Paperback
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253223067 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/29/2011 |
| Series: | New Anthropologies of Europe |
| Pages: | 336 |
| Sales rank: | 943,332 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.00(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Serbian Dreambook
National Imaginary in the Time of Milo?evic
By Marko Zivkovic
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2011 Marko ZivkovicAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-35623-9
CHAPTER 1
Belgrade
Those lucky to wake up this morning in Belgrade can assume that they have accomplished enough in their life for today. To insist on something else in addition would be immodest.
— DUŠAN RADOVIC, Beograde, dobro jutro, 1975
This is how one early July morning in 1975, from the top of the tallest Belgrade building, the Beogradjanka (lit., The Belgrade Girl), poet and writer Duško Radovic greeted the city in what was going to become the legendary radio show, a city's sound-signature, that left a lasting imprint on Belgraders' self-understanding and everyday speech. The show was called "Good Morning, Belgrade." Duško Radovic was a Yugoslav institution, comparable perhaps only to Dr. Seuss in the U.S. Generations grew up on his children's poetry. His rasping voice had a dark, almost misanthropic drone, his aphorisms a bitter, ironic bite. For a while the city had a true sage implanting pithy reminders of decency and common sense into the ears of semi-awake parents preparing to go to work and children packing their schoolbags. His friend and the illustrator of all his books, Dušan Petricic portrayed him as a moody hen perched on top of Beogradjanka in what became one of the truly iconic representations of Belgrade (FIGURE 1.1).
The sentence pokes fun at Belgrade-centered myopia, at the arrogance and self-centeredness of those capital city dwellers on whose mental map the rest of Serbia is probably shrunk to a mere appendage, as in infamous U.S. maps drawn by New Yorkers, and criticizes the arriviste and social climber's superficiality and lack of perseverance. Radovic here invokes a whole genre of laments over the shortcomings of native mentality — the propensity to rest on one's laurels or to stop any further efforts at the first sign of success (so fatal in soccer matches with Germans, where the brilliant Yugoslavs score early and then relax and lose to relentless, machine-like Germans who never give up). But underneath this dig there is also a genuine celebration of Belgrade as a good place to be, a grudging admiration that softens the irony's bite.
"He grew up on Belgrade asphalt" conveys concretely the identity of being nurtured by the city, as if literally having sprouted from it. To sprout from asphalt is to be streetwise, and products of Belgrade "asphalt jungle" are supposed to exhibit a peculiar combination of dangerous, violent temper, mischievous charm, and noble generosity that reaches its extreme and pure form in those legendary criminals who earn the title "Knights of Belgrade Asphalt."
Cobblestone is kaldrma in Serbian — a Turkish word that clatters crookedly over the tongue the way its bumps feel through the soles of your shoes or the way car tires rattle over it. Asphalt is opposed to the soil, the mud, the soft, fertile fields of village, the not-city. Kaldrma is internally opposed to asphalt. It is rough and unsophisticated, but it claims a longer urban pedigree.
The Street. The buildings stand one beside the other. They form a straight line. They are expected to form a line, and it's a serious defect in them when they don't do so. They are then said to be "subject to alignment," meaning that they can by rights be demolished, so as to be rebuilt in a straight line with the others (Perec 1999:46).
The characteristic dilapidation of surfaces, the variety of local building materials interacting with the local climate, and determinate periods of neglect produce unique patterns of peeling paint, bricks revealed by crumbled stucco, the rust spots, the patina of soot and grime, the broken façade ornaments, missing columns in balcony balustrades — Belgrade's peculiar decay formula. On top of that: the cacophony of roofs, the incongruity of architectural styles, slanted lines that unsettle the eye — a compounded crookedness (FIGURE 1.2).
