Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Edited by
ABEL POLESE, OLEKSANDRA SELIVERSTOVA,
EMILIA PAWŁUSZ AND JEREMY MORRIS
Published in 2018 by
I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd
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Copyright Editorial Selection q 2018 Jeremy Morris, Emilia Pawłusz, Abel Polese
and Oleksandra Seliverstova
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List of Illustrations xi
List of Contributors xii
Figures
Figure 3.1 ‘Croatia at the contact of three cultural-civilizational
circles: Central Europe, the Mediterranean, Southeast Europe’
(Tišma 2015:23). 69
Figure 3.2 ‘Natural population growth of Serbia’
(Stamenković and Gatarić 2015:73). 75
Figure 3.3 ‘Forced migrations of Serbs from Croatia
in 1995’ (Stamenković and Gatarić 2015:74; the same picture
appears in Milošević and Brankov 2015:62). 76
Tables
Table I.1 Four Waves of Nation-building Studies and
Four Different Interpretations in Scholarly Debates 6
Table 3.1 Summary of Identity and Nationhood Messages
Found in Serbian and Croatian Fourth-grade Nature and
Society and Eighth-grade Geography Textbooks 77
Table 6.1 Lyrics from the song ‘Naša sudbina’. 137
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
The flags hang limply (Billig 1995:40–1, see also Skey 2015), but
how do we know that people don’t notice them? And that by not
noticing them, they are making us compliant national subjects?
(Fox 2016:4)
in a clumsy attempt to save food she mentioned that the food was good
and she would have liked to take some of it to her place to eat it later.
Her hosts were of course delighted and simply ordered more food, this
time to be packaged for takeaway. Doggy bags have no future in Georgia,
at least not for the moment.
Abundance and generosity in food serving is not necessarily
something unique to Georgia. Many populations in the world are proud
to display their hospitality as a confirmation of their uniqueness.
Hospitality is something proper to the human race, although in different
forms and expressions. Still, it is not uncommon to visit a country whose
inhabitants will contend that ‘there is no people as hospitable as . . .
ours’. True, Georgians have a saying, ‘a guest is from God’, and think
that even an enemy, once in the home, should be honoured as a guest.
However, what is important here is not who the most hospitable people
are, but how the feeling of being the most hospitable people affects
perception of one’s Georgianness. While to a naı̈ve first-time traveller,
this claim might sound very close to reality, the scholar is more likely
to concentrate not on the uniqueness of the feature but on the claim to
uniqueness. To a Georgian, the claim of being uniquely hospitable,
generous and friendly will be an obligatory step in performing their
Georgianness, make them feel ‘authentically Georgian’ and place them
in opposition to the idea of what ‘non-Georgians’ are.
Claims of the existence, or absence, of certain practices are as
important as the practices themselves. Herzfeld (2004) has defined
‘cultural intimacy’ as ‘the recognition of those aspects of a cultural
identity that are considered a source of external embarrassment but that
nevertheless provide insiders with their assurance of common sociality
. . . [so to argue that] state ideologies and the intimacy of everyday social
life are revealingly similar’ (2004:3).
Following this claim this book is an attempt to go beyond state-
centred accounts of national identity construction and to bring to bear
an everyday perspective on post-socialist identities. We borrow concepts
from a growing debate on the forms of nationalism experienced and
renegotiated at the level of everyday life (Antonsich 2015; Edensor
2002; Foster 2002; Fox 2006, 2016; Skey 2011) to engage with a post-
state framework for the study of post-socialist identity. The power
of consumption and mundane practices has been largely acknowledged
in the Western world (Edensor 2002; Fox and Miller-Idriss 2008;
INTRODUCTION 3
policy makers and its outcomes. Critical research has shown that this is not
always the case (Mylonas 2013). A state, comprising a number of large
organisations, is not monolithical but reproduced and enacted through a
set of practices and interactions between people and their institutions
(Desbiens et al. 2004; Jones 2007; Kasza 2002, Polese et al. 2014), a thing
that a remark by the former head of UNAIDS express nicely:
as well as the role of other actors in their everyday work (Ventsel 2012,
2016; Wigglesworth-Baker 2016) shed light on a practice that has
been defined as ‘spontaneous nation-building’ (Polese 2009, 2009b,
2011) and that can be defined as
ideas with which we do not necessarily fully agree, but believe can
help feed a dialogue on the issue and provoke further authors to engage
with it.
The first part of this book provides evidence of the often-neglected
role of educational institutions as platforms for renegotiation and
contestation of state ideas on national categories. The first chapter, by
Dilyara Suleymanova, analyses the role of schools in a multi-ethnic
environment, offering the case of Tatarstan. She views schools as both
agents of the state and scenes/platforms for ordinary people on which
they can express their national sentiments, but also where they can act as
creators of some alternative accounts of nation while challenging the
official ones. The main message of this work is that people, even very
young ones, are not passive receptors and their agency in the nation-
building process is important to consider for understanding the ways in
which national identity is shaped (see also Knott 2015; Thompson
2002). In the following chapter, Tamara Trost sheds light on school
subjects not often considered as classical channels for transmission of
ideas on nation. Investigating the invisible side of the nation-
formation process, she demonstrates how such subjects as geography or
even sport can transmit messages about national categories in Serbia and
Croatia. When examining primary school textbooks she notes subtle
messages on nation there, which are however less ethnocentric than
official ideas on nation presented in history textbooks within the same
educational system.
The first part concludes with a chapter by Agnes Patakfalvi-Czirják
and Csaba Zahorán, who first identify some failures in the institutional
framework for national identity in Moldova and then demonstrate how
ordinary people cope with the projection of Moldovan national
community produced by local political elites. The authors reveal how
ordinary people make sense of ideas on national and ethnic categories and
how they fill the gaps they find in official narrative. Borders are
presented here as physical places to observe the mundane renegotiation
of ideas on national identity in Moldova, across which daily different
cultures, ethnicities and languages intermix.
The second part of the book consists of three chapters that explore the
role of media in shaping and portraying national community. Marharyta
Fabrykant analyses commercial advertisements in Russia and Belarus to
reveal which ideas of nation local businesses use when addressing their
14 INFORMAL NATIONALISM AFTER COMMUNISM
consumers. The results of her study show that businesses rely mainly on
state ideas of nation and do not take into account non-conventional, non-
government opinions. This leads her to suggest that advertisements are
another channel of state propaganda and not a reflection of everyday
understanding of nation, shared by ordinary people.
Elizaveta Gaufman’s chapter concludes the second part. Following
some similar concerns of the previous chapter, she analyses the discourses
of Russian social networks. However, she presents such discourses as a
response to the state’s foreign policy. Her chapter reflects on an existing,
though rarely highlighted, dialogue between citizens and the state.
Gaufman focuses on people’s reactions to Russia’s foreign policy. She
maintains that, whilst supporting it, people incorporate new elements of
Russian folklore in which the main characters are usually important
geopolitical figures. Gaufman argues that the creation of a geopolitical
enemy, against which the current version of national identity in Russia is
built, occurs not only at the level of political elite and transmitted
through various channels as propaganda. The idea of enemy is developed
further by ordinary people and social networks serve as a platform to do
that. Gaufman speaks also about the generation of new national images
which then serve as references for collective national identification.
The third part of the book illustrates everyday cultural practices
through which national identity is formed. The first chapter by Petra
Šťastná presents an interesting case study on a music genre – turbofolk
– that developed in the former Yugoslav countries. Turbofolk, which is a
combination of pop and folk music, is symbolically rich in references to
both the socialist past and capitalist future, nostalgia for the East and
expectation of the West. Moreover, it has been always supported by local
political elites and widely shared outside of former Yugoslavia amongst
members of the Yugoslav diaspora. Such features give turbofolk a
symbolic power to unite people and to inspire a sense of collective
belonging among them.
The next work in this section explores the role of food in the
formation of identity. In particular, Raina Gavrylova’s chapter focuses
on the production of cultural identity in the hospitality industry of
Bulgaria. By questioning the standards of national cuisine used by
local hospitality businesses she looks at the way Bulgarian national
cuisine is shaped and how this affects its consumers, in particular
their perception of ‘national’. The chapter illustrates a dynamic
INTRODUCTION 15
AND STRATEGIES OF
BELONGING AMONG
ADOLESCENTS FROM
MINORITY ETHNIC
BACKGROUNDS IN RUSSIA
Dilyara Suleymanova
Introduction
School education is considered central to the processes of state-building
and formation of national identity (Weber 1976; Boli, Ramirez and
Meyer 1985; Reed-Danahay 1996). Through the state-wide network
of public schools reaching to the most distant places, education
disseminates and transmits official ideology across territories and
populations. Schools promote universal literacy, knowledge of official
languages and common communication codes, fostering the processes
of cultural homogenisation (Gellner 1983). Moreover, they are
institutional sites where nationhood is imagined, emotionally experienced
and reproduced (Coe 2005; Bénéı̈ 2008; Adely 2012). Mostly, however,
our understandings of schooling are based on studies that rely on the
analysis of top-down educational policies, official documents and
textbooks, which convey only a partial picture of the educational
processes. It is crucially important to see how these educational discourses,
18 INFORMAL NATIONALISM AFTER COMMUNISM
the role of school in maintaining and developing the Tatar language and
in cultivating minority ethnic identities and cultures (Graney 1999;
Faller 2000; Wertheim 2003; Gorenburg 2005; Alvarez Veinguer 2007;
Wigglesworth-Baker 2016). These included not only diversification of
curricula and extra-curricular activities in the conventional Russian-
language schools (that constitute absolute majority of schools in
Tatarstan) to account more for the ethnic diversity of the area, but also
expanding and supporting the network of minority language schools
(that teach in Tatar, Udmurt, Mari, etc., languages). The idea was to
create spaces within school that would better reflect the diversity of
identities, cultures and histories of particular regions and provide
resources for resisting cultural homogenisation and centralisation.
