Remembering Utopia

The Culture of Everyday Life in Socialist Yugoslavia

Breda Luthar, Maruša Pušnik, Breda Luthar, Maruša Pušnik

• Editore: New Academia
• Anno: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781955835190
• Argomento: History
• Categoria: Eastern European History

Essays and photos that reveal and reflect on everyday life in socialist Yugoslavia, from tourism to television. Research about socialism and communism tends to focus on official aspects of power and dissent and on state politics, and presuppose a powerful state and a party with its official ideology on one side and repressed, manipulated, or collaborating citizens on the other side. This collection of essays instead helps uncover various aspects of everyday life during the time of socialism in Yugoslavia, such as leisure, popular culture, consumption, sociability and power, from 1945 until 1980, when Tito died. "A highly original project, which will cover a much neglected area, helping those who either did not make it to Yugoslavia in Tito's time or were born too late to understand what life then and there was all about." —Sabrina P. Ramet, Professor of Political Science at The Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway "This collection represents an original and highly useful work that helps fill a gap in the existing literature on socialist Yugoslavia and East-Central Europe in the Cold War. It also makes an important contribution to cultural history of the region in the second half of the twentieth century." —Dejan Djokic, Lecturer in Serbian and Croatian Studies, The University of Nottingham "This book focuses on a cultural and social history of socialist Yugoslavia from the perspective of 'ordinary' people and by reconstructing their memories. The contributors, many of them belonging to a new generation of scholars from the former Yugoslavia, employ new approaches in order to make sense of the complicated past of this country." —Ulf Brunnbauer, Department of History, Freie Universität Berlin

Introduction

The Lure of Utopia

Socialist Everyday Spaces

Breda Luthar and Maruša Pušnik

The contributors to this book have analyzed various everyday cultural practices in socialist Yugoslavia, including negotiations by its subjects with the state, and appropriations of power. The chapters are linked by a common interest in mundane and ordinary aspects of life under socialism and in the ways in which state power was exercised and negotiated at the level of personal experience and everyday life. Popular culture, in the form of any officially sanctioned aesthetics of mass spectacle or everyday cultural practice (e.g., national festivals and their popular reception, daily television viewing, youth cultures or Eurovision pop song contests, tourism, fashion, sporting practices and body control, or shopping and smuggling) is at the heart of the analysis: how does society understand and represent itself and how is it constructed through representation and gaze? The focus of our interest is on both, the material practices of everyday life, and the discourses that frame them.

This volume includes articles from history, sociology, cultural studies, media studies and studies of visual and consumer cultures. The case-study essays suggest how individuals supported, reinforced or resisted and challenged the political system, and how they appropriated material culture to cope with the conditions of daily life. Some contributions, ranging from the immediate post-war utopian age in the late 1940s to the collapse of Yugoslavia in the late 1980s, emphasize institutional constraints, while others focus on the capacity of individual agency to negotiate structural constraints. Popular culture is taken seriously with an acknowledgment of the necessarily political nature of the “popular.”

To paraphrase Michael Billig, this is a book on “banal socialism.” 1 Indeed, we contend that socialism cannot be understood without considering its “banality” and without revealing the extraordinary in the apparent naturalness of ordinary life.

Although Yugoslavia collapsed less than 20 years ago, traces of its cultural and material life rapidly disappear in the past. But the more the lived, internal memories of socialist Yugoslavia are lost from year to year, the more they are maintained by some exterior signs — “sites of memory” or lieux de mémoire2 — spaces with a residual sense of a specific socialist Yugoslav continuity. These sites of memory may function as the border stones of the socialist age; they are moments of history “plucked out of the flow of history, then returned to it — no longer quite alive but not yet entirely dead, like shells left on the shore when the sea of living memory has receded.”3 When analyzing the past we should bear in mind that we are dealing with worlds realized and manifested only in the memories of people, in various archival sources, or in other material traces/artifacts. Today socialist Yugoslavia still lives in two kinds of memories (if we borrow Maurice Halbwachs’ analytical model): in the inner, internal, personal or autobiographical memory of people and in the exterior, borrowed, social or historical memory.4 Both memories of Yugoslavia are addressed by this book.

