Ivan Kovačević

Dušan Bandić – context, opus, significance

The scientific opus of Dusan Bandic is viewed through the context and time frame in which he started researching folk religion in order to, through the analysis of his most important texts, arrive at the conclusion about the importance of his opus for the modernization of Serbian anthropology. This is just one segment, although the most important one, of the evaluation of the significance of an opus for the history of Serbian anthropology. Other aspects of action, which refer to institutional positioning and activity as well as one’s social and political life and ultimately the consequences such actions had are significant for the history of science, but are not encompassed by this paper. The paper deals with the description of the context and state of research into folk religion at the beginning of Bandic’s career and the general knowledge about global anthropological trends in Serbian ethnology at the time. Afterwards the focus is shifted to the contents of his work through viewing the larger ideas and methodological systems present in Bandic’s work – evolutionism, functionalism and structuralism, in order to, ultimately, come to a conclusion about the development of methods which Bandic applied, as well as the place which his opus occupied in a crucial time for Serbian ethnology.

An Essay on the Anthropology of Underground Economy: The Economic Behavior of the Tenants of a Building in Dorcol

The paper represents a case study of the economic behavior of the tenants of a building in downtown Belgrade. The data was gathered through ethnographic methods of observation and informal interviews. The external indicators of spending, as well as the researcher’s knowledge about the professions and income of a number of tenants pointed toward the conclusion that informal economy plays a major role in the earnings of the observed households. The goal of this paper is to point out the shortcomings of official statistical data on the income of Serbian citizens on which assessments of the standard of living are based. The outline of an “anthropology of informal earning” is given, and suggested as a way to access information on a wide variety of informal means of acquiring income which are left out of formal statistics, yet enable a significant proportion of Serbian citizens to attain a better standard of living than is suggested by official data. Another goal was to, by making a connection between informal economy and the political choices of Serbian citizens; point out the fact that the revolts occurring over the past two decades were mainly motivated by political and not economic reasons as would be expected. This is especially relevant, keeping in mind the catastrophic economic situation in the country which is often emphasized in public discourse, and taking into account the different events and parameters – starting with the hyperinflation in the first half of the 90’s, international sanctions, the increase in public spending on the part of all the regimes that had been in power, great budget deficits and national debt, up to and including the lack of much needed economic reform. Given all this, it is confounding that economic reasons do not cause the people to revolt, unless, we look to the informal economy which allows a significant number of Serbian citizens to have a more comfortable existence than public data suggests.

Fudbal i film: Drug pretsednik – centarfor

The paper is the first in the planned series of texts on football in films and TV programmes in Yugoslavia (Serbia and Croatia). The film Comrade President – Center-Forward (1960, directed by Žorž Skrigin), labelled as the genre of “film humoresque”, presents a ramifying and intertwined story about a small provincial town. The narrative is structured around a celebration of the agricultural cooperative and an important football match played by the local team. Through these two narrative lines the film speaks about the invention of traditions, modernization and industrialization, clothes, arts, popular music, and the elements of romantic comedy and the events surrounding the football match present the media through which the messages are conveyed about the phenomena in a small Serbian town and wider, in the society of the 1950s.

Antropološko čitanje naučne fantastike

The paper gives an overview of the prevalence of the analysis of science fiction literature and science fiction in other segments of popular culture in Serbian anthropology. This overview is preceded by a consideration of science fiction as a genre while keeping in mind the fluidity of the genre and the interweaving of subgenres as well as the transformations which science fiction is undergoing in certain media (books, films, TV shows and video games). In Serbian anthropology research on science fiction is more prevalent than the study of other phenomena, as the number of anthropologists whose work is represented in the paper is fairly large compared to the size of the anthropological community as a whole. The causes for this can primarily be found in a collective focus on questions such as: who are we and who the others are, what the basis of creating and building identity is or what the role of context in recognition of species is. Anthropology gives answers to these questions through the interpretation, explanation and understanding of the world around us, while science fiction does it through the literary considerations of these same questions.