However, with the changing political and social constellations in Russia
in the early 2000s, such initiatives were regarded as a threat to the
integrity of Russian statehood and to national unity, so gradually they
have been dismantled through a series of educational reforms (Zamyatin
2012; Prina 2015; Suleymanova 2017). With the introduction of the
new education standards (2010) and of the Unified State Examination
(2009), the ethno-regional component has been removed from the
curriculum, thus leaving almost no space in the classroom for
representations and narratives of minority or regional identities.4
The schools of the provincial town5 where I conducted my field
research have also experienced the consequences of these reforms. The
town is situated in a predominantly rural district of Tatarstan and is
populated mostly by Tatars (around 80 per cent) but has a significant
number of other ethnic groups, foremost Udmurts, Russians and a small
percentage of Mari and Kriashen.6 Situated in provincial areas, far from
the centres of policy making, small-town schools are no less subject to
bureaucratic control (by regular school checks) than city schools. What is
special about the small-town schools is that they are firmly embedded in
the social fabric of their surroundings; teachers, parents and students are
connected not only through school but also through kinship and
neighbourhood ties.
The countryside surrounding this town has Udmurt and Mari
villages, in some of which there are primary schools that partially use
native language (Udmurt and Mari) in teaching and also implement
some programs of Udmurt/Mari ethno-cultural education. Most town
schools however instruct in the Russian language, even though the
SCHOOLING AND STRATEGIES OF BELONGING 23
What was apparent from this exchange is that ethnic categories were
situated on a certain imaginative scale of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ nationalities,
with Russians being clearly identified as the best nationality, Tatars as a
‘good’ nationality and Udmurt and Mari ethnic categories ones to be
embarrassed of.
We continued our exchange on the topic of languages and it was clear
that children from Mari or Udmurt backgrounds did not want to admit
they knew or spoke their native languages. As I was showing interest in
these ethnic communities and tried to ask them more about various
festivities or cultural practices they knew, some of them would gradually
be released from their embarrassment and would react positively to the
fact that someone was interested in these cultures. Some students started
to tell me that they knew or took part in some special Udmurt or Mari
events or ceremonies.
SCHOOLING AND STRATEGIES OF BELONGING 27
After the lesson, I talked to the teacher, asking her about children
who declared they were mixed Russian-Udmurt or Russian-Mari
backgrounds. She told me that these children in fact were not from
mixed families but from ‘pure’ Mari or ‘pure’ Udmurt families. She said
that many of them were embarrassed to admit that they were of Mari or
Udmurt ethnicity and their strategy was to say that they were only ‘half’.
But what do students actually learn about these ethnic groups at
school? When one looks at what textbooks or other educational materials
say about the ethnic communities collectively referred to as Finno-
Ugrians, one should admit that these groups are silenced in the
educational discourse. Rarely are they mentioned in the textbooks at
all.9 One of the Russian textbooks specifically designed to reflect the
diversity of ethnic composition and histories of Russia’s population
mentions Mari, Mordva and Chuvash (without mentioning the Udmurts
at all) in a paragraph about the politics of Christianisation of the peoples
of the Volga-Ural region,10 calling them ‘pagans’ and listing their names
in brackets (Danilov and Kosulina 2004). In line with these discourses,
one of the pupils told me that he read somewhere that Udmurts
performed human sacrifices.11 In the local perceptions of the inhabitants
of this area, Udmurts and Mari were also associated with ‘paganism’,
suspicious rituals and sorcery. It was not rare to hear from the pupils that
Udmurts use the evil eye and practice witchcraft and sorcery. Usually
these views came together with stories of how one of their relatives
had been bewitched by an Udmurt. Here we see how local ethnic
prejudices intertwine with imperial and Soviet (through knowledge
produced by Soviet ethnographers) constructions of Finno-Ugrians as
‘pagan’ communities, practicing sorcery and witchcraft.
with him. As I later found out, his mother was not Russian but Kriashen
and came from a Kriashen village. Though his public identity at school
is perceived as Tatar, except for his closest friends, no one in school
actually knows that he feels more Russian. Everyone around him
categorises him as a Tatar because of his Tatar name and Tatar language
competence. This leads to situations when ‘some people do not know
that I sympathise more with Russians and start to say bad things about
Russians in my presence. Usually I get angry and try to explain to people
that this is not true’.
In conversations with Damir, I became aware of his deep concern and
dissatisfaction with the processes of categorisation and ethnicisation that
he encounters both at school and as outside of it. He told me that
sometimes he reacts strongly against his classmates’ utterances about
Russian villages being dirty and abandoned and contrasting them with
Tatar villages that are ‘nice and cultivated’. These ethnicising discourses
also have an impact on his private life. Dating a girl from a Muslim Tatar
family became a problematic issue for him, which made the discourse of
ethnicisation a personal concern:
Like many of his other classmates, Damir is also involved in the game of
‘impression management’, presenting himself as a Tatar in the ‘front
stage’ of school but experiencing more empathy and closeness to Russian
identity in the backstage contexts. What distinguishes him from others
is that, in his interactions with other peers and friends, he tries to resist
ethnicising discourse, articulating a critique that fundamentally
questions the need to ‘divide’ and ‘label’. This example shows that
adolescents do not passively and uncritically reproduce and accept adult
discourses but are able to problematise and criticise the hegemonic social
narratives and frameworks.
SCHOOLING AND STRATEGIES OF BELONGING 33
Conclusion
These stories reveal how students devise ‘strategies of belonging’,
strategically deciding when, how and with what means to highlight
different ethnic markers and pass as a member of either this or
that ethnic group. In this account, adolescents and children emerge
as active agents who navigate complex social terrains, renegotiating
and actively co-constructing their identities as actors in their
own rights.
At the same time, these examples draw our attention to school as a
social scene where young people seek to gain recognition, status and
sense of social adequacy. They do so against the backdrop of dominant
societal discourses about ethnicity, gender and nationhood that elevate
certain ethnic categories and stigmatise others. Goffman’s theory of
dramaturgical analysis is one of the possible ways to interpret and
conceptualise the experiences of these students. It highlights the
performative, situated and interactional nature of identity that can be
strategically renegotiated depending on the situations and contexts
(front stage and backstage). These students find themselves in complex
social situations of moving between the status roles they seek to acquire
or have already acquired and ethnic ascriptions.
Indeed, the sense of belonging of these young adolescents is a
complex and multifaceted phenomenon that cannot be reduced to one
ethnic category but is rather shaped by the variety of experiences,
practices, roles, competences and ascriptions by others. Thus, as Jenkins
(2004:19) argues, the identities that others ascribe to us are as important
to our renegotiation of identity as our own understandings of who we
are: ‘It is not enough to assert an identity. That identity must also be
validated (or not) by those with whom we have dealings. Identity is never
unilateral’ (original emphasis).
What the interactionist approach less satisfactorily accounts for are
the ways societal discourses (on ethnicity, nationhood, gender) shape and
constrain these adolescents’ strategies of belonging. As public discourse
marginalises some young people’s ethnically ascribed categories, they are
forced to deal with this by either bypassing, renegotiating or renouncing
their ethnic identity or by engaging in cultural and political activism to
change societal perceptions and stereotypes. We have seen the signs of
this positive re-evaluation of ethnic categories in case of an Udmurt girl,
34 INFORMAL NATIONALISM AFTER COMMUNISM
Notes
1. For example, teaching of the Tatar language as an obligatory subject at schools as
well as teaching of the history of Tatarstan and the Tatar people. These initiatives
have been implemented within the framework of the so-called ‘ethno-regional
component’ in the school curriculum (Suleymanova 2017).
2. According to the latest Russian census results (2010), the population of
Tatarstan is 53 per cent Tatar, 39 per cent Russian and 8 per cent representatives
of other ethnic groups. Results available at: http://www.gks.ru/free_doc/new_
site/perepis2010/croc/perepis_itogi1612.htm.
3. The languages of these ethnic groups are attributed by scholars to the Finno-
Ugric language group.
4. Thus in Tatarstan such subjects as the History of Tatarstan and the Tatar people
as well as regional additions to other general subjects had to be taken out of
lesson plans and only teaching of the Tatar language as an official language
of the Republic of Tatarstan could be retained at schools.
5. For the protection of my informants I do not disclose the name of this town and
do not give precise numbers on its ethnic composition. This town is a centre of
an administrative district in Tatarstan and has around 16,000 inhabitants.
SCHOOLING AND STRATEGIES OF BELONGING 35
BORDERS OF A BORDERLAND:
EXPERIENCING IDENTITY IN
MOLDOVA TODAY
Introduction
Many experts see and refer to Moldova as a country of social cleavages
and permanent ‘identity crisis’ (Negură 2015; Calus 2014) or as the
terrain of the constantly battling ‘hot’ and ‘banal nationalisms’ –
characteristic for most Eastern European countries in their view – or as
the source of geopolitical problems (Otarashvili and Lidicker 2014).
Transnistria depends on the Russian government for support, which
means the issue of the country’s instability remains part of
public discourse (O’Loughlin et al. 2008; Calus 2014:77). The other
problematic topic reinforcing the instability agenda is the state’s
poor performance in defining differences and similarities of identities
(Verdery 1995). The dilemmas and uncertainties concerning the issues of
identities and politics of memory (Chinn 1997:43– 51; Chinn-Kaiser
1996) are highly influential; they determine the country’s stability too.
