Cities draw fortune-seekers and adventurers, produce flâneurs and anarchists, inspire novelists and film-makers. Their histories, nostalgias and pathologies have been documented by poets (like Juvenal), literary scholars (like Raymond Williams), sociologists (like the Chicago School) and security analysts (who examine the “feral mega-cities” of the present). What then does anthropology, with its rural baggage and mostly second-hand theoretical trappings, have to offer?

A range of responses have been offered in the past thirty years, stressing in particular how participant-observation delivers the “underview” of the urban experience. The phenomenon of mass migration from country to city, especially dominant in the modernising post-World-War II period, offered new opportunities to ethnographers whose assigned reading had heavily featured classic monographs of island, tribe or village.

A generation later, though, genres are considerably more blurred. Ethnography is practiced across the social sciences and humanities, even as its essentially fictive nature is broadly being acknowledged. Suburbs and exurbs pose categorical challenges to the old rural-urban model, as do new transnational vectors of human mobility and communication, in which forced displacement, foreign military and civilian deployments, human trafficking and corporate profit-seeking compound the impact of diverse forms of labour migration across the globe.

In this dynamic, scaled-up environment, urban anthropology in, of and from Southeastern Europe has a central contribution to make. The paper draws on past and present work from the region to highlight three components of that contribution – naming and anonymity, framing and the optics of representation, and contested claims to civility.

Gavrilovna Rayna, University of Sofia „St. Kliment Ohridski“, Bulgaria

City, Culture and Change: The Epistemological Challenge

The student interested in the historical anthropology of the city knowingly or unknowingly immediately positions him/herself within an epistemological triangle defined by anthropology, history and urban studies. In the last few decades the classical anthropology of otherness has been accused of intellectual colonialism. Shifting the emphasis on another set of distant fields, we can ask the question: has historical anthropology been attempting to colonise the past? If we add the urban milieu as another defining element of the investigation: how do we avoid the Scylla of constructing identities and Carbide of turning the city into an abstract thing?

The proposal of the text is to approach past urban culture(s) with the motive of making sense of human acts as texts about acts or with the motive to understand: the city, culture and change. It offers some methodological reflections, a short survey of the field and a case to ground the claims and hypotheses. As every anthropologist and social historian would say, there is nothing more puzzling that the everyday fact. The coupages are imprecise and conditional, their ordinariness and routinenesssubversively misleading. Eating out as an intrinsic urban ritual appears to be a convenient research case, bringing together modernity, alienation, gender, distinction, competitiveness, discourse and symbol.

Hayden Robert M., Center for Russian & East European Studies, University of Pittsburgh, USA

Religious Structures and Political Dominance in Belgrade

In March 2004, anti-Muslim rioters damaged the Bajraklija mosque in Belgrade, the oldest structure in the city outside of the Kalamegdan fortress. Ironically, that mosque had been repaired, maintained and staffed by Serbian state funds in the middle of the 19^th century, at the time that Serbia obtained autonomy from the Ottoman Empire. This paper looks at the history of the construction and destruction of mosques and churches in Belgrade and elsewhere in the Balkans as manifestations of symbolic dominance, and argues that this form of contested symbolism is still practiced not only by “nationalists” in Bosnia and Serbia but also by representatives of the international community.

Hengartner Thomas, University of Hamburg, Germany

„Exploring the City“: Ways and Concepts of (Western) Urban Anthropology

In 1980 Ulf Hannerz published his well known book, from which the title of this paper is taken. Nevertheless, inquiries into urban anthropology remained a marginal topic. In 1993 Ina-Maria Greverus gave reasons, why anthropologists remained for decades a „notoriously agoraphobic lot”. In the last ten, fifteen years, however, urban space, urban places and urban life has become a central research field. But hardly did urbanism appear in the discipline was it called into question on the theoretical level.

In my paper, I will discuss central concepts of city and urbanism, not only their potential for contemporary urban anthropology, but also the often hidden images behind them. With a focus on the everyday dimension, I will end with some proposals for reformulating “urbanism”.

Paper Abstracts

Aleksov Bojan, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary.

St. Sava Cathedral in Belgrade: A History of National, Urban and Architectural Failure

From its conception at the end of the 19^th century up to present day attempts to end what turned into a never-ending building story, the cathedral dedicated to St. Sava on Vračar Hill in Belgrade was meant to epitomise and monumentalise the Serbian nation. The construction efforts both followed and tried to shape political and ideological shifts in Serbia’s troublesome twentieth century. In my paper I intend to reveal the forces and influences behind the construction of the St. Sava Cathedral and reveal the distance between their objectives and experienced reality.

The construction of religio-national monuments typically involves the production, reproduction and manipulation of meaning. The building of St. Sava Cathedral shares this feature, involving and visualising in it all the vicissitudes of recent Serbian history. The significance of the construction of St. Sava Cathedral has been transformed from the visual sign of the drive to unify all Serbs at the turn of the twentieth century to the inter-war strategy of using it to stress Serbian (pre)eminence in multiethnic Yugoslavia to Communist suppression of its construction as a symbol of Serbian nationalism, whose revival it indeed represented in the 1980s, to finally be abandoned in the 1990s as the nationalist project fell in disarray. Its design and location in the urban landscape provoked and continues to provoke debate, showing how monuments are built in discourse just like in reality.

Alexiu Teodor Mircea, Faculty of Sociology & Psychology, West University of Timisoara, Romania.

Neighbourhood Relationships in the Blocks of Flats in the Romanian Urban Environment

This study is an attempt to analyse the intensity of human contacts in the blocks of flats build during the socialist regime in Romania. Like in many socialist countries, the forced industrialisation process was followed by a forced urbanisation process. The building of big factories made mandatory the building of big blocks of flats of poor quality for the large numbers of skilled workers and their families. Usually these labourers were of rural origin (first or second generation “with shoes” as we say in Romania). Thus they were expected to have rural-like neighbourhood relationships (intense, informal, extended, etc.) and to exhibit rural-like behaviour (free communication, strong control through public opinion, intense observation of community space, judgmental rumors, etc.) The intensity of neighborhood relationships among the inhabitants of a block of flats build in 1978 in Timisoara was measured using a “neighborhood integration index”. The results showed that the urban environment changed dramatically formerly community-oriented public life and led the inhabitants to more individualistic behaviour. This behaviour led to the drop of associative attitudes and recently to a reversal of (urban → rural) migration flow.

Antonijević Dragana & Hristić Ljubomir, School of Philosophy, University of Belgrade, SCG.

Graffiti: An Urban Phenomenon of Anonymous and Public Expression of Worldviews

The theoretical basis for the paper can be found in the definition of graffiti as "folklore epigraphy" i.e. expressive culture that manifest itself in written or visual form, for the most part anonymously, through the utilisation of public space. Graffiti, considering the locality of its creation, method of communication and potential recipients, who together with the message-senders share a certain city-orientated Weltanschauung, is foremostly an urban phenomenon. The content and the form of messages, on the other hand, can be idiosyncratic and individual or traditional and collective. Almost as a rule, we are dealing with messages and attitudes which in order to become overt, have no alternative means of expression, save through graffiti. Some of them mirror widely accepted values and opinions, whilst others reflect socially unacceptable or undesirable attitudes. Graffiti, beside its primary communicative function, frequently incorporates an aesthetic dimension, which establishes it as a legitimate domain of folkloristic and semiological research. Graffiti found and recorded on the streets of Belgrade in the fall and winter of 2004/05, will be presented in the paper. Although a relatively non-turbulent political climate in the country has not proven to be a particularly fertile ground for the appearance of inflammatory, humorous and critically minded political graffiti that characterised the 1990s, graffiti emerging today deals with subjects that, nontheless, are witness to the zeitgeist and current interests. Based on their content, the graffiti in question can be classified into several categories: political, ethnic and national intolerances, gender discrimination, musings of football devotees, "philosophical" graffiti, love messages, "notifications". Each expresses the worldview of its author and will be the subject of semantic, contextual and functional analysis. This paper is the result of a collective effort by several scholars and students from the Department of Ethnology and Anthropology, School of Philosophy, Belgrade.

Avlijas Natasa & Monno Valeria, Dipartmento di Studi Urbani, Universita degli Studi Roma Tre & Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell’ Ambiente e per lo Sviluppo Sosteniblile, Politecnico di Bari, Italy.

Democracy and Planning Practices in Western Balkan Cities: Emerging Meanings of Public Urban Spaces in Split, Croatia

Urban public spaces have represented a core issue in urban planning, but their meaning have profoundly changed in our fragmented postmodern cities. What could be considered an urban public space and/or place and, above all, how to reimagine it has become a crucial issue in sustaining an expanded democratic and inclusive urban life in increasingly complex urban environments. In this paper we explore this topic in relation to the transitional urban environments of western Balkan cities where exogenous models of urban development risk simply being transferred without any reference to the local context.

In particular we focus on Split, one of the most important cities in Croatia, where the municipal government is resorting to technocratic traditional land use planning based on the top-down concept of “public interest” to escape a socio-economic and cultural crisis and to stabilise a fragile democracy.

Our study shows that in this complex urban environment, new local meanings of public urban space and place are emerging in everyday politics of city construction by means of constant negotiations between new and old social practices and local/global cultural patterns. These negotiations need to be taken into account in an expanded social debate. Otherwise, emerging potentials of social learning and conflict run the risk of being ignored together with the opportunities for generating local meanings of public urban space and reimagining local futures of coexistence.

Bada Konstantina, University of Ioannina, Greece.

From the Mountain Villages to the Cities: The Experience and Memory of the Women’s Migration

Towards the end of the 20^th century, globalisation and other dramatic factors such as the collapse of the socialism, ethnic conflicts etc., forced people from abroad to migrate to Mediterranean or other European regions. This kind of migration is different from migration described to date in history and anthropology. There exist many and complex inter-connections between migration and the formation and development of migrant communities, cultures and ethnic identities. Thus the mass influx of immigrants and the way of their settlements emerge has become a new and important research field in anthropology and history.

In this paper I will emphasise the ill- documented and hidden history of Greek women’s rural-urban migration. I am interested in the history and memory of their dramatic “exodus” from the mountainous villages and on the history of their everyday life into their new settlements. Attention will be paid to the way in which their local culture is recreated and transformed by them in the suburbs of the cities.

The research is based on anthropological fieldwork as well as on the analysis of life stories. The use of oral testimonies and other forms of life stories can reveal not only the patterns of events which took place, but also reveal how women felt about migration.

Bán David, Eotvos Lorand University of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary.

The Role of the Railway Station in Urban Society: Budapest “Keleti” Station

My research focusses on a question which seems to be rather clear: namely the social use of public spaces in urban areas. How do we use a given urban space and, in another dimension, how dothe constructed environments influence the people who use them. How do the spaces form the users and how do the users form these public spaces? Are there any specific characteristics to these places and how dothey change over time? I have chosen a very limited urban area, within the city, a specific urban phenomenon: motropolitan railway stations. I would like to present a train station – specifically the Budapest “Keleti” Station – as a unit within the urban environment and a meeting point for the people. Already in the 19^th century, this station was “a veritable microcosm of industrial society, a public place where all social classes rub shoulders.” The station symblises a border, a frontier between the country’s “open world” and the city’s “closed world,” like a new-age city gate. But how has this special urban environment developed in the past and today, when train stations all around Europe are trying to find a new “identity” for themselves, to develop truly new kinds of functions. Functions where the station is more than just a transport junction but a new type of city centre (see: Paris – Gare du Nord, Gare Montparnasse, London – Waterloo, Bruxelles – Midi, Berlin – future Zentralbahnhof, etc.).

Benovska-Sabkova Milena, New Bulgarian University, Sofia, Bulgaria.

Mountain Tourism, Urban Culture, and National Feelings: Climbing Vitosha Mountain by Sofia as Modern Pilgrimage

On 27 August 1895, a group of Bulgarian intellectuals climbed Cherni vrah, the highest peak of the Vitosha Mountain near Sofia. This event was the inauguration of tourism and the tourist movement in Bulgaria. Aleko Konstantinov, a popular Bulgarian writer of the 19^th century was amongst the initiators. He also wrote a story dedicated to this event and expressed the feelings and motivations of the participants: an homage of local natural environment. It appears that these feelings were shared by many because mountain excursions and picnics soon became a specific feature of urban/bourgeois culture and of the lifestyle of intellectuals. Since then, climbing Vitosha Mountain has become the favorite liesure activity for residents of Sofia of all generations.

This paper discusses mountain tourism as a point of intersection of the mass urban culture of the 20^th century in Bulgaria and the veneration of the local environment as specific expression of national feelings.

Bilsel Hande, Bahçeşehir University Istanbul, Turkey.

Exploration of the Middle Class Urban Youth Cultures vis-à-vis a Flux of Leisure Consumption in Istanbul: The Night-Life Scene at the Turn of the Millennium

There exists a limited academic discourse on youth cultures in general, the emerging rave and techno culture in particular, in modern Turkey. Although a tradition of ethnographic research on popular culture in Turkey has emerged since the 1990s, one of the most interesting and amorphous youth subcultures of the 1990s and the new millennium, “the new clubber or rave” subculture, has not been fully examined. The lack of research on rave culture – an upper class urban culture of youth renowned for amphetamine drug-use, an interest in computer-generated music known as techno and attendance at all-night-long “rave” dance parties – is surprising considering the notoriety the group has received in popular media and the new consumption practices and style it has brought along. The urban night-life scene has become an arena of identity formation and consumerism.

In the 1980s Turkey chose to follow liberalist economic policies in which the industry sector would be encouraged and a new bourgeoisie in Western terms would be created. Turkey was getting ready to be integrated into the global system. With Özalist laissez faire policies, modern Turkey embraced capital flow as well as import foreign trends, images, culture and consumptional practices that resulted in a massive wave of meta fetishism. Media, especially TV, bombarded this transitional society with popular leisure programming (both foreign and Turkish) with smiling, shining and winning icons of the American dream and led this transitional society to the ideal of the “affluent West” following the motto “work hard, spend more.” Different urban groups were formed as a result of this look West on the one hand, on the other, immigrant masses clinging to their traditions flooded metropolitan areas in the course of Turkish industrialisation since the 1960s. Arabesk has been the “culture” of the second-generation immigrant youth who had adaptation problems in the city and felt alienated. This trend was followed by the rock youth culture of the 1990s, which had its roots inurban, upper-middle class families dwelling in the cities. I chose to analyse one of those informal groupings: the new rave culture in urban Turkey especially in the second half of the 1990s.

In my study I examine the existing literature on rave and come to some conclusions about its cultural, commercial and post-industrial significance. I argue that the practice of raving and the values ravers promote, when combined with the size of the rave community (raving is today a global phenomena supported by worldwide media channels such as MTV and global marketing, advertising and brands), pose significant questions about millennium youth, pointing at the link between globalisation and consumer culture phenomena, the proliferation of pro-technology and pleasure seeking, apolitical, brand bound, escapist younth and cynical consumer raving through hyperreality, dissolving feelings and commitment into irony. I try to explore where this new middle class urban youth culture stands in the resistance-passivity continuum in Turkish rave culture. Could it be a form of symbolic intentional-tactical resistance against mainstream value systems and culture? Could it be a high-speed, ever-accelerating technological-cultural evolutionary process associated with the turn of the millennium as one of the ramifications of integrating “high tech” into leisure consumption which again could be interpreted as resistive to mainstream skepticism about postmodern technological developments as well as to perspectives on “how technology should be used” through hyper-consumption, as the Baudrillarian argument suggests? Or rather than subversion or deviance, as noted by Malbon and McRobbie, is it a subtle resistance, a “quiet”, depoliticised social movement incorporated and trivialised by global trends and brands? Or is it a case where raver youth, who debatably exist in the postmodern “iron cage” of mass media images, education, work and urban life, purposefully, consciously, non-resistantly and temporarily “escape” through excessive pleasure? Are we seriously to believe that the images of consumer culture or indeed the individualised meanings that we attribute to objects of consumption, override the influence of parents, friends, significant role models and so forth? Are identities devoid of any of the influences of early socialisation or of the range of experiences that life throws up, or of our experiences of success and failure, satisfaction and emptiness?

Bondžic Dragomir, Institute of Contemporary History, Belgrade, SCG.

The Provinciale Students in Belgrade after the Second World War

As a consequence of democratisation of higher education and social requirements for well-educated experts after the Second World War, the number of students at Belgrade University was increasing constantly, forming a significant part of the young population in the city. For many students who came from the province to Belgrade, the problems of accomodation, food supplyand adaptation to urban life were very evident. Some of them accepted the new way of life without difficulties, but others retained old habits and lifestyles for a long time. After finishing their studies, many students remained in Belgrade, found employment and began family to become a large part of the incoming population in Belgrade after the Second World War. At the same time, they formed an intellectual elite, which contributed to the development and progress of the economy, education, science and culture in Belgrade. The first decade after the war was an especially significant one, because this difficult period was marked by poverty, the effects of the war, great social changes and permanent ideological and propagandistic pressure from the Communist Party. The aim of this article is to examine the lifestyle, work and behaviour of provincial students in Belgrade after the Second World War in the faculties, libraries, student hostels, canteens, their cultural and everyday life, with emphasis on the process of adaptation to urban life and their mutual influence on the city suroundings. The work is based on the archive research, the press, memoirs, statistics and historical literature.

Boyadjieva Elia, University of Sofia “St. Kliment Ohridsky,” Bulgaria.

The Role and Position of Orthodox Clergymen in Bulgarian City Life: Social and Cultural Aspects

The subject of the clergy and urban orthodox parishes can be approached from several points of view. First, one could study the structure and functioning of cities within the bishoprics in relation to their geographic location. Second, one can point out basic problematic issues of the people and the Church in specific regions in which the population is ethnically diverse. The third interesting point is the influence of the clergy and religious life on the local city culture (specifically larger cities, which are social and cultural centres). I have also tried to trace the attitudes of the clergy and the public by studying the bishoprics in the central and southern regions of west Bulgaria as well as the regions along the coast of the Black Sea from Bourgas southwards.

I will summarise here some of the primary problems that the clergy have to face today. On the one hand there exists a lack of regulated finances for supporting the church. Each bishopric must find its own means for helping its parishes in terms of raising money for example for repairs on buildings, etc. It is interesting to note that despite these financial difficulties, city churches are being repaired everywhere, depending on local funds. The local community contributes a great deal by raising money or taking an active part in the repair work.

Additional problems, characteristic to the different regions in Bulgaria related to city culture, Christian traditions, city expansions or urban migration also exist. The problematic areas related to the Bulgarian city, religion and ethnic interaction within it that make up new cultural traditions, demonstrate in one way or another the relations between society and the Church, as well as Church social dimensions and its role in people’s lives.

Branc Simona, West University of Timisoara, Romania.

Memory, Identity and Cultural Diversity in the City of Timisoara

Situated in the multiethnic region of Banat, the city of Timisoara is considered a model of tolerance and peaceful coexistence. This image is deeply rooted in the conscience of its inhabitants.

The Cultural Anthropology and Oral History Group of the The Third Europe Foundation – Timisoara studies this phenomenon. Completed projects aimed at developing an oral history archive. Presently, this archive contains over four hundred interviews with Banatians coming from different ethnic groups. The study of these interviews has led to the publishing of several books.

The present project aims to reveal the way in which the image of the city of Timisoara is reflected in the discourses of its inhabitants. We also want to identify the elements that form the urban identity and the resonance of certain monuments, buildings or other public places in people’s memory. People preserve memories of each epoch in their lives, and these are continually reproduced.

The starting point of this research was an analysis of the oral history archive. We focused our attention on the discourses of the inhabitants of Timisoara belonging to different generations, social classes, religions or ethnic groups. Besides the “life-story” interviews, this urban anthropology project also made use of guided interviews. The subjects of these interviews are people engaged in preserving the city identity. This category includes actors in public communication, collectors, heads of cultural institutions and others. The socio-anthropological analysis of the interviews will represent an analysis of the urban memorial cultures.

Briciou Cosmin, Popescu Raluca & Virdol Amalia, University of Bucharest & Anti-Poverty and Social Inclusion Promotion Commission, Bucharest, Romania.

Urbanisation in Romania: Patterns and Dilemmas

The study is an interdisciplinary approach, integrating sociological, anthropological and urban geography perspectives fed by the various expertises of the authors. In spite of the abundant Romanian literature on urban topics, there is a lack of comprehensivity: the contributions tend to be limited to certain scientific domains and particular issues. This paper sketches the outline of an integrative perspective.

The aim of the study is to highlight the impact of transition period on urban areas, especially on demography, living conditions and culture in Romania. This will be discussed within a larger framework of historical urbanisation processes in Romania in a comparative perspective with Southeastern European and Western regional trends.

Urbanisation is approached from a social change paradigm and emphasised as a central development process but also as a source of diverse effects. Major dynamics like urban expansion, periurbanisation, residential migration and commuting, and the expansion of the tertiary sector will be addressed. Among negative effects, the informal economy, deviant subcultures, poverty pockets, ruralisation of small towns’ in their profile and lifestyles, aging and demographic decline, weakening of social cohesion, environment deterioration will be mentioned as well.

The analyses provide a special focus on urban poverty as a phenomenon distinct from rural poverty and on social inclusion as an intended product of Europeanisation relevant mainly in the urban context.

Brunnbauer Ulf, Free University of Berlin, Germany.

“The City of the Youth:” Dimitrovgrad and the Building of Socialism in Bulgaria

Communism, as ideology and political practice, intended to build a completely new society, which was to be populated by the New Men of communism. In the communist interpretation, the New Man was unambiguously an urban utopia, and his ‘purest’ home was to be the new ‘socialist’ cities, which were created in several communist countries: Magnitogorsk in the USSR, Nowa Huta in Poland, Sztálinváros in Hungary, Eisenhüttenstadt in the GDR. Bulgaria also had its new town, Dimitrovgrad in southwestern Bulgaria. The construction of the town started in 1948, mainly by using labour of youth brigades, which earned it the title “City of the Youth”.

As the Party had hoped, Dimitrovgrad turned out to be a microcosm of socialism in Bulgaria. Already during its construction, chaos ruled and the erection of buildings often went without plan. The recruitment of workers was also difficult as was the supply of the urban population with food. So many inhabitants of the new socialist city were forced to pursue small-scale agricultural activities, to the horror of the city authorities, who saw their vision of a modern city tainted. On the other hand, the architectural layout of the city, its place in the regime’s ideology and the pervasive cultural and propaganda efforts that took place helped to shape new identities among the urban population, many of whom had come from the countryside.

My paper will present the strategies of the authorities as well as the accommodation practices in Dimitrovgrad and will place this example in the wider context of new socialist cities.

Bugarič Boštjan, Science and research centre of Koper, University of Primorska, Slovenia.

Urban Space between Action and Stagnation: Public Interventions as a Communication Link between Public and Private Space

Regulation of contemporary urban space development is of a complex nature. Inappropriate programmes and the insufficient integration of the public in planning processes may result in developmental discord. The rigid principles of urban planning fail to solve conflicts encountered in the contemporary city. City centres are thus being abandoned and the suburbs are spreading without regulation.

The emergence of the degraded areas in the city centre is accelerated through the inflexibility of planning programmes. As a starting point, the choice of an appropriate social programme is needed for the revitalisation of city centres. Due to inadequate analysis, originating in political and economic interests, only certain types of privileged programmes are being promoted. Strategies of city centre revitalisation include renovation as well as social transformation. The success of revitalisation is enabled by the interaction of research and the coordination of appropriate strategies (gentrification, turistification, conservation, citisation).

The purpose of the paper is to analyse the development processes of contemporary cities. The uses of public space can be revealed through different kinds of events which take place in a specific urban place. Public interventions in open urban space act as points of public interest.

Bukovčan Zufika Tanja & Potkonjak Sanja, University of Zagreb, Croatia.

Stranger in the City: Commercialised Womanhood on City Billboards

This paper is the result of a polite question posed by a guest anthropologist, an Englishman, who was visiting the city of Zagreb, Croatia, that the public space in our town was slightly overcrowded by the images of women on city billboards. Far from being unnoticed, the phenomenon in itself was discussed privately among Croatian anthropologists, annoyed by the abuse of the image of women in commercials, but was never approached analytically, neither from feminist stances nor from media approaches. The billboards appear to be both a reflection of a newly developed capitalist urge for profit and a newly discovered modus for publicising commodities and finding customers in a post-socialist society. In the changing urban, post-socialist landscape, billboards have been appearing everywhere, along the highways, on the fronts of buildings, on skylines and bus stops. What is striking is the connection between the female figure and merchandise of all kind. Womanhood has been established as a sign of successful production, advertising and selling. The “stranger” of the title of this paper is confused by the variety of contexts women were put in, in these visual commercials. Young, smiling, fit, sparcely dressed, eroticised women from the billboards appeared to be selling goods from beverages, food, clothes to cars, travel and life insurance, challenging the “native” female anthropologists to think back about commodified bodies.

Chaveneau-LeBrun Emmanuelle, Université Paris-Sorbonne, France.

Renaming Zagreb: When the City Tells the Government Ideology

In 1991, when Tudjman's party won the Croatian elections, a movement of renaming the streets began. This occurred in all the cities and villages of the newly independent country, but was broadly implemented in Zagreb. The movement slowed down after 2000.

In a precise analysis of the new names given to Zagreb's streets and squares, the paper intends to show how a political power uses the city as a scene to produce its ideology. The capital in particular, is the best location, and even more the centre of the capital when seen as the real heart of the new country in which the state has to assert its power.

Indeed, a power needs places to acquire a concrete visibility. Consequently, these renamed places are not chosen for their beauty, but for their significance and connotations. A new power uses the same places as did the old power it replaces. Indeed, renaming the streets and squares is a way of erasing the memory of the old power, buring and forgetting its vocabulary, heroes, and periods of reference, etc. and by denying places any significance they gave to these.

The example of Zagreb between 1991 and 2000 proves that cities are political objects. Zagreb tells of the political break of the 1990s. On the symbolic field, the capital city condenses the authority of the government and the policy of the whole state.

Ciolan Narcisa & Ilie Magdalena, West University of Timisoara, Romania.

A Family for the City or a City for the Family?

The amplification of the urbanisation process and its implications on different aspects of life has generated many constructions and reconstructions of social dynamics. In this context we can speak of the reshaping of the gender concept and its socio-cultural and professional dimensions.

A profile of urban society and the spatial, temporal and axiological reconstruction it supposes, can be realised, also, from the perspective of re-assessing gender roles. In this way, we can talk even of a reshaping of these representations in the collective mind.

Urban life, the actions and interactions it involves, has had a major impact upon the reshaping of masculinity and femininity, the couple and marital representations, stereotypes and gender prejudices. An important aspect of the diagnosis of urban life is the reshaping of marital and couple relationships. The urban family is formed and functions according to other rules than those of the archaic village space.