Seen from above, Belgrade appears angular, torn, gray, and hard, as if a staircase made of ten settlements piled one atop another, and all that in motion and ascending. You feel that incline as you walk the Belgrade streets: under your feet the ground wells up and demands that you climb it. Walls of Belgrade houses are rarely horizontal at the ground level or level in height; they either abruptly shrink, or grow, and sometimes it is almost grotesque how a house suddenly disappears into the ground or leaps out of it ... Houses sit one on top of another because streets in many places carry each other on their heads ... You enter a gate (kapidzik) of some little old house and the inner courtyard startles you: a miniature town on ten different levels, tall, short, hanging. When they demolish a tall building somewhere, three or four levels jump out from behind it. At the lowest a wooden Turkish shed (catrlja) staring at you as if just dug it up. On the second level appear old, graveyardly calm trees. The third level is a plateau with a huge stone coat of arms in the middle. The fourth supports the foundation of some modern building standing in quite another city quarter. (Sekulic 2001:392) (translation mine)
Laundry is dried on strings or racks on balconies or outside windows. The intimacy of underwear and linen exposed to the public. This is below notice, in the realm of Perec's l'infra-ordinaire. Japanese dry their laundry the same way. That's perhaps one of the reasons why I felt so "normal" there. The Tokyo infra-ordinary is in many ways quite close to Belgrade's.
The bed is thus the individual space par excellence, the elementary space of the body (the bed-monad), the one which even the man completely crippled by debts has the right to keep: the bailiffs don't have the power to seize your bed. (Perec 1999:16)
Mattress, pillow, pillowcase, blanket, comforter, bedsheets (dušek, jastuk, jastucnica, cebe, jorgan, carsav) the infra-ordinary bed items, are all Turkish loanwords.
Turkish words for clock, stockings, slippers, soap, tap, coffeepot, sugar, spoon, boots, meat pie and yoghurt, money, pocket, change, small store, tobacco, bag, tavern, brandy, and carouser's ecstasy tend to map out the concentric worlds of the infra-ordinary.1 Starting from the bed, utensils, and food, they spread out to activities that define that indefinite realm of neighborhood.
Neighborhood is komšiluk in Serbian, a Turkish word that carries a high charge of intimacy as opposed to its neutral-sounding Slavic equivalent susedstvo. The neighbor (komšija), it is said, is closer than the shirt. Serbian envy, as an endemic character trait, is to wish the komšija's cow to die (da komšiji crkne krava).
Komšiluk is, first of all, people who live in the same or adjacent apartment buildings. A typical apartment building will have an engineer, a national ballet dancer, a university professor, a policeman, a doctor, a postman, an electrician, a government clerk, a manual laborer, and a janitor (called hauzmajstor), living on the first floor, usually a jack of all trades who can fix plumbing, household appliances, the elevator, and the hall lights.
The range of people you call komšija could be extended beyond the extreme proximity of its primary reference, but not indefinitely. It runs the risk of appearing as fake familiarity as soon as it leaves the confines of what are mostly named city quarters or districts. Significantly, many of these named districts have Turkish names — Cubura, Dorcol, Bulbulder. A Cubura dweller is not, usually, a komšija to a Dorcol dweller.
The whole city could, however, at times genuinely feel as an intimate komšiluk. During periodic massive power shortages Belgrade would turn into an irregular patchwork of dark and light neighborhoods. Sometimes these blackouts would follow a planned pattern announced in advance; at other times they were unpredictable. "Serbian roulette" was said to be played by sticking your finger into a power outlet. Those without power would visit friends who had electricity across town, and those whose freezers couldn't work would throw parties in order to use up massive amounts of meat that would otherwise spoil. Komšiluk solidarity would then extend across the city. The ultimate feeling of citywide neighborliness came, according to those who experienced it, during the three months of NATO bombing in 1999.