These dilemmas are strengthened by the forced mutual exclusivity and
opposition between different identity categories – such as ‘Romanian’,
‘Moldovan’, ‘from Moldova’, ‘Russian’, ‘Soviet’, ‘Gagauz’, ‘Jew’, etc., –
maintained by the political powers. The uncertain economic situation
and the slow change in social structures make this worse, thus
BORDERS OF A BORDERLAND 37
relation between the state and its citizens has failed to arise, thus it is
unclear whether this relation is based on citizenship (territorial) or on
ethno-cultural (national) affiliation (Negură 2012). Since the 1990s this
uncertainty has been exacerbated by many other factors. Romania has
established a political and cultural connection to ethnic Romanians from
Moldova through different institutions (similarly, Russian-speaking
inhabitants were connected to Russia and the Gagauz to Turkey);
the frozen conflict of Transnistria (see Blakkisrud and Kolstø 2011) left
borders uncontrolled; the serious problem of emigration emerged
(see Bloch 2013; Horváth and Kiss 2015:120– 1), the economic
hopelessness and the corrupt political system (Transparency Inter-
national – Moldova 2015) made the country a grey zone (Knudsen and
Frederiksen 2015).
All these issues make it hard for the state to establish legitimate
authority capable of creating a unified identity politics. Despite the
struggle of different political powers to nationalise and dominate
everyday life in Moldova, which manifests itself on institutional
level too, multinational and multi-ethnic contexts are normal, taken for
granted and the cultural environment is still highly shaped by the
former mechanisms and traditions of the Soviet Union. The general use
of Russian is appropriate evidence for this hypothesis.5 At least in
Chişinău, Russian is the obvious ‘lingua franca’ for different ethno-
cultural groups (such as the Gagauz, Jews, Bulgarians, Ukrainians).
Therefore, everyday interactions based on inherited social mechanisms
from the Soviet era overwrite the aim of the Romanian state to turn
Moldova into a ‘little Romania’. We can argue that nationalising
everyday experiences is most successful in the case of ‘hot’ nationalism
(see Billig’s definition 1995:45– 6). In the case of a region with a multi-
ethnic background, of people with affiliations to several nations –
national identity and citizenship become important when it comes to
issues such as employability,6 or when one has to decide whether one
wants to become a fan of Tiraspol’s football team or of the Romanian
national football team.
In Moldova the relation between the state and its citizens is
shaped mainly by the different ‘mother’ countries, by the national
minority groups and adjacent political entities the mother countries
support and their visions of a nation. There is significant dynamism
in the power field of the nationalising states, mother countries and
40 INFORMAL NATIONALISM AFTER COMMUNISM
Russian exclusively; the mother uses her poor Romanian when necessary
to solve administrative-official issues. The daughter met a Romanian
man and started a relationship. The parents oppose the marriage and the
young couple remain unmarried. This situation and the Romanian
origins of the father lead to constant fights in the family.21 They identify
as Moldovans and they would like to live in an economically more stable
and independent Moldova. They do not intend to get closer to Romanian
culture, traditions or to the Romanian language; they always find a way
not to use it or to avoid unpleasant situations. The interviewee made
remarks on this situation connected to the use of the Romanian
language. She experienced humiliation many times in interaction with
state and local bureaucracy, which makes her encounters with the official
sphere uncomfortable.
In this multi-ethnic environment, identity is often instrumentalised:
choosing an identity generally means a political statement. In the two
biographies some turning-points motivated by the international
contexts are present, which changed the ‘orientations’ of the interviewees
(‘pro-Russian’, ‘pro-Romanian’, ‘pro-European’). However, ‘choosing
identity’ is not only a political orientation or an emotional bond, from
the mentioned situations it is obvious that it can be a pragmatic decision
too. In the example of education, from the biographies it is visible that
the pattern of school choice (in the first case Romanian, in the second one
a Russian one in Russia) has not changed structurally after 1991: in both
cases the motivations show the efforts to synchronise identities and life
strategies. Later, choosing the right nation can also widen the
opportunities in the labour market (e.g., working in Western Europe
or in Russia). The exclusiveness of the identity categories may have
another effect: it can cause tensions in families that can lead to serious
conflicts (in both biographies).
Conclusion
Although the geopolitical, historical and economic situation of Eastern
Europe is essential to nation/state-building, in this chapter we have tried
to describe how these mechanisms are transferred to the very complex
everyday lives of people from Moldova. We connect different layers of
nationalism present in the country through a few examples of the various
manifestations of identity and identity politics. Our examples faithfully
show the many discrepancies between the aims of identity politics,
language issues, and politics of memory, on the one hand, and people’s
everyday life experiences and interactions, on the other hand. The inherited
ethnic/national variegation, identities and their multiple variations in the
everyday situations do not fit so neatly those ethno-political categories
offered by the political elites of Moldova and the involved countries.
The hegemony of political discourses glosses over the construction of
these categories and their interactions in everyday life. As we saw in
Moldova there are Eastern, Civic and Ethnic Moldovanism and Unionism
as the main political categories and ethnic categories of Moldovans,
Romanians, Russians, Ukrainians, Russian-speaking Slavs, etc. They are
arranged in a complex hierarchical structure; they derive from each other,
function beside each other and are situationally dependent and grounded
in actual contexts. The exact contexts define which category can be used: as
seen in one of our stories, when a mixed family consciously prepared a
child for life in the EU by ‘becoming Romanian’. Analysts often label this
phenomenon as Moldova’s ‘identity crisis’ and stress Moldova’s prolonged
limbo between West (Europe) and East (Russia). Although the term
‘identity crisis’ is accurate in many respects, it is also a good example of
political expropriation of identity-construction mechanisms. Petru
Negură states that the ‘identity crisis’ discourse has become an integral
part of the regime change narrative in Moldova, thus it has become
unquestionable, despite the fact that this so-called identity crisis is mainly
the issue of the ethnic Romanian elites and does not concern the rest of the
population of the Republic of Moldova.
Notes
1. We would like to thank the Erasmus Mundus Programme (Eastern Partnership)
for the possibility to research in Republic of Moldova and also ULIM
(Universitatea Liberă Internaţională din Moldova) for their generous hospitality.
54 INFORMAL NATIONALISM AFTER COMMUNISM
9. For the ‘weak state’ definition see Tsygankov 2007, Verdery 1995, 1996.
10. Oleksy calls it ‘Civil Moldovanism’ (Oleksy 2012).
11. The label ‘Unionists’ refers to the political goal of this group (the union of
Moldova with Romania). King calls them ‘pan-Romanianists’ (King 1994),
Oleksy ‘Pan-Romanists’ (Oleksy 2012), Danero Iglesias and Protsyk
‘Romanianists’ (Danero Iglesias 2013, Protsyk 2007).
12. Knott shows spectacularly the complexity of identity categories in Moldova,
although her categories are debatable – either due to their labels (‘organic’, etc.)
or either due to underrating ‘ethnic Moldovanism’ in her study.
13. Concerning the ethnic composition of territory between Prut and Dniester not
long after the Russian annexation, the majority of population was estimated as
Romanian-speaking (King 2002:19). In 1897, the Romanian-speaking
population of the region formed at least 47.6 per cent, while the Ukrainians
19.6 per cent, the Russians (Eastern Slavs) 8 per cent, the Jews 11.8 per cent, the
Bulgarians 5.3 per cent, etc., with Jewish- and Russian-dominated cities (King
2002:23). In 1930, the Romanians made up 56.2 per cent of Bessarabia’s
population, the Ukrainians 11 per cent, the Russians 12.3 per cent, the Jews 7.2
per cent, etc., but only 31.5 per cent of the urban population (Livezeanu 1995:
92). In 1989, the Romanian-speaking Moldovans formed 64.5 per cent of the
population of the Moldavian SSR, the Ukrainians 13.8 per cent, the Russians
13 per cent, the Gagauz 3.5 per cent. In 2004 (together with Transnistria), the
Moldovans made up 70 per cent, the Ukrainians 11.28 per cent, the Russians
9.34 per cent, the Gagauz 3.88 per cent (without Transnistria, the Moldovans:
75.8 per cent, the Romanians: 2.2 per cent, the Ukrainians: 8.4 per cent, the
Russians: 5.9 per cent, the Gagauz: 4.4 per cent) For more details see: Protsyk
2007, Appendix I.
14. According to different studies non-Romanian speaking Moldovan citizens do
not necessarily identify automatically with their ‘mother-countries’. A poll
from 2006 suggests that more than half (56 per cent and respectively
almost 60 per cent) of the ethnic Russian and Ukrainian respondents are
‘proud’ or ‘very proud’ of being a Moldovan citizen (see Protsyk, 2007).
Another complex analysis of the phenomena is given by Marlene Laruelle,
2015.
15. Igor Caşu identifies three stages of identity politics in the Republic of Moldova
between 1989– 2008: the ascension of ‘revolutionary, militant’ Romanian
nationalism (1989– 94), the years when identity politics were suppressed
(1994 – 2001) and, finally, the period after 2001, when the government made an
attempt to transform ‘ethnic Moldovanism’ from the level of ‘party ideology to
the level of state ideology’ (Caşu 2008:67 – 9). Since the downfall of the
communists led by Vladimir Voronin in 2009, the ideology of ‘civic
Moldovanism’ competes with the unionist ideology (to unite Moldova with
Romania) among the governing coalitions (Oleksy, 2012:131 –4).
16. The column was placed in the ‘Russian’ neighbourhood of the city Botanica.
17. In 1930, 36 per cent of the city was Jewish.
56 INFORMAL NATIONALISM AFTER COMMUNISM
18. See, for example: Vitalie Hadei, ‘Blasphemy. The Victims of Fascism jammed
by Mercedes-Benz’. Ziarul Naţional, 3 May 2015: ,http://ziarulnational.md/
blasfemie-victimele-fascismului-inghesuite-de-mercedez-benz/.
19. Marshal Ion Antonescu, leader of Romania between 1940– 4, regained
Bessarabia temporarily from the Soviet Union.
20. See Law nr. 3465 from 1 September 1989 concerning the languages used on the
territory of the Soviet Republic of Moldova: ,http://lex.justice.md/index.php?
action¼ view&view ¼ doc&lang ¼ 1&id ¼312813 . . See also King, 2002:
134– 5, Cimpoeşu, 2010:35 – 8. The third paragraph of the Law defines Russian
as another ‘language to connect nations’ besides Romanian. The thirteenth
paragraph of the constitution which was adopted in 1994 defines ‘Moldovan’
language as the official state language, but it guarantees the right to preserve,
develop and use other languages – like Russian – as well. See the Constitution
of the Republic of Moldova: ,http://lex.justice.md/document_rom.php?
id¼44B9F30E:7AC17731 ..