The urbanisation process generates social, economical and professional gender interactions, changes and reshapes the statutes and roles that men and women can assume in the new urban context. All these aspects have a major influence upon attraction and rejection between the two sexes and upon marital and couple relationships.

Codorean Gabriela, West Univiveristy of Timisoara, Romania.

The Influence of New Information Technologies on Gender Relationships in the City

In the last two decades, gender relationships in the city have experienced major changes, especially in Southeastern Europe.

The process of migration from rural to urban areas after the collapse of the communist regimes has produced important changes in the population distribution. One of the characteristics of urban life is the greater access to information and new technologies, which have a major influence on gender relationships in the family, in the work place and in social interactions.

It is well known that the media (TV, newspapers, journals, magazines, internet) contribute and influence greatly the construction of stereotypes and prejudices at several levels of human interrelation, especially in gender relationships.

The paper will focus on four main issues: (1) The influence of migration from rural to urban areas on gender and family relationships; (2) The impact of migration, urbanisation and media on lifestyles in the city; (3) How gender stereotypes and prejudices are reflected in the media; and (4) Media influences on gender and family relationships in the city.

Cojocari Ljudmila & Birladeanu Virgiliu, Independent International University of Moldova, Chisinau, Moldova.

Metamorphoses of Collective Memory and National Identity Reflected in the »Lieux de memoire« of a Post-Soviet Capital City: The Case of Chisinau, Republic of Moldova

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the myth regarding the background of the “Soviet people” have generated new and unexpected dilemmas for these formerly totalitarian societies. The fragility of values and traditions, specific for transitory periods, provoked a serious gap in the frame of social attitudes, identity feelings and collective representations. In the process of identity building, collective memory is a powerful force.

In this study we propose to investigate the metamorphoses of collective memory and identity reflected in a post-Soviet capital city’s monuments, relying on the concept of „lieux de memoire”. We consider the investigation of the social attitudes, values and representations toward historical monuments being able to reflect the evolution of memory culture and the shift of its role in creating new national, yet unconventional historical identities.

We will refer to the example of the Republic of Moldova, which today is confronted with a crisis of identity and a legacy of outraged memory. Political rituals, ceremony and the symbolic representation of power and government have played a prominent role in the history of the Republic of Moldova. In this paper we wish to present how, since 1989, the perception of historical monuments in the Republic of Moldova has evolved, studying the case of Chisinau as a post-Soviet capital city.

We will focus more specifically on analysing the confrontations between official (political) and unofficial (collective) discourses toward the „sites of memory” in order to demonstrate that the collective culture in the Republic of Moldova is still under the wieght of historical events (1812, 1940, 1944) that provoked the society’s resistence to any ideological change initiated on the part of the political powers; the political powers, in order to legitimate new realities, appeal to the historical past and historical images, giving new meanings and “historical explanations” to the historical monuments or inventing others anew.

Coman Gabriela, Université de Montréal, Québec, Canada.

Social Construction of the Cluj-Napoca's Central Plazas

In the middle of the 20th century, Cluj-Napoca (northwestern Romania) was a multiethnic and multireligious city. Despite the fact that after World War II the communist authorities initiated an aggressive policy of urbanisation, which contributed to diminishing the city's multicultural character, the centre's buildings erected in the 18th and the 19th century were preserved. My paper deals with the representations of the inhabitants of the city of Cluj-Napoca of the central public spaces, especially the central plazas. Cluj-Napoca's central public spaces represent the target of changing into “Romanian places” managed by a nationalist mayor (elected in February 1992 and remaining in office until July 2004). The monuments illustrating events or characters important to Romanian history were erected, Romanian flags were hung in the boulevards and in the central plazas, the benches and garbage bins were painted in the Romanian national colors, in the city's centre archaeological studies were done to prove the antiquity of the Romanian people as compared to Hungarians. My particular interest is in the manner in which the different social categories – Hungarians, Romanians, Greek-Catholics, Roman-Catholics, Greek-Orthodox, inhabitants of the city, politicians, specialists in urbanism, economic agents or clergy – think, design and build these spaces. What do all these official initiatives mean for them? Do they recognise themselves in these or not? Did they participate in these accomplishments or did they oppose them?

Cotoi Calin, University of Bucharest, Romania.

Urban versus Rural in Southeastern Europe: Different Traditions, Different Modernities, Different Sciences?

According to George Stocking Jr. there are two very different ways of “doing” anthropology. There is, first, the classical Anglo-Saxon tradition of “empire building anthropology” (“proper” anthropology) and then the more “German” tradition of “nation building anthropology”, a kind of diffuse ethnology. Völkerkunde versus Volkskunde. Of course the relationships between these two different anthropological traditions are quite complicated, the oppositions being counterbalanced by filiations.

A very interesting context for dialogue between the two fields (and also for a lot of misunderstandings and lost opportunities) is provided by the anthropology of Europe. The anthropological approach on European societies begins unavoidably with the study of „traditional societies” in Europe. The dichotomy between traditional/modern, which appeared to be set outside, in a well-structured social division of scientific work, explodes in the very core of anthropology and of European identity.

The so called “rural problem“ in Romanian sociological and ethnological tradition, the dichotomy rural-urban, highly emotional and ideological in Romania since it attracts other dichotomies like Romanian-stranger, culture-civilisation etc. appears, through “proper” anthropological lenses, in a quite different context. Tradition(s) and modernity(ies) have very different meanings and emotional underpinnings as seen from these different points of view. The mutual destruction of modernisation theories and nostalgic-ruralist ideologies in Southeastern Europe has opened up the field for a more sophisticated anthropology, less dependent on a Gemeinschaft/ Gesellschaft divide (the common root of both concurrent approaches).

Crvenkovska-Risteska Ines, University »Sts. Cyril and Methodius« Skopje, Macedonia.

Urban Youth in Macedonia and the Question of HIV/AIDS: Sex/Gender Implications

Current anthropological research on the phenomena of everyday life, especially research linked with 'urban life', has identified HIV/AIDS as a basic, primarily, and most essential question in the contexts of social and medical issues. The very first impression is that HIV/AIDS is exclusively a problem of urban life, an impression that is the result of small communities' perceptions as 'rural life', where HIV/AIDS has been considered very distant, as almost not existing in their own reality. That is, of course, in opposition to reality; it is ''potential' problem for everyone, not depending on the character of the community, but on the flow of precise and prompt information. The research shows that from the very beginning, the definition of HIV/AIDS problems in human interpersonal networks has been totally stereotyped as only an 'urban problem', or an 'illness of urban life''.

For the purposes of this analysis, ethnographic materials from two youth projects were studied. The projects were implemented in Macedonia and funded by UNICEF. Systematising the ethnographic materials according to age, socio-economic, educational and other indicators about the young people in the projects, one can see the results and directions for the further discussion of the cultural models among young people, and at the same time, sex/gender implications about HIV/AIDS, about the levels of information on these questions. As a result, the answers for HIV/AIDS questions usually are, just, reflections on almost constant sex/gender relations characteristic for cultural patterns in Macedonia.

Cvetković Marina, Ethnographic Museum, Belgrade, SCG.

Migrations and Contemporary Weaving in Cities of Serbia (1991-2004): The Study of Women Refugees from Former Yugoslavia Republics

It was supposed that the weaving tradition was going to disappear in Serbia in the second part of the 20th century. However, the fact is that weaving has become very popular and highly esteemed at the end of the 20th century. The number of active weavers in Belgrade alone exceeds 600 with tendency rising. The assumption is that such cultural phenomena are related to the social, demographic and economic changes in the war and in the post-war period in Serbia (1991-2004). In the times of crisis in impoverished, ruralised cities with a new demographic profile (settled by war refugees), there simultaneously appeared and evolved two different kinds of weaving associations. The first one, which represents the main subject of this paper, derived from creative textile workshops, intended primarily for the women refugees of former Yugoslav Republics, organised as nongovernmental, nonprofit, humanitarian organisations. The main goals of the weaving workshops were to provide psychological support, social care and economic reinforcement for the refugees. The second, citizens’ weaving associations, assembled domestic, educated and impoverished urban women. Research on the origins and development of refugee associations is based on a survey of the coordinators of the weaving associations and a survey of available documents, exhibition catalogues, and newspaper and journal articles, interviews with the weavers and personal participation and observation.

The aim of the research is to determine characteristics and qualities of contemporary, urban weaving as well as to present refugee weavers’ incorporation in urban cultural life. Selling their handmade products in the most popular tourist spots and souvenir shops, participating in cultural events and exhibitions, these women have succeeded in transforming a mere survival product into one of the main symbols of the cities they reside in.

Čvorovic Jelena, Institute of Ethnography, Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Belgrade, SCG & Arizona State University, Tempe, USA.

“Urbaneness” among Gypsies in Serbia

Based on original fieldwork among Gypsies in Serbia, this paper explores how migration to the city and adaptations to urban life affect Gypsy socialisation. To indicate what is common among Gypsies in general and how Gypsy urbaneness varies in relation to history, demography, socio-economic position and culture, we discuss two settlements, one urban and one rural. First, the city settlement: it is located on the outskirts of Belgrade, and represents a “typical” city Gypsy settlement. Two groups are self-identified: Ashkali Egyptians and White Gypsies both claiming they are “natives” of Belgrade. In spite of the relative proximity and access to the city-life, these Gypsies have little contact with Serbs or the outside world, except when they sell wood, or receive humanitarian help; they keep to themselves and marry within the settlement. Their “urbanisation” is kept to a minimum. The second settlement, inhabited by Gurbeti Gypsies, is located in Macva, in the countryside to the west of Belgrade. During Tito’s regime, many Gypsy villagers left for Austria, only to return to the village for holidays and special occasions. In this sense, the village is a typical gastarbeiter village: many Gypsies returned home to build two and three story houses, with excessive decorations and modern architecture; their settlement became more of a country-town-type than a typical Macva village, and the inhabitants adopted many norms of an urban-lifestyle, in behaviour, dress and attitudes. However, like their city settlement-fellows, they remained mostly endogamous. We argue that Gypsy social isolation, to some extent, is self-imposed through the acceptance of their traditions.

Dalipaj Gerda, Institute of Folk Culture, Albanian Academy of Sciences, Tirana, Albania.

Roma Communities in Elbasan – In and Out

Based on institutional resources, in the city of Elbasan almost 2622 Roma live among the 87787 inhabitants of Elbasan. These communities are settled in three main, well distinguished areas: in the centre of the city, in the periphery and extreme periphery. These three Roma communities reveal strong differences in their tribal origin, period of settlements, social structure and organisation, standard of living, way of conducting trade, level of education etc. The varicolored Roma culture has been introducing itself to Elbasan reality, while both realities have been subject to continuous change and also to bilateral communication. This paper will deal with the main changes in Roma life during three periods, before, during an after the communist order, and examine how these changes have been influencing the communication between Roma and other communities in Elbasan. I will also present aspects of Roma and non-Roma mentalities and how these mentalities, in combination with the above mentioned changes, have become factors in setting and maintaining communication and reciprocal acceptance. What are the bases of negative or positive stereotypes and the reactions towards them [possible identification or self-closure] and what is the role of the institutions and facilitators [NGOs, service offers, policy makers] in improving the co-existence of these communities?

Damljanović Tanja, Institute for the Protection of Cultural Heritage of Serbia, Belgrade, SCG.

St. Sava and St. Anthony: Byzantine Origins for Two Christianities

The main issue of this paper is to present how different architectural approaches faced the problem of creating specific identities of two major religious groups in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, the Orthodox and the Catholic, by focusing on two grand projects, one for the new Orthodox cathedral of St. Sava and another for the Franciscan Catholic church of St. Anthony. Both built in Belgrade - capital of the Kingdom - during the 1930s, each of them found a source for architectural articulation in the medieval Byzantine legacy. However, their specific architectural forms provided two quite different answers to the question of using the same historical references in modern architectural production. By doing so, they emphasised the specificities of religious affiliation, the Orthodox and the Catholic, of two major groups that existed in Yugoslavia during the period between the world wars and manifested their existence in the capital city.

The architectural forms of the new Belgrade cathedral dedicated to the first Serbian archbishop St. Sava were precisely defined in the competition announced for its design in 1927. It was supposed to be a copy of Gracanica, one of the most appreciated Serbian medieval monastic churches. Almost all architects that took part in the competition, including Aleksandar Deroko, who was finally given the commission, respected this requirement. On the other hand, the architectof St. Anthony, the Slovene Joze Plecnik, had no restrictions when he was invited to design a monastic church for the Franciscan order in Belgrade. Thus, the specific requirements of the commissioners played an important role in the creation of specific visual identities of these two churches, for which both architects found their inspiration in the Byzantine building tradition.

Dimova Rozita, Max Planck Instiute fro Social Anthropology, Halle/Saale, Germany.

On Similarity and Fear: Spatial Transformations of Class and Ethnicity in Contemporary Macedonia

This paper examines the relationship between space and ethnic tension in the town of Kumanovo. Situated near the borders with Serbia and Kosovo, this ethnically-mixed town embodies a social dynamic central to nationalism in contemporary Macedonia, namely the re-articulation of class and ethnicity materialised in commodities and transformation of space. I will analyse how ethnic Albanians and ethnic Macedonians have negotiated different class and ethnic positions since the 1991-independence of the country, and how this negotiation is represented in space. Class mobility of many Albanians, who actively participate in the market economy by opening private businesses based on financial support from the strong Albanian diaspora, has altered the social distance between Albanians and Macedonians. The urban space in Kumanovo is completely transformed by new and richly-decorated houses built by Albanians. Expensive cars, furniture, clothes, cell phones and other conspicuous commodities have become inseparable components of the urban landscape of the town. Macedonians, albeit glorifying the independence of Macedonia, cannot easily adjust to the new reversal of class privileges. The abrupt reconfiguration of the social distance between Macedonians and Albanians has caused difficulties for Macedonians to accept the proximity that Albanians have reached in terms of physical, but especially social space. Since 1991 the political-economic transformations have changed the ways in which Albanians have “emerged” in the domain of the visible. Both ethnicities consume identical Western commodities that erase visible differences between Albanians and Macedonians, making the two ethnicities ontologically similar.

Ditchev Ivaylo, University of Sofia “St. Kliment Ohridski,” Bulgaria.

Cities on Borders: Symbolic Geography of EU Accession

My paper will be based on field research in four Bulgarian cities near borders: two in the north on the Danube (Vidin, Russe), two in the south near Greece and Turkey (Gotze Delchev, Kurdjali). I was interested in the changing subjective perceptions of four different border situations, especially new transport and checkpoint arrangements, suitcase trade, trans-border projects, seasonal work and identity constructions that go with them. In the new, multiperspective territoriality, symbolic borders seem to outlive the administrative ones. Nevertheless, new power-relations are gradually being established between the national centre and distant provincial cities.

Djokić Vladan, Faculty of Architecture, University of Belgrade, SCG.

Urban and Cultural Identity of Serbian Cities: On the Phenomenon of the Serbian City Square

The objectives of the research are both general and specific. Even though these two levels are hard to separate, due to their dependence on the cultural context of the city square, the research is expected to show:

At the general level an understanding of the phenomenon of the city square, as forming a theoretical basis for understanding historical principles and actions. Mainly it is related to the relationship between the function and form of the city square in specific cultural contexts.

At the specific level the direction of the transformation of the city square through determining planning, designing and reconstruction processes on the basis of the previously defined methodology. Mainly it is related to the transformation of experience into codes, which will represent a formula for the next step related to the specific conditions of the location.

The practical value of this research is in the fact that city squares in Southeastern European cities have todate not been studied enough. The lack of representative examples of city squares in Balkan cities is certainly the most important reason for poor interest in this subject. As in all cultures, the Southeastern European region has characteristics which make it specific. This research will try to answer the question of whether the specific conditions of the Balkan squares can be solved through previously set formulas, and what the possibilities and restrictions that influence these formulas are.

Djordjević Jelena, Faculty of Political Science, University of Belgrade, SCG.

Imaginary and Real Belgrade

Every city can be considered a text in which social and political reality may be read and understood. This reality opens up to a reader in almost every aspect of the city life: in its urban and demographic structure, in the form and use of the space (centre, suburbia, streets, places, parks, theatres, music halls, government buildings, sport halls and arenas, restaurants, libraries etc.), in the organisation of time in daily routines and on special occasions, in traffic, ecological status, aesthetic qualities, atmosphere and many other things. Belgrade, the capital of Serbia and Montenegro presents in all the mentioned aspects a text where the dynamism of the social, economic and cultural transition from the socialist period, through the authoritarian and war period of the 1990s to the present is expressed in very obvious ways. The shift of political power from a one-party-system to pluralist one, economic sanctions, war, bombing, the rise of corruption, great number of immigrants, corruption, impoverishment of the middle class and the rise of the new rich class, explosion of the rural in the urban cultural tissue, political struggle between «two Serbias», among other things, left its mark on all aspects of life in Belgrade. The dynamism of these deep structural changes, being very fast and often abrupt, provoked by the struggle for power, both, «symbolic» and economic, created a disorganised, chaotic urban structure.

This disorganisation is read, in the obvious way, in the construction and reconstructions of the symbolically prestigious quarters of the city, in the way streets and buildings look, in the living culture, in the places of entertainment etc. All these spaces have an imaginary, symbolic value to the newcomer, to the new urban population, and this very value contributes decisively to the choices of spaces to be conquered, as well as to their appearance. The conquering of urban space means a change in the identity of the newcomers, and this new identity provides the means to offer a picture of an imaginary reality, parallel to the real reality. This also means a creation of new cultural standards that are offered as the norms, or goals to be attained. The disorganised, chaotic urban structure and life, the «real reality» stands in a strong opposition to the imaginary one, being a constructed but necessary «habitus» for the new urban classes and their rise to social and economic power.

The paper will show what are the principles of the construction of the imaginary reality are by analysing the ways the spaces of the city are used, formed and transformed. It will point out the tension between the imaginary and real as a product of the above mentioned social and political changes and processes.

Duda Igor, Faculty of Philosophy in Pula, University of Rijeka, Croatia.

Escaping the City: Leisure Travel in 1950s and 1960s Croatia

The 1950s and 1960s, a period of growing prosperity in post-war Europe, were decades of social, economic and cultural transformation in Croatia, then part of socialist Yugoslavia. The processes of industrialisation and urbanisation continued at a rapid pace and changed the habits of both old and new urban populations. The set of changes enabled the creation of practices of a mass consumer society. Since the state policy followed the common European goal of providing better living standards and well-being for all, it also accepted the idea of creating happy citisens by turning them into consumers and tourists. The development of mass tourism was perceived as part of a socialist social revolution, as one of the key indicators of living standards, as a field of both social and commercial interest, and as an aid to nation building. Modernisation thus made cities grow, but it also allowed city-dwellers to get away on weekends, public holidays and vacations. The socialist tourism system, consisting of holiday centres and a large set of subsidies, offered the cheapest holiday making solution. Much effort was put into the creation of the need for travelling, and new habits soon acquired the meaning of a status symbol. In the summer the Adriatic beaches were the most popular getaway, and as such the source of both enthusiasm and frustration. Travelling abroad and the international tourist image of the coast enhanced additionally Croatia's modernisation and consumerism drive.

Duijzings Ger, School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, UK.

Balkanising Urban Space in the Netherlands: What about the Balkans?

This paper explores a case of urban or landscape design that is geographically external to the region of Southeastern Europe. It is based on an essay written in 1999, entitled The Balkanisation of Brabant. Comments of a Balkan specialist on MVRDV's 'Brabant-city 2050, which commented on the long-term and visionary proposals for redesigning the Dutch province Brabant put forward by one the best known young Dutch architects Winy Maas, co-founder of the Rotterdam-based firm MVRDV. What makes this case interesting, and relevant for the sake of reflection and comparison, is that Maas used the term ‘Balkanisation’ to describe the core of his proposal: recreating contrast and difference in a landscape that is “losing its identity” and is becoming boringly homogenised —as it is being urbanised — very similar to the non-place urban realms of some American cities. It was his unexpectedly positive (but also rather uncritical) use of the term Balkanisation that, in the middle of the Kosovo war, made the provincial authorities of Brabant decide to commission an essay by a Balkan specialist. In this paper I will revisit the issues I dealt with in the essay, but now in a changed context of Dutch cities falling prey, one could argue, to forms of ‘Balkanisation’, i.e. fragmentation, spatial segregation, ethnic polarisation, and political violence (cf. the assassinations of politician Pim Fortuyn and film-maker Theo van Gogh). In this paper, I would like to take up the opportunity to compare the situation of Dutch cities such as Rotterdam, which have become ethnically extremely heterogenous, with that of major cities in the former Yugoslavia such as Belgrade or Prishtina, which have gone through processes of ethnic homogenisation.

Duşa Iona-Alexandra, Faculty of Sociology and Social Work, University of Bucharest, Romania.

Somewhere between Urban and Rural: Consequences for the Members of a Small Urban Community

The paper is a case study of a small and isolated urban community in Romania, were urbanisation and ruralisation trends coexist. Originally a village, the small town developed around the main employer of the region: a mine. After the restructuring of the mining sector, the function of the mine as the main employer has not been compensated and thus the population had to find strategies to survive, other than employment locally. One result was the out-migration of the population to other places where they were able to find employment: other cities or, more frequently, other countries. Another result was the ruralisation of the activities: people (re)turned to agriculture, especially subsistence agriculture. At the same time, pressure for urbanisation is very important: there are financing opportunities for making infrastructure more “urban” and, although the local government tried to reverse the decision about declaring the locality a town, in order to be eligible for appropriate funding, the request was rejected, on the grounds that as an EU accession country, Romania has to fulfill different standards, including a certain degree of urbanisation, be it artificial. The paper describes the consequences of such an in-between status for the community and its members, taking into account policies for urban and rural development respectively.

Erdei Ildiko, School of Philosophy, University of Belgrade, SCG.

Television, Rituals and Struggle for Public Memory in Serbia in the 1990s

The aim of the paper is to point to the role of television (mainly state owned and controlled) and ritual actions in creating and distributing messages concerning important social and political events during the 1990s. The main argument is that the urban street political protest actions that were performed by the political and social opponents of the ruling regime, mainly in Belgrade streets and squares, were a logical outcome of the regime’s media policy, and closely dependent on it. The aim of that policy was to silence the opposing voices and make them invisible, but also to avoid speaking about events that might threaten the image of the ruling regime as tolerant, peaceful and patriotic, the examples of which were information on war crimes, and devastations of Vukovar, Dubrovnik and Sarajevo. Political protests and ritual actions have created a space where these issues could safely be spoken out, thus creating an emerging public countersphere. Instead of considering media and rituals as separated forms of communication, it will be shown how in particular social and political contexts in Serbia during the 1990s, television and rituals have reached a point of mutual constitution and articulation.

Fridman Orli, Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, George Mason University, USA.

Public Urban Space and Alternative Voices: the Case of Women in Black

This paper will focus on the Women in Black vigil that took place in the Republic Square, downtown Belgrade on July 10^th 2004 commemorating the ninth year of the 1995 massacre in Srebrenica. On that day, approximately sixty women gathered at the heart of the city holding banners in memory of the victims, reminding the people passing by of what most of them would rather forget – the events in Srebrenica, the war crimes, the victims, the perpetrators and the price of war. But that day in the main Square, there were others who thought these voices had no right to exist. As the protesters gathered, some were attacked and beaten by an angry crowd – a crowd that stayed and observed the silent vigil by cursing and yelling, offending the women and mocking their message.

In 2004, now that the wars are over, those in Belgrade who argued strongly against the wars along the 1990s are still struggling. The struggle is now different. Will events like the massacre in Srebrenica be included in the collective memory as it is being created? Or will such events be obliterated? Will there be any space at all for this memory or its acknowledgement?

In my presentation, I will examine these questions by looking at the event that day in the Republic Square as an illustration of the struggle between those voices wanting to remind, and those insisting not to allow that memory to exist in the public sphere. Based on Stanley Cohen’s ‘States of Denial’ I will analyse Women in Black’s message as part of a current dynamic in Serbian society, as taking place in the main square at the heart of Belgrade’s urban centre.

Fruntelata Ioana-Ruxandra, Faculty of Letters, University of Bucharest, Romania.

A Second-hand Book Community in Bucharest

Second-hand book stands or kiosks are quite a common presence in the centre of Bucharest (Romania), especially in the University area. People buy used volumes for several reasons: accessible price, access to older academic bibliographies, passion for reading (an inheritance of the years previous to 1989, when books were one of the few means of entertainment). One can also connect the tradition of reading and treasuring old books to the model set for the Romanians by the great writers and scholars of the 19^th century.

Book traders and their customers have built up a community revolving around the acts of promoting and selecting reading. The display of books on a stand, posting information, negotiating prices or initiating the search for a “rare find” are some elements that help us to identify a group tradition of the second-hand book people. The anthropological approach enriches the understanding of such a book-interested merchant-buyer community by studying aspects such as “commerce” superstitions, oral promotion strategies, food ways of street sellers, group and personal reactions to daily routines etc.

At the same time, by analysing individual and collective practices founded in the commerce with used books, the anthropologist gets the opportunity to interpret one meaningful section of the puzzling process of defining self in the contemporary city.

Fujii Gen, School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, UK.

Changing Materialisation of Family in Gjirokastër, Southern Albania

The aim of this paper is to capture the current conceptualisation of family through the materiality of vernacular architecture in the post-socialist transition. By applying ethnographic approaches, this paper thus investigates post-socialist everyday life in the southern Albanian city of Gjirokastër. The old part of the city has been protected as one of two ‘Museum Towns’ under state designation since socialist times because of its magnificent built environment of late Ottoman vernacular architecture. During the course of the collapse of the socialist regime, however, the sense for heritage preservation was lost in the confusion and the preserved area was transformed through the building of modern constructions as a result of rapid urbanisation. What are the conceptual motivations at stake for local people to neglect their own heritage, but, in turn, to promote the construction of standardised and bland houses? Aside from obvious economic reasons, this paper will examine the reasons behind the construction of these new houses through the penetration of morality and ethics of the concept of family amongst Albanians, which have been culturally and socially embedded through time and space over the different periods in its history: the Ottoman Empire, the socialist regime and post-socialist transition. Each period seems to have different motives to contribute to the construction of the current conceptualisation of family. Thus, the questions, which will be discussed in this paper include: What were these motives and how did they interconnect to each other through different periods of time?

Gavrilović Ljiljana, Institute of Ethnography, Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Belgrade, SCG.

Internet: Overcoming the Distance Between Urban and Rural Culture

This paper discusses the role of the internet in standardising urban and rural cultural models. Urban and rural residents take part in a daily communication via the internet, which in turn, affects their behaviour in their offline lives. These internet users pass on and communicate different modes of thinking, shaped by constant communication with people with other cultural models. By doing this, they achieve not only anopen multicultural communication, but also a standardisation of thinking and behaviour in rural and urban environments of the same cultural area.