There is one more highly significant Turkish word that maps a (conceptual) space as intimate and indefinite, as komšiluk, yet of a different order of magnitude. Caršija originally meant the town square, market, or merchant's quarter. It now refers to a city's rumor mill, or "public opinion," but in a denigrating sense of small-town or village gossip, full of envy and backstabbing. To refer to Belgrade as caršija, is to rhetorically reduce a capital of 2.5 million to a provincial town where public opinion is formed by men who sit, each clan in its own tavern, around the city square, enveloped in cigarette smoke. Caršija is thus not a place but a creature that is part communicative practice/network, part a state of mind. Yet I have a clear image of a particular place in Belgrade as its physical locus. This is the square close to the city center surrounded by major media institutions (state radio and daily Politika) that boasts some of the most famous taverns (kafane) in Belgrade — Pod Lipom (Under the Linden), Šumatovac, Grmec. A kafana is distinguished from a café (kafic) — a more recent, espresso-serving institution modeled on Italian cafes, even though you can drink coffee in it (usually Turkish); it is not exactly a "restaurant" either, even though you can eat there (sometimes quite well). When I picture the legendary node of the caršija network — the tavern philosopher (kafanski filozof) — I picture him in Grmec. Right next to Grmec is a taxi stand where idle cabbies often play chess on the hood of a car. Taxi drivers are the mobile caršija. As elsewhere some are talkative, others taciturn. They will often immediately switch into the intimate mode. One can engage in sociological analyses, friendly gossip, common lamentation, or political argument with a taxi driver.
The kafana is proclaimed with mystical awe (mostly by men) to lie at the core of "everything." A central unit of the caršija rumor mill where tavern philosophers hold forth, this is where a certain unofficial, yet indispensable, "education" for young men is supposed to occur, where business is done, life, existence, and especially politics are discussed, and where, ultimately, the ecstasy of "sevdah," which forms the core of the inexpressible Serbian soul, takes place.
It is often heard in Belgrade that kafane as well as cafés and restaurants are always full. This usually means, in mock or genuine shame before outsiders or in the mode of serious social analysis: "Who ever works in this city?" (there is pride, too — we know how to live). This is an old question. More pertinent, during the Miloševic era, the question was: "Who has the money?" If it is noted that Belgrade kafane, cafés, and restaurants are, on the contrary, empty, this means: "If the kafane are empty, this is the end of the world as we know it." It's as ominous as saying that things are so bad even jokes have disappeared (FIGURE 1.3).
Once in Belgrade my feet immediately recognize how to compensate for the turns a bus would make on a familiar route.
Public transportation is buses, tramcars, and trolleys. Tramcars were Czech mostly, buses a mixture of Hungarian Icarus, and German MAN and Mercedes. The first trolley I remember was a clunky British Leyland. Some buses are of the accordion type with four instead of three doors. When opposition won in Belgrade in 1996, old and new buses were donated by European governments and even by Japan. Private buses of all conceivable types, shapes, colors, and states of disrepair were added to the mix. Japanese buses are painted yellow and adorned with a big red sun. Folklore has it that the Japanese stipulated that the city could keep the buses only on the condition that they were cleaned every day.
Careful observers will note variations in the intensity of body odors or strong perfumes, the quality of clothes and hairstyles, and passengers' general irritability according to the route, time of day, and social, economic, and political situation. One can also smell what people have been eating. That would vary according to the season.
Once a passenger, sitting above the wheel, fell through the rotting bus floor and was instantly killed. This happened in the late 1990s.
The young are supposed to give up seats to the elderly. Who counts as young and who as old is quite elastic and subject to dispute. When a young person remains seated, this is taken as a measure of general cultural and moral decline and gives the older person the right to openly castigate the young.
Public transportation routes tend to possess abiding characteristics. Bus No. 31 used to be No. 13 and may still be called the Dame (like the Queen in playing card). Bus No. 24 is elusive and rarely sighted. It manages to traverse the city center by squeezing through the narrowest of streets. The symbolically most pregnant is the tramcar No. 2, whose route describes the famous "Circle of Two" (krug dvojke) that supposedly encompasses the true civic, urbane heart of Belgrade. This magic circle either protects the true Belgrade from the barbarians that besiege it, or, in a more generous mode, transforms these barbarians, ever anew, into authentic city dwellers by some sort of alchemical osmosis.