21. ‘He is a Romanian, you can’t trust him. We gave an opportunity for our
daughter to break out from this country, she could go to St. Petersburg to study,
but she came back and started a life with a Romanian. We are disappointed, we
felt she had a cultural background, a status quo, but everything goes to dust’.
(R6, 76, retired)
22. ‘It is de facto the second official language of the country’. see King, 2002:
173 and Ciscel, 2006:584.
23. This distinction has proved to have such serious consequences in everyday life
that it was suggested to use numbers (standing for different districts), thus for
Chişinău there would be used number 1 instead of its abbreviation.
CHAPTER 3
Introduction
Children learn about and are socialised into national and ethnic
identities through a variety of channels, which can, but need not, be
explicitly nationalistic in character. Most research examining how
national identities are transmitted to youth focus on overt messages
teaching what scholars call ‘hot’ or ‘blatant’ nationalism: lessons about
what it means to be a member of one’s nation and ethnic group and its
position towards Others, such as those found in history textbooks.
Leaders, politicians and elites invest great effort into propagating
official symbols and revising national history to fit current needs and
state-sponsored celebrations, holidays and commemorations serve a
similar purpose. As such, particularly in post-conflict areas such as
the Western Balkans, literature examining the role of history textbooks,
collective memory and memorialisation and the influence of how the
past is remembered in the present – all features of ‘hot’ nationalism –
has flourished in the past several decades. Yet, children are exposed to a
58 INFORMAL NATIONALISM AFTER COMMUNISM
variety of more subtle messages about the nation through other venues,
such as geography, music and arts lessons, as well as discussions about
current events such as sports competitions, the environment, tourism
and popular culture, which are typically excluded from traditional
nationalism and ethnic construction literature. Scholars of so-called
‘banal nationalism’ have highlighted the unconscious and ‘mindless’
acts through which nationalism is communicated in everyday life (Billig
1995), while the related field of ‘everyday nationalism’ (Fox and
Miller-Idriss 2008) has pointed to the importance of national identity
processes at the level ‘below’ of mundane life. Both of these approaches
have emphasised the significance and urgency of studying these everyday
forms of nationalism and national identity. Whereas schools are also
important sites of banal nationalism through non-national subjects,
they are nonetheless generally considered domains of ‘hot nationalism’
and typically studied for their perpetuation of national symbols and
history through national history education and official commemorations
and state holidays.
In this chapter, I attempt to bridge this gap, by looking at
how education of non-national subjects such as geography implicitly or
explicitly instil particular ideas of national identity in youth. The
research thus lies at the intersection of the ‘banal nationalism’ and
‘everyday nationalism’ literatures, both of which aim to turn attention
away from the purposeful, deliberate indoctrination of youth into
particular nationalist ideas and instead towards the more implicit,
everyday forms of nationalising everyday life. Billig’s notion of ‘banal
nationalism’ was originally applied to consolidated democracies
(‘established’ nations) where nationalism becomes absorbed into the
environment through flags, stamps, street names and subtle ‘us’ vs.
‘them’ distinctions, all of which serve as unconscious reminders of nation
belonging (1995:41 –2). Relatedly, the field of ‘everyday nationalism’
follows the ‘nationalism from below’ approach first introduced by
Hobsbawm (1991) and Brubaker (2004), pointing to the necessity of
studying ‘the actual practices through which ordinary people engage and
enact (and ignore and deflect) nationhood and nationalism in the varied
contexts of their everyday lives’ (Fox and Miller-Idriss 2008:537).
The two approaches are necessarily related, as research has demonstrated
the disparate ways in which exemplars of ‘banal nationalism’ are received
and consumed, pointing to the importance of studying them within
TEACHING NATIONAL THROUGH GEOGRAPHY AND NATURE 59
their everyday, localised contexts (Jones and Merriman 2009; see also the
debate between Billig and Skey in Skey 2009).
Indeed, the connection between nationalism and school subjects such
as geography and nature and society warrant additional attention.
Geography in particular defines notions of place, space and territory, all
of which are critical in the imagination of nationhood and nationalist
politics (Brubaker, in Sturm and Bauch 2010:186) and can instil long-
lasting perceptions of one’s nationhood among youth. Scholars have
pointed to the relevance of political geography in instilling national
identities and ideologies among students and discussions on the
relationship between the teaching of geography and nationalism abound
(Bar-gal 1994, Post 2007, Raento 2010, Schlosser et al. 2011).
In addition to topics of borders and territory, the natural environment
also plays an important role, ‘not only to naturalize the connection
between nation and territory, but also visually to communicate and
reinforce identity with the nation’ (Agnew 2004:233). Similarly, the
landscape and national landscape imagery can naturalise certain images
into a national narrative, providing cues of what the nation is: it
naturalises particular images into the narrative and over time, these
images elicit shared values and meanings (Häyrynen 2000, Daniels
1993, Schama 1996). Studies examining geography textbooks have
shown how the use of maps and images can establish a particular
narrative (such as a narrative of ‘pathological territorial nationalism’ or
perpetual territory loss despite inalienable rights to an imaginary
territory, in the case of Argentinian textbooks; Escudé 1988), as
well an instil representations of other countries and other peoples
(for instance, representations of Asia and Asians in US geography
textbooks; Hong 2009).
In line with the approaches outlined, and drawing upon previous
ethnographic research with youth, I examine how youth in primary
schools are taught about non-national subjects such as geography and
how the nation is nonetheless defined through domains not typically
considered as sites of ‘hot nationalism’. I focus on two post-Yugoslav
countries – Serbia and Croatia – which represent an interesting
comparison as they both experienced significant shifts in identity
discourse over the last three decades, from Communism through
ethnic war through democracy, allowing us to observe their experiments
with national identity reconstruction over time and place, shedding
60 INFORMAL NATIONALISM AFTER COMMUNISM
Methodology
The process of creating new states following Yugoslavia’s ethnic wars of
the 1990s was naturally accompanied by the re-writing of history in
support of the new nation-building narratives in each country. These
transformations are reflected in history textbooks, which have been
extensively studied as sources of blatant lectures in ‘hot nationalism’ –
ideological messages about what happened in the country’s past, the ways
TEACHING NATIONAL THROUGH GEOGRAPHY AND NATURE 61
in which the past should be remembered and who belongs to the ‘nation’
and who does not (Stojanović 2004; Koren and Baranović 2009; Koren
2015; Pavasović Trošt 2017).1 Both countries went through a process of
extreme ethno-nationalism during the 1990s, which somewhat lessened
post-2000 with the election of new democratic governments, as well as
with pressure from international organisations to gradually eliminate
overtly nationalistic and normative text from textbooks. In Croatia, the
textbook market began opening in 2000, while in Serbia this move
happened in 2010, meaning that now, up to four or five alternative
textbooks are offered for each subject and there is no longer just one
‘official’ textbook for the entire country. The language and tone in these
new textbooks is markedly less overtly nationalistic, with the various
textbook ‘versions’ offering more or less nationalistic content (the choice of
which textbook is used is made by the teacher or school).2
In this chapter, instead of the traditional focus on history textbooks,
I instead rely on geography and nature and science textbooks. I analyse
textbooks used in the current school year in the fourth grade (Nature and
Society) and eighth grade (Geography) in Serbia and Croatia. Schooling is
still centralised in both countries following a similar curriculum structure,
meaning that students go through the same topics at the same time. The
first time students are introduced to topics of national relevance is in the
class called ‘Nature and Society’ (Priroda i društvo), when they learn about
national borders, national symbols and national history, though supposedly
under the pretext of a non-nature science/society curriculum. This course is
deliberately broad and covers brief introductions to an extensive range of
topics, including units on land, water, the sun, flora and fauna, the human
body, history, the country’s landscape, cities, cultural and historical
landmarks, etc. In Croatia, the second half of the textbook is devoted to
covering the natural resources, economy, towns and historical and cultural
landmarks of each of the four regions of Croatia, while in Serbia, a greater
emphasis is placed on nature broadly, natural phenomena, elementary
physics and chemistry, the human body and basic health; with the second
half also covering Serbian geography. The next time youth in Serbia and
Croatia are exposed to topics of national relevance is in eighth grade: both
through a designated history class and in a geography class. Eighth-grade
geography textbooks include important messages about the nation and
national identity, though less overtly than in history textbooks: they
discuss borders, physical and geographical distinctions of regions, basics of
62 INFORMAL NATIONALISM AFTER COMMUNISM
economy, climate, tourism, population, flora and fauna and natural and
cultural heritage.
In order to systematically analyse the content in these textbooks,
I surveyed all of the Nature and Society and Geography textbooks in use
for the 2016–17 school year, for a total of fourteen textbooks.3 The two
countries have similar textbook publishing processes – as noted
previously, the textbook markets are open, meaning that several different
publishers offer different ‘versions’ of the same textbooks, though all
follow the same government-mandated curriculum and must be approved
by the Ministry of Education. In practice, this usually means around three
to five publishers: each country’s former state-owned publishers – Školska
knjiga in Croatia and Zavod za udžbenike in Serbia – and several smaller
ones (in Zagreb, these are Alfa and Profil, while in Serbia they include
Klett, Bigz, Freska, Novi Logos and several smaller publishers with
limited circulation). As they follow the same curriculum and go through a
rigorous assessment at the Ministry of Education, differences between the
various publishers’ editions cannot be significant, but are nonetheless
noticeable: as reviewed elsewhere (Pavasović Trošt 2012), the textbook
author’s ideological slant is clearly perceptible in the language, tone and
details included or excluded in the textbook. As such, surveying several of
the publishers within each country allows for a glimpse into the internal
domestic national identity debates within the countries, in addition to
comparing the content cross-nationally. When examining the textbooks,
I paid attention not only to the actual text, but also the amount of space
devoted to a particular topic, number and type of pictures and maps,
organisation of topics, as well as the supplementary questions for review
and further instructions. Later, I organise the findings of the textbook
analysis by the following topics: messages about national identity through
history and messages about national identity through language, the
environment, Kosovo and Europe.
much more time explicitly discussing the 1990s war (in Croatia referred
to as the ‘Homeland war’), while Serbian textbooks, with some
exceptions, spend extensive time covering medieval history yet avoid
going into any discussions of the 1990s wars. Both extremes are
problematic. These discussions can primarily be found overtly in fourth-
grade nature and society textbooks in designated units, while in the
eighth grade they are scattered throughout the textbook in semi-related
topics (such as migration and population characteristics), since eighth-
grade students concurrently attend an actual history course, so the
geography curriculum does not specifically include historical topics.