The research employed classical ethnographic methods widely used in internet-based studies of its effects on daily lives – online and offline interviews. Furthermore, a rural-based control group, which uses the internet on a daily basis, was especially monitored to determine not only a possible change of attitudes, but also any changes in their real behaviour.

Georgelin Herve, École Française d’Athènes, Greece.

Transformed Athens and Thessalonica: The Impact of Asia Minor Refugees on Urban Life: A Social History

The main assumption of this paper is that the Asia Minor catastrophe created a new Modern Greek urbaneness and redefined the national self-perception of Greeks.[1] The Archives of the Oral Tradition (AOT) of the Centre for Asia Minor Studies (CAMS) in Athens as well as autobiographical texts, like Stis Paranges, Historia mias zôis, by Vasilis Kalaïtzoglou[2] are the major sources used.

After the destruction of the Orthodox presence in Asia Minor in the aftermath of the Hellenic defeat in the Greek-Turkish war 1919-1922, and as a result of the international treaty between Kemalist Turkey and vanquished Hellas that planned the compulsory exchange of Muslim inhabitants of Greece (except those in Thrace), against the Greek-Orthodox populations still settled in Turkey (with the exception of the Istanbul community), a major flow of refugees spread all over Greece, reaching some 1.5 million persons.[3] The arrival of such a human mass (a fifth to a fourth of the total Greek population once the exchange was carried out) radically changed the two main cities: (a) Athens-Piraeus, the capital, which became a major centre of urban proletarian concentration, and (b) Thessalonica, the newly (in 1912) conquered northern metropolis, ravaged by a fire in 1917, which was deprived of its Muslim inhabitants,[4] and whose Jewish character was challenged by the national state.

The influx of Asia Minor refugees triggered the hellenisation of the national territory in places once shaped by the Slavic or Turkish presence. Athens and Thessalonica were extended by suburban settlements: “And New Smyrna, New Ionia, New Philadelphia, Aigaleô, Kaisariani, Peristeri, Nikaia, Korydallos, Drapetsôna, Tavros, Alexandroupoli, Volos, Kilkis, Hirakleio of Crete were born.”[5] While outside ‘Hellenism’ would disappear, the Greek state had to accommodate unexpected but lively and adaptable elements, about to alter its economy, society and culture: “Generally speaking, the settlement of refugees in Greece […] resulted in the transformation from a static and belated society to a dynamic one, eager to make progress”.[6] All these “Turkish seeds”[7] were not welcome and dissatisfaction appeared, best expressed, for instance in the rebetiko songs of the working-class refugees and in the literary works of the literary generation of the 1930s and subsequent writers.

Grandits Hannes, Karl Franzens University of Graz, Austria.

The City as a Text: Using Methods of Historical-Anthropological Research

In my presentation I would like to reflect on the experience of a series of fieldwork seminars carried out in different cities in Southeastern Europe beginning in 1996 (Umag, Split/Zadar, Dubrovnik, Kotor/Cetinje, Belgrade, Sarajevo). Selected approaches of dealing with the specifics of urban spaces (and how these places are socially used) shall be presented and some of their potentials and limits will be discussed.

A particular focus in my paper will be on the dimension of time. Urban spaces are most often symbolically arranged according to different historicalperiods. Historical meanings are of course transformed over time. Nevertheless, historical and present meanings usually remain closely interrelated. Together, they make up specific frameworks for the social use of urban space. How should one deal with these historical “determinants” in urban anthropology? What are the methodological consequences? Having this in mind, this paper aims to offer some suggestions for the organisation of research strategies.

Greenberg Jessica, University of Chicago, USA.

On the Road to Normal: Discourses of Travel in Serbia and Montenegro

Traveling was important to people from Yugoslavia, because we could do it, while the others in Eastern Europe could not...It was enough to go to Prague or Budapest to feel superior.

Slavenka Drakulić, How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed

During the course of my 18 months of fieldwork in Serbia and Montenegro, my interview subjects almost inevitably turned our conservations towards two “facts” about the country. The first was that neither Serbia nor its citizens were “normal,” and that the further one went from the main cities, the more abnormal people were. The second truism was that this abnormality had been exacerbated by Serbia’s isolation in the 1990s, and particularly by people’s inability to travel abroad after decades of doing so. Based on data from these conversations, this paper will consider the relationship between travel and discourses and experiences of normalcy in Serbia as its cities went from cosmopolitan sites of culture, consumption, and leisure, to pariahs within an ever-poorer region of Europe. I argue that these two conversational truisms reveal key social categories and conditions through which citizens of Serbia are framing political and social transformation in the current moment. As such, the inability to travel is a critical social phenomenon through which people make sense of Serbia’s recent history of violence and international isolation, as well as imagine possible alternative futures for the country. Furthermore, isolation has exacerbated tensions between rural and urban status, such that normalcy has become increasingly tied to one’s capacity to claim urban status in lieu of travel. Thus as the possibilities for cosmopolitan citizenship have shrunk, the meaning of movement among urban centres at home and abroad is increasingly linked to the production of ‘normal’ political subjectivities.

Gruber Siegfried, Karl Franzens University of Graz, Austria.

The Quarters of Shkodra in 1918: Differences and Similarities

The southern part of the city was the old city, inhabited almost exclusively by Muslims. In the newer quarters of the city, the Catholics were living in the eastern part and the Muslims in the western part. The Catholics had much higher literacy rates than the Muslims, in one of the Catholic quarters, 80 percent of adult men and 50 percent of adult women were literate, while in one of the quarters of the old town, only 2 men out of a population of 414 persons were literate. In two of the northern quarters more than one third of the adult population was born outside of the city, while in the quarter with the lowest literacy rate, more than 90 percent of the adult population was born within the city. The Catholic monasteries were all situated in the southeastern part of the city and the barracks of the Albanian military and police were in the Catholic parts of the city. The quarters also differed in household formation: In Qafa, almost 60 percent of the population were living in joint or extended families while in Mahalla e ré, only 20 percent were living in such households and 75 percent were living in nuclear families. There were also marked differences in the occupational structure of the quarters: In Mahalla e ré and Rusi i vogël (i katholikwe) more than half of the population were living on the production of goods, while in some other quarters it was less than 15 percent.

Grujić Marija, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary.

Urban Identities in Popular Culture in the Post-Socialist Serbia: Symbolic Appropriations and Exclusions of the Rural

The paper deals with the post-socialist constructions of urban identities represented in the field of popular culture in Serbia. In many post-socialist societies, the urban/rural dichotomy plays a significant role in the creation of group identities, which is particularly manifest in forms of popular culture. My main argument is that the post-socialist constructions of urban identities in popular culture in Serbia have been created through two processes that are at work at the same time: symbolic appropriations of rural cultural spheres and symbolic exclusions of rural cultural identities. In addition, I argue that key aspects of the urban/rural dichotomy in post-socialist Serbia have drastically deviated from the urban/rural tensions represented in popular culture in socialist Yugoslavia. The argument is supported by the examples taken from the movies and popular music market from both socialist and post-socialist periods. By using a method of discourse analysis of visual and textual contents of these examples, I explore how the appropriations and exclusions of the rural, observed along the lines of class, gender and sexuality, participate in the construction of urban identities in post-socialist Serbia.

Gulin Zrnic Valentina, Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, Zagreb, Croatia.

The Community within a Community in New Zagreb

New Zagreb is part of the city built after World War II, in particular between the 1960s and the 1980s. It was built to accommodate approximately 120 000 people in ten new housing estates, each planned for some 10 000 inhabitants. It was an extensive housing development programme aimed at resolving housing deficiencies caused by rapid industrialisation and increases in city population. People who moved in were of very heterogeneous ethnic and regional origins.

Urban neighbourhoods in New Zagreb were planned according to the precepts of modern architecture, as functional units with all the necessary daily infrastructure (educational, commercial, medical, social etc.), services and facilities within the residential community. Churches were the only element in this otherwise well-equipped community that were intentionally not planned. However, Church organisations found their way into this modern and socialist part of the city.

The paper focuses on Catholic parishes founded in new housing estates during the socialist period. Both the organisational aspect and the everyday practice of religion will be presented and discussed based on various materials (interviews, official documents, newspapers). Religious communities within residential communities will be interpreted as a tacit segment of socialist urban development with a significantly changed role in local urban communities in post-socialist 1990s.

Halili Rigels, School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies, University College London, UK.

The Coming of »the Chechens«: Changes in Urban Life in an Albanian Town

This paper focuses on the changes that have been taking place in Gjirokastra, a southern Albanian town, since 1991. As many other large and middle-sized towns in Albania, Gjirokastra has experienced two phenomena. The first is the extensive and sudden urbanisation as a result of massive internal migration of the rural population to towns, the second is the radical change of towns' social composition – many 'old' inhabitants moved out to other bigger cities throughout the country, mostly in Tirana, or abroad, especially to neighbouring Greece.

The article intends to discuss some of the main consequences on the organisation and functioning of the urban life following the above mentioned changes. Attention will be focused on some central issues, like the shaping of the public sphere, the modus vivendi of “old” and “new” inhabitants, the mechanisms of preserving identity among the 'old' inhabitants as opposed to the identity-building ones used by the 'newcomers', and finally the emerging clear division of the urban space between the 'old' and 'new' inhabitants.

The inquiry is based on direct observations, conversations with both categories of inhabitants, and on personal experiences as a native of Gjirokastra whose family still lives there. Several photographic illustrations will also be included.

Hartmuth Maximilian, College of Arts and Sciences, Koç University/Istanbul, Turkey.

Europeanisation of the Post-Ottoman Cityscape in the Balkans: A Comparative Analysis of Processes in Belgrade, Sofia and Sarajevo 1878-1918

The geopolitical changes following the Berlin Congress 1878 resulted in a reorientation of urban development policies in the post-Ottoman Balkan cities. Governments aimed at a re-establishment of cultural bonds and developments with (Western) Europe, wherein cities like Vienna and Paris were taken as immediate models. To fill the gap left by the absence of a local elite trained in designing cities and buildings in the contemporary “European style”, architects and planners from Austria-Hungary, Germany or France were invited to become active between Sava and Bosporus.

The model of the compact Central European city of the turn of the century, laid out on a grid plan, dominated by wider streets lined with multi-storey mixed usage buildings took over. Consequently the Historicisms (the “neo-styles”) entered the stage, replacing the traditional housing forms, whereby the strict separation between čaršija (commercial district) and mahale (residential districts) original to the Ottoman town was also abolished.

Falling into a period of national emancipation, these processes coincided with the trend of creating ethnic distinctions in architecture (“national styles”). Safeguarding of national identity was seen as an artistic programme that should also be articulated architectonically. While Athens had chosen the Antiquity, and therefore Classicism, as a point of reference for its urban redesign, Serbs and Bulgarians sought their national styles in the Byzantine art dominating their middle ages, whereupon polychrome, tripartite façades and semicircular arches became common decorative features.

Sarajevo, on the other hand, witnessed the introduction of a style often wrongly described as a style designed exclusively for Bosnia: Orientalism, an eclectic mix of influences from the Muslim architectures of Moorish Spain and North Africa (thereby purposefully disregarding the Ottoman architectural output). As a misunderstood metaphor for continuity of oriental architecture in Bosnia, this style was promoted by the Habsburg officials, drafted to formulate a compromise (or reconciliation?) between Orient and Occident reflected in the province’s history.

In Sarajevo, ironically, the same architects that had come to Bosnia in their late twenties to accelerate the architectural Europeanisation of the urban fabric later became the proponents of a reorientation towards a vernacular style of construction. Shortly before WWI they developed what they called the “Bosnian Style”, only later appreciated as a further development of traditional Bosnian/Balkan architecture with elements of the trendy Secession movement.

Hausmaninger Anna, Karl Frenzens Univeristy of Graz, Austria.

Transnational Aspects of Urbanisation: A Macedonian Case Study

Like in every process of identity formation, which needs the famous “other” from which a person or a group distinguish themselves, the city dweller needs the villager as his or her “opposite”. In my case study I will describe how in western Macedonia the images of the “self” and the “other” constructed during socialism have recently been challenged and how the line between the villager and the city dweller ‘threatens’ to blur.

In western Macedonia, Orthodox Christians who left the villages during socialism establishing a new urban culture, constructed the villager as a backward Muslim. In doing so they negated their own background. In the village I am investigating, the general trend is confirmed: Many Christian families moved to the town while a large share of the Muslims stayed in the village, only sending its male population abroad to ensure the existence of their families through labour migration.

The destinations of these labour migrants were in many cases towns in Slovenia, Austria or Italy, making these villagers part of urban migration in a transnational context. Their experience is reflected in their clothing, lifestyle, architecture etc., challenging the above mentioned image of the ‘backward Muslim villager’.

Helms Elissa, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary.

Only Peasants (and Policemen?) Hit their Wives: Masculinity, Domestic Violence and Rural/Urban Identities in a Bosnian Town

This paper examines the intersection of gender with class and rural/urban identities among local police officers dealing with domestic violence in the Bosnian town of Zenica. In recent years, the police force has undergone UN and EU led reforms, a major increase in the participation of women, and training by a local women’s organisation in sensitivity towards gendered violence. While procedures and legal frameworks have indeed improved significantly, gendered talk and joking on the job among the police represents gendered violence as a fundamental component of “Balkan” rural, “traditional,” and “primitive” masculinity: domestic violence is perpetrated in villages and by men with “peasant mentalities.” At the same time, however, many policemen re-appropriate the popular stereotype of the police as primitive, macho “peasants,” boasting of their physical and psychological power over women, while challenging their colleagues’ masculinity as a function of the degree of power they have over their wives. They denigrate each other as papučari, or hen-pecked husbands. Styles of masculinity performance and expressed attitudes about domestic violence are, however, different among the more educated police detectives, who are seen as occupying a different (higher) class position from those of uniformed officers. In this context, I examine how conceptions of gender and gender hierarchies inform and construct identities based on variations of the civilised/primitive, Balkan/Western, or urban/rural dichotomy. The analysis is based on ethnographic research conducted among women’s NGO activists and local police in Zenica, Bosnia-Herzegovina, from 1999-2000 and in the summer of 2004.

Hočevar Marjan, University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Social Sciences, Center for Spatial Sociology, Slovenia.

City as an Instrument or City as a Reflexive Commodity?

Globalisation of urban flows based on network transactions have a strong impact on the changes of spatio-temporal organisation in cities as well as on individuals and other city actors. Because of demands for global universality of spatio-temporal organisation, a mechanism of maintaining of heterogeneity of certain urban locations within the cities with respect to the other cities is needed. The importance of cities in the industrial age was granted by geographical centrality or exceptional physical accessibility. However, in the postindustrial age the reflexive role of urban placeness has greater importance than just instrumental spaceness. In this frame we establish the importance of differentiation between the characteristics of instrumental urban spaceness and reflexive urban placeness. Reflexive role is not dependent solely on geographical centrality or classical territorial conditions. Centrality as-such was, in the past, determined concentration, relative permanence and inertia of localisations of flows in the few existing "prime cities". The less the urban space carries only the instrumental function of accessibility, the more diverse actors – urban users (e.g. inhabitants, visitors, investors, organisations) for whom spatio-temporal paths are more flexible, become sensitive to the differences within and amongst the spaces. City users reflexively judge the difference amongst the places, the special content of the places, what their symbolical and functional meaning, and what their value and purpose is. Reflexive role is "acquired" through the abilities of a designing, producing, adapting, and creating of elements of spatial distinctiveness with regard to other cities. We will therefore try to explain the localisation of global flows in contemporary cities through different kinds and forms of physico-spatial localness, especially cultural, visual and economical-finacial.

Hofman Ana, Marković Aleksandra, Tarabić Iva, University of Arts & Center for Balkan Music Research, Belgrade, SCG.

Roma Musicians as a Hidden Class in the Urban Cultural Environment

Based on music and culture research among the Roma – done in 2003 in the vicinity of Obrenovac and Belgrade (in the project »Respecting diversity«) – the authors will show Roma musicians as a hidden class within their own community and without it as well.

Several crucial issues will be highlighted:

1. Influence of urban culture on Roma music becomes visible on one hand in the usage of new instruments and on the other hand in adoption of new genres. This practice can be explained by the interesting phenomenon of particular denial of “Roma” origins (attribution). Could Roma music be discussed both in terms of authenticity and originality, and in terms of urban and rural in music? Within this endless intertwining of constant and change lies the core of Roma music as such: a phenomenon per se, and a part of a wider context of urban popular music.

2. Due to the ever growing trend of world music, the position of Roma music is rapidly changing. In the course of these developments, Roma have acquired a different role in the Serbian urban music scene as well (given the increased production of CDs with Roma music as part of a global, multicultural music scene).

3. What are the causes of heterogeneity of Roma music (introduction of new genres of popular music and the creation of new »hybrids«)?

4. Is interpretation (i.e. »explanations and interpretations that include the points of view and attitudes of their authors«) a referent point in defining the Roma musical identity?

Horváth Sándor, Institute of History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary.

The Knife-Thrower and the Gold Star: Pubs and Social Identities in the First Socialist City in Hungary

Pubs had a special importance in the public sphere of the first Hungarian socialist city, Sztálinváros (Stalintown), founded in 1950. The migrants created in them a distinctive social institution of their own that symbolised not only a rejection of some of the cornerstones of official lifestyle but also an acceptance of alternative public modes of sociability and solidarity. My paper aims to serve as an introduction to the key transformations that have taken place in the discourse on the different lifestyles in Sztálinváros. Specifically, it examines changes in the process of construction of the different types of pub-goers, who were represented as the folk devils of socialist city, and the role of official discourse in constructing new social identities.

The official discourse suggested that pub-culture was a countercultural phenomenon; official efforts were made to stigmatise every unplanned and unofficial phenomenon. These efforts generated a public debate about the pubs. In this debate, pubs and their customers were represented as ‘non-urban’ and ‘non-socialist’ phenomena. The cultural conflict involved in this new, ‘socialist’ urban adjustment can be shown by the representations of the most notorious pub of Stalintown, called Késdobáló (‘The Knife-Thrower’) and by the depictions of the Aranycsillag Hotel (‘Hotel Gold Star’), which was opened at the same time the ‘The Knife-Thrower’ was closed, to urge the spread of socialist lifestyle in the socialist town, and which later became a symbol of the ‘petty bourgeois-lifestyle’ in Sztálinváros.

Hristov Petko, Ethnographic Institute with Museum – Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia, Bulgaria.

The Market and the Piazza for Hired Labour in Sofia as Places to Exchange Cultural Stereotypes

The historical and social study of every day life in the Balkans pays special attention to the market and the piazza for hired labour. The agricultural market is an urban area where the town and the village meet; both the market and the piazza are places to exchange goods, services, labour, cultural stereotypes and “urban” modes. These are also places for public appearances.

This paper deals with the development of the market and the piazza for hired labour in Sofia after Bulgarian independence (1878) and during the first decades of the 20th century as a “channel” through which new cultural stereotypes penetrate the “intimate world” of the patriarchal village. The gender specifics of seasonal work are also discussed: the construction labourer as a typical male role and being a servant as a female one.

The market for agricultural products is not a place for cultural exchange. The penetration of new behavioural models and cultural stereotypes in the patriarchal village is primarily a result of men and women’s seasonal migration to the rapidly developing towns. Since the 1920s, being a servant in a wealthy family became a crucial point in the life of the girls coming from the mountainous regions surrounding Sofia (known as “Shopluk”).

Ichimescu Dan, University of Bucharest, Romania.

Urban Space and Place: Entering the Supermarket

The paper proposes a study of a highly representative urban space: the supermarket, to be more specific, on entering the supermarket. I will take into consideration three supermarkets in Bucharest (Cora, Mall, Carrefour) all situated in semi-residential areas. These malls provide very attractive urban spots, being representative for the urban culture.

The paper will investigate the architectural composition, the various cultural levels and the significace of their articulation in reference to the mall entrance. The research will try to demonstrate the irrational character of this architectural composition, as a space addressing itself particularly to human affectivity. The elements that make up the entrance are identity marks also used in other, very different situations: the entrance to a space where an epiphany (or a hierophany) is to happen; the entrance to a ceremonial space.

In traditional space, the gate is a very important architectural object, being frequently represented and highly evaluated. For example, the entrance to a church is representative for what this research is trying to prove. The gate signifies a hiatus: it marks the difference between secular, homogenous, linear time and sacred, real, axiologically ladden time.

This is the explanation for the presence of symbolic markers at the mall entrance: flags, columns, plazas, big doors, guards, pseudo-monuments etc. During secular ceremonies the same symbolic markers are used, underscoring the ceremonial nature of the event. In both cases space is undergoing changes. These changes are more or less rational, more or less appealing from an emotional point of view.

Describing and analysing the mall entrance and the elements of which it is composed will substantiate the argument of this paper. The organisation of that space is important as it tries to manipulate and to influence the affectual part of the human mind. The entrance tries to shock, to create a pseudo-ceremonial space, so that the „sacred” act of buying can be pursued in a non-rational way.

Iliescu Laura Jiga, »Constantin Brailoiu« Institute of Ethnography and Folklore of the Romanian Academy, Bucharest, Romania.

Pilgrims and the City

The spiritual trip, performed as an individual or in a procession, reshapes the environment according to a symbolic geography, marked by special places related to miracles, encounters, relics etc. and by personal memories. But the religious experiences represent only one of the elements involved in the processes of revaluation the space, which acquires new economical, social and political functions as well.

Our study concerns pilgrimages to relics stored in churches in the urban environment (especially Iassy – St. Paraskeva, Bucharest - The New St. Dumitru, Curteade Arges – St. Philophteia). Going there, people also experience contact with the city (for some of them their first visit to that city takes place with the occasion of pilgrimage), contacts with old friends or with strangers coming from other places or even from other countries. We are interested in finding out how pilgrims “see” and draw the map of the city at the confluence of religious and non-religious impressions, what they choose to take home as narratives or as objects and how the city prepares itself to receive the pilgrims.

Inal Onur, College of Arts and Science, Koç University, Istanbul, Turkey.

Nationalism as a Tool of Social and Cultural Change in the Urbanisation Process of Istanbul in the Post-Ottoman Period

In the course of history, societies and their physical conditions have changed much. In comparison to the previous centuries, the 20^th century was the most dazzling in terms of social change. The 20^th century has experienced two world wars. According to the general rules of history, cities have also enjoyed this rapid change. Indeed, the 20^th century witnessed an ongoing process of urbanisation, which actually made a start some decades ago. Besides the general patterns or the main causes of urbanisation, such as increasing population, better employment opportunities or the attraction of the big city for various reasons, each city also has its own internal dynamic and original history of urbanisation.

Istanbul has also experienced an immense transformation in the republican era and became one of the most prominent metropolises of the world. With over ten million inhabitants, Istanbul is the most populous city of the Balkans and the Near East. Just a century has passed from the days it was inhabited by around a million people to the present. In addition to its unique geographical position at the crossroads of diverse cultures, or its cultural heritage comprising the remains of Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman empires, it is also noteworthy to discuss its history of urbanisation during the post-Ottoman period, since this process not only includes the general patterns of urbanisation, but also conceals some social and political facts.

The nationalism of the Kemalist era has imprinted itself on modern Turkey. Emphasising a shared past and the desire to live together as the common denominators of the nation, the Turkish state tended visibly to an official definition of the Turkish nation and announced “the people of Turkey, regardless of religion and race, are Turks as regards Turkish citizenship”. Immigration and resettlement policies, or let us say Turkification policies, promoted by various governments during the republican era are in coincidence with Istanbul’s social and cultural history as well as its process of urbanisation. The post-Ottoman city characterises a total social, cultural and ethnic discontinuity. Modern parts of the city, which are supposed to reflect the Kemalist desire of Westernisation, have been ridiculously re-settled by new communities characterised by a Islamo-Turkish identity. To sum up, Istanbul has been urbanised and Turkificated at the expense of its Christian and Jewish communities. The recommendation of an internal report published by the 9^th Bureau (which is responsible for minority issues) of the one-party government in the 1940s, is enough to explain the government’s tendency towards its non-Muslim citizens. “On the 500th anniversary of the conquest of Istanbul by the Ottoman forces, not one Greek should be left in the city.”

Inan Derin & Patsavos Nikolaos, Architectural Association Graduate School of Architecture, London, UK.

Istanbul Plaji. The Suburban Istanbul Beach as a Place for the Construction of Modern Turkish Identity

Focusing on the specific place of the suburban İstanbul Plajı (a place viewed in its intimate relationship with modernisation and the emergence of the suburbs), and trying to locate the role of architecture (design and planning) in this historical process, the paper will try to put forward an understanding of the present urban condition by means of an ‘archaeology’ of the İstanbul Plajı. In studying the various ways in which modern behaviours, lifestyles, symbols, structures and infrastructure have been interfering with each other within the context of İstanbul plaj’s ecology, the ways architecture has operated as one of the conditions of emergence of the plaj discourse and its relative cultural practices will be questioned.

Plaj culture is understood as a specific 20th century ‘bio-political’ phenomenon; a discursive formation whose elements lie in the modernist categories of health, class, sexuality, identity and progress. A whole series of new public rituals (activities, styles and forms) have been developing within this context. In direct analogy to fashion design’s difficulty in defining ‘what a swimsuit look like’, if not ‘what it is’, architecture has been called to give an answer to an original question: ‘how does one design a plaj?’ New architectures accompanying/motivating the ever-changing patterns of plaj culture (and life) have been radically effecting the dispersion of the city. The architectural questions did not come after the practices of plaj culture had already been shaped, but together with them. Instead of a tool, the plaj could now operate as a model/structure for the production of spaces where behaviours, forms and symbols would not be predetermined according to a dictum but were fleeting and in constant negotiation.

Ivanović Zorica, School of Philosophy, University of Belgrade, SCG.

Kinship and Urban Culture: Towards a New Paradigm

This paper presents a critical examination of some classical research paradigms in the study of kinship in urban settings in the light of the recent critique of anthropological theories of culture and kinship. Within the ‘classic’ research paradigm, the study of kinship was primarily and almost exclusively focused on the problems of social morphology, that is, social and organisational aspects of kinship systems. This theoretical position, which also dominated the study of kinship in the Balkans, put forward a widespread view that certain social and cultural forms of kinship and family life were to be seen as characteristic of ‘traditional’ and rural societies. Their presence in modern societies and urban settings was then to be understood as a residue of the past. Thus, "classic" kinship studies privileged the domain of kinship and, as a consequence, separeted it from the totality of social relations and cultural meanings.

