Forms, Feelings and Their Afterlives

Based on the book Utopia of the Uniform: Affective Afterlives of the Yugoslav People’s Army (Duke University Press 2024), the lecture explores the meanings of the mandatory service in the Yugoslav People’s Army and its afterlives in the aftermath of the disastrous end of Yugoslavia and its socialist project. It seeks to offer insights into this collective experience which escape the “large” categories of (militarized) masculinity, violence, patriarchy, and the hegemony of the event-aftermath paradigm. Through the analysis of ethnographic interviews with former JNA soldiers collected over several years and various kinds of archival material, it sheds light on the power of repetitive, ritualized, and performative forms that constituted the reality of military service, provided a framework for radically different men to live together in military bases and were capable of generating feelings of solidarity, care, love, and friendship among these men. In their afterlife, these feelings disrupt the givenness of the present and its relation towards the past and the future. They subtly and hesitantly, but persistently point to the possibility of social life outside ethnic, class, or linguistic divisions, forever lost, together with many lives, houses, families, hopes, and friendships, in disastrous wars in the 1990s.

Tanja Petrović is a principal research associate at the Institute of Culture and Memory Studies, Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. She is interested in the uses and meanings of socialist and Yugoslav legacies in post-Yugoslav societies, as well as in cultural, linguistic, political, and social processes that shape the reality of these societies. She is the author and editor of several books and a number of articles and essays in the fields of anthropology of post-socialism, memory studies, masculinity, gender history, heritage studies, linguistic anthropology, and labor history. She is head of the Institute of Culture and Memory Studies, a professor at the ZRC SAZU Postgraduate school and an Honorary research associate of the Graduate School for East and Southeast European Studies of the University of Regensburg.