Croatian fourth-grade nature and society textbooks start the historical
discussion in the sixth to seventh centuries, introducing Croatian
national identity and desire for independence as unchanging and
uninterrupted over the past century. These sections are titled ‘Croats and
their New Homeland’ or ‘The arrival of Croats to their Homeland’ and
clearly present a narrative of non-interrupted inhabitance of Croats in
the country that is presently Croatia, from the sixth century until
present times (Kisovar Ivanda et al. 2015:74; Ćorić Grgić and Bakarić
Palička 2016:64; Jelić 2015:46; Škreblin et al. 2015:50). This clearly
supports the narrative of the ‘millennial thread of Croatian statehood’,
which continues throughout the textbooks: the next subunit, referring
to the period of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, is called ‘The
century-long struggle for preserving independence’ (stoljetna borba za
očuvanje samostalnosti) or ‘Croatian states and the battle for the homeland’
(Kisovar Ivanda et al. 2015:78; Škreblin et al. 2015:54). Then, when
speaking of the nineteenth century, two of the textbooks have special
units on ‘The battle for the Croatian language’ (borba za hrvatski jezik,
Ćorić Grgić and Bakarić Palička 2016:70; Kisovar Ivanda et al.
2015:80), which further the story of an uninterrupted language, nation
and statehood and the idea of the century-long battle/struggle to achieve
these, from the sixth century until present times. More problematically,
in the few sentences on the nineteenth century, the textbooks include
lists of the ‘many Croats who gave their contribution’ to creating their
independent state, whose ‘ideas and actions are invaluable for the
Croatian people’; in two of the textbooks, this list, accompanied by a
picture, includes Ante Starčević, a highly controversial political
figure known for his anti-Semitism and anti-Serb nationalist ideology
(Kisovar Ivanda et al. 2015:81; Jelić 2015:53). The narrative of a
64 INFORMAL NATIONALISM AFTER COMMUNISM
themes for each era: ‘where and how did people live?’, ‘what kinds of jobs
did people do?’, ‘where did people study?’ and ‘how did people of this era
dress?’; the subunit on ‘Serbia through the centuries’ includes barely any
text, simply maps with territory and pictures of the leaders of the time –
both effectively avoiding discussion of potentially problematic aspects of
history (Gačanović et al. 2015:136). In eighth grade, the war manages to
creep into the text, but in a relatively hidden manner: for instance, the
unit on ‘Migrations’ covers migrations from ancient to contemporary
times and does not mention the events of the 1990s anywhere in the text,
but nonetheless includes a picture of a column of refugees during
operation ‘Storm’, with the subtitle ‘Forced migrations of Serbs from
Croatia in 1995’ (see Figure 3.3). Sparse text on the war can be found in
the units on ‘Serbs outside of the borders of Serbia’, in which the war is
called a ‘civil war’, during which many Serbs were forcibly displaced
from the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Stamenković and
Gatarić 2015:91–2; Milošević and Brankov 2015:106– 7), as well as
that many Serbs left Serbia proper due to the ethnic conflicts, sanctions
imposed upon Serbia and the economic crisis that resulted (Kovačević
and Topalović 2016:175). This section notes that Serbs owned around
two-thirds of the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina before the war, but
due to the Dayton agreement of 1995, now only own 49 per cent
(Stamenković and Gatarić 2015:92), similarly refering to the loss of
Serbian population in Croatia, which fell from 12.2 per cent before the
wars to only 4.3 per cent today, which is attributed to ‘the civil war and
forced migrations of Serbs’ (Milošević and Brankov 2015:107). Also
importantly, some of the eighth-grade textbooks discuss the Federation
of BiH and Republika Srpska as two separate countries, not two entities
of the country of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which is also a reflection of
the mainstream nationalist narrative and is quite problematic for future
relations between the two countries.
Finally, aside from the units on population and migration, the eighth-
grade textbooks also highlight the centrality of Kosovo’s churches and
cultural heritage to Serbia, for instance in units on UNESCO-protected
sites, which include pictures and descriptions of four of Kosovo’s
Figure 3.3 ‘Forced migrations of Serbs from Croatia in 1995’
(Stamenković and Gatarić 2015:74; the same picture appears in Milošević
and Brankov 2015:62).
Table 3.1 Summary of Identity and Nationhood Messages Found in Serbian and Croatian Fourth-grade Nature and Society and
Eighth-grade Geography Textbooks
Serbia Croatia
History Prior to Extensive discussion of middle ages and ‘golden’ era Narrative of continuous and uninterrupted
twentieth of twelfth and thirteenth centuries. statehood since arrival of Croats in sixth and
century seventh centuries; focus on battle for Croatian
language.
World War II Brief coverage; no discussion of ISC, četnik and partisan Brief coverage; no discussion of ISC.
movement described as side-by-side movements.
1990s wars Wars cursorily mentioned as part of Yugoslavia’s Extensive discussion of Homeland war and
disintegration, sections on migration and Serbs in the Serbian ‘aggression’ throughout the textbook as
diaspora and in photographs accompanying the text, well as in dedicated subunits.
no discussion of culpability; Federation and RS in
Bosnia discussed as two separate countries.
Identity Environment Mentions need to preserve in environment in non- Emphasis in dedicated units on environment,
dedicated units; emphasis more on universal social Croatia’s natural wonders, Adriatic sea as ‘our’
responsibilities as ‘citizens of the world’, dedicated sea since eleventh century, climate change and
sections to UNESCO-protected sites. what each Croat citizen should be doing to
preserve the environment.
Europe Discussions of EU and regional integrations provided Explicit categorisation of Croatia as central-
in positive, factual terms, stating Serbia’s clear European and Mediterranean; emphasis on EU
commitment to the EU; global identity emphasised accession and its implications.
in light of UNICEF, human and children’s rights.
Table 3.1 Continued
Serbia Croatia
Language Mentioned cursorily without separate unit. Extensive discussion in separate units on
importance of Croatian language and the ‘battle’
for preserving Croatian language.
Overt identity No overt discussion. Explicit discussion of cultural-civilisational
narratives identity circles.
Other identity (1) Discussion of Kosovo as an indisputable part of (1) Millennial thread of statehood;
narratives Serbia or with explicit remark that Serbia will never
recognise its independence; mention of Kosovo’s
fertility rate;
(2) Victimhood – loss of territory. (2) Victimhood – loss of territory; foreign
control.
TEACHING NATIONAL THROUGH GEOGRAPHY AND NATURE 79
While far from a test of how effective the messages analysed in this chapter
resound on the ground in the two countries, recent ethnographic research
in the two capital cities has pointed to significant differences in the way
youth in the two countries understand their own identities (see Pavasović
Trošt 2012). This research has shown that Croatian youth are able to
conceive of their national identity in non-ethnic terms, such as through
pride in the seaside and clean air, while youth in Serbia – even those
explicitly trying to escape nationalist discourse – have difficulties
expressing their national identity without resorting to ‘hot’ nationalist
symbols such as historical battles and war. This is largely supported by
studies demonstrating that Serbian nationalists have successfully co-opted
traditional national symbols into their illiberal discourse (Rossi 2009),
whereas Croatian youth are able to combine traditional nationalist symbols
with a pro-Western, democratic narrative, also explained by Subotić (2011)
as a process of identity convergence vs. divergence between European and
national values. Similarly, when asked about their sources of national pride
explicitly, Serbian youth mention non-national events such as tennis or
Eurovision successes, pointing to both the void in positive, present-day
pride in Serbian national discourse; whereas in Croatia, youth are
overwhelmingly proud of Croatia in the present, pointing to the success of
the post-2000 Croatian narrative of the achieved millennial dream of
statehood (see Pavasović Trošt 2017 and Najbar-Agičić and Agičić 2007).
These and other ethnographic studies fall into the realm of ‘everyday
nationalism’, discussed in detail already, which importantly can show us
how these banal symbols are received on the ground. While not necessarily
measuring the effect of instruction of non-national subjects such as
geography and nature and society, they nonetheless point to the extent to
which non-nationalist terms such as pride for the seaside, clean air or sports
successes can and do inform youth’s understandings of their own national
identity, sometimes to a larger extent than official national history
narratives (Yerkes 2004; Pavasović Trošt 2012). As such, the analysis
points to the possibility of non-national subjects such as geography, the
environment, tourism and sports and music successes to provide youth
with important beyond-ethnic ideas about their national identity.
These findings raise several additional questions. First is the question
of the extent to which we can even consider geography and nature and
society instruction as ‘banal’, as the lessons provided are occasionally
quite explicit and far from ‘mindless’, as per Billig’s definition of the
TEACHING NATIONAL THROUGH GEOGRAPHY AND NATURE 81
Notes
1. Most notably, Dubravka Stojanović (for Serbian textbooks) and Snježana Koren
and Magdalena Najbar-Agičić (for Croatian textbooks) and several other authors
have continuously provided excellent reviews of the state of history education in
their respective countries and are involved in on-going projects of producing less
biased and less normative, agenda-driven history education (see especially
Stojanović 2004 and Koren and Baranović 2009). Apart from these, many other
organisations and scholars have been involved in history textbook research in the
two countries; see volumes by Hopken (1996), Koulouri (2002), Brunnbauer
(2004) and Dimou (2009).
