doiSerbia

Yugoslavia as a place for living a normal life: Memories of ordinary people in Serbia

Spasić Ivana (Filozofski fakultet, Beograd)

The text reconstructs the representation of life in socialist Yugoslavia, as depicted by ordinary people in Serbia today, on the basis of empirical data collected through focus group interviews. It is shown that this representation is consistent with findings of several studies of Yugonostalgia. What is lamented is material prosperity, social security, chances for employment, free health care and education, but also, as singled out in the analysis, a kind of moral universe in which in was possible to act as autonomous moral agents but which was lost at the beginning of the 1990s. This entire cluster of features is condensed in the label of „normal life“ that Serbian citizens feel they are still denied. The paper closes with a discussion of action and political potentials of Yugonostalgia.

Keywords: Yugoslavia, socialism, Yugonostalgia, memory, normal life