The value of centrality is immense. What exactly counts as center is precisely the point of contention. A friend living very close to the "center" once declared that everything beyond Beogradjanka (and thus my neighborhood) is "periphery." A rather bold move (offending, of course, my pretensions to centrality), intended humorously, and exposing its own vulnerability — a more central "center" could conceivably be found that would relegate him to the periphery.
A young man is taking a pig on a leash across the main Belgrade square one murky December day in 1925. Behind him the National Theater; the pavement is predominantly cobblestone (kaldrma), numerous people on the street and no cars, but one person in something that could be a military uniform looks like he might be directing traffic. The photograph is being sold as a postcard on that same Republika square, in a Belgrade shop window — a store that specializes in more tasty Belgradiana aimed at the nostalgic Diaspora and foreigners.
Belgraders often comment that their city is in reality a "big village" ... One constantly encounters small, but telling reminders that this is not the West, but rather some half-way station between Europe and the East, between the past and the present. Within five blocks of the National Theater the early morning hours are punctuated by the crow of roosters, and on the city streets one may be approached by a peasant in homespun dress offering a freshly slaughtered suckling pig which he has produced tail-first from a battered suitcase. (Simic 1973:70)
The smallness of the Belgrade airport, the tractors of the common sort used in villages that pull the luggage trailers, and plowed fields immediately beyond the single landing strip.
Some Images of the City
Children write compositions about "my native city" every year. An architect-philosopher, who was also the mayor of Belgrade (1982–1986), admiringly mentions one such composition that likened Belgrade to a perky little rooster. And it was the shape of the city, seen from a particular vantage point, that suggested this image — his tail is this part of the city, his wings that feature of its silhouette, his beak this prominent landmark. Belgrade is thus a little ruffled, small but cocky, alert, ready to fight. The city-philosopher admired the freshness of this image.
Phoenix rising from the ashes is a standard image of Belgrade — a city razed to the ground and rebuilt many times in its long existence. The image appears with tedious frequency in tourist brochures, popular histories of the city, and literary compositions young Belgraders write in grade school. Phoenix is invoked when Belgraders have to explain to visitors from Europe the absence of truly old architecture.
When Le Corbusier said that Belgrade was the ugliest city with the most beautiful location, he was looking at the result of centuries of destruction. Those who love and know this city today, know it not from what they have seen or touched. Its greater, perhaps finest part has disappeared without a trace and we shall never see, photograph or touch it again. But the part of it that is gone, that can never be reconstructed, belongs to history too, the history that is inside us. (Pavic 1998:1)
On the intimate side it is the sparrow who is the true bird mascot of Belgrade. Belgraders feel peculiar warmth toward sparrows because they are small, unpretentiously gray yet spirited, and they don't leave the city even in winter when all the avian traitors are gone to places where it's easier to live. A legend, not a widespread one, just an idiosyncratic literary fancy I came across, tells of how once, after one of those legendary battles for Belgrade, they found a sparrow shot through with three arrows under the Kalemegdan Fortress. In the Mahabharata, arrows fly so thick that they eclipse the sun. Here the hyperbola is of vastness in minuteness.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Serbian Dreambook by Marko Zivkovic. Copyright © 2011 Marko Zivkovic. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1 Belgrade 15
2 Serbia's Position in European Geopolitical Imaginings 42
3 Highlanders and Lowlanders 76
4 Tender-hearted Criminals and the Reverse Pygmalion 94
5 Serbian Jeremiads: Too Much Character, Too Little Kultur 115
6 sGlorious Pasts and Imagined Continuities: The Most Ancient People 144
7 Narrative Cycles: From Kosovo to Jadovno 168
8 "The Wish to Be a Jew"; or, The Power of the Jewish Trope 198
9 Garbled Genres: Conspiracy Theories, Everyday Life, and the Poetics of Opacity 211
10 Mille vs. Transition: A Super Informant in the Slushy Swamp of Serbian Politics 237