The paradigm shift in the study of kinship, as well as social, political, cultural and technological processes and changes that characterise modern urban societies, puts on the agenda a new set of questions that seem to be gaining increasing relevance. A move away was made from the focus on social structure and organisation to an emphasis on cultural symbols and meanings, social processes and human agency. Notions of social rules and regulations are giving way to concepts, which redefine the topical focus in terms of identity, gender, sexuality, self, power and performativity. The stress is upon fluidity, ambiguity and multiplicity of meanings that characterise local practices and personal experiences of everyday life in the changing social world of urban settings.

Janiskee Robert & Radovanović Olivera, The University of South Carolina, USA & Green Network of Vojvodina, SCG.

Repairing the Urban-Rural Symbiosis in Vojvodina: Moj Salaš and Via Pacis Pannoniae

The rural-to-urban population shift, technology-driven changes in agricultural production, and related trends have badly eroded the traditional symbiotic relationship between the urban and rural realms. Many of today’s urban-rural linkages are unbalanced, unhealthy, and ultimately unsustainable. This paper discusses a grassroots campaign in Serbia’s Vojvodina Autonomous Province that is helping to restore and strengthen symbiotic urban-rural relationships through a series of projects employing socially and ecologically responsible concepts and practices. Led by the Novi Sad-based Green Network of Vojvodina, a coalition of NGOs is implementing several externally funded projects designed to protect environmental resources, develop trails and related recreation facilities, improve rural quality of life and reinvigorate the salas (small farm) approach to food and fiber production. The “Moj Salas” project promotes organic food production, brings green markets to the cities, and fosters the development of salas-based agrotourism. The Via Pacis Pannoniae project enlists the cooperation of many rural communities in Vojvodina and an adjoining area of Croatia to create lengthy greenway loops with trails for hiking and bicycling. These two projects benefit city residents by offering them healthier food choices, re-connecting them with food producers and rural lifestyles, and providing them with high-quality “getaway” recreational opportunities in the countryside. Additional projects still in the conceptual stage will address related needs.

Jansen Stef, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK.

White Socks and Modernity: Post-Yugoslav Urban Nostalgia

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia, this paper revisits the specific social categories that were created by, and in turn gave shape to, Yugoslavia's rapid and recent urbanisation, investigating the reformulated everyday constructions of urbanity/rurality that pervade post-Yugoslav post-war social reality.

The starting point is the understanding, shared by wide layers of the not-so-recent urban populations, that the prime causes for the conflicts and the material and symbolic losses of the 1990s are to be found in rural primitivism. Inverting the nationalist tendency of projecting national purity onto peasant existence, this alternative view sees rural purity as backward and inherently prone to violence. Central to this urban interpretation is the singling out of groups that I call 'frontline peasants', who are considered key bearers of rural primitivism. Particularly those who have moved to the cities in the 1990s are represented as latter-day 'peasant urbanites', made recognisable through stereotypes such as their alleged propensity to wear white socks. Crucially: incongruously white socks. Perhaps stretching poetic licence to its limits, I deploy urban meanings attached to those garments as condensed symbols of a discourse of urban orientalist distinction.

The paper understands such everyday discourses against the background of a domesticated modernisation paradigm as a struggle over the cultural property of modernity. It investigates their functioning amongst post-Yugoslav urbanites, who lament the experience of de-modernisation in their own lives and reject the inauthentic modernisation represented to them by white socks, resulting in a paradoxical nostalgia for modernity.

Jerman Katja, Institute of Slovene Ethnology, Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Ljubljana, Slovenija.

Analysing the City’s Identity Through its Monuments and Street Names: The Case of Nova Gorica

The following paper is founded on ethnological research in the Slovene-Italian border region, precisely the Slovene city of Nova Gorica, which was founded after the Paris Treaty (1947). The result of the French demarcation line was that the centre of the city of Gorica/Gorizia and its western suburbs remained in Italy while eastern suburbs and the majority of its hinterland came under the jurisdiction of the state of Yugoslavia. The Slovene population thus remained without an administrative, political and culture centre.

TheYugoslav political solution was to build a new centre on the border between the two countries. The importance of the new city was the subject of many politically engaged speeches and Nova Gorica was presented as a beacon that will protect Yugoslavs against the dangers of the “reactionary West”, as a “symbol of the working people” and “an expression of the brotherhood and unity of our nations”.

The author considers how political power and influence can be seen through symbols and rituals. By erecting numerous monuments and naming newly constructed streets in Nova Gorica, the local political authorities tried to protect the idea of socialism and also infiltrate it into the city’s tradition. Following an historical perspective and by analysing the city’s monuments and street names the author, following Bourdieu’s notions of naming places and their reconceptualisation, concludes that symbols and (re)named places are one of the crucial aspects of a city’s identity.

Kalapoš Gasparac Sanja, Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, Zagreb, Croatia.

City’s Images Through the Looking Glass

Photography is, without doubt, one of the most powerful means of conveying the desired identity of a social, spatial or geographical unit, be it a village, a city, a region, the whole country or even a continent. Especially photographs made by local authors can inform us about the way the locals want their city to be perceived. A photographer chooses both its object and the way it is going to be pictured, in accordance with theaesthetic criteria of a given period, but also in the way he or she wants to present the photographed city.

Living in a city with an old university, developed industry and a strong financial centre, Zagreb's citizens boasted a Central European identity. This is evident in Zagreb's older photographs and postcards: the majority of them show the city's elegant architecture, while some of them present the nearby villages, its inhabitants, their national costume and customs as an inherent part of the city's identity. While the pre-WWII Zagreb was more or less free to enjoy this above all cultural image, the post-WWII Zagreb has become a capital of a socialist republic, "socialist" being the operative word. The new photographs of the city, although always showing the older architecture and city's cultural heritage, often have new motives: new part of town, called "New Zagreb" with its numerous low-cost buildings, socialist monuments and other symbols of the era. Finally, after 1990, new motives that show the city's progress were shown to the tourists. Such developments in the motives used in materials that were meant for broad tourist consumption show us not merely the contemporary history of the city, but also the way its public identity was shaped.

Kalkandjieva Daniela, Faculty of Theology & Center for Interreligious Dialogue and Conflict Prevention, University of Sofia “St. Kliment Ohridski.”

The Places of God in Bulgarian Cities under Communism

The aim of my paper is to present the fatereligious sites in Bulgarian cities under the communist regime. It will reveal the process of the destruction of urban religious communities and their places of worship and religious teaching (churches, mosques, cemeteries, seminaries, etc.). It will also analyse to what degree the urban environment contributed to the communist plans for annihilation of religion in society and especially in the cities as bastions of the Party.

The paper will pay special attention to the desacralisation of Orthodox churches connected with the historical Bulgarian-Russian friendship. They were preserved from being closed or blown up but not from desacralisation. Their ‘biographies’ were changed in tune with the slogans of brotherhood with the Soviet Union, while their buildings were turned into cultural monuments.

Kaneff Deema, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle/Saale, Germany.

Properties for Sale: British Migration to Bulgaria and EU Integration

The common perception of European migration, fed by the media, is of the massive population movement of East Europeans moving to the West in search of economic security and jobs. But less attention is given to a reverse flow of Westerners moving either temporarily or permanently to the East. Yet this phenomenon is having (arguably) as significant an economic and social impact on the local population as the migration of East Europeans is having to the West. Fieldwork for this paper was conducted in the city of Veliko Turnovo and looks at the growing property market in the town (a phenomenon also strong in other parts of the country, especially near the Black Sea). In Veliko Turnovo and surroundings it is predominantly the British who are scrambling to buy up cheap properties. It is one way in which foreigners are economically active in the country at the same time as a vast majority of Bulgarian investors find themselves excluded by the ever increasing prices. The social impact of the foreigners is another fascinating dimension as some seek acceptance into the community by learning the language, while others choose to restrict their contacts to other English speakers, so building a social ‘island’. On a broader scale, the presence of these Western migrants represents a particular way in which Bulgaria is being drawn into ‘Europe’’; its sunny climate and red wine giving it a reputation as a new, relatively cheap and desirable location for British migrants no longer able to afford the more traditional locations of Spain or Tuscany.

Kantsa Venetia, University of Aegean, Greece.

Strolling and Holding Hands in the Centre of Athens: Same-sex Sexualities in Urban Contexts

I want to take the hand of my beloved one – whenever she appears – and stroll with her light-hearted in the centre of Athens, go with her on a journey to my favourite Galaxidi. And I want our mothers to know that we are there together, and be happy for us, because we deserve it. (Letter sent to the Greek Lesbian Magazine Madame Gou 1997, 5: 20)

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among lesbian women in contemporary Greece, mainly in Athens, the aim of the proposed paper is to discuss social inclusion and exclusion in urban society.

Being socially constructed, space is both gendered and sexed, and both gender and sexuality are spaced. Space and place do matter in the construction of sexualities, especially for homosexual people, for whom space has been considered to be of significant importance. While extensive work was initially done on the impact that gay and lesbian communities have on the urban fabric on the neighbourhood level, another thread of research has recently appeared which explores the hegemony of heterosexual social relations in everyday environments, from housing and the workplace to shopping centres and the street. Such research contests the old binaries: homosexual–heterosexual, private–public, rural–urban, on which past examination of sexuality and space was based and displays their arbitrary character.

In the proposed paper I will focus on the uses of space by lesbian women in an urban environment, placing emphasis on the material and the everyday, i.e. how genders and sexualities are lived out in particular places and spaces, while avoiding drawing on given dichotomies.

Karamihova Margarita, Institute of Ethnography, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences – Sofia & University of Sofia “St. Kliment Ohridski”, Bulgaria.

Myths of Nation-Building after Socialism: How One Local Folk Song Leads National Ideology, while Simultaneously Creating a New Nation-Building Strategy

This paper will present observations on how a local myth, created during the period of modern Bulgarian nation-building in the second half of the 19^th century, continues to develop and be “proven” in the town of Zlatograd in the 21^st century. In the post-communist era, the folk song based on this myth has become recognised nationally and globally. Urban anthropology involves the study of the cultural systems of cities as well as the linkages of cities to other places and populations, both smaller and larger, as part of the world-wide urban system (Kemper 1996).[8] This paper will show how this local myth creates visible and stable networks, across a broad local region, nationally and across international borders.

Zlatograd is in the southern Rhodope Mountains, near Bulgaria’s southern border with Greece. It is the oldest town in the mountain range. Its population is religiously mixed, including both Bulgarian Orthodox Christians and Bulgarian Muslims. Due to various factors, the local population’s strategy to maintain the delicate balance between Christians and Muslims is explicitly dominated by the ideology of Bulgarians’ ethnic origins.

In the first part of the paper, both religious groups will be presented in their respective historical, cultural and socio-economic contexts. The second and larger part of the paper will explore the ways the local folk song “Izlel ye Delyu Haydutin” [Delyu has Become a Rebel] has been used over the last 100 years to support Bulgarian ideology in the region, and now froms the core of a new nation-building strategy. The paper points to the role of a particular city as a model of the "Great Tradition" as opposed to the "Little Tradition" of local villages (Robert Redfield 1947).[9]

In the process of researching this paper, a wide variety of sources were used, including written materials, ethnological interviews, historical studies, novels and other sources.

Kaser Karl, Karl Franzens University of Graz, Austria.

Historical Anthropology of the City: A New and Exciting Challenge

Urban anthropology has been transformed during the last few decades by integrating perspectives from cultural geography, political economy, urban sociology, and regional and city planning. An emphasis on spatial relations, mass media, and consumption as well as urban planning and design decision-making provides new insights into material, ideological, and metaphorical aspects of the urban environment. Urban anthropologists apply a variety of methodological approaches like urban ecology models, community, family and network analyses, studies of the power of planning and architecture, and political economic, representational and discursive models of the city.

Not accidently, this summary of interdisciplinary approaches and applied methodologies of urban anthropology does not contain history and historical methods. A historical anthropology of the city practically does not exist. This statement holds true for the field of urban anthropology in general as well as for urban anthropology in Southeastern Europe in particular. Urban history follows its own path and only occasionally meets questions of the urban anthropologist.

The conference paper attempts to explore what a historical anthropology of the city may mean and contain; to explore the advantages and limits of historicised anthropological questions; and to develop an applicable framework of a historical anthropology of the city in Southeastern Europe.

Kazalarska Svetla, University of Sofia “St. Kliment Ohridsky”, Bulgaria.

Gazing at the City from the Window of a Bus

This paper will present the findings from a research project that I am currently carrying out within the framework of the Visual Seminar programme initiated by the Center for Advanced Studies in Sofia. The project is about gazing at the city and understanding its culture and urban development from the window of a bus as an alternative to the centralised museumifying gaze upon the city. The basic theoretical assumption of the project starts with seeing the city as human movement, as flows of people moving daily from the city periphery to the city centre and vice versa. Furthermore, the bus stop and the interior of the bus itself are seen as urban spaces of intensive communication, where both the public and the private meet. The ambition of the project is to create the thematic content and design for a community-based heritage trail that runs along the route of an established public bus line and interprets the local history, urban development and visual culture of the city neighbourhoods. The selected bus line number 76 was introduced in 1972. Its route starts from an outlying residential district, crosses through the city centre, and ends in another residential district. Interpretative panels will be installed at selected bus stops on the route. The panels will not focus exclusively on the past but will reflect upon the issues of the day. The city residents’ perspective will guide the interpretation and representation of the city.

Kera Gentiana, Karl Franzens University of Graz, Austria.

Living in a City in Continuous Transformation: Urban Life in Tirana (1900-1939)

All foreign travellers who visited Tirana at the beginning of the 20^th century have described it as a town with a clear oriental character, with many beautiful mosques with high minarets, gardens and a central bazaar where the economic life of the city was concentrated. After the proclamation of Tirana as the capital of the new Albanian state, efforts were made to change this view, to westernise and modernise the city and make it appropriate for its new function as capital. Several town plans applied during the 1920s and 1930s changed almost completely the view of Tirana and created new public spaces. The changes in the urban structure of the city and rapid population growth primarily as a result of immigration from other towns and villages were accompanied by changes in social life. Along with the previous places that had served as meeting points for the local population, such as mosques or public squares, other amenities built during these years began to play an important role in everyday life. The aim of this paper is to analyse how the growth of the town influenced social life, what role the new inhabitants had in this process and what function the new buildings had as meeting places. The increasing presence of women in public spaces will also be considered.

Koci Arianit, BBC World Service in London, UK.

Rebirth of an Idea: Community Policing in Albania

In the last fifteen years, Albanian police have undergone substantial changes aimed at transforming it from a militarised force to a public service. One of the latest initiatives is community policing. The idea is not new. It was used successfully during communism in Albania. Then it was perceived as a means of social control. This time it is being reintroduced as a mechanism for improving public safety.

Community policing implies close ties between the police and the public. It also requires the existence of a consensus on social norms and values. However, in the last fifteen years a redrawing of such norms has taken place and much of the very fabric of Albanian society has changed. It has thrown away most of social bonds that were imposed on it during communism and has become fragmented. Freedom of movement has created internal migration towards the cities, where in the absence of state structures, social order is maintained though family and kinship ties. Such communities have become hot spots of urban unrest.

Community policing requires the police to tailor its objectives to the needs of the community it serves. This means that the police ought to be aware of the specific needs of the community and enjoy their trust, which still remains to be the case in Albania.

This paper will examine the shifting patterns of policing in post-communist Albania and discuss whether the current trend to introduce community policing is enough to win the public trust.

Kodra-Hysa Armanda, Institute of Folklore, Tirana, Albania.

Regional and Religious Tolerance: A Basis for Mutual Understanding between Immigrant and Autochthon Populations in the City of Tirana

Tirana, as the capital of Albania, has become a refuge for many immigrants from the country’s other regions looking for a better life.

Albanian cities were founded in different periods, a large part of them in the late Middle Ages. After these cities came under Ottoman sovereignty, the process of islamising began. A characteristic of this process was the retreat of the remaining Christians into fortress quarters within these cities.

Tirana, as a city, belongs to a latter period. It was founded in the beginning of the 17^th century, when the Ottoman Empire was at the hight of its economic, political and military power. The population of villages of the region where Tirana was founded was already islamised. As a result, Tirana was one of the cities with 100% of its population being Muslim since the time the city was founded. This population came from the villages around the city, having similar habits and traditions. It was a religiously as well as ethnographically compact population.

After the destruction of Voskopoja, its inhabitants of Wallach origin migrated to many Albanian cities, including the city of Tirana. Even though there was no Orthodox Christian population in the city, these immigrants were welcomed and provided a better refuge than in some other cities where this population already existed. Within a short time, two Orthodox Christian churches were built, including the one in the city centre, beside the Old Bazaar.

In the middle of the 19^th century there were only six Catholic families in Tirana. In spite of this, in the year 1856, with the financial support of the Emperor Franz Joseph, a great Cathedral was built in the middle of the city, on the Rruga e Kavajës, where it is still to be found today. The inhabitants of Tirana agreed to this so as to provide a place of worship for the Catholic merchants coming in the city, mainly on Sundays. Later Tirana would become a refuge for refugees from Bosnia and Dibra.

The aim of this paper is to find deep in the history of the city why violent clashes did not take place between the native population and thousands of immigrants coming after World War II and after 1990. The reasons for this phenomenon are to be found in the religious and regional tolerance characterising the inhabitants of this city.

Koleva Daniela, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Sofia “St Kliment Ohridski”, Bulgaria.

Rural-Urban Migration in the Normal Biography

The paper will deal with the representations of what might be called the ‘rural exodus’ in communist Bulgaria in the life stories of about 150 elderly persons interviewed by teachers and students at the Department for History and Theory of Culture, University of Sofia. The time frame is the socialist period and the present. The interviewees tell about the reasons for their migrations and the impact these have had on their careers and their lives. At the same time, migrants have preserved strong ties with their native villages and in most cases active exchange has been going on (aptly called ‘quasi-extended household’ by Yulian Konstantinov). The analysis of the narrative material was complemented by the experience of short fieldwork trips in four villages between 1997 and 2000, which reveal the views of rural residents on this phenomenon. My argument will demonstrate that rural-urban migration has been considered as not only spatial mobility but in terms of social ascent as well. Therefore, migration has become part of the ‘normal biography’, i.e. the notions of what a good life should be like and what a successful life career should imply. I hope to be able to reveal in the paper how an informal norm has come into existence and how its rationale has changed in the past 10-15 years.

Kostovicova Denisa & Petrović Mina, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK & School of Philosophy, University of Belgrade, SCG.

Reading Identity from the City: Interpreting NATO Ruins in Belgrade

Five years after the NATO intervention in Serbia and Montenegro, unreconstructed ruins of destroyed government buildings hit in the air raids in Belgrade have become a part of the cityscape of Serbia’s capital. In particular, the gutted concrete structures of the army and police headquarters in one of the city’s busiest boulevards do not only represent physical scars on the urban fabric, but their destruction is also a spatial reference point for rethinking Serbian national identity in relation to the national policy towards Kosovo and the West. This paper explores the relationship between identity and space by investigating the renegotiation of national identity in response to the meaning and symbolism read into and from the physical structure of the city. Therefore, this paper contributes to the growing literature exploring a mutually constitutive interrelationship between identity and space. While the scholarship is mainly focused on the implications of an active inscription of identity into the city, such as the erection of national monuments or the renaming of city streets, this paper demonstrates that the passive interpretation of space and its features is also informative, contested and meaningful. In addition, the paper makes a methodological contribution to the analysis of space and identity by focusing on the neglected yet significant everyday lived experience of spatiality, thus going beyond the official and recorded discourse. However, the latter will be taken into account in order to offer a comparative perspective. Informed by a qualitative method, the paper is based on semi-structured interviews with a university-age student population.

Kovač Senka & Kovač Jelena, School of Philosophy & School of Architecture, University of Belgrade, SCG.

The Old Courtyards of Belgrade: Places Where Ethnology Meets Architecture

The urban core of Belgrade has preserved numerous courtyards, defined by small family houses that survived since the early part of the 20^th century. Courtyards of Vračar, the most densely populated part of Belgrade, represent such oases in which premodern residential forms of architecture and more traditional forms of social life have survived until the present.

Taking into consideration that the complex process of urbanisation influences the disappearance of such courtyard “communities”, it is our wish to investigate their essential characteristics, such as the spatial organisation and behaviour in them, as well as the types of social relationships that exist between the courtyard residents. Special attention will be paid to common gatherings and identification with this shared space. The analysis will try to show how social relationships within the courtyards influence their spatial organisation.

Kovačević Ivan, School of Philosophy, University of Belgrade, SCG.

The Belgrade Kiosk between Economy and Politics

The significant rise in the number of kiosks in the streets of Belgrade during the last decade of 20^th century inspired a series of urbanistic and, even more, political debates. An anthropological approach to this problem starts with an overview of different types of kiosks during the half-century of their existence. Transformations of functions and ownership during the period of transition led to the emergence of politically controversial attitudes, making the kiosk a problem for both economic and political anthropology. In the economic sense, a kiosk is a substitute for declining trade in socialism, while in the political sense they unveil ideological patterns of particular political groups that are contrary to those officially proclaimed.

Krasteva-Blagoeva Evgenia, New Bulgarian University, Sofia, Bulgaria.

Country House Ownership: A Rural-Urban Phenomenon in Bulgaria

The main aim of the research is to study country house ownership in Bulgaria as a typical socialist “rural-urban” phenomenon with contemporary dimensions. The culture of country house (“villa”) owners is viewed as a specific mixture of rural and urban elements; as a kind of substitute and compensation for the lost rural way of life for the peasant migrants to towns in the 1950s to 1980s. The research is based on fieldwork (5 years of participant observation in a country house hamlet Kori near the village of Rebrovo, western Bulgaria). The factors for choosing a place for a country house are analysed. The main motivation of the “new” citizens to buy a country house is found in their strong affiliation to the land, to the cultivation of vegetables and fruits, and to a way of life closer to nature. They are bearers of urban lifestyles and their “urban” identity is undoubted. Their newly created community functions as a “rural” or “traditional” society in many respects: the town’s anonymity is lost – peoples’ behaviour is controlled by constant gossips; collective parties resembling traditional working-bees were organised in the socialist period etc. The opposition between the country house owners and local people is also analysed. The latter are considered “villagers” – i.e. second grade people. Concealed conflicts between the two groups and within each one of them are clearly seen in a new local feast – a common sacrifice on the 20^th of July (St. Elija’s Day) “invented” by a group of country house owners in the last ten years.

Kronja Ivana, Institute for Theatre, Film, Radio and TV, University of Arts, Belgrade, SCG.

New Urban Trends in Serbia, 1990-2004: From Urban Life to Popular Culture and Vice Versa

The paper will explore representations of urban life in contemporary Serbia in the field of popular culture, particularly in popular music, music videos and cinema, and, conversely, how popular culture influences the ways, habits and ''rituals'' in contemporary urban life in Serbia. In order to do so, we will examine various examples, such as the influence of urban criminal subcultures in the 1990s, known as ''Warrior Chic''; turbo-folk and dance music, style and content of Serbian music videos in the 1990s; the ''boomerang effect'' which the so-called ''pink culture'' and its norms of sexual behaviour had on night life in Belgrade and other Serbian cities; and the subculture of city cafes, including the fascinating phenomenon of the so-called ''Silicon Valley'', the popular cafe area in central Belgrade; representations and interpretations of the youth's ''minimal strategies'' of rebellion and emotional and psychological survival within the urban millieu in local Serbian urban cinema coming from the authors of a younger generation, particularly in the films of Radivoje-Rasa Andric, which make a cinematic trilogy including: ''Tri palme za dve bitange i ribicu'' (''Three palm-trees for two vagabonds and a chick'', 1998), ''Munje'' (''Thunders!'', 2001) i ''Kad porastem biću Kengur'' (''When I grow up I will become a kangaroo'', 2004). The paper will argue that the reality of urban life and culture in contemporary Serbia (and elsewhere) strongly depends on constant negotiation between media representations and role models, which create dominant paradigms in society, and citizens' self-understanding within the social and political processes that create their status and lifestyles. In this process, media contents play a crucial role, shaping the reality of urban life and culture today to an unprecedented degree, while Serbia is rapidly becoming a part of a global media culture.

Kyurkchieva Iva, Ethnographic Institute and Museum – BAS, Sofia, Bulgaria.

Football and Political Symbolism in Bulgaria in the 1980s and 1990s

The aim of the research is to review and analyse the relation between football events and their political symbolism from the 1980s until the end of the 1990s in Bulgaria. Sports (including football) and their political dimension have been the object of numerous anthropological interpretations, but the Bulgarian case adds new directions to the interpretation of this problem area. The period is not randomly selected – it includes the socialist period, when political activity was restricted by the state and political party activity was not possible in the commonly accepted (democratic) sense. The state authority transfered its control mechanisms and organisational approaches to football as well, thus causing the antagonisms, which are natural for any society, to be identified with different football teams. The period also covers the 1990s – a period of acute political confrontation, which is again extended into the football realm. It is an established fact that football is often used for political purposes and people related to football are often engaged within the confrontation in the political sector.

Apart from political purposes, many football symbols are loaded ideologically and nationalistically. Besides the extreme rightist symbolism copied from Western European supporter groups, the extreme fans demonstrate a specific Bulgarian nationalism including a negative attitude towards minorities, which is also projected onto the football adversary.

The methods applied in the course of the research are typical for social and cultural anthropology and include analysis of oral accounts (included observation, interviews) and documented data, predominantly from the period press (daily newspapers and specialised sport publications). Additional and important information sources are Internet websites and typical graffiti.

Lafazanovski Ermis, Institute of Folklore “Marko Cepenkov”, Skopje, Macedonia.

Spaces of Utopia and Places of Nostalgia: Towards the Study of Contemporary Culture in the City of Skopje

Anthropological places and urban spaces are two of the major topics discussed in my paper dealing with cultural life in Skopje from 1963, when an earthquake completely destroyed urban life in Skopje, until today.

Unrealised urban exclusivity, which was the leading idea in building the new Skopje after 1963, dislocated the consciousness about the citizens’ space of urbanity, and provoked a growing nostalgia about places of the past.

At the same time (during the socialist period) extensive migration processes (rural to urban) took place, and as a result a kind of "rurbanity", which is not only characteristic for the periphery of Skopje, but also for the areas around the city centre developed. On this level we find a new mixture of rural and urban places and spaces.

Taking into consideration these themes of contemporary urban culture in Skopje, we hope to pose relevant questions about urban life and culture of contemporary citizens of this unique Southeast European city.

Larionescu Sanda, Musée National du Village “Dimitrie Gusti” de Bucarest. La Faculté de Lettres et à la Faculté d’Histoire de L’Université de Bucarest, Roumanie.

