The so-called Yugoslav Wars ended in 1999. To what extent has the post-war period brought healing and to what extent has the war fully ‘passed’? How is the transition to a post-conflict society understood in Serbia? How can we register – ethnographically but also through narrative and metaphor – the persistence of states of mind associated with the war and with attachments not extinguished by the war ending? The chapter argues that various practices of monitoring one’s physiology mark the passing of time since the end of the wars. The notion of good health translates into a range of different ideas: of entrenched inequalities among the population, of physical or social capital, of feelings of suspicion and indignation, and of other personal and social values and expectations about the future. People both act on their expectations vis-à-vis and construct these as conceptual resources, since it is through the circulation of biomedical and political categories of health that people sometimes keep tabs on public modes of post-socialist, post-conflict but also future temporality.
COBISS.SI-ID: 40241197
The chapter addresses belonging to a place where supposedly ‘not much is going on’, a place that is perceived as ‘quiet’ or ‘still’ by those who belong there. This specific belonging stimulates engagements with movements tied to this particular place: the Slovenian countryside town of Cerkno, where many inhabitants, and particularly the ‘young’, have recently been occupying themselves with organizing popular music and arts festivals. It focuses on the jazz festival ‘Jazz Cerkno’ – and on its organizers, who engaged themselves in the production of the festival in order to trigger movement toward, and within, their hometown, with the aim of ‘disturbing’ the sensed ‘stillness’ of the place. The chapter discusses a small number of ‘locals’ from Cerkno, who are deliberately called ‘organizers’ because, because they seem themselves as entrepreneurs who organize available resources into new assemblages in order to direct the trajectories of cultural exchange in, and cultural positioning of, ‘their place’. The festival is understood as a future-orientated mode of action, and an expression of anticipated transformation of local conditions.
COBISS.SI-ID: 62790242
The article argues that we explore postsocialist changes through an intersection of various levels, discourses, policies, not merely in relation to production and privatization, but also distribution and system of social care. It is this intersectionality that marks people’s lives. Various postsocialist reconstructuring in Slovenia did not merely changed political or economic systems, but they have also transformed the organization and ideology of labor, social expectations and norms, the way we understand our working lives and our being. The article stresses the importance of tracing those changes and understanding their geneaology. This, besides other things, involves challenging academic concepts, categories and models, through which scholars explain the nature of changes. Transition is often understood from the perspective of a political change, in the context of democratization of the society, or in relation to the market. The article challenges such views through an anthropological perspective.
COBISS.SI-ID: 3701876