"Goodbye Serbian Kennedy": Zoran Din corss d sign ić and the new democratic masculinity in Serbia

East European Politics and Societies

Volumn 20, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 126-151

  Greenberg, Jessica ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

Democracy; Kinship; Masculinity; Post socialist state transformation; Serbia

Indexed keywords

EID: 32044449229     PISSN: 08883254     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0888325405284250     Document Type: Article

References (59)

1. Serbia is a member of the two-state union Serbia and Montenegro, which changed its name from the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in February 2003.
2. According to the research firm AGB Strategic Research, the funeral attracted the largest television audience on record in Serbia. "Rekordna gledanost prenosa sahrana," Danas, 22-23 March 2003.
3. See Daphne Berdahl, Where the World Ended (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999);
4. Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995);
5. Susan Gal and Gail Kligman, The Politics of Gender after Socialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000);
6. Lynne Haney, " 'But We Are Still Mothers': Gender, the State, and the Construction of Need in Post-Socialist Hungary," in Katherine Verdery and Michael Burawoy, eds., Uncertain Transitions: Ethnographies of Change in the Post-Socialist World (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999);
7. and Gail Kligman, The Politics of Duplicity: Controlling Reproduction in Ceausescu's Romania (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
8. See Jill Benderly, "Rape, Feminism, and Nationalism in the War in Yugoslav Successor States," in Lois West, ed., Feminist Nationalism (New York: Routledge, 1997);
9. and Renata Salecl, The Spoils of Freedom (New York: Routledge, 1994).
10. See Susan Gal, "Bartok's Funeral: Representations of Europe in Hungarian Political Rhetoric," American Ethnologist 18:3(1991): 440-58;
11. and Katherine Verdery, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).
12. For more on East/West, European/non-European, modern/primitive dichotomies and their imbrication in forms of power across the continent and beyond, see Milica Bakić-Hayden, "Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia," Slavic Review 54 (1995): 917-31;
13. Gal, "Bartok's Funeral";
14. Robert Hayden and Milica Bakić-Hayden, "Orientalist Variations on the Theme 'Balkans': Symbolic Geography in recent Yugoslav Cultural Politics," Slavic Review 51 (1992): 1-15;
15. Michael Herzfeld, Anthropology through the Looking-Glass: Critical Ethnography in the Margins of Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987);
16. Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Longman, 2002);
17. Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997);
18. and Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994).
19. On the discourse of Europe in contemporary Serbia see Zala Volčič, "The Notion of 'the West' in the Serbian National Imaginary," European Journal of Cultural Studies 8:2(2005): 155-75;
20. and on central dichotomies such as civility/incivility in contemporary Serbia, see Mattijs Van de Port, Gypsies, Wars and Other Instances of the Wild (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1998);
21. and Marko Živković, Serbian Stories of Identity and Destiny in the 1980s and 1990s (Dissertation, University of Chicago, Department of Anthropology, 2001).
22. This experience was reinforced by the book of mourning, in which people's personal experiences of loss became part of a widely circulating narrative of collective grief. In addition to signing actual books, available at the Democratic Party headquarters and other sites, people could also post messages online.
23. This image of loving father was confirmed on the New Year's 2003 episode of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, one of the most popular shows in the country. The New Year's edition of the program featured prominent Serbian personalities, including Din cross d sign ić, and was widely watched as part of New Year's celebrations. Din cross d sign ić, during one question about a pop culture reference, used one of his "lifelines" to his young son, who was in the audience. This was met with much sighing and declarations of sweetness among the people with whom I watched the program (most especially the women in the room).
24. The linking of ideal family types with political projects in Serbia has precedent. It was argued in the socialist period, that the existence of the clanlike family form known as zadruga in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Serbia meant that Serbs were ideally suited for collective life under socialism. The zadruga combined social and political organization within an extended family form. In a more recent example, popular Serbian discourse about Kosovar Albanians in the 1990s centered on their high fertility rates and large families. Implicit in this often racist discourse was the argument that such nonnuclear, large family units were also nonmodern and non-European.