Sociabilité et solidarité au sein d’un voisinage restreint de la ville Giurgiu, Roumanie

La communication est le résultat d’une enquête menée auprès des habitants de deux immeubles d’appartements d’un quartier de centre-ville de Giurgiu (ville située à la frontière avec la Bulgarie), enquête qui fait partie d’une recherche plus vaste, mise en place à l’aide du Conseil National de la Recherche Scientifique du Ministère de l’Education et de la Recherche de Roumanie et ayant pour objet une approche ethnologique des relations de voisinage dans des localités urbaines du sud du pays.

L’auteur tente à déceler la vie de voisinage des résidents des immeubles en question, situés face à face et construits aux années ‘80 du siècle dernier. A part quelques familles ou personnes, plus individualistes ou plus occupées, les habitants de cet espace de proximité résidentiel constituent une communauté: solidaire, fondée sur des relations très fortes et solides, qui nous rappellent en quelque sorte d’anciens voisinages ruraux.

En dehors de la vie privée, les acteurs-voisins, dont un grand nombre de personnes vivent seules ou qui, par manque de leurs conjoints ou de leurs enfants partis au travail, restent seules beaucoup du temps pendant la journée, de couples de retraités, de femmes divorcées à des enfants mineurs, ont une réelle vie de voisinage. Elle ressemble à la vie d’une famille élargie. C’est ce que sentent ces voisines. “Nous sommes une famille” disent ils. Les lieux de rencontre et les formes de sociabilité et solidarité, directes ou indirectes, traditionnelles ou modernes, souvent ritualisées (fêter ensemble les jours anniversaires), maintiennent cette vie de voisinage.

Lavrence Christine, Chaire de recherche du Canada en histoire comparée de la mémoire/AUF, Université Laval, Canada.

Negotiating “Catastrophe Tourism” in Belgrade and Sarajevo

This paper builds on my dissertation research (archival and ethnographic), undertaken in Belgrade in 2002, on the negotiation of monumental urban spaces during the political crises of the 1990s. Based on a second leg of fieldwork that will be undertaken in Sarajevo in spring 2005, this paper is part of a larger comparative project that will compare the negotiation of memory and identity in these two cities through an investigation of visual cultural artifacts such as key monuments and urban places, which pose questions about how divided memories are negotiated in shared public spaces, instances of memory that are beyond narrative treatments of the past. In this paper, I am particularly interested in how the recent past of these two cities is being marketed for international tourists interested in what Ugresic has called “catastrophe tourism”. I will examine the tensions between place and space, local and global processes of identity that are articulated in how specific sites of (traumatic) memory (Nora’s “lieux de mémoires” ) are being represented to tourists in these cities, and probe how this reflects contemporary memory, particularly in contexts where it is deeply divided. I will situate these issues in broader questions of how contemporary global cultural processes are impacting the production of local place and memory.

Leutloff-Grandits Carolin, Department for Southeast European History, Karl Franzens University of Graz, Austria.

The Role of Kin in Child-Care in Urban Croatia: The Example of Zagreb

The paper presents some preliminary findings and hypotheses on the impact of kin and family networks on the provision of child-care in the city of Zagreb 15 years after the end of socialism. It aims at relating the impact of kinship on child-care to the tremedous changes in the state social security system over the last two decades as well as to the underlying values of obligations of reciprocal help between relatives.

In the first part, the paper explores the actual existing helping relations among relatives, e.g. grandmothers who care for children. In the second, it addresses the norms and expectations concerning the family in regard to support in child-care, and examines the reasons why norms and expectations might be different from real social relations. In this frame, the paper focuses on discussion of the embeddedness of kin-provided child-care by relating it to other child-care providers, such as the state but also friends and neighbours, as well as by relating it to state family policy and the general demographic, social and economic situation in Croatia. The paper is based on empirical anthropological research in Zagreb (beginning early 2005) and is part of a larger EU project on kinship and social security. Due to the early stage of the project, the paper has a clearly explorative character.

Lubenova Stefka, York University, Toronto, Canada.

Train stations: History, Memory and Renewal

How does the city deal with the question of remembering and forgetting if its material substance is constantly changing? Does renewal always compromise the memory of the past? What is the work of city consciousness in dealing with “bad” memories?

Train stations are often sites where the discussion about preservation and renewal finds immediate expression. The abandoned Union Station in Detroit, for example, is hardly part of the material of the city, it is, to use Simmel’s words, the “site of life from which life has departed”. On the other hand, recent redevelopment projects are attempting to transform train stations into “destinations of their own” by converting them into suburban style malls with peripheral transportation functions. Trains stations today are everything from deserted buildings or ruins, abandoned by the city, to malls, transportation hubs, and even museums or memorials linked to the collective memory of generations. The question, however, remains – what is worth being preserved, what parts of the city should remain untouched by the commercial interest and what should be reconstructed and transformed to serve better the needs of the city dwellers. Where, in other words, lies the boundary that will mark the necessity to preserve in order to remember with the urge to redevelop in order to live more comfortably?

This paper will take the train station as an occasion to explore how the tension between preservation and renewal, between memory, forgetting and practicality, is solved in the city. Recent projects of train station redevelopment in the cities of Toronto and Sofia will illustrate the solutions generated by the city in a way that mirrors the collective concerns, the character of the community and displays the operation of social values.

Lukić-Krstanović Miroslava, Ethnographic Institute of the Academy of Sciences and Arts, Belgrade, SCG.

City Spectacles in Belgrade: Popular Music and Ideologies

Spectacle today has become one of the essential phenomena of urban life and identity. Theoretically, the spectacle appears at the same time as society itself and as part of society (Guy Debord). I analyse music spectacles as cultural and ideological scenarios in the socialist and post-socialist periods. The spectacle spaces in Belgrade are stadiums, halls, squares and boulevards coded in temporal service to history. After World War II, communist dogma, state cults and Titoist charisma were reflected in stadium rallies and socialist performances. Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, parallel to populist ritual models, a rock sub-culture, and pop and newfolk culture entered the field of megamusic happenings. At the beginning of the 1990s music spectacles were stimulated by social and political antagonistic reality, becoming part of the city drama: music resistance, music marketing for political campaigns and megaconcerts for amusement and music nationalistic euphoria. The historical background of popular music has been affected in ''popular'' and ''populist'' fields. On the one hand, there are the organisational orders of political marketing, bureaucracy and financial transactions. On the other hand, there are the music communitas interactions empathised by living-in-events. Fragments between ritual experiences and ritual narratives are presented through semantic order and hypertrophied and condensed symbols, which provide the activities and behaviour for various levels of identification: we – public, we – actors, we – participants, we – outsider/non-public, narrator(s) etc. This ethnological research stresses complex urban divisions – lifestyles, music genres, political strategies and scene movements.

Luković Jovica, Institute of History, Free University Berlin, Germany.

The Social Map of the City: Urban Answers to Workers of Peasant Origin in Southeastern Europe

The development of modern urbanity in Southeastern Europe is generally described by the term rurbanisation. It hints, firstly, to the slow development of urban infrastructure caused by belated industrialisation in that part of Europe; secondly, rurbanisation is characterised by a relative absence of urban lifestyle due to a weak process of social differentiation.

My presentation deals with region-specific traits of urbanisation within Southeastern Europe itself; I will compare the two towns of Veliki Beckerek (Zrenjanin) in the Serbian, and Temesvar in the Romanian part of the Banat region. Until 1918, they both belonged to the Habsburg Monarchy; during the inter-war period, however, as parts of two separate states, they developed differently.

I will focus on the formation of the working class, analysing this genuine urban stratum under three aspects: (1) The urban structural conditions that shape proletarian existence, such as the labour market, access to education, and housing. (2) Given the workers’ peasant origins, the influence of traditional ideas of the city and life on their attitude towards urban life. (3) Urbanisation in Southeastern Europe as a consequence of social differentiation as understood within the context of the workers’ ethno-confessional origins.

Luleva Ana, Boncheva Tsvetana & Pimpireva Jenja, Institute of Ethnography with the Museum of BAS, Sofia, Bulgaria.

Constructing Identities in a Border Area: Intercultural Gender Relations in a Bulgarian – Greek Case

The paper is a presentation of the results of a research project called “Greeks in Bulgaria – cultural Interactions and Identities”. We will focus on identity constructions and gender relations between Greek and Bulgarian inhabitants of the towns along the southern Black Sea coast. Long-time co-existence of both communities in this area has resulted in the formation of a distinct local hybrid culture, different from “pure Bulgarian” and “pure Greek” culture. The aim of this paper is to analyse gender symbols and images as diacritical characteristics of cultural and ethnic diversity; the variation of gender relations in the changing social and political context; and their shifting construction after 1989 – from ethnic and cultural into trans- and intercultural. Various qualitative and quantitative methods are used – the paper is based on archival sources, autobiographical narratives and interviews.

Maksin-Mićić Marija, Institute of Architecture and Urban and Spatial Planning of Serbia. Faculty of Economics, University of Belgrade, SCG.

Central Versus Peri-Urban Zones: Planning and Implementation

The key question of Serbian spatial planning is urban development overspill and decentralisation. Growth control problems and more balanced urban development have been European and overseas topics for years. In choosing between urban concentration/compactness and decentralisation of urban development, urban form has become a compromise – so-called decentralised concentration. This problem is harder to solve in underdeveloped economies and societies with broad gaps between urban and rural. The main characteristics of demographic development in Serbia are that growth took place primarily in peri-urban regions. The question is how different the quality of life is in central and peripheral urban regions. This case study of the medium/small urban centre Valjevo discusses this issue. Here the overall growth has taken place in a peri-urban regions, along the main transport corridors and on the “green field”, a location suitable for small and medium enterprises, services and dwellings. The main problem is a lack of space utilisation control and arrangement in such regions and a lack of resources for erecting technical and social infrastructure in the peripheral areas. Spatial planning practice is the solution for the renewal of central urban regions, but also for the redesign of peripheral regions and their quality of life.

Malešević Miroslava, The Institute of Ethnography, Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Belgrade, SCG.

The Revival of Religion and its Impact on Collective Identity in Post-Communist Serbia

This paper discusses the doggedness of Orthodox Christianity in a present-day Serbia. Although the existing Constitution guarantees the separation of church and the state, the Serbian Orthodox Church has significant influence on political and social issues. In fact, backed by the top echelon of the government, prevailing Orthodox attitudes have acquired the status of a national ideology, affecting in this way many spheres of public life. Indeed, Church influence appears to be so profound and its authority so unquestionable, that many analysts rightly claim that Serbia is increasingly turning towards radical clericalism.

In this paper I examine Orthodox Crhristianity as a national ideology in the public sphere. The main question posed is: what is the impact of glorified principles, founded on traditional values of patriarchal-tribal society, on collective identity among Belgrade youth? Based on research conducted among senior students in two Belgrade schools, I was able to survey ways in which a polarisation on a social plane reflects the moral choices of these young people. A special segment of the paper is dedicated to the collision of female identities: that taught in religious courses and other forums for «getting close to the faith» on the one hand, and modern female identity shaped in the secular context, on the other.

Marjanović Vesna, Ethnographic Museum in Belgrade, SCG.

Masks and Disguising: A Medium of Communication in an Urban Environment

This discussion is on the contemporary role of masks and disguising in urban communities in Serbia. In traditional culture, masks and disguising were involved in various customary processions throughout the year. The functions of masking and disguising have been modified with time and acquired a new role in society although their form is partially maintained. During the last decades of the 20^th century and at the beginning of the new millennium, investigations of these phenomena reveal increased tendencies to disguise out of the context of traditional practice. However, there are cases in which certain “traditional” customary processions with masks take place “de novo”, particularly, during religious holidays – the Christmas Caroling procession (Bethlehem’s) or masque balls on Shrove Sunday and so forth.

Although masks and processions in which disguised persons appear were never deeply grounded in Serbian traditional culture, today they are increasingly present as communication tools in public places. This is particularly obvious in the urban environments of Serbian cities such as Leskovac, Ivanjica, Cacak, Krusevac, Novi Sad, Becej, Belgrade and Pancevo and includes children’s and students’ mascarades and disguised performances drawing public attention during sports events, fairs, and political and other manifestations.

“Mask language” reveals a particular space of action in the Serbian urban environment. What actually is going on is communication with the public through the use of specific symbols and specifically framed behavioural mechanism provided by the mask as the conductive medium for transferring messages, both to a targeted or a wider population.

Marković Predrag, Institute of Contemporary History, Belgrade, SCG.

Two Contrasted Myths: Rural Arcadia versus Urban Metropolis – The Perception of Village-City Relations in the 19th and 20th Century Serbian Culture

Urbanisation is by all means one of the most crucial processes of modern history and modernisation itself. As such, it is also a major topic in all kinds of arts. The focus of this article is to follow two interconnected, but contrasted myths that followed urbanisation in modern Serbian culture. The first is the myth of the Serbian village as a “Lost Paradise” of ‘pure’ people deeply connected to nature and a ‘real’ national tradition. Of course, this myth derived from the general European experience dating back to romanticism and Rousseau. The other, opposite myth is the myth of ‘urbanity” as the only valuable cultural quality. Especially in the 1990s, to be “urban” became the obsessive concern of ‘pro-European’ and ‘anti-regime’ artists, journalists, scholars, etc. From that perspective, all political mistakes and misdeeds (including war crimes) were too easily attributed to the rural newcomers to the cities. Both ends of this dichotomy have influenced strongly literature and (in recent times) visual media production. What are the “ideal types” that represented each of these two myths? What are the characteristic literature and film narratives for both of them? This paper will try to open this field of research.

Matić Miloš, Ethnographic Museum, Belgrade, SCG.

Urban Economics in a Rural Manner

Urban areas in Serbia faced high levels of in-migration after World War I and especially after World War II, when many peasants moved to nearby or distant cities or towns. These so called ”former peasants“ brought with them many elements of the rural way of thinking, including ideas on the economy as a whole and economic aspects of everyday life. On the other hand, after World War II, new communist authorities were forcing specific legal changes regulating private property and entrepreneurial activities. The socialist system therefore had a strong impact on economic life, on the level of the entire state but also on the level of the individual and the household.

Within the framework of rural way of thinking and, later, in the context of the socialist economic and property system, and with the influence of other factors too, a specific form of economic thinking and behaviour was developed in Serbian towns and cities, termed “rurban economy”. This rurban economy appears on the level of everyday life, the individual and the household and contains no direct link with industry. This is the economy of small private enterprises too.

The phenomenon of the rurban economy is discussed in the paper, factors that influenced it, and the influence of the rurban economy itself. Efforts are made to explain the economic behaviour of urban populations in Serbia, particularly on the level of the household and the small enterprise. Explanations will mainly be within the framework of the decision-making process in the economic sphere. Discussion is based on data collected in Belgrade, Valjevo and Jagodina, and related papers in economic anthropology.

Maxwell Alexander, University of Wales, Swansea, UK.

Budapest and Thessaloniki as Slavic Cities

Significant improvements in communication and transport during the 19^thcentury led to unprecedented urbanisation worldwide. These same improvements, however also contributed to the rise of nationalism: as Karl Deutsch noted, nationalism requires communication networks. One consequence of this is that nationalist organisations tended to appear in cities. In the ethnographic patchwork of Eastern Europe, however, several nationalist movements frequently emerged in towns dominated by other nationalities. This paper examines two non-Slavic cities, Budapest and Thessaloniki, as seats of Slavic nationalism.

Budapest hosted several Slavic national organisations, notably the Serbian Matica Srpska and the Slovak Matica Slovanských Národov Uhersku, even though the population of the town was primarily German and Hungarian. Thessaloniki hosted rival Bulgarian and Macedonian nationalist organisations, notably IMRO and the Revoliutsiono bratstvo despite having a majority Greek-Jewish population and a Turkish elite. These Slavic movements had their origin in educational institutions, particularly the University of Buda and the Exarchate Boys’ Gymnasium in Thessaloniki. These successes on non-Slavic territory suggest that Slavic patriotic organisations needed proximity to merchant patrons and intellectual life more than a Slavic environment.

Furthermore, this multi-ethnic urban environment brought problems of inter-ethnic conflict and cooperation to the foreground. While some patriots desired to claim multi-ethnic cities for their own group, several others sought to give their nationalism a “multi-ethnic flavour,” emphasising love for a multi-ethnic homeland. This paper examines the multi-ethnic urban environment of 19^th century Slavic nationalism, and links this environment to the often-overlooked multi-ethnic themes within Balkan and East European nationalism.

Meehan Pedrotty Kate, Department of History, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA.

Visiting the Socialist Capital: Tourism and Cosmopolitan Identity in Belgrade, 1950-1980

With its liberation from German occupation in the fall of 1944, Belgrade became the capital of a new socialist society in Yugoslavia and quickly thereafter the symbolic and practical centre of the Yugoslav socialist “third way.” This paper will explore the rejuvenation of the capital city after the ravages of a brutal attack and occupation, paying particular attention to strategies – such as architecture, sculpture, and place names – used by Tito’s government to rebuild and refashion Belgrade as a vibrant and appropriate capital for the socialist nation as well as an attractive and respected symbol for Yugoslavia on the international stage. Using guidebooks, pamphlets, and other tourist marketing materials aimed at both Yugoslavs and foreigners during the post-war period, this paper will analyse the rhetorical and visual narratives being produced about the new socialist capital and will particularly examine the subtle directives tourists were given about the proper way to experience the resurrected city. This paper represents a small part of a larger project aimed at analysing the many ways in which the Yugoslav socialist government tapped into tourism and tourism marketing in its attempts to fashion socialist space and socialist citizens in the post-war period.

Mihailesku Vintila, National School for Political Studies and Administration, Bucharest, Romania.

From Pre-War Elites to Postmodern Mixed-Culture: Usages of Space in a “Symbolic” Sea-Side Resort

Vama-Veche and 2 Mai are two villages on the Romanian-Bulgarian border by the Black Sea coast, each enjoying a very good reputation as an underground intellectual resort during communism. Their sudden reputation was due to the migration of the pre-war artistic elites from Kaliakra, around the Queen’s palace, to 2 Mai after the war. With post-communism, a strong “civic” movement (“Save Vama Veche”) emerged, aiming to create an “intellectual reservation” and thus preserve the “true” spirit of the resort. Nouveau riches and teenagers alike invested symbolically in the same space. Hybrid patterns of behaviour and symbolic usages of the space thus emerged, turning the resort into a postmodern “Erlebnisraum”. The paper aims to identify the main social and symbolic practices of that space, their continuities and splits as well as their positioning in a market-oriented kind of tourism.

Mihaylova Dimitrina & Harriss John, University of Oxford & London School of Economics, UK.

City Networks, Trust and Economic Development: An Ethnography of the Advertising Agencies in Sofia, Bulgaria.

This paper examines trust, social networks and economic development in the city of Sofia, Bulgaria. Trust has become an important focus of inquiry across the social sciences, but despite the growing body of literature on the importance of trust for economic development, research on trust and the economy in Central and Eastern Europe has been limited. The first part of the paper presents the main theoretical argument of the paper: we contend, against the popular arguments of several writers, that trust cannot be understood except in the context of institutional development, economic interest and power relations. The second part of the paper is a critical review of the existing research on trust and social capital in Central and Eastern Europe and its relevance to the Balkan context. We examine the debates about the absence of a generalised morality in the Balkans as a matter of culture or a result of the weaknesses of the formal institutional framework. The third part of the paper is an ethnographic exploration of the concerns and responses of Bulgarian advertising businesses, situated in the capital city, to the new conditions associated with economic reforms and globalisation. We examine the uneven transformations of advertising companies in Sofia depending on institutional innovation, from reliance on personalised relationships or 'selective' trust to reliance upon abstract principles and professional codes.

Milanović Vesna, School of Arts, Educational Liason Centre, University of Surrey, UK.

Place and Memory

We are the strange privileged, non-privileged witnesses of non-witnesses. It seemed to me that we have a duty to act as reverberators by writing the history of this century’s pain and sorrow.

Cixous, 1998:36

In the past few years ‘the theatre of everyday life’, ‘the theatre of war’, ‘the theatre of sorrow, betray, loss, love and death’ has been the focus of my research and part of my lived experience. Being the witness of the political turbulence in post Cold War Europe, my paper discusses the implication of daily politics on performance practice.

Place and Memory introduces the political atmosphere in Belgrade, seen as a place of political, site specific and street performance practices. It juxtaposes my personal experience in relation to the place, as a diary of political and personal events. It also juxtaposes my experience of real and metaphoric exile with Cixous’ concept of exile transferred as the force for ‘writing the body’ and écriture féminine.

The presentation introduces the short electronic piece Ex Ponto 2000, created in the course of this research. The electronic piece is created using the PORT interactive system, originally developed for the Institute of New Technology Performance Research, University of Surrey as the collaborative work of the programmer and artist.

Miletić Aleksandar, School of Philosophy, University of Belgrade, SCG.

Urban Life, Cultural Changes and Modernisation in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, 1918-1928.

This paper will attempt to illuminate some of cultural transformations that took place in the main cities of the Kingdom of SCS. It is the result of research in archival materials, newspapers and other publications of that time. The paper discusses social conditions and changes in Skopje, Sarajevo, Ljubljana, Novi Sad, and, moreover, deals with the everyday preoccupations of citizens and the impact of cultural transformation on their lives, especially among the urban populations of Belgrade and Zagreb. The first part of study concentrates on broader European economic and social conditions emerging during and after the First World War, and the reflection of these circumstances in the life experience of the urban populations of Yugoslavia. The second part of the study deals with the large number of specific cultural and technical innovations and tries to estimate their contribution to the modernisation of interwar Yugoslav society. While the first part of study is strictly analytical, the second section focuses more on describing particular phenomena and individual human experience of it.

Milić Vladimir & Djokić Jasmina, Faculty of Architecture, University of Belgrade & Faculty of Traffic and Transportation, University of Belgrade, SCG.

Informal Urbanisation in Post-socialist Serbia: Urbanism without Urbanists, Architecture without Limits

The topic of this paper is the genesis and structural characteristics of informal urbanisation in big cities in Serbia during last decade of the 20^thcentury, as well as its spatial and cultural effects. This was a period of extremely intensive economic, social and political crisis. The paper aims to identify main factors that provoked the creation of large areas of informal and illegal settlement, mostly in urban peripheral zones. These settlements were produced spontaneously, due to the lack of housing, without or even despite urban regulations.

The paper hypothesises that the described process is the result of two parallel influences: informal social policy of an undemocratic state in a transitional period, and free market urban resources, which ignore or confront urban regulations.

The third component of this phenomenon is specific design of these settlements. Construction and style had no basis in any previous urban tradition or context and architects rarely designed them. Instead, they reflect a popular perception of suitable housing.

In the second part of the paper typological, functional and aesthetic characteristics of this, so called “wild architecture” are discussed as a group of informal cultural urbanisation codes, which are presented by architecture as a medium.

Milićević Nataša, Institute of the Recent History of Serbia, Belgrade, SCG.

The Historical Development of the Serbian Civic Community until 1944/45.

In this work the rise and development of the Serbian civic community as an urban "class" is considered in the course of a century, on the basis of acquired historical knowledge. Contrary to the Western European civic community (or middle class), the Serbian civic community did not rise in the struggle with aristocracy and nobility, as these did not exist at the time. Its origin and development was due to the uprisings against the Ottoman Empire, leading to a national liberation process, the beginnings of the modern Serbian state of the Western type, changes in the ethnic and religious characteristics of the city population (emigration of the Turks), development of the cities, industrialisation and modernisation. In the few cities, the Serbian civic community (merely 7% in 1834, 14% in 1900, 16% in 1931) represented a thin social stratum, was pretty underdeveloped and mostly connected with the state. Education and knowledge represented the most important characteristics of the Serbian civic community. It was the way to spread civic community culture patterns. Compared to the rest of society characterised by agricultural structures and low literacy rates (20% in 1900, 45% in 1921), education and knowledge were themselves a privilege and an advantage, representing the possibility for social advancement and change of social status. Besides education and wealth, the status of the civic community was reflected in investing in education of children (especially the female population), developing different type of social ties, introducing the “urban book shelf” as material proof of educational status, clothing style, leisure time and social events. The World Wars influenced the reduction both the biological and material resources of the civic community, but the victory of the Communist, political and ideological opponents of the civic community, in the Second World War resulted in its complete dispersal.

Milutinović Zoran, School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, UK.

Miloš Crnjanski’s European Cities

The paper examines the discursive shaping of ideas of urban life in the time of accelerating modernisation and urbanisation in Serbia. My hypothesis is that literature played an important role in these processes by introducing the representation of the city and urban lifestyle into Serbia's rural culture. This representation was created by the observation of city life in the urban centres of Western and Northern Europe. I shall focus on Miloš Crnjanski's travelogues published in the interwar period. As a diplomat and journalist, Crnjanski travelled extensively throughout France, Germany, Italy and Spain, and published a number of travelogues in which the idea of the city had a prominent place. I will also take into account two of his most important fictional works: Kod Hiperborejaca, sometimes classified as a travelogue, and Roman o Londonu, which is quite explicitly a novel about a city.

Münnich Nicole, Transatlantic Graduate Research Program Berlin – New York “History and Culture of the Metropolis in the 20th Century, Berlin, Germany.

Ambiguous Urban Identity – Belgrade in the Socialist Era

The "socialist city" of Belgrade appears as a highly stratified contact zone as well as an agglomeration of regional, national and European cultures under the specific conditions of a "closed society". My paper explores the process of urban transformation in the 1960s, a time of multiple cultural changes in Yugoslavia. It deals with the question of what effects the implementation of a socialist urbanism from above and counter-currents from within the society had on Belgrade's cityscape. Urbanity is not planable and consists of various patterns of behaviour. Moreover, citizens have to be willing to act differently in public than in private space. Belgrade was a centre of a dynamic and complex transformation process where different concepts of metropolitan life coincided. One the one hand, Belgrade was supposed to be shaped as a representative nucleus of the Yugoslav "new society". On the other hand, however, several cultural approaches and subcultures – provoked by a temporary liberalisation of the system – developed in society. Belgrade was moulded by the first post-war generation. Within this generation, the urban population with its Western-influenced way of life blended with an extraordinarily huge number of immigrants from the country whose rural behaviour remained exceedingly stable. Using methods of cultural history, the paper will discuss the ways in which this heterogeneous population of Belgrade took possession of their city in order to constitute an urban consciousness and a metropolitan cultural identity against the background of a forced ideological city planning.

Nagy Raluca & Colotelo Cristina, National School of Political Sciences and Administration, Bucharest, Romania.

Clubbing in Bucharest: Networks and Practices around Electronic Music

The main objective of our research is to understand the motivations and interactions of people who go to a certain category of clubs: electronic music clubs. As we analyse this club culture as a subculture phenomenon, we are particularly interested in group relationships and social interaction.

