, Vesna Blazina
Expelling the plague,
2015, 20150401, 2015, 2015-04-17, 2015-04-01, Volume:
43, 43.
eBook
A vibrant city-state on the Adriatic sea, Dubrovnik, also known as Ragusa, was a hub for the international trade between Europe and the Ottoman Empire. As a result, the city suffered frequent ...outbreaks of plague. Through a comprehensive analysis of these epidemics in Dubrovnik, Expelling the Plague explores the increasingly sophisticated plague control regulations that were adopted by the city and implemented by its health officials. In 1377, Dubrovnik became the first city in the world to develop and implement quarantine legislation, and in 1390 it established the earliest recorded permanent Health Office. The city’s preoccupation with plague control and the powers granted to its Health Office led to a rich archival record chronicling the city’s experience of plague, its attempts to safeguard public health, and the social effects of its practices of quarantine, prosecution, and punishment. These sources form the foundation of the authors' analysis, in particular the manuscript Libro deli Signori Chazamorbi, 1500-30, a rare health record of the 1526-27 calamitous plague epidemic. Teeming with real people across the spectrum, including gravediggers, laundresses, and plague survivors, it contains the testimonies collected during trial proceedings conducted by health officials against violators of public health regulations. Outlining the contributions of Dubrovnik in conceiving and establishing early public health measures in Europe, Expelling the Plague reveals how health concerns of the past greatly resemble contemporary anxieties about battling epidemics such as SARS, avian flu, and the Ebola virus.
History in exile Ballinger, Pamela
2018., 20180605, 2018, 2002
eBook
In the decade after World War II, up to 350,000 ethnic Italians were displaced from the border zone between Italy and Yugoslavia known as the Julian March. History in Exile reveals the subtle yet ...fascinating contemporary repercussions of this often overlooked yet contentious episode of European history. Pamela Ballinger asks: What happens to historical memory and cultural identity when state borders undergo radical transformation? She explores displacement from both the viewpoints of the exiles and those who stayed behind. Yugoslavia's breakup and Italy's political transformation in the early 1990s, she writes, allowed these people to bring their histories to the public eye after nearly half a century. Examining the political and cultural contexts in which this understanding of historical consciousness has been formed, Ballinger undertakes the most extensive fieldwork ever done on this subject--not only around Trieste, where most of the exiles settled, but on the Istrian Peninsula (Croatia and Slovenia), where those who stayed behind still live. Complementing this with meticulous archival research, she examines two sharply contrasting models of historical identity yielded by the "Istrian exodus": those who left typically envision Istria as a "pure" Italian land stolen by the Slavs, whereas those who remained view it as ethnically and linguistically "hybrid." We learn, for example, how members of the same family, living a short distance apart and speaking the same language, came to develop a radically different understanding of their group identities. Setting her analysis in engaging, jargon-free prose, Ballinger concludes that these ostensibly very different identities in fact share a startling degree of conceptual logic.
Mythologies and narratives of victimization pervade contemporary Croatia, set against the backdrop of militarized notions of masculinity and the political mobilization of religion and nationhood. ...Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in rural Dalmatia in the Croatian-Bosnian border region, this book provides a unique account of the politics of ambiguous Europeanness from the perspective of those living at Europe's margins. Examining phenomena such as Marian apparitions, a historic knights tournament, the symbolic re-signification of a massacre site, and the desolate social situation of Croatian war veterans,Narrating Victimhoodtraces the complex mechanisms of political radicalization in a post-war scenario. This book provides a new perspective for understanding the ongoing processes of transformation in Southeastern Europe and the Balkans.