2. Nonetheless, the battle over the national identity narrative and the ‘correct’
version of history in textbooks continues to this date, with the main points of
contention including the events of World War II and the Independent State
of Croatia, the nature of the Communist regime, as well as the dissolution of
Yugoslavia through the wars of the 1990s and culpability for war crimes.
3. Several other editions were approved, but not analysed in this text due to space
considerations and/or the limited circulation of the textbooks: for Serbia,
I limited the analysis to seven textbooks, which excludes editions by the
publishers Novi Logos, Eduka, Gerundinijum, Freska and Nova Škola; for
Croatia, all approved textbooks for both fourth and eighth grade were analysed
(seven in total), with the exception of the publisher Ljevak.
4. For an explanation of the various movements during World War II and the
conflicts regarding their re-interpretation in recent times, see Mihajlović Trbovc
and Pavasović Trošt 2013.
5. For extensive reviews of the long list of studies demonstrating the relevance of
textbooks, see Apple and Smith (1991) and Soysal and Schissler (2005).
6. For a review of the literature on the development of identities among youth, see
Scourfield et al., 2006.
CHAPTER 4
Marharyta Fabrykant
Introduction
Studies of everyday life have been steadily gaining prominence in social
science. In cultural studies, the focus on everyday life enables a non-
positivist, empirically based approach to build general theory via specific
cases, intertwining numerous cultural motifs. In sociology, Sztompka
(2008) went so far as to announce the sociology of everyday life as a
third paradigm able to solve the sociological tension between a focus on
structure versus agency. In the interdisciplinary field of nation and
nationalism studies, an attempt to shift attention towards everyday
manifestations of nationality (Fox and Miller-Idriss, 2008) was initially
perceived by A. Smith (2008), in a now-classic contribution to the field,
as a threat to the previous historical focus and the adoption of a shallow
temporal view. Subsequent studies, however, demonstrated the multiple
opportunities of approaching national identities, and not least the
representations of national history, via everyday life. This approach has
proved especially fruitful in supplementing the impact of the actual
84 INFORMAL NATIONALISM AFTER COMMUNISM
spelled with a yer at the end, but also used this letter as its shortened
name. The use of the last letter instead of the first one, as is habitual in
abbreviations, shows the advertising trend of the time, as well as the
word choice itself, meaning a distinctly antiquated, but certainly not
pre-nineteenth-century synonym to a modern word ‘businessman’
(‘biznesmen’ v. ‘kommersant’).
The pre-reform spelling was combined with brand names
characteristic of the late-nineteenth-century Russian businesses,
specifically by calling the new brands by male Russian family names,
such as Korsunov (a brand of elite chocolate and sweets), sometimes
in their Frenchified versions, again referring to the nineteenth-century
practices, such as the Tin’koff bank or Smirnoff vodka. Importantly,
while these two brand names sound familiar, only one of them genuinely
belongs to the nineteenth century. The Smirnoff distillery was founded
in 1863 by Piotr Smirnov, who later emigrated and sold his brand rights
to a British company. The attempt of his great-grandson to revive the
brand under the name Smirnov (here again, ending with yer) resulted in a
dispute eventually resolved by Smirnov brand becoming a daughter
company of Smirnoff. The Tin’koff bank, on the other hand, was founded
in 1994 by Russian businessman Oleg Tin’kov and the antiquated
version of the name, no longer used in the transliteration of similar
Russian surnames, is thus purely a stylisation. The overt merging of past
and present made the nineteenth-century version of Russian national
identity, based on its attachment to European high culture, spread
throughout Russian branding and advertising of the 1990s. The
abundance of nineteenth-century-looking brand names with yers, the
usually subdued visual representations, formed a new image of Russian
cities that soon became entrenched in everyday life.
The situation changed in the early 2000s, when the nineteenth
century as a source of the prototypical Russian national identity was
effectively hijacked from the new Russian businesses by a very different
power – mass culture propagating distinctly illiberal political views.
In the 1990s, the imagery of the romanticised nineteenth century of
the kind formed in the commercial advertising attracted hardly any
interest from the then-intense and highly competitive political
campaigners. The Russian liberals paid little attention to popularisa-
tion of their views and to the national identity issue. Their rivals first
relied on Soviet nostalgia and, when playing the national card, such as
REPRODUCTION OF EVERYDAY NATIONHOOD 93
and the present. Thus, the commercial use of national identity symbols
may only seem to integrate the national identity into everyday life.
Consumption of national identity may, on the contrary, become a
consumption of escapism, driving all things national from everyday
life. This single case demonstrates the multiple disruptions between
the national and the local, between the national and the historical,
between the national and the everyday and, ultimately, between the
national and the nationals, Belarusian identity and Belarusians
themselves.
Another example of the contradiction inherent in Belarusian identity
is another Minsk café called the ‘Old Town’. Unlike the Grunewald café,
it makes use of the location at a historical spot in Minsk. Both its name
and its exterior, reminiscent of late medieval towns, suggest an attempt
at the commercialisation of the national urban culture, particularly after
the early post-Soviet Belarusian nationalist historians tried to create an
image of the medieval Minsk as a highly developed European town with
lively trade and efficient self-government. The latter was especially
important, because for several centuries Minsk, along with a number of
other now-Belarusian and Western European towns, enjoyed the
Magdeburg right to self-government, which did not exist in Russia – a
fact framed in the nationalist discourse as a proof of supposed European
superiority of Belarus over Russia. Strangely, however, the café does not
build on this rich material. Instead, it offers typical peasant cuisine
described in a countrified folksy manner, with proverbs and
colloquialisms reminiscent of the representations of ‘typical Belarusians’
in Soviet Belarusian fiction. This folksy manner may be partly due to the
initially selected target audience. Unlike the Grunewald café, the Old
Town first positioned itself as an affordable place of leisure for young
people. The inconsistency between the urban exterior and the countrified
interior reflects a much debated controversy within Belarusian
nationalist identity – the lack of a recognisable national urban culture.
Rural culture, based on contemporary adaptations of folklore, looks
genuinely Belarusian, but is not as prestigious, while the urban high
culture cannot be easily traced to any past tradition. Here again, as in the
previous case, nationalist historians’ inattention to the everyday life
dimension of the past hinders the integration of national identity into
present everyday life. On the other hand, the customers are not expected
to directly identify themselves with the bucolic Belarusian peasants.
REPRODUCTION OF EVERYDAY NATIONHOOD 99
The folksy atmosphere hidden behind the old town exterior invites its
customers to relax and ironically look down at the past generations of
Belarusians – a more attractive option for the young people than
looking up to the medieval heroes of the Grunewald battle. This case
resembles the Russian case of the Nikola kvas, since both show how the
gap between the outdated national self-image and the contemporary
lifestyle of the target audience can be commercialised not by creating
links, but, on the contrary, by emphasising the contradiction ironically.
These two cases highlight vexed issues in contemporary Belarusian
national identity, which mostly originated in the early years of
independence when not only the specific traits, but even the very
existence of Belarusian national identity was a subject of doubt. Over the
last few years, however, researchers started to speak of a habitualised
Belarusian identity, especially among the generation born in
independent Belarus. These processes are difficult to trace because of
unclear operationalisation and one of their most vivid manifestations, at
least in the Belarusian case, is the emergence of new commercial
products and new kinds of advertising.
One such example, building on the two previous cases of cafés, is a
pub opened in 2016 under the name ‘1067’. The minimalist design
and the standard international menu do not overtly suggest any reference
to national identity. It is only cognoscenti who would recognise 1067 as
the year when Minsk was first mentioned in written historical sources.
Unlike the Old Town and the Grunewald cafes, this pub does not
attempt to recreate as many symbols of the national past as possible,
but relies on a single reference to the city’s long history. Even more
importantly, it does not adopt a picturesque touristy version of
‘the national flavour’, but relies on a single symbol to commercialise
national and local patriotism. Thus, the new Belarusian national identity
enters everyday life not by recreating the atmosphere of the past, but by
making mere knowledge about the past sufficient and mundane.
Another and earlier example of the modernisation impact on
Belarusian national identity refers to the symbol that so far has proved
the most problematic to integrate into everyday life. This symbol is the
Belarusian language. Since most Belarusians can at best understand
Belarusian, but not speak it fluently and use in their everyday life either
Russian or Trasianka (a mixture of Russian and Belarusian analogous to
the better-known Ukrainian Surzhik), the use of the Belarusian language,
100 INFORMAL NATIONALISM AFTER COMMUNISM
process was given in 2014, when Belarus hosted the world hockey
championship and the demand for souvenirs increased dramatically,
resulting in a much more varied and imaginative offer. The need to
present the country to tourists from abroad helped to better define the
representations of national identity recognised by Belarusians
themselves. These examples show another interesting feature of
advertising using national identity symbols – its relation to nation-
branding. Allegedly, nation-branding should create universal national
imagery, which various businesses can then adapt to their specific
products and advertising strategies. In a modernising state like Belarus,
however, economic modernisation may well precede and even create the
demand for national identity. The oft-mentioned idea that Belarusians
need less advertising of the Belarusian language and more advertising
in the Belarusian language demonstrates how commercialisation of
national identity symbols can be regarded not as self-serving and
potentially degrading exploitation of the national sentiment, but as a
kind of social responsibility.
The recent years saw the appearance of products where the use
of national identity in advertising constitutes an integral part of
the product itself. One such example is the souvenir tea box ‘Belarus in
History’. The four sides of the box, corresponding to various periods in
Belarusian history, are densely covered with pictures representing great
personages, cultural artefacts and the characteristic visual background of
each epoch. The transposition to such a mundane product as tea serves
well to legitimise Belarusian national identity as stable and completed,
with its established set of socially approved symbols. The painful issues
of Belarusian nation-building, the search for identity, dealing with
contested or morally ambiguous characters from national history, the
gap between the past and the present – all these issues evaporate.