Some characteristics not necessarily causally linked but definitely connected include a specific music – electronic, techno; drug (or alcohol) consumption is often involved; and the look – these “trendy” people behave and dress in a certain way. The actual locations of this network are not only clubs but other kind of space (such as rented or private houses) as well and main characters (dj-s, artists, journalists, etc.) that usually organise, manage or even generate the events of this network.

The most visible background of the phenomenon, or the issue that ties all the other, would be electronic music. The type of music that is being played in a club has a major role in gathering the clientele. But the importance of electronic music as such for the network that it eventually generates might be marginal: it is more than “trendy” people being primarily interested in this music (the same people were listening to disco or rock some years ago), it is about a whole lifestyle.

Nagy Terezia, Centre for Regional Studies, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary.

The City as a Theatre of Subcultures: Looking for Interpretation

The city is a stage and a home at the same time; a home, possessed by subcultures, and a stage, on which actions take place. In my interpretation I understand the postmodern theoretical approach of the city and the interpretation of the city as a liminal and stage-like space. Furthermore I also understand interpretation of the networks of these spaces as an imaginary map. I will show the possibilities of the intertextual interpretation of city cultures.

One can say that liminal spaces represent inversity: subcultural space instead of home, mainly night instead of day, spaces of recreation instead of a working environment. The territories of subcultures, which are invisible during the day, are part of the city. These spaces emerge in the lives of subcultures and become narratives. But these are different from the liminality of Turner: after completing these rituals and actions, the individuals return to the same structures and norms, which they have left before. And the city neutralises these spaces for a while again.

The subculturally preferred spaces (and times) can be considered stages, like the (urban) paths connecting these special parts of space. Subcultural symbols and values can be represented and the differences between cultural tribes manifested. The open spaces of the city are meeting places and serve the possible introduction of individuals and groups – to those, who seek such introductions.

These theatres have people who do the makeup, props and dressing-rooms – the legitimating, tolerating, and hiding power of the inhabitants, if it was acceptable to the dominant power; but if not, than it can be discriminating, excluding.

On the stage and around it, representation comes forth, the acquirement of poses and gestures – cultural consumption, acceptation and rejection.

The stages and territories transform into narrative spaces, which represent the mentality and space usage of a generation, while redefining itself beyond the seemingly rigid frames of physical space. They break the virtual space of the city with their rites, and thereby lay out in-group and out-group communication, time and space. Meanwhile, the cultural tribes get in touch with one another, dip into the dominant culture, or at least reflect upon it, whereby a unique intertext evolves.

Naumović Slobodan, School of Philosophy, University of Belgrade, SCG.

Images of Belgrade and the Idea of Urbanity in the Serbian Culture Wars during the 1980s and 1990s

In the paper I set out to analyse the political and cultural logics behind what Peter Fritzsche has aptly phrased in his “reading” of Berlin (1996) as “the terms of mediation between city and text”. In other words, I propose to unpack some of the more salient ideas and meanings that can be associated with particular ways of constructing Belgrade as “a word city” or image city in individual narratives, public debates and various forms of artistic production emerging in Serbia during the 1980s and 1990s.

The development of contrasting representations of Belgrade among fiercely competing circles of a rapidly growing intelligentsia can be associated with the painful processes of state and nation building, industrialisation, and urbanisation in Serbia. Differing ways of imagining Belgrade supplied the core metaphors needed for the imagining of competing forms of individual and national identities in a rapidly transforming society. The metaphorical potential supplied by the only Serbian metropolis was perhaps most effectively instrumentalised by the writer and essayist Vladimir Velmar-Janković, who attempted to establish his vision of “the Belgrade man” as the only viable alternative to the supposed decadency of a “transitional mentality” that was spreading between the world wars. The paper examines the possible links between recent and contemporary urban “discursive frameworks” and the positions that were being upheld in Serbia in public debates during the second half of the 19^th century. I will then trace the phases of its reappearance during the 1980s and 1990s, and the intended and unintended political implications of two powerful images of the great city – the demonical one that sees the city as the rapidly growing cancer in the healthy, not yet fully urbanised tissue of Serbian society, and the radically opposed one that pits the refined, cosmopolitan urbanity of self-proclaimed “true” Belgraders against the supposed primitivism, virulent nationalism, and sheer idiocy of their less urbanised small-town and rural “compatriots”.

Onal Feride & Zeybekoglu Senem, Faculty of Architecture, Yıldız Technical University, Istanbul, Turkey.

The Changing Uses of Public Space in Traditional Anatolian Settlements: The Case of Bolvadin, Turkey

The city of Bolvadin, which is located in the west of Anatolia and on the Ancient Royal Road, is one of the oldest settlements in Anatolia. It reveals many different cultural and spatial traces of different civilizations from nearly 10,000 years. The historical centre, with its organic street patterns and architectural features, reflects traditional Turkish city characteristics. The buildings, which belong to different periods of history, make it possible to read the different layers of history in the urban space.

The development process of the city of Bolvadin displays some of the special problems belonging to it. The lack of an efficient planning mechanism that considers the potentials and tendencies of the settlement, the industrial complexes located on the periphery of the city and on agriculture land without contributing to the economic life of the settlement and a low level of education and awareness of history can be considered the most critical of these problems. All these result in the destruction of the traditional patterns and a poor quality of life in the city.

Traditional buildings and places maintain a balance with nature and society that has been developed over many generations. They enhance the quality of life and are a proper reflection of modern society.

The aim of this study is to understand the effects of socio-economical and cultural changes on the city by analysing the current spatial structure of the city, especially focusing on the public spaces of Bolvadin. The importance of rehabilitating the traditional patterns of the city, through which we can preserve a sense of identity and counteract social alienation, is going to be underscored.

Otoiu Damiana Gabriela, Institut de Recherches Politiques, Université de Bucarest, Roumanie.

La (re)construction du droit de propriété en Roumanie postcommuniste. Acteurs et strategies /
The (Re)construction of Property Rights in Postcommunist Romania. Actors and Strategies

A recent field of investigation, the restitution of private property represents an important aspect of the economic, political and social restructuring in post-totalitarian countries. Since the restitution of property is a major political issue (but an economic and social one as well) of the post communist era, an analysis of the different players involved in this process becomes imperative. Thus our research focuses on the processes associated with the formation and institutionalization of the most significant socio-political actors concerned.
Two interest groups constitute the object of our research: the Association of Owners Abusively Dispossessed by the State (AOADS) and the Association of Tenants in Nationalized Buildings (ATNB). While other foundations and associations founded in Bucharest since 1992 in defense of owners' rights (and tenants' rights, respectively) generally lasted only a short time, maintaining a weak organizational structure and mobilizing only a small number of members, the AOADS and the ANBT can boast a large membership, various local branches, and partnerships with several political parties, having imposed themselves as the sole legitimate representatives of owners and tenants.
The present study explores this "reconstruction of property" in post-communist Romania by investigating the "former" owners of the nationalized buildings and the present tenants (or the "new" owners) as two antagonistic interest groups. Focusing on the creation and on the organization of these two groups, as well as on their actions in the political, electoral and media environments, we show how they have ultimately been transformed into satellites of different political parties.

Papa-Pandelejmoni Enriketa, Department for Southeast European History, Karl Franzens University of Graz, Austria.

Family Life in Shkodra: The First Half of the 20th Century

Traditional Albanian family and household formation was based on the Balkan cultural pattern, a patriarchal pattern, and this historical development resulted in an autonomous patrilineal kinship and household structure that was unique in Europe. Albania and the Albanian people entered the 20^th century living in conditions based on this cultural pattern.

At the beginning of the 20^th century, patriarchal ideology, which played an important role in the northern highlands, was no longer a general phenomenon for the whole country and especially not for urban settings. But with regard to the formal patriarchal structures, the principle of patrilineality and patrilocality were still constitutive for household formation. The “men-folk” dominated the life of the family. Agnatic kin became the core of the complex household and wives were married into it.

The paper will discuss the main characteristics of family life in the city of Shkodra and draw a parallel between family life in city and that of the whole country.

Pavićević Aleksandra, Ethnographic Institute SASA, Belgrade, SCG.

Cremation as New Age Urban Phenomenon: From Ecology to Ideology

The paper will deal with historical and ideological aspects of cremation. This way of dealing with deceased persons was established in Serbia in 1964. The cremation movement was established long before, in the middle of the 19^th century, first in Western European countries, and later in Serbia. The members of the highest Serbian intellectual circles of that time were supporters of new ideas concerning cremation. Since 1964 the burning of the deceased was only possible in Belgrade where the only crematorium existed. In 2004 a new crematorium was opened in Novi Sad, the capital of Vojvodina Province. In this time (since the beginning of the 20^th century) the “Oganj” (“The Flame”) association advertised this model of dealing with the dead. The association was established in 1934, thirty years before cremation was allowed by law and the crematorium was built in the “New Graveyard” in Belgrade. At the inception of cremation movement, ecology and economic use of the environment were emphasised as the primary justification of this idea; in the meantime it has become a specific atheistic ideology.

Cremation supporters’ contemplations over death, posthumous life as well as customs that follow the send-off for cremation will be included in the paper.

Pavlović Mirjana, Ethnographic Institute SASA, Belgrade, SCG.

Centre – Periphery: Ethnicity of Serbs in Timisoara

Timisoara is a cultural, religious, and political centre of Serbian national minority in the Banat. It is also a multicultural, multinational and multireligious town in which, since the 18th century, different ethnic/national groups (Romanians, Serbs, Hungarians, Germans and others) has been living together. Timisoara has also been an attractive destination for rural emigrants, especially after World War II. As a result, Timisoara has been an environment in which complex acculturation and assimilation processes have taken place for centuries, which has also influenced the Serbian community. A traditional, rural and patriarchal way of life mixed with a Central European cultural pattern and the cultural influences of other ethnic/national groups.

This paper examines the influence of complex processes of integration, acculturation and assimilation on Serbian opinions and values regarding the preservation of ethnic identity, as well as on the regulation of inter-group relations between urban – rural, centre – periphery in the Serbian community in Timisoara. The analysis is based on interviews and material from the Serbian weekly journal "Naša reč" ("Our word").

Pemunta Ngambouk Vitalis, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary.

Negotiating a Reconceptualisation of the ‘Urban’ and ‘Rural’ in the Social Sciences

Globalisation tacitly implies a general shift in the relation of the spatial; the social as cultural phenomena has become deterritorialised. Yet social scientists have continued to use the uncomfortable ‘urban-rural’ dichotomy as two distinctive categories. Their continuous usage suggests a contingency in patterns and in the character of these social phenomena. This article sets out to rethink this conceptualisation based on the culturally embedded nature of human behaviour in both space and time and the difficulties in delineating rigid subject boundaries today, unlike in the past. I will use here empirical case data from social phenomena such as the procurement and consumption of medicinal plant recipes in an urban setting, ‘dualistic’ religious inclination and urban agriculture to show that the geographic, spatio-temporal conceptualisation of distinctive urban and rural phenomena are problematic, especially at this point in time when culture and place are suffering dislocation. I begin this intellectual endeavour by attempting to uncouple the multiple embedded meanings and representations of the concepts of “urban” and “rural” in both common discourse and within the academy. Then follows an exposition of urban-rural networks to show the untenability and fluidity of disparate geographic spaces and the existence of ‘multi-stranded’ social fields through rulership, education and development. I further attempt to negotiate a theoretical and methodological reconceptualisation of “urban-rural” phenomena by postulating the notions of ‘urban-ruralism’ and ‘rural-urbanism’ to capture these processes while underlining the behavioural continuum/consistency.

Perica Vjekoslav, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, USA.

Young Croatia and the City of Split at 1700: Conflicting Constructions of the National and Local in Croatia, 1990-2005

This paper examines the revival of local identity in the Croatian city of Split in the broader context of restructuring of national states in Southeastern Europe since 1990. After Yugoslavia’s collapse, the region of Dalmatia and its largest town Split have become part of the new Croatian nation designed as a centralised state by the Tudjman regime (1990-1999). The national capital Zagreb and the ethnic diaspora communities embraced the new official nationalism as opposed to regions such as Dalmatia and Istria, which “imagined” a federated, polycentric Croatia with considerable regional autonomy. In Split, ideological tensions broke out between the Adriatic coastal-insular “natives” and rural settlers; the former sympathising with the new politics of regionalism spreading from Western Europe, the latter defending the Tudjman regime’s centralism. Dalmatian regionalism based in Split involved political parties seeking greater regional autonomy and metropolitan self-rule. The movement also commemorated a perspective on World War II that conflicted with the new nation’s founding myths. In 1997-2005 Split celebrated the 1700^th anniversary of its foundation, thus competing with the young nation in “the invention of tradition”. Yet the recent revival in the former Venetian colony of Spalato-Split was above all a cultural movement that I compare with the Venetian carnival. It emphasised the use of the dialect, local pop culture and the world-famous athletic college, as well as the Dalmatian identity-name. It satirised the national capital’s mentality, ridiculed the new ethnic nationalist discourse and its carriers – the rural settlers. Yet, overall, neither were relations of power and class structure in the new nation-state and society altered nor seriously challenged.

Petre Raluca, Faculty of Letters, ‘Ovidius’ University of Constanta, Romania.

Reconfiguring Leisure in the City: ‘Pub’ Culture in Constanta

The post-socialist period is one of change and the urban setting might prove instrumental in research on socialisation and specific patterns of behaviour. In this paper we narrow this large premise and explore leisure time habits in pubs in the city of Constanta, Romania. The emergence in this issue allowed us to come to know the city better in this respect, to map the problem and to understand some specific interaction patterns and specificities of leisure. Empirical data was gathered over several months, namely between November 2003 and May 2004 in several self-titled ‘pubs’ in Constanta.

The initial hypothesis was that there is quite a solid referent for a ‘pub’ and people interact and develop social relations there in a certain way. The hypothesis needed nevertheless to be revised, since a 'pub' turned out to be quite a vague concept, being circumstantially defined. The whole concept of ‘pub’ was redefined based on the understanding of pub as it functions in its homeland, the UK, and then some local sites were compared against this model. This perspective turned out to be particularly useful and provided insights on the local means of instrumentalising the pub.

The theoretical framework that became articulated in our approach had as point of departure the phenomenology of Alfred Schutz and Erving Goffman's interactions and roles in everyday life. We tried to be aware of the situatedness of the research and of ourselves as observers and interviewers, some of the ethnomethodological ideas helping us become aware of our limits and our position within the inquiry. The concept of ‘habitus’ developed by Pierre Bourdieu in his work offered the lense through which to look at the human landscape, as well as when approaching the different tastes and arrangements of the sites. Last but not least the ‘hybridisation’ concept introduced by Homi Bhabha helped us get over the panic of not being able to find a genuine pub in Constanta.

Petreska Vesna, Institute of Folklore “Marko Cepenkov”, Skopje, Macedonia.

Urban and Rural Relationships in Kinship Relations: Examples of Macedonian Migration Families

Urbanisation, as a visible feature of the socialist changes in Southeastern Europe, especially in the period immediately after the Second World War is also distinctive for Macedonia. The socialist period with its industrialisation and modernisation produced obvious novelties, among them migration from the village/town, which resulted in the rapid growth of the cities, especially of Skopje, and the shrinking (or extinction) of villages. Under such conditions, there surely was an interdependence between urban and rural relationships, since the changes were not universal, but were realised partially, and since the most intimate spheres of human life are the slowest to change. Such conditions confirm the thesis that between settlements in some regions there is a complex net of interdependences, and that the urban and rural do not exist as standard patterns, but as mixed forms. Exactly these migration families will be the subject of analysis, above all the function of the kinship network as traditional mechanism in the process of adaptation into the new environment and the modern tempo of life.

Generally speaking, it could be said that the influence of the city is extensive among relatives that moved into the cities and those that stayed in the villages, and that the influence of the city culture, i.e. urbanisation and modernisation processes, is dominant. Analogously, individual and personal initiative appears on the stage. However, in the given circumstances, people apply models of their rural lifestyle if they feel it is efficient, although in a modified version and in accordance with the new needs of everyday life. The most recent transitional period, the time of economic crisis, also show the appearance of alternative networks in kinship relations. This is evidence that “tradition” is not static, but dynamic and capable of change. Some specific parts of the tradition, although forgotten, reappear on the surface at appropriate times.

Petronijević Edita, The University of Rijeka, Croatia.

The Unspoken Word – Rijeka: Potential or Effective Urban Space

This paper deals with the concrete case of the city of Rijeka, a littoral Mediterranean city with quite an interesting past and somewhat dull present. Rijeka seems as if trapped in a perpetual state of “might have been, if only…” Following the distinction between space and place outlined by Michel de Certeau (The Practice of Everyday Life), where space is practiced place (it is like the word when it is spoken, says Certeau), the city of Rijeka gives the impression of the unspoken word – a place on the map that has not managed to develop into an urban space. So much so, that some younger residents suspect that Rijeka is not even a proper city.

Despite its geographical position, memories of and desires for Rijeka somehow lag behind its potential. The city has a problem with transforming itself from a potential urban space to an effective, fully exploited urban space. The concepts of potential and effective environment, proposed by Herbert Gans, help to distinguish between the physical place as the arena for potential but not yet realised actions and the same place, now becoming an urban space par excellence where this potential function is accepted and realised by its users. This transformation in the case of Rijeka is limited and the limitation is evident in the way the city functions in everyday life and in the way its citizens judge their own city.

Petrov Petar, Institut für Volkskunde, München, Germany.

Die Erziehung eines bürgerlichen Theaterpublikums in Bulgarien im späten 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert

Kaffeehäuser, Wirtshäuser, Läden und Frisiersalons waren und sind heute noch in Bulgarien – wie in den anderen Ländern Südosteuropas – Orte des mündlichen Austausches von Neuigkeiten über lokale Ereignisse und von wichtigen Informationen aus Tagespolitik, Wirtschaft und Kultur. Im letzten Viertel des 19. Jahrhunderts wurden Zeitungen und Zeitschriften zum Inventar dieser öffentlichen Räume. Hinzu kamen auch Druckgraphiken, die auch den Leseunkundigen die Partizipation an den politischen Debatten ermöglichten. Im Mittelpunkt des Referates stehen das italienische Blatt „Il Papagallo“ (1873-1915), welches sich in Bulgarien große Beliebtheit erfreute, und einige weitere heimische Blätter, die nach italienischem Vorbild entstanden und zwischen 1892 und 1961 (überwiegend) wöchentlich erschienen. Diese Blätter hießen z.B. „Östlicher Papagei“, „Bulgarischer Papagei“, „Balkanpapagei“, „Weltpapagei“ oder einfach „Papagei“. Sie waren alle Farbdrucke im Format ca. 60x40 cm, von der Komposition und vom Inhalt politische Szenenkarikaturen, die durch Personifizierungen einzelner Staaten aktuelle politische Entscheidungen, Ereignisse und Zustände bildlich darstellten und kommentierten. Mein Interesse gilt der öffentlichen Verwendung und Rezeption dieser Bilder. Anders als die Karikaturen der Wegwerftagespresse wurden sie als Wandbilder verwendet. An die Wände öffentlicher Räume angeklebt, sollten sie die Meinungsbildung der Öffentlichkeit gestalten (so die intendierte Funktion) und lösten tatsächlich Diskussionen über politisch relevante Themen aus. Somit entstand in den Städten eine neue Art vom Publikum – jenes der Bildbetrachter und Bildkommentatoren.

Petrova Ivanka, Ethnographic Institute and Museum at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria.

Geschlechterrollen in einem internationalen Unternehmen in Sofia

Die meisten städtischen Bulgaren verbringen heute einen Großteil ihres Alltags als Arbeiter oder Angestellte in einem Betrieb. Durch die regelmäßige Zusammenarbeit in den Unternehmen bilden sich soziale Regeln und kulturelle Formen heraus, welche aus ethnologischer Perspektive gut erforscht und analysiert werden können. Außer den von der Organisation vorgeschriebenen formellen Handlungsnormen wirken sehr oft auch ungeschriebene Regeln am Arbeitsplatz, die man als Ergebnis des kulturellen Erbes und der Anwendung von traditionellen Denkmustern und Handlungsweisen in der Arbeitswelt bezeichnen kann.

Die Organisation der Geschlechterverhältnisse spielt z.B. eine wichtige Rolle beim Strukturieren der Arbeit in den Betrieben sowie bei der Bestimmung der Inhalte. Im Prozess der Erfüllung von beruflichen Aufgaben sind oft die Weitergabe und Aktualisierung von traditionellen Verhaltensweisen, die mit der Zugehörigkeit zum einen oder anderen Geschlecht verbunden sind zu beobachten.

Im Vortrag wird die geschlechterspezifische Arbeitsteilung in einer Gruppe bulgarischer Mitarbeiter in einem internationalen Unternehmen in Sofia dargestellt, welche durch die gegenwärtigen Auswirkungen von traditionellen Geschlechterrollen und -verhältnisse in der Arbeitswelt zu erklären ist. Dabei wird untersucht, welche Rolle die traditionellen Geschlechterstereotypen der Bulgaren für die beruflichen Chancen im unternehmerischen Umfeld spielen. Es werden auch die mit der jeweiligen Arbeit verbundenen geschlechterspezifischen Anforderungen für Arbeitsergebnisse und für das Verhalten in der Arbeitswelt thematisiert.

Petrović Todosijević Sanja, Institute for Contemporary History, Belgrade, SCG.

“Other Life“: European Influence on the Process of Modernisation of Everyday Life in Šabac between the Two World Wars

Europeanisation of everyday life in Šabac between the two World Wars represents a reality. Different parts of society reacted differently to the process of modernisation. A part of the public rejected with resignation all that came from the West, while the other part was more open, looking for a better life and zealously accepting all achievements of modernity, primarily in the field of everyday life. In the light of the writing of “Šabački glasnik” (The Messenger of Šabac) and “Podrinski vesnik” (The Herald of Podrinje), Šabac was represented as “the gates of the West”, as town that, owing to its position, was under the influence of all that comes to Balkans from the West. Achievements of Western civilisation are accepted in the areas of announcements and advertising. Goods from the West and products aimed at creating a nicer, easier and more comfortable way of life flooded the shops of Šabac. Different forms of amusement attracted mainly younger generations, while the older generation detestingly observed the youth wallowing in “luxury and grandomania”. The favourite ways of spending leisure time were visits to football games, different parties, cinema, and the beach, often called “naughty beach”. Conservative part of the Šabac`s public thought that these forms of leisure time “demoralise” the youth. European influences were visible mainly in the field of fashion. Unconditional acceptance of fashion coming from the West, were marked in the press as “being modish”.

Petrović Tanja, Institute for Balkan Studies, Belgrade, SCG.

Urban vs. Rural in Language Ideology of Speakers of the Contemporary Serbian Language

The standardisation of the Serbian language, initiated by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, was strongly influenced by proto-romanticist ideas about people's authentic nature and soul as expressed in their vernaculars. In his efforts to establish the Serbian standard language on a purely vernacular basis, Karadžić based the Serbian standard language on his own Eastern Hercegovinan vernacular and considered any urban influences as "spoiling" the authentic folk language.

During the century and a half since Karadžić initiated his language reform, urban centres and urban vernaculars have developed in Serbia, but practically none of the large urban centres are in the area in which the vernacular chosen by Karadžić is spoken. Moreover, in one of the biggest Serbian cities, Niš, the local vernacular is significantly remote from the standards set by Karadžić. All this caused the emergence of the spectrum of different and often conflicting language ideologies of speakers of Serbian. The paper will focus on these language ideologies and provide an analysis of non-linguists' beliefs about language obtained from people coming from different cultural settings and having different linguistic backgrounds. It will explore the potential of ideological notions of "pure" and "spoiled" vernaculars as well as the notion of linguistic "correctness" in the Serbian context. The paper will also deal with functions of urban Serbian vernaculars and symbolic values attached to them in an attempt to reveal the social relevance of urban dialectology, a discipline which is largely neglected in Southeastern Europe.

Pisac Andrea, Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK.

Singlehood as a Rite of Passage in Post-Communist Croatia

The paper looks into the emerging phenomenon of single women, whose number is on the increase since the fall of Communism and the end of the Balkan conflict. It is based on fieldwork conducted in Zagreb, Croatia, in 2004.

Insights into the day-to-day life of financially independent single women challenge a widely accepted notion that women are shouldering the biggest burden of the transition period in post-socialist countries. I will argue against the representation of women as universal victims and non-actors. Self-imposed singlehood, which is becoming common among economically independent women, shows that power can be expressed in a variety of ways – by opting out of marriage and motherhood, women do not comply with state population politics and thus exert a particular kind of social power.

Singlehood, as a ‘liminal’ stage in a woman’s life, has a deep influence on traditional kinship and gender structures. Between being a daughter and being a wife, there emerges a new space offering independence and social maturity, which is not defined by marriage and procreation. Even though, ideologically, being a single woman in the Balkans does not occupy a high social rung, a woman’s liminality gives her the power to contest traditional social structures. I will argue that singlehood must be looked at as a sign of socio-political change, inevitably transforming traditional kinship relations, and that single women possess more social agency than they are given credit for.

Plecadite Cristina & Kalambayi Fidelie, Babes Bolyai University, Cluj – Napoca & Romanian Angel Appeal Foundation, Bucharest, Romania.

Keep up the Sound: Club Culture in Bucharest

A century ago, Bucharest was famed as being the “little Paris” – a proud label that recommended it as an attractive capital city among the best-known cities in Europe. Today, after almost 50 years of communism, Bucharest bears only few signs of its former glory; however, it tries to keep pace with the latest European and global urban entertainment “fashion” – the dance/electronic music scene.

The latest mixes, the latest DJs, small clubs and big clubs, private or public parties, legal and illegal ones, drug use and fashion habits – club goers in Bucharest have it all.

Taking as a starting point two theses approaching extensively – from an anthropological point of view – the concept and phenomenon of club culture[10], our paper aims at defining the characteristics of what appears to be the development of a (electro) club culture in Bucharest.

Using a “clubbing map” as the methodological concept, the research takes as a point of departure one of the most popular clubs in Bucharest – the Web Club. From this electro centre the study follows[11] individual and group “routes” towards other electro events (i.e. parties, concerts) or places (i.e. clubs). The analysis refers mainly to the shaping of individual clubbers’ lifestyles, to the acquiring of clubbing habits and fashion and to the design and functioning of clubbers’ networks in Bucharest (for exchanging/finding information, drugs etc.).

Podovšovnik Eva, Science and Research Centre, University of Primorska, Slovenia.

Digital Divide among Slovenian Youth

Our society is experiencing several structural changes since the information revolution. With the introduction of new technologies in the 1870s, people became aware of its positive and negative sides. Information society is not based on physical power, as was the industrial society. Instead, the focus is on human, social and information capital (Fountain, 2000).

Scholars started to study the diffusion of the new technologies in the late 19th century. In that period mainly anthropologists were interested in this process. In the first half of the 20th century, the topic attracted also economist, and rural and medical sociologists. In 1943 it was discovered that the diffusion of the new technologies followed an s-curve distribution. Its shape is determined by social contacts.