The everyday and the ordinary are at the center of relationships of economic, political, symbolic and communicative powers in socialist Yugoslavia with different authors uncovering the complex memories and memory sites of various aspects of the ordinary, unremarkable, and taken-for-granted daily practices during the time of socialism. Theoretically speaking, they address connections between the agency of individuals, the role of political power in orchestrating daily life across a dispersed set of practices, and forms of non-conformity. Consequently, this volume offers a diverse range of materials on the everydayness of socialism and socialist modernity. The shared orientation of diverse contributions becomes more obvious when contrasted with what is too often absent from the dominant discourse regarding the era of socialism. Traditionally missing in many histories of socialism are precisely those cultural and social accounts of the textures of life with narratives of the experiences and practices of ordinary people. Instead, the majority of work on (Yugoslav) socialism is focused on institutional aspects of socialism within the fields of political science or history.

This volume avoids interpretations of “real” life under socialism, which stress the study of social structures and rely mostly on political and institutional histories, but scrutinizes ordinary, everyday life in socialism while moving away from institutional history, extraordinary events and canonic personalities. We agree with Nick Couldry, who argues that if we are serious about studying culture, we cannot avoid listening to the individual voice.5 We also avoid the simplified, so-called totalitarian paradigm that rests on the “dichotomous picture” of the totalitarian socialist Yugoslavia, where state and society, official ideology and everyday practice are sharply distinguished as two opposite entities.6 This volume offers at least a glimpse at the heterogeneities and conflicts within a normative socialist culture and gives some insight into the relation between official culture and its internalization or subversion by individuals. Contributions in this volume focus on different aspects of everyday practices (sports, television viewing, holidays and tourism, or shopping) or on the official and unofficial discourse of everyday life (women’s magazines on cooking and housekeeping, official politics on tourism, physical exercise and body control, or canonization of heroic personalities in staged spectacles).

Yet, popular culture, although a part of everyday life, is not necessarily representative of the popular experience of ordinary people, nor can the experience of culture be reduced to its most visible meanings. However, the discourse reveals at least partially the intertextual context of everyday life in Yugoslav socialism, or the “lived culture,” as Raymond Williams would argue.7 Ideally two domains of socialist culture — a whole way of life and the forms of signification (films, magazines, newspapers, books, or laws) that circulate in a society — are studied together. The background for studying everyday practices and popular representations is provided by the study of power and resistance that cut through everyday life and social practices and that should be studied at several levels: the disciplinary power of the state and para-state institutions, gender and class relations, ethnic differentiation, and finally, power relations in the relationship of the peripheral, “communist” East and the central, “civilized” West.

Furthermore, aside from political reasons for the persistence of a “totalitarian paradigm” as the articulation of cold war values in studies of socialism, there is also a gender aspect to the lack of studies about socialist everyday life. Everyday life is, on one hand, linked to the daily rituals of private life, mostly within the domestic sphere and traditionally controlled by women, such as cooking or shopping, which are typically associated with women as a gendered skill. On the other hand, there is the masculine version of the everyday in public spaces (work, sporting events, or popular cultural events).8 Studies of socialism involving macro structures or spectacular aspects of socialism have excluded particularly accounts of the everyday lives of women and the feminine version of everyday. The latter was regarded as a sphere of reproduction and maintenance, or as a feminine space to be subjugated to the pursuit of a higher purpose or the heroic.9

To approach socialism from the vantage point of everyday life and through a micro-history of the ordinary means attempting to grasp the everyday without relegating it to institutional codes or to private perceptions of individuals and to recognize the social in the individual. Or, according to micro-historians, we should be able “to see a world in a grain of sand.”10 The entanglement of the institutional/social and the individual is at the centre of our work; the study of everyday cultures and experiences or memories always makes some connections to the general social system and its discursive apparatus while implying a different understanding of how power works in society.