Conclusion: Chrono-tropes and Awakenings 249
Notes 259
Bibliography 281
Filmography 299
Index 301
What People are Saying About This
"The use of 'imaginaries' in scholarship helps determine the limits of 'what it is possible to think'; they provide raw material for narratives of various sorts and play a psychological and cultural role akin to discourse in shaping practical and creative endeavors. Anthropologist Živković (Univ. of Alberta, Canada) takes readers a long way toward a long overdue, fair-minded, and full analysis of the Serbian imaginary. Although one might argue that most national imaginaries contain many self-serving, exotic elements, Živković tries to convince readers that 'the stories Serbs tell themselves' are so 'bizarre, outlandish, and strange' that they deserve the more provocative collective title of 'dreambook.' The author's colorful examples and relevant analyses provide short courses on various Serbian cultural touchstones, such as archaeology and the hunt for ancient, non-Slavic progenitors, and the enduring megalomania of a 'Byzantine Commonwealth.' From the historian's point of view, this intriguing work does not so much explain Serbian politics as explain how Serbs explain politics, and it offers a valuable chronicle of what one might call the 'default settings' for the (domestic) representation of Serbian history. Živković's focus is the Milošvsević period, corresponding to the bloody dissolution of Yugoslavia, although earlier and later periods call for similar treatment. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Most levels/libraries. —Choice"
The use of 'imaginaries' in scholarship helps determine the limits of 'what it is possible to think'; they provide raw material for narratives of various sorts and play a psychological and cultural role akin to discourse in shaping practical and creative endeavors. Anthropologist Živković (Univ. of Alberta, Canada) takes readers a long way toward a long overdue, fair-minded, and full analysis of the Serbian imaginary. Although one might argue that most national imaginaries contain many self-serving, exotic elements, Živković tries to convince readers that 'the stories Serbs tell themselves' are so 'bizarre, outlandish, and strange' that they deserve the more provocative collective title of 'dreambook.' The author's colorful examples and relevant analyses provide short courses on various Serbian cultural touchstones, such as archaeology and the hunt for ancient, non-Slavic progenitors, and the enduring megalomania of a 'Byzantine Commonwealth.' From the historian's point of view, this intriguing work does not so much explain Serbian politics as explain how Serbs explain politics, and it offers a valuable chronicle of what one might call the 'default settings' for the (domestic) representation of Serbian history. Živković's focus is the Milošvsević period, corresponding to the bloody dissolution of Yugoslavia, although earlier and later periods call for similar treatment. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Most levels/libraries. —Choice
The use of 'imaginaries' in scholarship helps determine the limits of 'what it is possible to think'; they provide raw material for narratives of various sorts and play a psychological and cultural role akin to discourse in shaping practical and creative endeavors. Anthropologist Živković (Univ. of Alberta, Canada) takes readers a long way toward a long overdue, fair-minded, and full analysis of the Serbian imaginary. Although one might argue that most national imaginaries contain many self-serving, exotic elements, Živković tries to convince readers that 'the stories Serbs tell themselves' are so 'bizarre, outlandish, and strange' that they deserve the more provocative collective title of 'dreambook.' The author's colorful examples and relevant analyses provide short courses on various Serbian cultural touchstones, such as archaeology and the hunt for ancient, non-Slavic progenitors, and the enduring megalomania of a 'Byzantine Commonwealth.' From the historian's point of view, this intriguing work does not so much explain Serbian politics as explain how Serbs explain politics, and it offers a valuable chronicle of what one might call the 'default settings' for the (domestic) representation of Serbian history. Živković's focus is the Milošvsević period, corresponding to the bloody dissolution of Yugoslavia, although earlier and later periods call for similar treatment. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Most levels/libraries. —Choice
I completely agree that dreams are 'a machine to think with,' and Serbian Dreambook is a powerful machine indeed.