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Orientalist Variations on the Theme "Balkans": Symbolic Geography in Recent Yugoslav Cultural Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Milica Bakić-Hayden  and
Robert M. Hayden
Milica Bakić-Hayden
Affiliation:
The Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago
Robert M. Hayden
Affiliation:
The Department of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh
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Extract

At first we were confused. The East thought that we were West, while the West considered us to be East. Some of us misunderstood our place in this clash of currents, so they cried that we belong to neither side, and others that we belong exclusively to one side or the other. But I tell you, Irinej, we are doomed by fate to be the East on the West, and the West on the East, to acknowledge only heavenly Jerusalem beyond us, and here on earth-no one.

–St. Sava to Irinej, 13th century

Since the early 1980s, the crisis of Yugoslav society has been brought to public awareness through discussions in the mass media, both within Yugoslavia and outside of the country. While the causes of the crisis were initially analyzed within the framework of the ideology of Yugoslav self-management socialism, the past several years have seen increasing use by politicians and writers from the northwestern parts of the country of an orientalist rhetoric that relies for its force on an ontological and epistemological distinction between (north)west and (south)east

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 51 , Issue 1 , Spring 1992 , pp. 1 - 15
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1992

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References

1. Milica Bakić-Hayden, “Retorika jugoslovenskog orijentalizma,” Borba 2-3 June 1990: 1, 4, 5.

2. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979).

11. Katherine Verdery, “Images of East: ‘Orientalism, ’ ‘Communism, ’ and the Toll at the Border” (Typescript ca. 1988), 5 (emphasis added).

12. See, e.g., Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1923).

13. Jelavich, Barbara, History of the Balkans, Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983): 166.Google Scholar

14. Potapanje Srbije Intervju (Belgrade), special publication no. 14, 11 August 1989.

15. Memorandum: Šta pise a šta se ćita u ozloglašenom dokumentu SANU, Duga (Belgrade), special issue, June 1989.

16. We must note that similar charges of exploitation were made during the political crisis of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which in turn led to the decentralized political system introduced by the 1974 constitution. Thus the charges were not novel, but had been dormant for nearly twenty years.

17. Taras Kermauner, “Pismo srpskom prijatelju,” Mn (9 August 1987): 23.

18. Ibid.

19. Ibid.

20. In Yugoslavia in the late 1980s, “civil society” referred to a Slovenian model of a demilitarized, non-authoritarian association of people(s) that contrasted to what Slovenian intellectuals posited as the authoritarian models of Yugoslav communism. See, e.g., Dimitrij Rupel, Od vqjnog do civilnog društva (Zagreb: Globus, 1990). With the demise of that communism, “civil society” seems to have lost its utility and thus passed from use.

21. See Robert M. Hayden, “Constitutional Events in Yugoslavia, 1988-90: From Federation to Confederation and Paralysis?” (Final report to the National Council for Soviet and East European Research under contract number 804-06, 21 June 1990).

22. Similar constitutional doctrines were advanced at roughly the same time by various republics in the Soviet Union, each seeking to negate federal authority within it. These parallels cannot, unfortunately, be pursued here. It should be recalled, however, that the same concatenation of issues and “confederal” doctrines led to the American civil war. See Abraham Lincoln's First Inaugural Address (1861).

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25. Kermauner, 22.

26. Slaven Letica, “Vodje, mase i modeli,” Danas, 7 March 1989.

27. See Timothy Garton Ash, “Does Central Europe Exist?” in The Uses of Adversity (New York: Vintage, 1990); “Eastern Europe Central Europe … Europe,” Daedalus 119, no. 1 (Winter 1990).

28. Marko Barišić, “Hrvatska suverena!” Glasnik Hrvatske demokratske zajednice no. 15 (6 August 1990): 4. Emphasis added.

29. Kermauner, 6.

30. Peter Jambrek, “Human Rights in a Multiethnic State: The Case of Yugoslavia,” in Vojtech Mastny and Jan Zielonka, eds., Human Rights as a Security Issue in 1 East-West Relations, (forthcoming). Emphasis added. J

31. Dimitrij Rupel, “Some Recent Political Developments in Slovenia and Yugoslavia,” paper delivered at University of Pittsburgh, 10 October 1989. Emphasis added.

32. See, e.g., Tine Hribar, “Duhovna prostost Slovencev,” in T. Hribar, Slovenska drzavnost(Ljubljana: Cankarjeva zalozba, 1989).

33. New York Times, 6 April 1990, A8.

34. New York Times, 17 June 1990, El.

35. Washington Post, 9 February 1990, A22. Emphasis added.

36. New York Times, 4 April 1989.

37. Rupel, “Recent Political Developments,” 7.

38. Danas, 4 September 1990.

39. Open letter from Peter Tancig, Minister of Science and Technology of the Republic of Slovenia, 29 June 1991, sent to Slovenian scientists in the USA on the E-mail nets “Pisma Bralcev” and “soc.culture.yugoslavia. “

40. See Gal, Susan, “Bartok's Funeral: Representations of Europe in Hungarian Political Rhetoric,” American Ethnologist 18, no. 3 (1991): 440–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Katherine Verdery, “Is Romania in Europe? Interstitial Elites and the Politics of Identity” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Phoenix, AZ, Nov. 1988); and Verdery, , National Ideology under Socialism: Identity and Cultural Politics in Ceausescou's Romania (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

41. Herzfeld, Michael, Anthropology Through the Looking-Glass: Critical Ethnography in the Margins of Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987 Google Scholar.

42. Zoran Djindjić, “Hrabrost držaća sveće,” Borba 18-19 August 1990. Djindjic became a leading figure in the Democratic Party in Serbia in 1990-91.

43. Mile Šetinc, “Da li je gradjanski rat u Sloveniji završen?” Demokratija (Belgrade) 1, nos. 10-11 (3 August 1990): 17.

44. See Clifford, The Predicament of Culture; Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

45. Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983 Google Scholar; Hobsbawm, Eric, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990 Google Scholar.

46. See Spencer, Jonathan, “Writing Within: Anthropology, Nationalism and Culture in Sri Lanka,” Current Anthropology 31 (1990): 283–300.CrossRefGoogle Scholar