Remembering Socialist Yugoslavia:

A Brief Historical Background

Among many models of the socialist system none was “typical” according to Katherine Verdery. Each had its specific internal structure while sharing certain features with some but not all other socialist countries.11 Here is a brief summary for readers not entirely familiar with the distinct Yugoslav version of socialism, including some of the milestones in its post-war history from 1945 to its breakup in 1991.

Yugoslavia (called the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in 1918, and named Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1929) was a multi-ethnic state, underdeveloped economically and in terms of democratic traditions. Cultural and economic differences between the Catholic northwest (which had belonged to the Habsburg Empire before WWI) and the Muslim and Orthodox south were significant with Serbia in a contested political position of dominance in the country. Yugoslavia was reconstituted during WWII (November 29, 1943) by the partisan resistance movement dominated by communists on a liberated territory in occupied Bosnia. In January, 1946, the new constitution officially established six socialist republics and two autonomous provinces and designated Belgrade as the federal capital. On this basis federal authorities in the multi-ethnic and multi-national state — with its three official languages, SerboCroatian, Slovenian and Macedonian, — succeeded for a long time to suppress any form of nationalism. From its beginning Yugoslavia was built on the political concept of “brotherhood and unity,” which became its guiding principle and national motto; it was an idea which should have prevented ethnic tensions and the dominance of any single ethnic group. The slogan had its roots in the partisan movement during WWII, but emanated originally from a gymnastics movement (Sokol) at the beginning of the 20th century.

Contrary to other eastern European countries, Yugoslavia was never liberated or occupied by the Soviet army. The Communist Party as a leading organizing force in the resistance movement during WWII had provided moral or cultural leadership and was perceived as a national liberator. Consequently, “Yugoslavness” had its strongest roots in the pan-Yugoslav partisan resistance movement and in a paternalistic father figure, Tito. The consensus regarding egalitarian state socialism and cultural leadership of the communists/liberators after WWII had important consequences for Yugoslav socialism and its distinctiveness in Eastern Europe. After the war, during a period of reconstruction, the Yugoslav federation was built and reproduced on a discourse of victory introducing a Soviet-type administrative socialism with its cult of physical work, collectivism, anti-capitalism, and a five-year economic plan. The aim was to build a socialist country with the aid of massive voluntary work. Sovietization was based on state intervention regarding the economic and social life of society, and as part of a messianic project of creating a new Soviet civilization while implementing a Soviet socialist strategy of modernization. This utopianism was actually a part of the sovietization of Eastern Europe, which “involved the transplantation of institutions and methods developed in the USSR into the very different environments provided by the states of Eastern Europe after 1945.”12 At that time, for instance, most of the Yugoslav countryside received electricity, private property was nationalized (although the process of nationalization lasted almost 20 years), private entrepreneurship was reduced, and heavy industry was promoted at the expense of producing consumer goods.13 In the 1950s Yugoslavia represented the fastest growing economy in the world, partly because of its low starting point.

Until 1948 Yugoslavia had maintained a close relationship with the Soviet Union. However, Yugoslav communists emerged from WWII as liberators, as the engine of the resistance movement, with a history of an independent and authentic revolution. Accordingly, they were self-confident and conducted an independent foreign policy in the Balkans that challenged Soviet interests, including absolute control of the Soviet Union over the Balkan peninsula. In 1948, amidst tense relations between Tito and Stalin, the Soviet Union demanded a dominant position in Eastern Europe while Yugoslavia tried to keep its political independence and hegemony in the Balkans. Stalin accused Tito and Yugoslavia of nationalism, of departing from Marxism-Leninism and of exhibiting an anti-Soviet attitude. Consequently, Yugoslav communists were expelled from the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform/Informbiro), which had been founded in September 1947 as the official forum of the international communist movements.

Following Tito’s break with Stalin and the withdrawal of Yugoslavia from the Eastern bloc — provoked largely by the power stand-off between the two communist leaders and their parties — Y...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Introduction
• Part II Remembering Tito and Yugoslavia Before and After the Fall
• Part III Popular Culture and Yugoslavness
• Part IV Leisure, Work and the State
• Part V Consumption, Fashion and Transgression
• About_the_Authors