This summer the European team started data collection in Serbia as part of the Geographies of Philosophy Project. Serbia is just one of the countries where we are conducting research in Central and Eastern Europe, along with Slovakia, Bosnia, Ukraine, Russia, Poland, and the Czech Republic. All of these countries have a specific socialist past, and all expect Serbia and Bosnia used to form what was once known as the Soviet Bloc. Unlike the Soviet Union and its satellite countries, Bosnia and Serbia (then republics of the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia) were members of the Non-Aligned movement and thus had a different trajectory and relationship to socialism.
When we set out to conduct research in the Serbian Province of Vojvodina, in central Banat, we were not expecting to encounter remnants of the socialist past. And yet, Yugoslavia and its former president Josip Broz Tito kept showing up in the background.
For example, our first field site was in a village. Elemir is a village located in the Zrenjanin municipality, in the Central Banat District of Serbia. It is situated in the province of Vojvodina. As of 2011 census, the village has a population of 4,338 inhabitants. The majority of the population is Serbian, and the median age of the population is 40 years old. Most of the inhabitants are employed in the city of Zrenjanin. The study was conducted in the village hunting lodge “Jedinstvo” (Unity). The building is located in the center of the village and has both a vibrant present and past. The name and the hunting lodge originate from the socialist period. Fraternity and Unity (Bratstvo i jedinstvo) were the key concepts in socialist Yugoslavia. The main highway between the capital Belgrade and the now capital of Croatia, Zagreb has named the road of fraternity and unity meant to symbolize the bond between the constitutive nations of Yugoslavia.
Our participants used this space quite frequently in their daily lives. It is a space where not only the local hunters would gather every Friday evening to play cards, but also the space for weddings, celebrations of birth, commemorations of death, and now space where international research is conducted. This is also a local example of institutions as a site of (socialist) memory (Szpociński, 2016) and thus a local repository of knowledge. Socialism is remembered not only in the name of the lodge but in the artwork inside the lodge. In Yugoslavia, it was common if not mandatory to have a picture of President Tito inside every public institution and inside institutions of culture. Occasionally they would also have statuses of Tito decorating the insides of the space. A visual reminder of the Party and a symbolic representation of the sites of power. Monuments to socialist leaders were a common landmark in every socialist country and town. After the fall of socialism, as a part of the revolution most of these monuments and statues have been torn down and destroyed (Verdery, 1999). In Elemir, a needlepoint of Tito still hangs in the main room of the lodge.
While hunting lodges in small villages are no longer public institutions, our second field site in Novi Bečej, a larger town in central Banat. There we conducted research in the town assembly hall. In this building, there were no over remnants of the town’s socialist past. We used the small kitchenette space for our exit-interviews and during one such interview our Research Assistant, Filip (himself a resident of Novi Bečej) showed us the statue of Tito hidden away in the kitchenette cupboard, right next to the voting box that is now used during elections in the town.
Although no longer in a prominent and visible space, for the people who work in this town hall the socialist past remains as a form of nostalgia for the imaginary past. While our task during this fieldwork was not related to questions of sites of memory it is an important question to consider when studying notions of wisdom, knowledge, and understanding. How do these sites of memory shape our understandings of the past?
References
SZPOCIŃSKI, A. 2016. Sites of Memory. Teksty Drugie, 245-254.
VERDERY, K. 1999. The political lives of dead bodies: reburial and postsocialist change, New York, Columbia University Press.