The selected symbols assume the status of banality by means of their link
to something as firmly entrenched in everyday routines as tea. Another
such example is the clothes brand ‘Honar’. The name translates from
Belarusian as ‘honour’ or ‘pride’ and the clothes themselves incorporate
stylisation of the national embroidery not into fancy folk costumes for
celebrating folk holidays, but into modern shirts and dresses to be worn
in the office or at a party. Curiously enough, despite the well-known
symbolic meaning of clothes adorned with the national embroidery,
‘vyshyvanka’, in neighbouring Ukraine, the ‘Honar’ clothes are presented
102 INFORMAL NATIONALISM AFTER COMMUNISM
Conclusion
The present study, unlike most research on the uses of national
identity in marketing, focuses not on their anticipated and actual
effects, but on their relatively little-known prerequisites. The review of
materials combining field observation data and knowledge of the
business environment reveals the background of national identity-
themed advertising in Russia and Belarus.
The results show that in both the ex-core and ex-periphery of the
former empire businesses implicitly rely on the state-transmitted version
of nationality as a primary source of information about popular attitudes.
By drawing upon a number of cases from the early 1990s to the
present, the study reveals that businesses increasingly rely on official
representations of national identity when governments become not more
but less friendly to the private sector. In the case of Russia, the use of
national identity symbols in advertising becomes more varied
(from ethnic to imperial nationalism) and more intense (in certain
cases, up to blatant xenophobia) in the years of increased reassessment of
the earlier free market reforms and tightening state control in various
spheres including the country’s economy. In Belarus, businesses become
more enthusiastic about the use of national identity symbols in
advertising not only when the national identity issue is freed from the
associations with nationalist, but also at least declaratively pro-market
oriented, opposition and is approved by the government, with its
complicated relations with the private sector.
This dynamic is due to business owners’ view of themselves as a
struggling elite minority who in contrast to the government are
following the well-established tastes of the post-Soviet masses. As a
result, vivid images used in advertisements translate the abstract
language of nationalist propaganda into specific role models and patterns
REPRODUCTION OF EVERYDAY NATIONHOOD 103
Note
1. This work is an output of a research project implemented as a part of the Basic
Research Program at the National Research University Higher School of
Economics (HSE).
CHAPTER 5
Elizaveta Gaufman
Introduction
With foreign policy being an integral part of national identity, it is vital
to study the everyday consumption of foreign policy, that is, how foreign
policy aspects of national identity are interpreted at a grassroots level.
Given that foreign policy emanates from the state, it requires less effort
to support than oppose, making it arguably a more inclusive form of
civic nationalism (Halikiopoulou, Mock et al. 2013; Reeskens and
Wright 2013). This chapter argues that foreign policy interpretation in
society is a manifestation of an (individual) psychological desire for
a positive self-identity (Giddens 1986) akin to ‘banal nationalism’.
Moreover, unlike the growing studies of everyday nationalism, there are
few investigations of ‘everyday foreign policy’ or the everyday of
geopolitics (Morris 2016) and this chapter fills an empirical lacuna of
bottom-up study of Russian foreign policy analysis, traditionally
focused as it is on Russian government (Mankoff 2009; McFaul 2012;
Tsygankov 2016).
Even though nationalism is supposed to be a mass phenomenon, the
study of the masses has been notoriously absent from scholarship and
the ‘nation’ in question was usually taken for granted (Whitmeyer 2002;
EVERYDAY GEOPOLITICS IN POST-SOVIET RUSSIA 105
Fox and Miller-Idriss 2008). It is, however, important to study the way
nation is enacted, renegotiated and even subverted by the population
(Herzfeld 2014). Because even though nationalism is constructed top-
down, it cannot be properly understood unless it is also analysed bottom-
up (Hobsbawm and Ranger 2012; Isaacs and Polese 2016; Seliverstova
2016). It is therefore crucial to study how nationhood is discussed, framed,
symbolised and enacted (cf. Fox and Miller-Idriss 2008).
The literature on everyday nationalism is new and bourgeoning, but
already offers numerous perspectives that go beyond the top-down
approach to the study of nationalism and identify grassroots perspectives
on nationalism, identity and everyday practices. Most authors who deal
with the topic of the everyday expression of nationhood draw on Billig’s
notion of ‘banal nationalism’ (Billig 1995) and explore this concept from
an anthropological/sociological perspective, meticulously tracing the
ways in which nationalism can be produced and consumed on a popular
level – perhaps even, ‘prosumed’. Prosumption is a phenomenon
involving both production and consumption and a locus of social
change, often relating to new media practices and having particular
resonance in former communist societies (Sokolova 2012). Nationalism
and its everyday manifestations and prosumption do not exist in a
vacuum; they have significant implications for the political lives of
citizens, especially their attitudes towards Others (Morozov 2009).
As Prizel notes, ‘[an] emotional, albeit irrational sense of nation and
national identity . . . is an extremely important if not driving force
behind the formation of [. . .] foreign policy’ (Prizel 1998:14). In other
words, an increase in nationalist sentiment correlates with an intensified
grassroots foreign policy discourse.
Russia has pursued a ‘foreign policy for domestic consumption’
approach (Tsygankov 2016), with foreign policy being an integral part
of the nation-building process, as well as legitimation effort (Hutcheson
and Petersson 2016). In Russia this tactic showed its disastrous effects on
the eve of the first revolution in 1905 when Russian Minister of the
Interior Pleve suggested ‘a little victorious war’ with Japan in order to
distract the population from domestic problems. By projecting ‘great
power national identity’ in the form of assertive foreign policy it
was thought possible to strengthen internal societal cohesion – a
phenomenon that is most commonly known as ‘rally around the flag’ and
is not exclusive to Russia (Oneal and Bryan 1995; DeRouen 2000;
106 INFORMAL NATIONALISM AFTER COMMUNISM
Speaking Geopolitics
Despite the reset policy3 and the obvious decline of unilateralism in
America’s foreign policy, the US continues to dominate Russia’s foreign
policy discourse. According to Levada polls, 82 per cent of respondents
expressed negative attitudes towards the US. As Morozov (2009) notes,
there is a complicated relationship between Russia and the West that
oscillates between attraction and repulsion, where an inferiority complex
and the feeling of spiritual superiority play major roles. In any case, if
there is one feature that can define Russian foreign policy it is its
obsession with the portrayal of an enemy, which in Russia’s case is the
US, on both a state and a grassroots level. Most sociological studies point
to the rising perception of the West and the US as threatening
(Dubin 2011; Levada 2012, 2014). As Dubin (2003) notes, ‘the West’ is
a kind of empty signifier with a negative overtone that is mostly used for
internal purposes in Russia. Given that collective memory is the basis for
‘invented traditions’ (Isaacs and Polese 2016) and memory itself is an
integral part of national identity (Mälksoo 2009), it is not surprising
that collective memory serves as a basis for foreign policy legitimation
(Gaufman 2017).
The US and the West provide probably the most extensive collection
of collective memory references. Remnants of Cold War propaganda
tropes in everyday political discourse are remarkably ubiquitous
(Meduza 2015; Morris 2016). By searching key words related to the US,
one can quickly identify a whole slew of anti-American, anti-gay and
anti-liberal communities that use visual aids to get their message across.
Notably, most of the anti-American groups have large ‘albums’ hosting
collections of photographs of Russian weaponry (mostly missiles and
EVERYDAY GEOPOLITICS IN POST-SOVIET RUSSIA 109
Framing Geopolitics
What are the tropes and specific frames that the population use in their
discussions? As noted earlier, the main goal of grassroots foreign policy
discussion is to create a positive image of national identity and for that
one needs to disparage or at least differentiate oneself from the
opponent (Coser 1956; Tajfel 1981). Fox and Miller-Idriss also note
that it is a masculine form of the nation that comes to the fore in
everyday practices, commemorations and, especially, in sports events
(Fox and Miller-Idriss 2008). It is extremely visible during football
matches between competing countries: during the UEFA Cup in 2012
both Russian and Polish football fans tried to remind their opponents
of historical events when Russians/Polish defeated each other,
projecting military confrontation onto the stadium (Gaufman and
Walasek 2014).
This preference for militarised masculinity is particularly evident
in the choice of frames used in grassroots geopolitical discourse.
Feminisation of the opponent also serves as a tool to underline
‘otherness’. Gilman notes that feminisation was a frequent tool for
othering Jews in European culture (Gilman 2013). Given the
overwhelming prevalence of heteronormativity in Western culture
(Bunzl 2000; Fradenburg and Freccero 2013) it is no wonder that
othering binaries were common, upholding male as a norm and female
as deviation, not to mention any other gender identities. Gilman goes
further to argue that even the notion of ‘diseased’ was also associated
with ‘female’ (Gilman 1999; Gilman 2013).
112 INFORMAL NATIONALISM AFTER COMMUNISM
Symbolising Geopolitics
Nationhood is reproduced in everyday life by ordinary practitioners, that
is, citizens (Edensor 2002; Fox and Miller-Idriss 2008). This is
reminiscent of the Paris School of thought in International Relations
(Bigo 2002; Bigo 2002; McDonald 2008; Leese 2015). This postulates
that security is enacted on an everyday basis by professionals working in
the field. This is also the case for the kind of everyday geopolitics that
was particularly visible in the symbolism around the Ukraine crisis.
A reference one’s loyalty to ‘our’ side in the conflict around Ukraine was
primarily manifested by the St George’s black and orange ribbon.
Although the ribbon became a symbol for pro-Russian support during
the Ukrainian crisis, its use was actually popularised in the mid-2000s
by the pro-government ‘Nashi’ youth movement. It was also extensively
and increasingly used in commemorations of World War II. This is
probably why several Russian oppositional figures are reluctant to accept
it as a symbol.
