The practice of serving in the Yugoslav People’s Army (Jugoslovenska narodna armija) was a ritualized experience: it consisted of repetitive, predictable and highly performative practices and patterns, and it was surrounded by a number of rituals (including army send-offs; paid songs played at local radio stations by parents, grand-parents, and relatives; photographing in local studios once they became the JNA soldiers and sending these photos to family members, friends and relatives). Taking this ritualized nature of the army experience as a starting point, this paper explores the border-crossing and border-maintenance practices as performed by those engaged in army services. I argue that this ritualization was always followed by detachment of the act from its literal meaning, thus opening up spaces of subversion, resistance and refection. Although there are scholarly works and popular knowledgethat suggest that that this ritualization was a tool of socialist elites to make masses subjected to communist ideology without reflection, subversion or opposition, I argue that the detachment and multiplicity of ways to approach borders set by ritualized protocols enable particular kind of agency to emerge—agency that sheds new light on the dialectic relationship between oppressive institution and oppressed individuals. This also makes memories of the JNA into powerful sites of multiple, often contradictory, meanings, attitudes and interpretations that go beyond the banality of the “army stories.”
B.03 Paper at an international scientific conference
COBISS.SI-ID: 35771437As a response to an increasingly differentiated and commoditised post-socialist societies, various artists, including musicians, have been also focusing on partisan topics and aesthetics (literature, films, exhibitions, music) aiming to give this past new employments in the engagement with the present rather than the past. At the level of music activities, such revitalizing and renarrating of partisan songs as the leading genre of socialist music legacy, occupies a significant place in the emergence of new discourses about socialist experience and plays an important role in current (re)conceptualizations of alternative voices in post-Yugoslav soundscapes. The lecture at the international conference in Shanghai thematizes musical activities and suggests focusing on conceptual and affective complexity of these practices.
B.03 Paper at an international scientific conference
COBISS.SI-ID: 35969837Oto Luthar was supervisor to the doctoral dissertation thematising the hisotry of the Kočevje region after the Second Wld War.
D.09 Tutoring for postgraduate students
COBISS.SI-ID: 2928635Through analysis of memories of computers, encounters with and uses of computer technology in the1980s Yugoslavia, the paper discusses the then kids' relationship to the world, i.e. their understanding of the world and themselves in the 1980s socialist Yugoslavia, and today. The paper interrogates the hypothesis that contact with computers and computer games influenced kids' perception of self in socialism and that the use of computers then influenced their lives later on (in post-socialism). In light of this the analysis focuses on their understanding and valuation of socialism, Yugoslavia, the break-up of the country, the present and the past, democracy, nationalism, freedom, technology.
B.03 Paper at an international scientific conference
COBISS.SI-ID: 35972653The author presented literary works of Zofka Kveder and Luiza Pesjak written in German. She discussed the role of these female authors as mediators between Slovene and German cultural spaces, as well as the influence of German female writers on Kveder's and Pesjak's writings.
B.04 Guest lecture
COBISS.SI-ID: 2755579