New rituals and New Serbian anthropology – The process of mutual constituting

The intensive shift toward studying new rituals in the mid-80 is one of the key points of modernization and anthropologization of Serbian ethnology. The key initiator of this shift was the Ethnological society of Serbia, the scene of events were the yearly councils of the Ethnological society, and Papers in Ethnology, the society’s journal, published the first papers about new rituals. In the ambience of ethnology back then, wherein the foremost interests were concerned with recording memories of rural life in the 19th century, the innovative character of researching the send-off of retiring workers, entrance of children into the pioneer organization, send off of men to obligatory military service, the behavior in coffee shops or at the promenade, was more than obvious. From today’s perspective, thirty years later, the significance of these events for the constituting of the new Serbian anthropology is reviewed.

Fudbal i film: „Trener“

The film „The Coach“ (Trener, 1978) directed by Purisa Đorđevic, uses the film’s story as a prism through which many events from the reality of football in that time period as well as the past represented by the war and death camps are viewed, and contrasts this with the economic and social context of the time in which the film was made. When the titular coach of a big football club goes abroad to Germany to work, his decision is situated at the crossroads of the professionalization of football and the economic social reality on the one hand and the reminiscence about war and German death camps and their victims on the other. The results of a football match which will determine whether the German or the Yugoslav team will qualify for the final of an important European championship symbolize the results of the passage of time and the 25 year-long development of Germany and Yugoslavia after the war.

An Article Valued More Than a Book?!? On the Destruction of the Interpretative Sovereignty of Serbian Society

The article analyzes the consequences of the reductionist application of criteria typical of the natural, mainly laboratory sciences, in the process of evaluation of the results of the work of researchers and institutions in all the other scientific disciplines, mainly in the field of social sciences and humanities, in the Republic of Serbia. As an example of this trend, the analysis focuses on the absurd criteria, currently in effect, for the conducting of PhD studies in the field of social sciences and humanities, which exclude the scientific books written by lecturers and only value articles published in journals. After this, the ignorance, misapprehensions, logical fallacies and interests which might be behind these criteria are analyzed. Special attention in the analysis is given to the reduction of global to fundamental. It is concluded that the application of the criteria currently in effect leads to the loss of interpretative sovereignty, which occurs when institutions, authors, referees and editors who are highly competent experts in regional and national issues are sacrificed in favor of foreign owners, institutions, authors, referees and editors that, by and large, possess less competence and expertise in regional and national issues, and have non-scientific interests and loyalties which don’t necessarily coincide with the interests of Serbian citizens. Finally, the consequences of the ongoing ethnocidal renunciation of scientific interpretative sovereignty are considered, especially the relinquishing of interpretations of history, identity and interconnected cultural issues and social problems to nonscientific discourses in Serbian society. Discourses which inevitably fill the empty room left in the public sphere by the ever-faster extinguishing of journals and publications in Serbian and the languages of ethnic minorities.

The anthropology of music: contemporary theoretical perspectives

The anthropological study of music focuses on meanings which music hah and produces in a specific sociocultural context. Preferences toward a certain genre of music are tightly linked to the preference of certain cultural values, so music represents an important factor of identification in everyday life. In Serbian ethnology and anthropology music was long viewed as part of Serbian traditional culture, so the interests of researchers focused on “traditional music”. In the 1980’s first papers analyzing music which went outside the traditional frameworks appeared (new folk music – turbofolk), and this tendency has increased in the last ten years.

Short cuts: Anthropological study of contemporary comercials

The anthropological study of commercials is based on the meaning of the entire content of the commercial, in order to contextualize the time and space in which the commercial is made and used. On the basis of this analytical step it can be determined which values the commercial contains and what its relationship to the value system in its surroundings is. The analytical steps of the semiology of commercials, as the most important methodological approach in the anthropological analysis of commercials, is generated from the general semiological approach but can also be “borrowed” from the semiology of visual images, especially the semiology of film.

“The Russians are coming, the Russians are coming” – an apology of detente

The 1966 film The Russians are coming, the Russians are coming is a film which promotes the politics of detente in America. After cold war era films in which the Soviets are exclusively portrayed as spies endangering America, this is the first film to portray them as positive characters, while ridiculing those who propagate war and confrontation. After the Cuban crisis and the process of stopping the spread of nuclear weapons it was necessary to show the American public the funny face of detente. In the comedy about sailors from a stranded Soviet submarine confrontation is always possible but us avoided through solidarity and communal efforts. This apology of detente, intended to calm the cold war situation and anti-war lobbies in America is one-sided, because there weren’t any such films on the other side. What happened over there during the detente period is evident by the following decade in which the largest number of military interventions by the Soviet and Cuban armies around the world occurred.