People in Spite of History Várady, Tibor; Buxbaum, Richard; Boris, János
2021, 20210120, 2021-01-20
eBook
Three generations of a family of lawyers have run a firm founded in 1893 in the small city of Becskerek (today in Serbian Zrenjanin), first part of the Austro-Hungarian Habsburg monarchy, then ...Hungary, then Yugoslavia, then for a while under German occupation, then again part of Yugoslavia and finally Serbia. In the Banat district of the province of Vojvodina, the multiplicity of languages and religions and changes of place-names was a matter of course. What is practically unprecedented, all files, folders and documents of the law office have survived. They concern marriages, divorces, births and testaments, as well as expulsions, emigrations, incarcerations and releases of these largely rural and small-town dwellers. Mundane cases reflect times through war, peace, revolution and counter-revolution, through serfdom and freedom, through comfort and poverty. The files also show everyday lives shaped in spite of history. Tibor Várady transforms them into affecting and vivid vignettes, selecting and commenting without sentimentality but with empathy. The law office of the three generations of the Várady family demonstrates that the legal profession permits and in difficult times even requires its members to defend the ordinary men and women against the powers of state and society.
James Ron uses controversial comparisons between Serbia and Israel to present a novel theory of state violence. Formerly a research consultant to Human Rights Watch and the International Red Cross, ...Ron witnessed remarkably different patterns of state coercion.Frontiers and Ghettospresents an institutional approach to state violence, drawing on Ron's field research in the Middle East, Balkans, Chechnya, Turkey, and Africa, as well as dozens of rare interviews with military veterans, officials, and political activists on all sides. Studying violence from the ground up, the book develops an exciting new framework for analyzing today's nationalist wars.
This substantial essay depicts urban collapse in an exceptionally difficult period of the Serbian capital. The author has marshalled facts, reflections, photographs and other imagesto demonstrate the ...transformation of Belgrade during the Milošević years. With the theoretical grounding of cultural anthropology, history studies, culture of memory, history of art, and urbanism, Mileta Prodanović considers changes to the built environment and urban landscape in the city in the 1990s. He covers many visual aspects of life with great ingenuity: shopping centers, unregulated construction and “wild” modifications of buildings, new buildings (broadcasting studios, shops, homes) that do not fit the surroundings, bad taste in home furnishings (camp, kitsch), boondoggles such as the international art center, problematic historical markers like the obelisk of the eternal flame, billboards, store displays, electoral propaganda, graffiti, grave-markers and cemetery memorials, coins and paper money, calendars, beer labels, and even religious icons (and more). All this information is provided with some critique and much implied comparison to past standards.
Analyzing informal trading practices and smuggling through the case study of Novi Pazar, this book explores how societies cope when governments no longer assume the responsibility for providing ...welfare to their citizens.
How do economic transnational practices shape one’s sense of belonging in times of crisis/precarity? Specifically, how does the collapse of the Ottoman Empire – and the subsequent migration of the Muslim Slav population to Turkey – relate to the Yugoslav Succession Wars during the 1990s? Using the case study of Novi Pazar, a town in Serbia that straddles the borders of Montenegro, Serbia and Kosovo that became a smuggling hub during the Yugoslav conflict, the book focuses on that informal market economy as a prism through which to analyze the strengthening of existing relations between the émigré community in Turkey and the local Bosniak population in the Sandžak region.
Demonstrating the interactive nature of relations between the state and local and émigré communities, this book will be of interest to scholars and students interested in Southeastern Europe or the Yugoslav Succession Wars of the 1990s, as well as social anthropologists who are working on social relations and deviant behavior.
Metropolitan Belgradepresents a sociocultural history of the city as an entertainment mecca during the 1920s and 1930s. It unearths the ordinary and extraordinary leisure activities that captured the ...attention of urban residents and considers the broader role of popular culture in interwar society.As the capital of the newly unified Yugoslavia, Belgrade became increasingly linked to transnational networks after World War I, as jazz, film, and cabaret streamed into the city from abroad during the early 1920s. Belgrade's middle class residents readily consumed foreign popular culture as a symbol of their participation in European metropolitan modernity. The pleasures they derived from entertainment, however, stood at odds with their civic duty of promoting highbrow culture and nurturing the Serbian nation within the Yugoslav state.Ultimately, middle-class Belgraders learned to reconcile their leisured indulgences by defining them as bourgeois refinement. But as they endowed foreign entertainment with higher cultural value, they marginalized Yugoslav performers and their lower-class patrons from urban life.Metropolitan Belgradetells the story of the Europeanization of the capital's middle class and how it led to spatial segregation, cultural stratification, and the destruction of the Yugoslav entertainment industry during the interwar years.