With the rapid diffusion of computers and the internet into the workplace, home and schools, several changes have occurred. Sociologists became aware of the digital divide, which represents the social inclusion or exclusion of people on the basis of their social status. Younge remployed men, living in urban societies are facilitated in experiencing the new technologies (Attewell, 2001; Dolničar and others, 2002; European Commission, 2003a).

The purpose of the present paper is to present the results of the survey I have conducted in 2003 among Slovenian primary-school leavers about the diffusion of the new technologies, especially of computers and the internet. Special attention will be given to the discrepancies among rural and urban student population.

Popović Dragan, Humanitarian Law Center, Belgrade, SCG.

Some Observations of »Peasant« Life in Towns – Is Adaptation Possible?

In the last decades peasantry has been forgotten and placed on the margins of the social life. Communist ideology defined it as unprogressive and insensible for “modern streaming”. In recognition of these claims, there was an unnatural (forced) exodus from rural areas to city centres. There the people encountered uncertain employment, due to still underdeveloped industrialisation. Micro movements created other, mostly negative social relations. Under conditions of low-level opportunities found in the city centres, an antagonism between “new comers” and citizens appeared, especially on the psycho-cultural level.

In this atmosphere, peasants lose their social “credentials,” throwing out rural characteristics and “possible” retrograde traditionalism, and accept models inappropriate for their archetypal existence. In that way they become subject to an unnatural unification, where processes of acculturation is only partially realised, strengthening already firm stereotypes. They need years of adaptation to the new cultural models. No matter how strong the methods of social adjustment and cultural transformation are, villagers cannot become equal in the cultural sense, with those who are already accustomed to a certain way of life. These primary psychological reasons hinder their vertical advancement, or more precisely, their aim to acquire greater social power.

Prato Giuliana B., University of Kent, UK.

From via Egnatia to Corridor Eight: Balkan Cities in East-West Encounters

The paper will focus on the Albanian city of Durres. Looking at the strategic position of this city throughout history, it will discuss the significance of Balkan cities in the contemporary geo-political situation. Since Roman times, Durres has been a gateway to Eastern Europe and, later, a meeting point between the Christian West and the Muslim East. New political projects targeting Eastern and Southeastern Europe have singled out some Balkan cities as focal points for the development and stability of the area. Durres, a key point of “Corridor Eight”, provides a significant case study of the impact that “global political projects” are having on the economic, political and cultural life of these cities and, more generally, on the Balkan region.

Preda Sinziana & Vasiluta Marius, Faculty of Sociology and Psychology, West University of Timisoara, Romania.

Queuing up as Urban Reality: An Aggression against Time

In a Southeastern European urban anthropology, the queuing up phenomenon has a definite place. This subject deserves a complex study, which starts – first of all – from collective representation and urban mentalities, especially those generated in the communist period. Queuing up is an urban privilege and, for a long period of time, we considered queuing up a communist invention that had to be eradicated. In the 1980s, this ”activity” became permanent: the main purpose was to buy food, which was rationed at that time. From a certain point of view, the urban territory was much more marked by communist pathology, the “queue” having its well-defined place.

Among other things, queuing up is surely an aggression against leisure time. For the communists, especially, this kind of aggression was a definite target. It is well-known that time reserves create desires for liberty. A person that has time reads, takes initiative, creates his own private space, and feels the need to join in something and to communicate. On the other hand, queuing up stultifies, humiliates, oppresses, and reduces a person to the lowest limit of existence. The individual is no longer a human being but only a part in a tremendous wheel, which crushes him; it limits any initiative, reducing the individual to an obedient and unassuming element.

Pušić Ljubinko, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Novi Sad, SCG.

Urban Life as Everyday Life: The Cultural Context

This paper starts with the fact that today, it is not possible to think about any single segment of everyday life without meanings of the urban appearing as its underlying concept.

The recognition of this concept presupposes: (a) that this is a matter of a quasi-theoretical construction; (b) that the study of everyday life is an attempt to demystify the scientific point of view of what people “see but do not notice;” (c) that it is possible to recognise the way of life in a particular space by means of the study of everyday life; and (d) that the contextual dimension of culture is unavoidable in the process of recognising everyday life.

The central issue of this paper is the lowest common denominator of “the urban way of life” in various cultural settings in the region of Southeastern Europe. The “search” for it moves within the circle of mythical notions of authentic values, romanticised notions about pre-modern cities and rational living conditions in modern cities. What represents a distinct problem is the knowledge that the issue of urban life is fogged by its various interpretations within the domains of anthropology, ethnology, sociology, urban studies and history.

In this paper, the solution to the controversy brought about by these presuppositions is achieved by constructing three problem planes. The first problem plane – connecting culture, civilisation and the city, the second problem plane – determining the space in which the Southeastern European city is located, and the third problem plane – using urban idioms and patterns on the basis of which it is possible to recognise the authentic values of the urban way of life in Southeastern Europe.

Radojičić Dragana, Ethnographic Institute of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Belgrade, SCG.

Urban Biorhythm of a Suburban Community

Vrcin, as a suburban community on a road junction, has changed significantly during the last decades of the 20^th century.

Accelerated urbanisation during period of socialist development, the abandonment of the rural environment and pressure on the city have resulted in merging of nearby villages with the city. It was, thus, possible for newly migrated populations to settle in the peripheral region. Considering living conditions and paths by which living space is obtained in town, and spreading reluctance of former rural inhabitants to rent apartments and follow norms required in the city, this is a study of the new biorhythm of inhabitants in Vrcin and on relations between the urban, the suburban and the rural.

This paper is on the meeting of "festive slowing" and global time conditioned by urbanisation. Society, in its diverse forms and productive levels is not prone to the same biorhythm and includes certain variations in different spaces and times. Using anthropological research methods time is shown to be versatile in Vrcin.

The mechanical controlling of time is becoming an obsession of the "new" Vrcin inhabitant, and is involving him gradually in a state of neurosis and psychosomatic disorders. Individual impressions on time and biorhythm are continuously adjusting to contemporary social conditions.

Radu Cosmin, Faculty of Sociology and Social Work, University of Bucharest, Romania.

The Dynamics of the Urban Marketplaces: Fragmentation, Expansion and Regulatory Practices in Bucharest

Institutional transformation in postsocialism has lead to the emergence of diverse categories of subsistence-oriented retailers. Fragmentation and expansion of space required an increase in regulatory practices. Institution building aimed at eliminating middlemen and the mafia culminated in October 2004, two months before the presidential and parliamentary elections, when police became an active and autonomous agent of control at the level of the marketplace. The reinforcement of control in the marketplace at the beginning of October 2004 lead to an explosion of new retailing space and has lead to an unprecedented conflict between market administration, peasants and sidewalk sellers. A large part of retailers chose the sidewalks near the marketplace in order to avoid the sudden controls practised by the new “police of the marketplace”. At the end of October 2004, the peasants from the Moghioro marketplace started a strike, refusing to carry out their regular activities. They explained that marketplace administration tolerated the sidewalk commerce at the expense of the stall-owners. The aim of these new institutions was to protect the consumers by levelling the prices for agricultural products. The paper is based on fieldwork carried out between November 2002 and May 2003 in Bucharest as well as on more recent observations.

Réka Geambaşu, Department of Sociology, Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj, Romania.

The Dynamics of Social Network Management among Rural Immigrants

Rural immigrants are supposed – according both to everyday common sense, but to sociological literature as well – to organise their social lives around family relationships and primordial ties, so that they can avoid contact with external, formal, administrative institutions. It is thought that they build small farms in blocks in order to “re-experience” former peasant lifestyles. Meanwhile, they are seen as groups that perpetuate past relationships with villages. The goal of this kind of analysis is to describe an attempt of reorganising former rural autarchies in the context of urban space.

According to the results of a survey realised in 2002 in the city of Cluj, the only significant difference between the social networks among people of rural and urban origin respectively, is that rural immigrants living in cities seem to lack these important ties that might function as social capital. Moreover, these “gaps” in their social networks result in frustration that eventually leads to a pessimistic view of their own life chances.

However, most probably as a consequence of this situation, citizens of rural origin tend to rediscover and re-establish ties with their rural communities of origin. Renewed personal relationships with people from the countryside acquire new meanings, and will additionally contribute to the restructuring of social networks.

The aim of the paper is to understand and contribute to the interpretation of personal relationships seen both as emotional ties and social capital among the first generation urban citizens who see relocation/removal to their original rural communities as the only economic surviving strategy left to them.

Risteski Ljupčo, University of »Sts Cyril and Methodius«, Skopje, Macedonia.

Anthropological Research of (Non)Discrimination Comprehension among Macedonian Youth

Macedonia has long been leaving its "transitional life". A variety of social, economic, cultural and, mostly, political changes and processes have influenced people's attitudes about some very important questions including the practice of (non)discrimination. These processes are most intensive and most noticeable among the younger population.

We consider the comprehension of (non)discrimination a very relevant anthropological question, and at the same time a relevant social problem on which one should work actively. Ethnology and anthropology can play an active role here. Department of Ethnology of the University of "Sts. Cyril and Methodius" in Skopje, has for several years, actively been working in a project in which the young population is the main target group, aiming to observe current and relevant social processes among the young people in Macedonia, an to help young people in implementing the results, improving knowledge about questions of (non)discrimination and influencing the changes in their attitudes and their behaviour. The research project and the implementation of its results in the sense of stimulating changes in young people's attitudes have been realised in four cities in Macedonia: Skopje, Gostivar, Sveti Nikole and Prilep, in which young people (12-18 years of age) from Macedonian, Albanian, Turkish and Roma communities were included.

In addition to presenting research results from some creative youth projects, we also aim to share our own experiences about how ethnology and anthropology can be effectively involved in applied youth activities.

Ristović Milan, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade, SCG.

City in the Ideology of the Serbian Radical Right 1941-1944

Anti-urban elements in the ideology of the Serbian radical right during WWII were one of the important components in the construction of the project on the "national organic state". The Serbian collaborationist administration during the time of German occupation tried to promote a concept of "national spiritual renewal", a patriarchal "zadruga-state" founded on the basis of an idealised image of de-urbanised, hierarchically organised authoritarian society. The main promoters of the concept came from the circle around Dimitrije Ljotic and his "Zbor" organisation, which in his ideology included elements of a model of agrarian-fascism. As in similar European and especially, Southern European movements, open animosity was shown to the "decadent" and "alienated", "denationalised", "racially impure" "liberal", "communist", etc., city against a highly idealised and idyllic patriarchal village utopia, the "only possible", "ultimate model for national survival". In the criticism of almost all forms of urban life, similar language and elements were used as their European ideological and political paragons, although with some "national specificities".

Analysis was based on texts published between 1941and 1944 in different magazines and newspapers, and also on the documents from the Belgrade archives.

Samardžić Nikola, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade, SCG.

Pavement Brigandage: Deurbanising Belgrade

An history of Belgrade's material culture is probably exceptional as a parallel chronicle of an almost irrational struggle for the city's survival, and an endless external and internal destruction. In such a sense, Belgrade succeeded more as an illusion of its own future projection of a calm and settled community. Belgrade is simultaneously filled with love and hate of its own citizens and new settlers, its defenders and conquerors. Belgrade abandoned its vernacular descendants, becoming a shelter, or a trap for those who never felt, and understood, its basic values and spirit.

The Yugoslav dissolution and ethnic wars in the 1990s concluded with the NATO bombing and the fall of the Milosevic's authoritarian regime. All these processes have brought misery, isolationism and self-isolationism, and serious temptations to the city's deepest, substantial identity. In other terms, Belgrade became a model for an anthropology of modern or postmodern barbarism, as many social and political revolutions bring together communication breakdown, a culture of pillage and a mythology of noble banditry.

The central city zones have been abused by intense »over building«. Already ruinous buildings have been loaded with supplementary floors, frequently constructed according to some distant, rural customary. The pavement is crowded with illegal kiosks, black market sellers, smugglers, beggars and wrongly parked cars. Suburbs have grown, with their ugly architecture and lack of almost any infrastructural facilities. Oligarchs have built their swaggering, clumsy villas in residential jungles. And so on. And it is not only the lack of resolute town regulations and general poverty that has endangered the city's urban and historical identity, it seems that the whole history of insolent behaviour has risen, originating in the ancient struggle between the alienated state and traditional society with its peculiar, striving and violence-orientated values.

Scarboro Christofer, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA.

Mapping Socialist Subjectivity: Reading the City through Proximate Tourism

The city and urbanism were central organising principles of identity within the Bulgarian socialist system. For the socialists, the city promised freedom from the idiocy of rural life, a more modern and efficient model for society writ large, and a prosperous future. This paper, part of a larger dissertation on the Bulgarian socialist humanist project of the 1960s and 1970s, focuses on the narrative of a remade socialist city of Haskovo of the period through small, daily acts of proximate tourism from home to work, walks in the park and lunches eaten on monumental steps.

The socialist humanist system invested tremendous resources in directing the movements of its population, at least in part to transform it subjectively. My work investigates, through an examination of the negotiations over controlled movement, the daily operations and interplay of the intentions of the normalising regime and those of its subjects. As Haskovo was built during the 1960s and 1970s to accommodate the massive influx of urban residents, city planners sought to build new urban socialist subjects. Using architectural plans for the city: street grids, parks, housing complexes, museums, theatres, and city monuments, this paper investigates the city as a central space for negotiations over new modes of subjectivity.

Sedmak Mateja, Science and Research Centre Koper, University of Primorska. Faculty of Humanities of Koper, Slovenia.

Social Inclusion/Exclusion of Immigrant Groups in Urban Slovenia: A Case Study of Istria

The paper will present some crucial aspects of the quotidian urban life of members of immigrant groups (Croats, Serbs, Montenegrins, Albanians, etc.) from the republics of the former Yugoslavia who migrated to the territory of Slovenia after World War II (in particular during the 1970s). The phenomenon of the social urban inclusion/exclusion of the diverse immigrant groups and the nature of the interethnic relations will be presented in a case study of Slovene Istria, a multiethnic area between Italy and Croatia. The examined territory (including the municipalities of Koper, Izola and Piran) is defined by a distinctive cultural, linguistic and religious pluralism. The population of the area includes members of the Slovene majority, the Italian autochthonous minority and immigrants from former Yugoslavia who migrated to Slovene Istria (mostly for economic reasons). The analysis of the phenomenon of social exclusion/inclusion will encompass different aspects of everyday life: the nature of interethnic contacts, ethnically mixed marriages, housing inclusion/exclusion, the educational system, employment, etc. In relation to the topic, autochthonous or ‘un-autochthonous’ status emerges as the crucial component. Finally, the paper will analyse the impact of the broad social and political changes that occurred in the territory of former Yugoslavia (the disintegration of the once common state and the ensuing independence of Slovenia).

Siegel Allan, Intermedia Department, Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts, Budapest, Hungary.

From Market Halls to Hypermarkets: The Social Space of Food Shopping

The 19^th century market hall represents an effort by architects, civic officials and economic interests to create a social space able to meet the changing economic and social demands of the rapidly expanding industrial metropolis.

Besides providing functional urban retail space, the market hall also institutionalised relationships between agricultural producers, craftsmen and urban consumers; it situated the social and economic links between urban and rural realities within an evolving urban geography. Consequently, as an emblematic neighbourhood element, the market hall formed a significant public space and became an integral component of city life.

With the growth of globalisation and consumerism, the market hall has been frequently displaced by supermarkets and hypermarkets. These mostly generic, featureless structures are usually situated in commercial zones on the urban periphery or in other economically viable locations. They define what might be called the inert social space of the private sector.

In its early manifestations the market hall was connected, in some sense, to a utopian vision of urban reality or its possibilities. In contrast, the hypermarket arises as a reflection of the dystopic realities of city life.

My paper is an examination of these two social spaces: the market hall and the hypermarket, what they suggest as architectural types and social markers, and their place within the changing social geography of cities in Central Europe.

Spasić Ivana, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade & Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, Belgrade, SCG.

Asfalt: Constructions of ‘Being Urban’ in Lay Discourses

Studies of the symbolic and political loading of the urban/rural distinction in Southeastern Europe have privileged official and publicly visible sources, such as media, academic, and literary texts. This paper, while building on the existing research, looks rather at the level of daily social meanings and mundane ideology, seeking to examine some of the ways in which “urbanness” is constructed in everyday discourse by Serbian citizens – as part of their identity, as an ideological and emotional reference, and as a tool for establishing social and political boundaries as regards “Others”. The analysis is based on interview data collected in 2001-2002 for the research project “Politics and Everyday Life” of the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, Belgrade, in which references to “being urban” by the interviewees were very frequent and, more importantly, completely spontaneous. Therefore the paper takes these invocations of “urbanness” by the speakers and subjects them to an analysis which, though necessarily involving discourse-analytical procedures, has mainly a sociological thrust. It focusеs on questions such as: who is using the “urban” label as an instrument, for what purposes, and by what means? What words are used to describe “urban” (and “rural”)? Are there other counter-concepts to “urban”? Against whom (or what) is this usage turned? How does it articulate with social class or with political divisions in Serbian society?

Stankovič Petar, Department of Cultural Studies, Faculty of Social Sicences, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Sport, Nationalism and the Shifting Meaning of Football in Slovenia

The paper attempts to unveil the hidden political connotations of the changing cultural meanings of football in Slovenia. Its point of departure is the simple observation that so many different meanings have been attributed to the game of football in recent decades in Slovenia, that it is difficult to believe they are just a reflection of the varying fortunes of Slovene clubs and, later, of its national team. Accordingly, it is argued that the most important shifts in the meaning of football in the country have more to do with the recent construction of Slovene national identity as something essentially “un-Balkan”, rather than with the game itself. The radical devaluation of football in the period between the late 1960s and late 1990s, for instance, can be interpreted as a way of preventing the emerging Slovene nationalist discourse from threatening inconsistencies, since the other nations in former socialist Yugoslavia were better in this sport, something Slovenes, understanding themselves as a distinctively “European” (and therefore, “superior”) nation found difficult to cope with. Accordingly, football was interpreted as a “stupid” game, which not only explained to Slovenes the disturbing fact that the disdained peoples from the “Balkans” played better football than themselves, but also turned out to be an important element in the processes of legitimising the existing ethnic cleavages in Slovene society.

Stanoeva Elitza, Human and Social Studies Foundation, Sofia, Bulgaria.

Social Differentiation Translated into Spatial Arrangements (Sofia, 1878-1924): From Ethnically Enclosed Neighbourhoods to Class-divided Residential Quarters

After Sofia was announced the capital of the newly legitimised nation-state in 1879, it underwent a rapid and intensive transformation of its composition and appearance aimed to signal a transition from an Ottoman city to a modern European capital. This project concerned not only the physical structure of the city but also the lifestyle and public behaviour of its residents. The social dimensions of urban modernisation in Sofia are evident in the arrangement of the neighbourhoods, being the level of urban life where the domestic and the public spheres intertwine.

Prior to state autonomy the city was divided on an ethnic principle and the residential units (makhala) displayed social homogeneity and closure. The ethnic differentiation of districts was banned in 1882 and new principles of spatial division consistent with modern social stratification came into being. Emerging social inequalities were spatially enhanced in the zoning of the city and visualised through the contrast in the appearance of planned prestigious zones and unplanned settlements of the lower class.

Whereas the elite neighbourhoods were officially recognised as such and moreover, reserved for certain professional estates by the local government, the quarters of the industrial workers and poor people were self-regulated, internally integrated and externally isolated communities. Some even made attempts to institutionalise their spatial distinction, developing attributes of a self-contained traditional settlement and thus, inheriting the functions of the ethnic neighbourhoods, dispersing the duties and authority of the head of the makhala, among all members of the community.

Stanoeva Elitza ….

Ştiucă Narcisa, Ethnology and Folklore Department, University of Bucharest & National Centre for Popular Art, Bucharest, Romania.

The Ways to the Town

Villages show us a past marked by tradition and homogeneity while towns are places where different individualities and destinies meet. The towns established at the commercial crossroads developed quickly and became an attraction for peasants, offering them greater access to the world, employment and a complete new lifestyle.

I intend to present in my paper some aspects of the movement from the village to the town recorded in Calarasi (in Southeastern Romania, on the Danube). This town evolved from the state of a simple village to that of a market town and strategic point during the Balkan Wars, to become an industrial centre during forced communist industrialisation. However, Calarasi continued to be a sum of villages both in terms of its outlying districts and the attraction it asserted on the surrounding villagers. Many of them considered the urban space as a last refuge, an undesirable scarcely accepted alternative to outlive.

The stories are not only testimonies about lived history but may become the history of settlements themselves.

The life stories of some families from Calarasi are related to the history of this town and to the whole country. They tell of the abandonment of the transhumant shepherding, about the colonisation of South Dobrudja and the return from this territory, about the collectivisation process and the systematisation of the villages under the communist regime.

Stoimenov Ivaylo, University of Sofia “St. Kliment Ohridski”, Bulgaria.

Sons of the Wind: The “Rockers” Subculture in Contemporary Bulgaria

The 'Rocker' subculture appears to be one of the most durable western youth subcultures in Southeastern Europe. Despite the fact that today, the term Rocker is almost out of use when referring to the motobikers' groups in the West, it has remained the same in Southeastern Europe. However, it is not correct to define contemporary Rocker subculture just as a youth phenomenon, because it unifies bikers of different ages.

The paper analyses the aspects that distinguish the Rocker subculture from the dominant culture and from the other urban subcultures. It defines the common values that build this community. Key terms in this respect are freedom, movement (travelling), risk, solidarity, creativity (in a motorcycles' design) etc. The research is also focused on the internal divisions of the community, "good" vs. "bad" Rockers, "travellers" vs. city bikers etc. The paper also examines the stereotypes about Rockers in society through inquiry among persons without direct relationships to the Rocker community.

The methods used include interviews and participant observation. During the preparatory process the author attended a number of national motorcyclist meetings. The author is currently working on his Master's thesis research on the Rocker subculture.

Stojanović Dubravka, School of Philosophy, University of Belgrade, SCG.

Village vs. City: Anti-urbanisation Discourse and Ideology in Serbia at the Beginning of the 20th century

The most important changes in the process of the urbanisation of Belgrade started in 1893, when first loans were voted in National Assembly. Until 1905 central streets were electrified and most of the construction work on the water system and canalisation were finished. But, for finishing these works a new loan was needed, which opened a new discussion in the Assembly and among the public. The debate was very tense and the loan was postponed for the next year. The arguments for and against modernisation and urbanisation given in that debate are a very important source for anti-urban discourse analyses and can help us in better understanding of specific anti-modernisation and anti-European populist ideology, which represents one of the longue durée processes in Serbian political culture.

Stojanović Lidija, Institute of Folklore "Marko Cepenkov", Skopje, Macedonia.

Dazwischen: Mentalitätswandel und Hysteresis des Habitus

In diesem Beitrag geht es um die "narrativen Transpositionen" individueller Lebensgeschichten makedonischer Einwanderer im Hamburg mit Schwerpunkt auf besonderen Bestandteilen verschiedener Lebensstile. Diese Elemente werde im Rahmen der Habitus- bzw. Feldtheorie (Pierre Bourdieu) analysiert. Konkret wird die innere Urbanisierung, d.h. "die Stadt im Kopf" (G. Korff) vorgestellt, mit dem Ziel, ihre Mannigfaltigkeit beweisen. Fragen nach der mentalen großstädtlichen Zeit- und Raumaneignung und -wahrnehmung prägen schließlich einen Komplex von konzeptuellen Überlegungen zu Urbanität und Mentalitätswandel. In diesem Sinne beschreiben viele narrative Transpositionen eine wesentliche Diskrepanz zwischen Habitus und Feld. "Raum und Zeit in der Großstadt“ sind also völlig neue Erlebniskategorien und Werte. Dies ergibt beim ersten Aufenthalt eine mechanische Aneignung völlig neuer und „unverständlicher“ Handlungen und Gewohnheiten. Wie wird die Heimat (d.h., makedonische Städte wie Skopje, Strumica, Stip, Ohrid, Prilep, Bitola)erlebt und wie verläuft die narrative Transposition dieser Erfahrungskonstellation? Hier sollten die Bedeutungen von „Wohnung“, „Nachbarschaft“, „Straße“, „Verwandtschaft“, „Kneipe“, sowie die Arbeits- und Freizeigestalltung, die parallel zu Hamburg als zwei kulturelle Grammatiken funktionieren untersucht werden. Wie funktionieren Apathie und Energie und werden diese in Lebensgeschichten reflektiert? Wie werden die typischen “sozialen Phobien und Euphorien” erlebt und erzählt? Und schließlich wird die Frage gestellt, ob es möglich ist, eine totale Transformation des Habitus und den kompletten Übergang, von einer gemeinschaftlichen zur einer industriellen Gesellschaft, in einer einzigen Generation zu vollziehen?

Švab Alenka, Faculty of Humanities Koper, University of Primorska. Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Public Homophobia and Privatisation of Homosexuality: Everyday Life of Gays and Lesbians in Slovenia

The paper will address the topic of everyday life of gays and lesbians in Slovenia. According to various research results from Western countries, gays and lesbians are more likely to live in urban places (Sandfort) and thus constitute an important urban subculture. The research project carried out in Slovenia from 2002 to 2004 on a sample of 443 gays and lesbians confirmed these data – 62% of respondents in the sample do live in a major urban city, either Ljubljana or Maribor. These data seem to suggest that urban places are safer for gays and lesbians because of the higher level of privacy and social acceptance. The paper will question this view, showing that – at least in the Slovenian context – gays and lesbians are exposed to social exclusion, high levels of homophobia and violence. More than 50% of the respondents in the survey were victims of violence at least once, most often in public places, such as streets, pubs and similar. On the other hand, the private sphere, especially the social network of friends and increasingly families (parents), seems to be ‘safer’. There is therefore a double situation with a high level of homophobia on the one hand, and the so-called ‘privatisation’ of homosexuality on the other.

Taylor Karin, Department for Southeast European History, Karl-Franzens University, Graz, Austria.

Tourism and Leisure Culture in Socialist Yugoslavia: 1960s and 1970s

Tourism and travel as leisure are significant social phenomena that developed from a culture of the elite into a mass activity in the course of the 20^th century. In Yugoslavia after World War Two, tourism became part of the way of life of many families. While there is a considerable body of literature on leisure and holidaymaking as revealing aspects of ‘modern’ societies in Western Europe, few studies exist on the social and cultural transformations connected to urban recreation in socialism.

