Jessica R Greenberg

There's nothing anyone can do about It: participation, apathy, and "successful" democratic transition in postsocialist Serbia

This article investigates rconparticipation in politics as a rich set of moral, political, and cultural engagements. Contrary to the idea of apathy as an absence of political and social progress, Jessica Greenberg argues that nonparticipation can be an expression of complex and sophisticated responses to changing sociopolitical contexts. Greenberg also examines how such responses are affected by the global deployment of normative models of democratic success and failure. Starting with both policy and academic discourse about civic participation and popular Serbian narratives about politics and European belonging, Greenberg integrates the ethnographic material from her fieldwork in Serbia to illuminate the context in which such ideas reinforce understandings of democratic policies as elitist, corrupt, morally suspect, and disempowering. In conclusion, she suggests that researchers and practitioners should interrogate their own roles in creating and deploying frameworks for political success and failure and the impact these frameworks have on the lived experience of democracy.

Nationalism, masculinity and multicultural citizenship in Serbia*

Since the 5 October revolution that formally ushered Serbia into a democratic era, political commentators, scholars, civic activists and others have watched the country for signs of resurgent nationalism. Many perceived the primary threat to the new democratic order as the persistence of nationalism, particularly in the years after the 2003 assassination of Zoran Djindjić. Such nationalism, forged in the 1980s and 1990s, was subject to eruptions among unsavory politicians, pensioners, Mafiosi and denizens of Belgrade’s suburbs and Serbia’s “backward” countryside. The problem underlying this model of resurgent nationalism is that it assumes, and simultaneously constructs, nationalism as a static and unchanging arrangement of ideological and social factors that flare up and die down in response to political stimuli—the arrest of indicted war criminals, the outrageous rhetoric of populist politicians, negotiations over the status of Kosovo, or high-stakes sporting events. While there is no question that such events create discursive space for nationalist, sexist and racist agendas, the flare-up model presents a dangerous simplification of how nationalisms work. In this article, I argue that nationalist forms draw on a multitude of contemporary social categories and relations, making nationalism less a regressive backlash, and more a malleable social response to changing conditions. I consider nationalism, like nation, a “category of practice” that “can come to structure perception, to inform thought and experience, to organize discourse and political action.” Furthermore, we should not mistake the similarity that forms of nationalist expression take for a continuity in people’s experience of what nationalism means. As Katherine Verdery and Michael Burawoy have argued in examining post-socialist forms, “what looks familiar has causes that are fairly novel” and “people’s responses to a situation may often appear as holdovers precisely because they employ a language and symbols adapted from a previous order.” It is no less true that we need to be attentive to novel causes underlying the circulation of nationalist forms in contemporary Serbia by looking to the social, political and economic contexts in and through which people are articulating nationalist projects. More specifically, I use the analytic lens of masculinity to argue that recent anti-gay nationalist practice and rhetoric must be understood in terms of the specific transformation of categories of political and social belonging in Serbia. As others have argued, nationalist masculinity is a resource that people in Serbia, and other post-socialist Nationalities Papers, Vol. 34, No. 3, July 2006

Value of Amniocentesis versus Fetal Tissue for Cytogenetic Analysis in Cases of Fetal Demise

Objective: Use of fetal tissue for cytogenetic analysis in cases of second- and third-trimester fetal demise frequently results in unacceptably high failure rates. We reviewed our ongoing use of amniocentesis prior to uterine evacuation to determine if this provided a better source of cells for cytogenetic analysis. Methods: We compared cytogenetic results using fetal tissues obtained following uterine evacuation to our ongoing use of amniotic fluid cell obtained by transabdominal amniocentesis prior to uterine evacuation from 2003 to 2008. Results: In 49 of the 63 cases evaluated by fetal tissue biopsies performed after uterine evacuation, a karyotypic analysis was obtained (77.8%). Among the 38 cases evaluated by amniocentesis, an amniotic fluid sample and fetal cytogenetic results were obtained in all 38 (100%) cases. Conclusion: Our findings indicate that amniocentesis is a more reliable source of cytogenetic information than fetal tissue in cases of second- and third-trimester fetal demise.