What happens to student activism once mass protests have disappeared from view, and youth no longer embody the political frustrations and hopes of a nation? After the Revolution chronicles the lives ...of student activists as they confront the possibilities and disappointments of democracy in the shadow of the recent revolution in Serbia. Greenberg's narrative highlights the stories of young student activists as they seek to define their role and articulate a new form of legitimate political activity, post-socialism. When student activists in Serbia helped topple dictator Slobodan Milosevic on October 5, 2000, they unexpectedly found that the post-revolutionary period brought even greater problems. How do you actually live and practice democracy in the wake of war and the shadow of a recent revolution? How do young Serbians attempt to translate the energy and excitement generated by wide scale mobilization into the slow work of building democratic institutions? Greenberg navigates through the ranks of student organizations as they transition their activism from the streets back into the halls of the university. In exploring the everyday practices of student activists—their triumphs and frustrations— After the Revolution argues that disappointment is not a failure of democracy but a fundamental feature of how people live and practice it. This fascinating book develops a critical vocabulary for the social life of disappointment with the aim of helping citizens, scholars, and policymakers worldwide escape the trap of framing new democracies as doomed to failure.
Examining the stage performance of female vocal groups as cultural practices which produced a new pattern in the representation of gender in the light of the socialist identity politics, book offers ...a multifaced picture of the personal experiences of the socialist gender politics in socialist Serbia.
This book examines the role of Russian and Serbian nationalism in different modes of dissolution of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia in 1991. Why did Russia's elites agree to the dissolution of the ...Soviet Union along the borders of Soviet republics, leaving twenty-five million Russians outside of Russia? Conversely, why did Serbia's elite succeed in mobilizing Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia for the nationalist cause? Combining a Weberian emphasis on interpretive understanding and counterfactual analysis with theories of nationalism, Veljko Vujačić highlights the role of historical legacies, national myths, collective memories, and literary narratives in shaping diametrically opposed attitudes toward the state in Russia and Serbia. The emphasis on the unintended consequences of communist nationality policy highlights how these attitudes interacted with institutional factors, favoring different outcomes in 1991. The book's postscript examines how this explanation holds up in the light of Russia's annexation of Crimea.
The 1941 Axis invasion of Yugoslavia initially left the German occupiers with a pacified Serbian heartland willing to cooperate in return for relatively mild treatment. Soon, however, the outbreak of ...resistance shattered Serbia's seeming tranquility, turning the country into a battlefield and an area of bitter civil war. Deftly merging political and social history, Serbia under the Swastika looks at the interactions between Germany's occupation policies, the various forces of resistance and collaboration, and the civilian population. Alexander Prusin reveals a German occupying force at war with itself. Pragmatists intent on maintaining a sedate Serbia increasingly gave way to Nazified agencies obsessed with implementing the expansionist racial vision of the Third Reich. As Prusin shows, the increasing reliance on terror catalyzed conflict between the nationalist Chetniks, communist Partisans, and the collaborationist government. Prusin unwraps the winding system of expediency that at times led the factions to support one-another against the Germans--even as they fought a ferocious internecine civil war to determine the future of Yugoslavia.
In the years following the fall of Slobodan Milosevic, Serbian social, cultural and political responses to the wars of the 1990s have fallen under intense scrutiny. In Ethnic Conflict and War Crimes ...in the Balkans, Jelena Obradovic-Wochnik explores some of those responses - taking into consideration notions such as silence, denial and conspiracy theory, the book sheds some light on the complicated narratives about the 1990s. The book considers the experience of knowing, witnessing and speaking about atrocities, and thus contributes to the debates on confronting the past in Serbia. Specifically, it considers how individuals of the "ordinary" public in Serbia reflect upon, understand and keep secrets about the 1991-1999 conflicts in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo, and the atrocities, human rights abuses and war crimes which were committed there. Close attention is paid to the stories of individuals whose voices and experiences are generally excluded from the broader debate about the past. Jelena Obradovic-Wochnik explores how these narratives diverge from, resist and are invisible to the formal and civil society initiatives aimed at confronting the past in Serbia.In doing so, the book also explores silence about and denial of the violent past, and considers how and where these dynamics manifest and what they might mean. In addition, it covers themes such as narratives of self-victimhood, conspiracy theory and the perception of war-time leaders and combatants. This is a detailed and considered investigation into how groups cope with knowledge and the witnessing of violent pasts. It is based on ethnographic research and interviews with a group of 'ordinary' individuals, in post-Milosevic Serbia. As such, it provides a unique perspective on the lived experience of the conflicts, and the ways in which stories of the 1990s emerge in everyday contexts.
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