Utopia of the Uniform
Affective Afterlives of the Yugoslav People's Army
Published on 15. March 2024
Book
Hardback
256 pages
978-1-4780-2094-3 (ISBN)
Description
The compulsory service for young men in the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) created bonds across ethnic, religious, and social lines. These bonds persisted even after the horrific violence of the 1990s, in which many of these men found themselves on opposite sides of the front lines. In Utopia of the Uniform, Tanja Petrovic draws on memories and material effects of dozens of JNA conscripts to show how their experience of military service points to futures, forms of collectivity, and relations between the state and the individual different from those that prevailed in the post-Yugoslav reality. Petrovic argues that the power of repetitive, ritualized, and performative practices that constituted military service in the JNA provided a framework for drastically different men to live together and befriend each other. While Petrovic and her interlocutors do not idealize the JNA, they acknowledge its capacity to create interpersonal relationships and affective bonds that brought the key political ideas of collectivity, solidarity, egalitarianism, education, and comradeship into being.
Reviews / Votes
"In Utopia of the Uniform, Tanja Petrovic offers a powerful and compelling narrative that provides a very much needed alternative reading of the end of socialist Yugoslavia. I particularly like the way the author mines the Yugoslav past for the possibilities of a utopian future. This book will shift the debate in a variety of fields." - Kristen R. Ghodsee, author of (Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us about the Good Life) "Tanja Petrovic's Utopia of the Uniform is a tender, provocative account of how men lived, thought, and felt in the Yugoslav armed forces. It is also about what happened to their friendships and solidarities when their country came apart at the seams. Petrovic writes about masculinity from a place outside it. In so doing, she captures something that those who live it can't see." - Samuel Fury Childs Daly, author of (A History of the Republic of Biafra: Law, Crime, and the Nigerian Civil War) "Utopia of the Uniform stands out for its engaging language. The large number of first-hand testimonies and photographs transcend the hermeticism of academic literature, making it accessible to a wider readership interested in the former Yugoslavia." - Astrea Nikolovska (Reviews in Anthropology) "The work is ethnographically rich and theoretically complex, arguing strongly that Yugoslavia was held together by such "affective infrastructures," which made Yugoslavs see themselves as members of a collectivity. This study is an important corrective to the literature focusing on the wars that ended Yugoslavia and to the anthropology of the state. Recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty." - R. M. Hayden (Choice)More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
North Carolina
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Cloth over boards
Illustrations
55 illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 235 mm
Width: 157 mm
Thickness: 18 mm
Weight
526 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-4780-2094-3 (9781478020943)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Tanja Petrovic is Head of the Institute of Culture and Memory Studies at the Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. She is the author of numerous books, including A Long Way Home: Representations of the Western Balkans in Political and Media Discourses.
Content
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction. A Silent Force That Unsettles Ruins 1
1. History, Stories, and Selves 22
2. A Barbed-Wire Utopia 37
3. The Routine 61
4. The Uniform 76
5. The Ritual 96
6. Dissolution of Form 118
Interlude. The Catastrophe 128
7. The Aftermath 134
8. Form and Life 153
9. Afterlives 173
Epilogue. An Infrastructure for Feelings 185
Notes 195
Bibliography 217
Index 231
Introduction. A Silent Force That Unsettles Ruins 1
1. History, Stories, and Selves 22
2. A Barbed-Wire Utopia 37
3. The Routine 61
4. The Uniform 76
5. The Ritual 96
6. Dissolution of Form 118
Interlude. The Catastrophe 128
7. The Aftermath 134
8. Form and Life 153
9. Afterlives 173
Epilogue. An Infrastructure for Feelings 185
Notes 195
Bibliography 217
Index 231