25. My texts are drawn largely from three daily newspapers with national circulation in Serbia: Danas, Politika, and Blic. Blic has the largest circulation of the three. It is a tabloid-style paper. Politika, the oldest of the three papers, was strongly associated with the Milošević regime until recent years. It has reinvented itself as independent from the government. It is the most conservative of the three papers but also carries the most gravitas. Finally, Danas is a relatively new paper and is strongly associated with pro-European politics. Within days after Din cross d sign ić's assassination, and in honor of his legacy, the paper introduced a new "Europe" section of the paper, separate from its usual coverage of world news.
26. "Zbogom Srpski Kennedy," Danas, 16 March 2003.
27. See also "Tužna kolona na ulicama Beograda," Politika, 16 March 2003.
28. "Srbija bez prevara, pacova i budala," Danas, 16 March, 2003.
29. One could also argue that the familial language in part justifies the sweeping, sometimes violent operation Saber, which the government - headed by Živković - undertook following the assassination. Within days of the shooting, the government had declared a state of emergency and used special powers to arrest anyone suspected of ties to the Zemun clan and other organized crime outfits. The sweeping powers used in the campaign have led to accusations of human rights violations. As Begoña Aretxaga has pointed out, it is ironic that a democratic government can use a moment of " antidemocratic" terrorism to justify excessive state violence and the violation of citizens' rights. See Begona Aretxaga, "A Fictional Reality: Paramilitary Death Squads and the Construction of State Terror in Spain," in Jeffrey Sluka ed., Death Squad: Anthropology of State Terror (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002).
30. "Ostvarićemo Din cross d sign ićev testament," Blic, 14 March 2003.
31. "Tragedija koja otvara oči," Danas, 16 March 2003. This and all other translations are my own.
32. Eric Gordy, The Culture of Power in Serbia (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999).
33. Jessica Greenberg, "On the Road to Normal: Travel, Democracy and the Moral Serbian Subject" (Unpublished dissertation chapter, 2005).
34. "Dosta je bilo bratomržnje," Danas, 16 March 2003.
35. "Zorane, tvoj san će biti realizovan," Danas, 16 March 2003.
36. "Zorane, tvoj san će biti realizovan," Danas, 2003, Ibid.
37. Miloš Vasić, "Novi Prilozi za Biografiju Dušana Spasojevića," Vreme, broj 682, 29 January 2004.
38. Thanks to Aleksandra (Sasha) Miličević for bringing this to my attention.
39. Ivan Čolović, Politics of Identity in Serbia (New York: New York University Press, 2002)
40. "Počinioci Najtežih Zločina," Blic, 14 March 2003.
41. "Piramida Zločina," Danas, 5-6 April 2003.
42. "Mapa Kriminala Srbije," Danas, 25 March 2003.
43. "Svet U Beogradu," Danas, 16 March 2003.
44. In addition to the family-state couplings of Ceca and Arkan, and Zoran and Ružica, presentations of Slobodan Milošević and his wife Mira Marković would be another extremely productive lens through which to examine kinship, the production of state affect and masculinity. Thanks to Marko Živković for suggesting this as a line for further analysis.
45. "Veze sa opasnim momcima," Politika, 19 March 2003.
46. For more on long-standing urban/rural tensions in Yugoslavia and Serbia, see John Allcock, Explaining Yugoslavia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).
47. Greenberg, "On the Road to Normal."
48. Blic, 16 March 2003.
49. Gal and Kligman, The Politics of Gender, 12.
50. Gal and Kligman, The Politics of Gender, 30.
51. Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 4-5.
52. It is hardly then surprising that people participated in a mass public act of intimate mourning as a significant part of their political, public life. In fact, widespread voter apathy and demobilization over the past five years means that this intimate form of citizenship may be displacing other forms of democratic politics in Serbia. Given the mass political participation on 5 October and throughout the 1990s, such demobilization seems incongruous. However, as Julia Paley has demonstrated, political demobilization in new (neo)liberal democracies can be a consequence of democratic transformations, rather than an aberration. Julia Paley, Marketing Democracy: Power and Social Movements in Post-dictatorship Chile (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001).
53. Gal and Kligman, The Politics of Gender.
54. Aretxaga, "A Fictional Reality," 2002.
55. Aretxaga, "A Fictional Reality," 60.
56. Aretxaga, "A Fictional Reality," 48.
57. Miloš Vasić, Atentat na Zorana Din cross d sign ića (Beograd, Serbia: Narodna Knjiga [Politika, B92, Vreme], 2005), 7.
58. Citing Dimitrijević's terminology, Vasić goes so far as to characterizes the criminal elite ideology as one of tribal nationalism (Vasić, Atentat, 14).
59. Vasić, Atentat, 15.