This paper will present the theoretical departure points of a planned research project at the Department of Southeast European History in Graz. From the 1950s, the Yugoslav state communicated a narrative of national unity and growing prosperity, mediated also through the idea of leisure provision for the ‘worker’. Facilities for leisure and tourism changed urban life, both as the manifestation of socialist ideology and in the sphere of social practice. But in contrast to other socialist countries, the nature of the Yugoslav system allowed the population significant space in which to determine the personal sphere and display social differentiation through consumption. Since leisure also gives rise to notions of community and citizenship, the paper will deal with the meeting points and tensions between political discourse, regional concepts of cultural heritage, urban identities and social life in the former Yugoslavia.

Tesar Catalina, Ecole Doctorale, University of Bucharest & National School of Political Sciences and Public Administration, Bucharest, Romania.

Shopping for Human Relationships

My paper is based on participant observation in three different supermarkets in Bucharest, as well as a case study on my next-door neighbour family. The “Carrefour”, “Cora” and “Bucuresti Mall” differ in their location (“Cora” is peripheral while the other two are close to the city centre), their organising space (the “Mall” is built vertically, the others horizontally), their prices, target customers, utility and in their way of displaying products. All of them are made up of a proper supermarket and shops selling non-food products. I could observe during my several visits to all of them not only the different social status of the customers, but how different spaces could model communication among people. Subscribing to D. Miller’s[12] idea that the act of shopping, beyond it being an economic exchange, speaks about a network of human relations (family structure, gender status, friendship etc), I propose to analyse customers’ behaviour and acts of speaking in the three different places. I will join my young neighbour family shopping, debating their choice for one of the three supermarkets on different occasions, observing their way of acting and communicating in the three places. My study is mainly constructed around the question: “Do different public spaces induce different behaviour?” and it uses M. Auge’s conceptualisation of space[13].

Tirca Miruna, National School of Political and Administrative Sciences, Bucharest, Romania.

City Representations through Public Space Use: ThreeCase Studies from Bucharest

In a former socialist capital city such as Bucharest, the scarcity of public spaces that allow for resting and gathering is an obviously visible fact. The main central squares are designed to be transitory points rather than places where one can sit and spend time. Urban architects and sociologists have agreed that the only location which could be accepted as a real square is Piaţa Universităţii (University Square). Its very popular meeting place, La fîntînă (At the fountain) brings together all sorts of people every day: students, teenagers, old people that sit around for hours and chat, sometimes shouting loudly their opinions through a megaphone, street children or homeless people that sleep on the benches. This square, with its gathering possibilities, also has a symbolic background and it is not by chance that during the Romanian Revolution in 1989, most of the people demonstrated and remained there for days.

Throughout the last decade, within a process that might be classified as inventing public space, locations like the central metro as well as areas in front of important buildings such as National Theatre have become acknowledged and established as both meeting and socialising places. These territories are shared but invisibly marked by different categories of young people.

On the other hand, using a public space like the Bucharest Mall becomes a sign of social prestige and an occasion to show oneself or to draw attention. It is the perfect place to be seen and to see others – the most important thing is one´s presence there. Observing and analysing how a post socialist city finds and establishes its own public spaces is, by all means, an extremely challenging, interesting and revelatory exercise.

Toma Stefania, Center for Interethnic Relations, Cluj-Napoca, Romania.

Symbolic War for Space and Time in Cluj: An Anthropological Inquiry into the Symbolism of Nationalist Discourses in Cluj/Kolozsvár

My study begins with the premise that the construction of national identity is realised in concrete social practices, practices that can be described in terms of time and space and are defined mostly by elements of social (it is more proper to say: public) memory.

We have a natural awareness that space is an organisational feature of our daily lives that is irremediably embedded within practical matters. But it is also “readable”. We can ask the question if this means that particular places have stable, enduring and obdurate world of spatial arrangements, the meaning of which is known in common by members of a community. It is possible, if we consider one, ethnically homogenous community. But in cases where the same place is shared by two or more communities, the space became the witness of a symbolic war, where the winner is who has more political power.

My attention was drawn to Cluj, the cultural centre of Transylvania. In this town two competing nations, the Hungarians and the Romanians, contest public symbolic space. The two national communities have to share the same territory, and have to negotiate a form of co-existence. As a consequence both communities try to appropriate the territory in specific forms appropriate to their own cultural tradition.

In fact, the fight is about identity markers – about the definition of the communities themselves.

Tomanović Smiljka, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade, SCG.

Meaning and Significance of Community for Children: Studies in Three Belgrade Urban Settings

The presentation aims, by using the operationalisation created by V. Morrow (2003), to explore the validity and specific meaning in the case of children of the features and components of social capital such as social networks, sense of belonging and local identity, community, and participation. The evidence for the analysis comes from a small-scale survey and eight focus group interviews with 13 – 14 year old schoolchildren carried out from November 2003 to June 2004 in three Belgrade urban settings.

The locations have been chosen as representatives of different types of urban settings, which are marked by unequal levels of development of social infrastructure, as well as by different types of organisation of residential space (individual or collective housing or housing blocks/estates). Various features of the three rather different locations – their proximity to the city centre, existence of parks, woods or the riverbank etc., together social infrastructural elements – especially sport facilities, playgrounds and shopping malls, were perceived differently by children as benefits in their neighbourhoods.

The evidence shows that community is not located in a geographical location but in the sense of belonging stemming from relations with other people (V. Morrow 2003: 177). This community of friends – a kind of «virtual community», which is situated in spaces around the school, streets and other favourite places, extends beyond the physical limits of the neighbourhood.

Treitler Inga, The Terranova Group, Knoxville, Tennessee, USA.

Hanging a Clothesline in Dubrovnik: Meeting Private Needs in Public Places

The path to urbanisation and modernisation commonly moves activities from the public into the private domain. For example, today, on any side street leading to Stradun, the heart of Dubrovnik’s old city, you will see clotheslines strung between private residences across narrow public streets, shared by two unrelated families. Clotheslines are a practical solution to one of life’s basic needs and they require cooperation. The image of clotheslines is introduced in this paper as a graphic and symbolic illustration of public cooperation in the practice of private activities. This paper focuses, rather, on another traditional practice in Dubrovnik, the corso, or walk, contrasting it to the American “work out.” The corso is highly ritualised public behaviour integrated into daily life. It meets the basic private need for exercise, fresh air, and social interaction, but is conducted in public, and places an individual in interactive social contexts. Cooperation in public spaces is a vital community element in Dubrovnik today as it has been for centuries.

The public-private continuum is established in this paper by contrasting the corso with the American “work out.” Homes in U.S. suburbs meet many basic needs, from home schooling, to home entertainment, religious practice, and even home gyms. While the corso, permits residents to remain both physically and socially fit, the American “work out,” may segregate the exerciser in the home, or in private clubs, in stark isolation from community interaction or cooperation. The U.S. data on the work out are drawn from a weight loss study of the National Weight Control Registry conducted in three American cities. “Societal privatisation” bears consequences worthy of examination as Southeastern Europe continues down the path of modernisation.

Vasiloiu Ionut, Ecole Doctorale Regionale en Sciences Sociales, Bucharest, Romania.

Urbanism and Science Fiction Literature. The Soviet Model Imported to Romania

Linking science fiction and architecture seems unusual. However, after the Bolshevik Revolution, science fiction and architecture were two of the most innovative forms of artistic creativity in the USSR. Science fiction can be compared with the architectural avant-garde or constructivist style, having in common their attempt to explore new spaces but at the same time contributing to the creation of a new communist world. Later this new world was “exported” to the Soviet satellites as well, including Romania.

The relationship between architecture and the socio-political context in which its creation took place is a complex one. In the case of Romania, the relationship between politics and urbanism is a key feature in the sense that one can perceive an overlapping of the political and artistic stages, though there was not always perfect synchronicity. The essay focuses on urbanism as conceived by science fiction literature, which emerged in Romania under Soviet protection, having in the city of Bucharest the archetype of real and imagined urbanisation as captured by the change from Socialist Realism to a modernist conception of architecture. The features of imagined urbanisation are based on science fiction literature, while the real dimension of it is given by the memoirs and speeches of the person most involved in the transformation of Bucharest.

This peculiar juxtaposition is the context of this analysis of the relationship between politics and artistic production (in this case architecture/urbanism and science fiction literature), in Romanian society of the 1950s and 1960s, a period which corresponds to a shift and a rejection of Stalinist models and practices.

Višnar Katarina, Urban Planning Institute of the Republic of Slovenia, Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Evaluating the Spatial Context of the Suburban: The Case of Ljubljana East

The paper examines the application of the evaluation tools characteristic for built heritage to a non-heritage spatial context, here represented in the case of the suburbs of Ljubljana East. Twenty years after becoming an administrative part of the city of Ljubljana, Ljubljana East remains not only rather suburban, but also non-urban, and practically neglected from the point of view of the urban. Though usual criteria would recognise very little heritage context within the suburban – and could even prefer not to evaluate it at all –, the crucial question asked here is what would happen if we widen both the concept of heritage (towards an integral heritage), and the social context in which this evaluation is to take place? In this study, the local community is approached in order to help articulate and establish a statement on spatial values existing within this particular context. The aim of the study is to address particular social, cultural, political, and economic issues in order to provide experiential data necessary for establishing a methodology for an inductive, complex, and holistic evaluation of the suburban spatial context as a foundation for future planning. The study draws on the basis of the recently conducted research into the role of the tertiary sector within the built heritage preservation field in Slovenia.

Voiculescu Cerasela, Faculty of Sociology, University of Bucharest, Romania.

Music and Postsocialist Lifestyles in Bucharest

This study aims to explore a much disputed product in the contemporary Romanian music industry, usually named “manele”. “Manele” could be best defined as a musical hybrid containing oriental, Balkan and Gypsy rhythms beside “traditional” Romanian music but also dance or hip-hop influences. It is disputed because of an ardently public and media critique but also because of its public influence. In many cases, this musical genre is labelled immoral and it is generally interpreted in the key of ethnic and racial stereotypes. This type of public discourse is approached by many intellectuals and journalists. From their point of view, “manele”, as representing a form of ignorance that threatens the “education of youth”, should be removed.

My analysis is focused on consumption and takes into account the socioeconomic context within which “manele” is produced and consumed. The songs’ lyrics and their cultural significance is an important reference point in the study of consumer behaviour. The lyrics contain a discourse of everyday life that increases the level of popularity of this music, made visible in the music charts made by local radio stations and internet pages.

This music is also associated with the economic and psychological features of both singers and consumers. The general trend of opinion “explains” the consumption of this cultural product in terms of poverty, the lack of education and social integration. However, it is difficult to circumscribe the pubic of this musical genre in terms of class, socioeconomic status, education, occupation, and other variables. “Manele”, in its contemporary form as consumer culture could represent the musical expression of postsocialist life trajectories. Industrial decline, the increasing rates of poverty and unemployment that occurred after 1990, have lead to complex life strategies (economic informalisation), which have been adopted by people in order to survive. Therefore, many of the lyrics are inspired by urban folklore. In this respect the lyrics contain specific attitudes and beliefs related to work, money, gender relations, friendship and kinship. The paper will emphasise the links between “manele” and specific urban lifestyles.

Vučetić Radina, Institute for the Recent History of Serbia, Belgrade, SCG.

Belgrade: A Patriarchal Town or a Modern City?

In my paper I will explore the urbanisation of Belgrade, from the mid 19^th century to 1941. I will trace changes that occurred in the city, from the first urbanisation plans to the beginning of the WWII. In a way, changes in architecture and in urban planning can be seen as a search for identity, because Belgrade went through three different phases:

- At first as a part of the Ottoman Empire, when Serb inhabitants of Belgrade lived in a small part of the town, called “varoš” outside the city walls.

- Then, after the expulsion of the Turks, Belgrade searched for its “Serb identity” – forgetting about the Ottoman heritage and making new urbanisation plans, in a wish to create a “human” environment and a real Serbian capital.

- Finally, after 1918, Belgrade became the Yugoslav capital, trying to find an equal place among European capitals, changing itself and modernising.

After one hundred years (1842-1941), what was created in Belgrade was described by architects and urban planners as a complete urbanist chaos. Was that chaos an answer to the question of identity? Being between East and West and between different cultures, Belgrade became, and still is, a “patchwork city”, with the permanent wish to be modern city.

Vučinić-Nešković Vesna, School of Philosophy, University of Belgrade, SCG.

Corso: The Total Phenomenon in Towns of Serbia and Montenegro

Corso, the circular promenade in the main town street, is a longue durée phenomenon in Serbia and Montenegro. Belonging to the domain of ritualised daily life, it has clearly defined temporal, spatial and behavioural rules. In the reminiscences of our interviewees, this informal public institution goes back to the 1920s and lives on in small and medium-sized towns until the present. The basic characteristics of each corso, such as the space it occupies, the socio-demographic characteristics of its participants, their routes and meeting points, as well as the density of their flow, all changed over time. These changes reflected the overall political, economic, social, moral and cultural trends in the society at large. They also mirrored the local changes created by the reconstruction of the urban cores, including urban planning and architectural interventions as well as the transfer of ownership of commercial objects that served as the meeting, socialising and entertainment places in and around the corso.

When clipped from a temporal continuum, each corso appears as a reflection of the local urban community. Its space is segmented according to the social structure of the community, reflecting the size, status and power of every social group distinct by age, gender, educational level and profile, social status, ethnic and religious belonging, even subculture. The paper will point to the most essential characteristics of this total social phenomenon (as defined by Marcel Mauss), using as an example the towns of Serbia and Montenegro in which the corso has survived.

Vujović Sreten, Faculte de Philosophie, Université de Belgrade, SCG.

Les Acteurs des Changements Urbains en Serbie

Au cadre de cette étude, nous présentons quelque-uns des plus importants acteurs des changements socioprofessionels agissants dans les villes de la Serbie post-socialiste en ce tournant de siècle. Nous décrivons les places et les rôles des acteurs principaux de la »production de l'espace« dans ce moment, de leurs hiérarchies internes, des conflits qui les animent, de leurs alliances horizontales ainsi que ceux dites verticales. Notons bien que le problème ainsi posé ne peut être abordé que du point de vue de la sociologie urbaine moderne.

Pour qu'on puisse mieux comprendre cette transformation agitée de nos villes, nous sommes amenés de prendre en considération tous ces processus de l'urbanisation qui se déroulent devant nos yeux, et que nous pouvons décrire d'une manière assez brève: une fuite accélérée de l'activité économique vers le secteur soi-disant tertiaire, une privatisation chaotique, une commercialisation de toutes les sphères de la vie, une mobilité résidentielle accrue, une ségrégation sociale de plus en plus aiguë. Il s'avère que les principaux acteurs des changements urbains faut-il chercher dans les ranges des hommes politiques, des PDG nouveaux, des hommes d'affaires, des »professionnels« du ménagement de l'espace... Et nous voyons bien que les citoyens, en tant qu'acteur potentiels des changements urbains, se voient-ils placées au niveau assez bas dans cette hiérarchie de pouvoir.

La notion de l'acteur urbain doit être prise ici dans la signification suivante: il s'agit d'un individu, ou bien d'un groupe, qui occupe une certaine position dans la société, disposant donc de certaines ressources sociales et, sur cette base, défendant ses intérêts et valeurs spécifiques; cet individu, ou bien ce groupe, entretient donc ses rapports avec les autres et, à partir de ces dispositions, dans une interaction active avec eux, met en forme son identité à lui même, et c'est à partir de cette prise de conscience qu'il propose des projets sur le développement de la ville et le renouvellement da la vie quotidienne.

Enfin, dans un niveau un peu plus élevé, on voit surgir dans notre projet un cadre de référence beaucoup plus large: celui où nous allons organiser notre matériel suivant une triade, disons, hégélienne: société/Etat – cité/pouvoir local – citoyen/logement, voisinage, quartier... Et nous voilà sur le terrain d'une exploration (en même temps global que local!) sur les stratégies »transformatrices« des individus et des groupes sociaux en Serbie.

Yeomans Rory, School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, UK.

Night and the City: Degeneracy, Renewal and the Urban Visions of Nationalist Writers in the Independent State of Croatia, 1941-1945.

The city was integral to the Ustashas’ propaganda and ideology. In many respects, the Ustashas were deeply suspicious of cities and urban values. The Ustasha regime and its supporters frequently portrayed the city as a dark dystopian nightmare, teeming with decadent influences. Only when the city had been regenerated by the pure blood of healthy peasants and cleansed of the ‘alien’ and ‘degenerate’ influence of ‘foreigners’ would a genuine nation-state be achieved. Hardly surprisingly, the Ustashas often idealised the values of the peasantry and eulogised the idyll of rural life. However, the Ustashas did not perceive of the city in an exclusively negative manner; nor was village life uncritically interpreted. Rather, the Ustashas aimed to remake national life by reconciling the long-held division in Croatia between the countryside and the city. Just as the presence of peasants would help Croatian cities return to what the Ustashas deemed Croatian values, so the importing of ‘progressive’ and ‘urban’ values could help to elevate the countryside and civilise the peasants. The Ustashas believed that modernity and technology would eradicate backwardness in the countryside permanently. Through an examination of propaganda, popular culture, novels and iconography, this paper examines how the Ustashas both demonised the cosmopolitanism of the city and embraced its modern utopian possibilities in an effort to mobilise the population behind a radical nationalist agenda.

Yilmaz Bediz, Institut Français d’Urbanisme, Paris 8 University, France & Marsin University, Turkey.

The Dialectics of Exclusion and Inclusion in the Example of Kurdish Conflict-induced Migrants Living in an Istanbul Slum

My presentation will discuss the physical living conditions and economic survival strategies of the Kurdish families who have been directly or indirectly affected by the internal displacement phenomenon in Turkey after 1993 and who are now living in an inner-city slum neighbourhood, namely Tarlabasi, in the Beyoglu district of Istanbul that some researchers would even define as a “ghetto”. The paper will comprise part of my ongoing PhD dissertation in which I try to combine the socio-economic aspect of the forced migration issue to the spatial aspect. I will thus propose to look at forced migration as a key factor of social exclusion that reinforces the enduring exclusion of the Kurds as an ethnic group from citizenship. Indeed, the Kurds that have been forced to leave their villages in the Southeastern Anatolia have experienced, during their migration and after having settled in an urban environment, unprecedented poverty. The paper will consider their coping strategies in this new livelihood including child labour, street vending and informal (or illegal) activities and try to answer the following question: Do these strategies represent the short-term survival mechanism of an excluded group or do they serve long-term integration, as it was the case for previous rural-to-urban migrants?

Zavratnik Zimic Simona, Science and Research Centre of Koper, University of Primorska, Slovenia.

Framing Migrant’s Existence on the Margins of Urban Life

The aim is to consider the question of the marginalisation processes that affect migrants foremost from two perspectives: segregation on the basis of geographical location and exclusion from social life. This basic observation can be easily viewed by various examples across Southeastern Europe, although the Western European experience does not differ very much. In the first part of the paper a broader theoretical frame will be given in order to identify links between geographical and social exclusion of migrants and implications for everyday practical life. In addition, the case of recent migratory processes in Slovenia will be contextualised from this perspective.

The starting point of the paper will be the statement that exclusionary practices resulting in marginalisation of migrants in contemporary urban life are the result of complex and interconnected public policies regulating access to citizenship, the position of the welfare state and migration and asylum policies. The latter should be based on labour market needs as well as human rights aspects.

To build coherent framework for the analysis of processes that are leading towards practices of social and spatial exclusion, three main concepts coming from different disciplines of social science will be introduced: citizenship, integration and human rights.

Zerilli Filippo, University of Cagliari, Italy.

Ethnographic Locations: Reflections on Doing Fieldwork in Urban/Rural Postsocialist Romania

The world has changed. This trivial consideration reflects the increasing proliferation in the flows of persons, goods, sounds, images, and ideologies (a.k.a "globalisation"). Nevertheless, in recent years a good number of scholars in the social sciences addressed the question of if it is really the world that has changed or rather the way we look at it. While anthropologists have offered various answers to this general issue they have unanimously acknowledged the specificity of their method, namely ethnography or extensive fieldwork. To what extent fieldwork and classical methods and techniques elaborated in the early 20th century are appropriate tools for social inquiry in the contemporary social world is a less obvious and relatively unexplored issue. Comparing fieldwork experiences the author has made both in urban (Bucharest) and rural (Transylvania) postsocialist Romania, this paper explores the way traditional field research methods (such as "participant observation", taking notes, conducting interviews, writing a diary etc.) produce particular knowledge within situated social contexts. While arguing against a radical polarisation of the urban vs. rural dichotomy (one largely constructed by social scientists themselves) the paper investigates how specific face-to-face encounters participate in the production of locality, and clarifies how ideas of space and place are modified and possibly created through ethnographic research practices. The paper will also tackle the question of how diverse "ethnographic subjects" categorise and conceptualise the anthropologist and his/her activities during fieldwork in urban and rural contexts.

Zlatkova Meglena, University of Plovdiv “Paisii Hilendarsky”, Bulgaria.

The City in Transition: A Bulgarian Case

The paper will present some results of my work in a larger research project about Bulgarian cities in transition. The first part will discuss some methodological problems about the state of the social sciences and humanities from the viewpoint of their interest in the city, why the town and the city were underdeveloped research subjects during the socialist era and how and on which ways they became to be more important and significant in the 1990s.

In that frame the paper will point out several topics from the case study of the city of Plovdiv concerning the changes in the last years on a local level, but with references for the context of Bulgaria too. To present the current situation and some trends of the urban development, the changes in urban milieu are studied on the following levels:

First - searching for and creating ‘new’ images of the city in the context of the process of EU-integration – discourses before local elections in 2003, projects of the local authorities, civil associations and media debate.

Second - restructuring and re-defining of the city as presented in urban planning, urban zoning, urban spaces and social division and mobility.

Third - how those changes and discourses are situated in the context of the local, national and international – how the city tries to find and to create emblems, “trademarks” and to develop strategies for tourism based on culture as a resource.

Žikić Biljana, Graduate School of Humanities, Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Representation of the Urban Woman: Comparative Analysis of Serbian and Slovenian Transitional Press

Mass media (re)construct reality while simultaneously representing it. Most of our social and political knowledge and beliefs about the world derive from media reports we read or see everyday. Therefore, mass media is one of the main territories where discursive negotiations over meanings take place.

I will examine the negotiation of the meanings of ‘urban’ and of ‘woman’. I am also interested in what way these two concepts intersect. I will analyse the Slovenian weekly Mladina (Youth) and Serbian weekly Vreme (Time), in the period immediately after the collapse of Yugoslavia and in the beginning of the transitional period. That period is interesting because of the instability of meanings and new narratives which emerged after the socialist period. Also, these two countries have the same socialist experience, having been parts of the same federal country, and I am concerned in what way that influenced public discourse, considering their very different political positions in the postsocialist period. I will examine how ‘urban‘ is constructed and how women are represented in the press? What is ideological construction of urban women in the postsocialist, transitional press?

I will use semiotic and critical discursive analysis to examine in depth the structures (associations and meanings) which are under the surface of words and photography in media discourse and which refer to the representation of urban women.

Žikić Bojan, Sinani Danijel, School of Philosophy, University of Belgrade, SCG.

How to Place the City? Conception of Urban Topography in the Organisational Agenda of Serbian Football Association

Football matches in Serbia and Montenegro follow the organisational patterns set and applied by the Football Association of the former Yugoslavia. These include the division of the lower leagues according to geographical criteria. The overall principle of classification employed is the provisional concept of the four-corners-of-the-World division of physical space of the country, and further classification takes into account the regional administrative particularities.

Being not just the capital, but outclassing the other “big” cities of the country five or six times, Belgrade also has a special position in the organisational agenda of the Serbian FA. Its physical space is conceived by the Serbian FA officials to meet the demands of the particular levels of competition. The most peculiar of these constructs used to be the one performed in organising Division Two competitions 2001-2004. At a glance, one is given no clue to the reason behind this concept: the Belgrade clubs of that competetive level were divided among the Northern, Western or Eastern groups of Division Two, ignoring almost all of the possible principles eventually to be considered for such an operation – physical topography of Belgrade, its municipal administrative organisation, or the geography of Serbia.

We intend to present the facts of this kind of urban topography conception in detail, to analyse it and to discuss the results considering: a) what Belgrade presents in Serbian cultural cognition in general; b) some special social, cultural, and economic features of the country in transition; c) the institution of the FA itself.

The transcription of Greek words in the Latin script used in this paper merely aims at simplicity

[1] Renée Hirschon (ed.), Crossing the Aegean, An Appraisal of the 1923 Compulsory Population Exchange between Greece and Turkey, Oxford, New York, Berghahn Books, 2003.

[2] Vasilis Kalaïtzoglou, Stis paranges, Historia mias zôis, [In the shanties, Story of a life], Athens, Hestia, 1993, (in Greek).

[3] Yiôrgos N. Lampsidis, The refugees of 1922: Their contribution to the development of the country, Thessalonica, Kyriakidis, 2^nd edition: 1989, (in Greek), p. 91: “According to the 1928 [Hellenic] census, by which the flow of refugees into Greece could be then estimated, refugees who arrived here numbered 1.221.850 persons, among whom 151.892 came before 1922 and 1.069.958 after the Catastrophe of Asia Minor.”

[4] Marc Mazower, Salonica City of Ghosts, Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950, London, Harper Collins, 2004, pp. 351-355: “The City without Muslims”, Oxford, New York, Berghahn Books, 2004.

[5] Yiôrgos Deliyiannis, Aichmalôsia, Exodos apo ti Smyrni, [War detention, Exodus out of Smryna], Athens, Idmôn, 1^st edition: 1997, 2^nd edition: 2001, (in Greek), p. 18.

[7] “Tourkosporos” was a common insult uttered to discriminate against Greek Orthodox refugees from former Ottoman lands.

[8] Kemper, Robert V., Jack Rollwagen (1995) Urban anthropology. In Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology. Ember, Melvin, David Levinson, eds. Lakeville: American Reference Publishing.

[9] Redfield, Robert (1947) The folk society. American Journal of Sociology 52: 293-308.

[10] Borthwick, Stuart (1998) Dance, Culture and Television: an analysis of the politics of contemporary dance culture and its tele-visual representations, PhD thesis, Liverpool John Moores University, available at http://www.staff.livjm.ac.uk/mccsbort/thesis/introduction.html.

Jecu, Marta (2004). Imaginea nomada. Turism visual si spatiu identitar, Master's thesis, Program on Anthropology and Social Development, The National School of Political Sciences and Public Administration, Bucharest.

[11] The research methods/techniques used are: participant observation; interviews; time budgets; content analysis of relevant material (electronic discussion forums, flyers, magazine interviews with electro artists etc.).

[12] Miller, Daniel, Making Love in Supermarkets, in B. Highmore(Ed.), The Everyday Life Reader, 2002, London: Routledge

[13] Auge, Marc, Non-lieux. Introduction a une anthropologie de la surmodernite, 1992, Paris : Editions du Seuil