The ribbon itself was first introduced by Catherine the Great during
the Turkish-Russian war of 1768– 74 and was later used following
Russia’s victory against Napoleon during the Patriotic War of 1812.
Building on its symbolism for heroism and glory, the ribbon was later
used during the Soviet era on medals ‘For the Capture of Berlin’ and
greeting cards for Victory Day. This too, perhaps, was a deliberate
116 INFORMAL NATIONALISM AFTER COMMUNISM
Eating Geopolitics
What could be a more mundane and daily task than deciding what to
eat? Even as children people are exposed to geopolitical discourses via
food and foodways. We are encouraged to eat porridge in kindergarten
because ‘children in Africa are starving’; nations are disparaged
geopolitically through food associations: France’s refusal to support the
American invasion of Iraq led to the renaming of ‘French fries’ as
‘Freedom Fries’ in Congressional cafeterias and the French were called
‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys’. Thus, food and geopolitics
frequently intersect. The condemning of foreign food in an attempt
to bolster certain political decisions is by no means a new strategy.
Russians are familiar with ‘surgical strikes’ of specific food sanctions
proposed by the former Chief Sanitary Inspector Gennady Onish-
chenko that were officially imposed for health reasons but almost
always came on the heels of political decisions taken by targeted
countries. These bans for ‘health reasons’ (e.g., of Georgian wines or
Ukrainian products) earned Onishchenko the title ‘Okhrenishchenko’
on social networks that could roughly be translated as a person
who [fucking] lost his mind. This time, however, food sanctions
were not disguised by charges of ‘low hygiene standards’ in the
countries of origin.
After EU sanctions against Russia in summer 2014 connected to the
shooting down of the Malaysian passenger flight over Eastern Ukraine,
the Russian government banned European agricultural produce from
Russian markets in an attempt to hurt the EU’s common market. TV
reports of crushed Polish apples, French frozen geese or Dutch cheese
(RBC 2015) were supposed to show the determination of the
EVERYDAY GEOPOLITICS IN POST-SOVIET RUSSIA 119
[Slyshatsya stony
Ot pyatoy kolonny:
‘Gde motsarella?’
‘Gde maskarpone?’
Khvatit skulit’,
Bezdukhovnyy burzhuy!
Syr nash rossiyskiy
Plavlenyy zhuy!]
Conclusion
The phenomenon of patriotic prosumption is relatively new to Russia
compared with the US, where both the everyday unthinking or creative
incorporation of geopolitics into practices is well established: state
symbols such as flags are seen routinely displayed on residential houses,
clothing, food, etc. and a general level of ‘patriotic religiosity’ is quite
EVERYDAY GEOPOLITICS IN POST-SOVIET RUSSIA 121
Notes
1. Ontological security refers to the need to experience oneself as a whole,
continuous person in time – as being rather than constantly changing – in
order to realise a sense of agency (Giddens, 1991; Laing, 1969:41 –2).
Ontological security seeking consists in the drive to minimise hard uncertainty
by imposing cognitive order on the environment (Mitzen 2006).
2. An internet troll is a person who deliberately tries to provoke people online by
posting inflammatory statements. A ‘Kremlin troll’ is a type of internet troll
who posts pro-Kremlin and anti-oppositional statements.
122 INFORMAL NATIONALISM AFTER COMMUNISM
TURBOFOLK AS A MEANS OF
IDENTIFICATION:MUSIC
PRACTICES AS EXAMPLES OF THE
NATIONAL IN EVERYDAY LIFE
Petra Št’astná
Introduction
Turbofolk (TF) is a contemporary music style found under different
names throughout the Balkans and in other countries around the world
where migrants from the Balkan1 area live. It is a mixture of
contemporary popular and (traditional) folk music, often with an
electronic component. Variants can be observed globally as a part of the
pop-folk music category. TF is an example of global hybridisation of a
once-traditional music style through contact with Western music styles
(pop music, disco, hip-hop, RnB, etc.) based on the incorporation of
new, foreign elements into one’s own (national, regional, local) tradition
of popular culture (music). Pop-folk is just one variation of this tendency
(others are, for example, folktronica or rock-folk).
Serbian scholar Ivana Kronja points out the specific role of media in
the post-socialist bloc countries including the former Yugoslavia.
Together with political and economic transformations, these countries
have also experienced a ‘media’ transformation: a direct mass-media
post-modern society transformation, where all the important social
relations are ‘mediated through media’ (Kronja 2008:97). This leads to
124 INFORMAL NATIONALISM AFTER COMMUNISM
simple lyrics, ordinary people were able to identify with it and therefore
chose to listen to it. In the mid-1990s, turbofolk established a music
monopoly over the whole country (over and above war-folk music,
NkNM and the dance-techno scene) and started to spread beyond the
borders, where it experienced a rapid increase in popularity too.
According to many scholars (Archer, Gotthardi-Pavlovski, Kronja,
Grujić), the TF music industry helped fuel the nationalistic mania of
the era. They usually illustrate this by pointing to the wedding of the
then most famous singer Svetlana Veličković – known as Ceca- to the
founder of Srpska dobrovoljačka garda paramilitary troops, Željko ‘Arkan’
Ražnatović in 1995. Nevertheless, it is essential to understand the
atmosphere at that time in terms of the chaos in the ethnic sphere evoked
by the nationalistic movement diffusing through society. Turbofolk
embraced these values and used them to increase its commercialisation.
Turbofolk stars took pleasure in assured financial profit and therefore
perfectly corresponded to the materialistic tendencies of the era.
In the same way that the political and social atmosphere at the time
contributed to the production of turbofolk, TF served to reinforce and
legitimise the values of society.
The main, recurring themes present in the TF scene coincided ideally
with the escapist needs of society at the time and, as such, were attractive
to the lower and lower-middle classes. Common topics included, but
were not limited to, physical attraction, the naked female body, erotic
themes, alcohol, entertainment and sometimes consisted of quite vulgar
content. Marija Grujić even finds a ‘pornographic sadomasochistic
image’ in turbofolk style (2013:91). Songs had a simple structure,
a strong chorus and easy, metaphoric language. They were inspired by
current events, they highlighted the Orthodox religion and Serbian
national traditions and used easily recognisable symbols.
Later, in the 2000s, some new singing stars appeared (for instance
Seka Aleksić, Goga Sekulić, Dado Polumenta, Djogani, Sandra Afrika)
and the rhythm in TF accelerated so that it could compete with the
contemporary music in Western discos. By this time, it had also
spread among all the other Balkan countries, sometimes joining already-
existing, similar styles of music.4 Apart from rare exceptions that used
orientalisms to a large degree (which could be possibly explained as a
self-orientalisation), national elements in the TF music industry were
slowly minimalised. However, TF has remained almost exclusively sung
TURBOFOLK AS A MEANS OF IDENTIFICATION 129
I must’, ‘only if they turn it on in some club’, ‘if I am out and it’s on’,
‘I don’t care about the music when I am with my friends’, ‘only if I must
because of the others’. One pattern is apparent from these answers –
individuals like to socialise and places for young people in the diaspora
are dominated by the turbofolk scene.
It is very common for households in the diaspora to have access to
media that continuously play turbofolk. For example, TV Pink, which
experienced a boom in the private sector of TV music channels in the
1990s, is still a must-have for many households. Moreover TV Pink
and other TV music channels are an inexpensive way to keep track of
what is happening in the countries of origin. Thus, it is not surprising
that many respondents heavily exposed to the music coming from
ex-Yugoslav countries. Examples of the outward practices of turbofolk
are seen when TF music is loudly blaring from ethnically decorated cars
in the suburbs of Vienna or half-drunk guests are belting out songs in a
TF concert or disco. The atmosphere is always very emotional and people
feel a strong sense of camaraderie. The entertainment and emotional
factor is usually strengthened by the amount of alcohol drunk.
Connection to TF can be significantly tied to physical features and
body sensitivity. This physicality relates mainly to dance, alcohol
drinking, general enjoyment, loud music and close contact between the
sexes – to TF clubbing and hedonistic identity (including the purported
‘Balkan mentality’ framework: ‘samo polako’, ‘nema problema’, etc.).
According to respondents, at a TF party, one can experience great fun,
the music is joyful, the rhythm is quick enough to dance and visitors are
drunk and happy. The atmosphere is carefree, relaxed, without any barriers
or rules (‘I love to go to Balkan parties because there are not many rules,
it is chaotic, the best party!’, ‘I feel incredible there’, ‘When you hear
it [TF music], you start to sing immediately.’ ‘Relax . . . enjoying’).
Some respondents boasted that they go to the TF party to get drunk. This
clubbing relation is dominant among young consumers, whereas some
older ones visit these places less often as they move on to another life phase
(‘Sometimes I feel old, the music is about the same thing all the time,
for example drunkenness and that some woman looks good so that you can
go with her’.) We can add the motifs of forgetting everyday problems
and escaping inferior minority feelings to the attractions of TF. As one
informant stated, many of visitors have very low self-esteem, but this
changes ‘180 degrees with entrance to the party’.
132 INFORMAL NATIONALISM AFTER COMMUNISM
headphones, radio and in the concert hall, we are only where the music
takes us’ (1996:125). At first glance, it might seem that the
consumption of turbofolk in the diaspora leads to the typical expression
of a cultural practice within an ethnic perspective (as, for example, Fox
and Miller-Idriss observe). That it can be personified by a
complementary identification with the country of origin. For example,
for a long time I did not understand how it was possible that young
Croatians (or Bosnians/Bosniaks) in the diaspora in Austria identify
themselves with mostly Ekavian (Serbian-dialect) turbofolk coming
from Serbia. The same turbofolk that is related to unfortunate war events
during the break-up of Yugoslavia. One of the respondents explained
what practising means to her. In principal, she does not identify with the
music, but with the consumers of the music. She does the same as the
young Croatians in Croatia. She said: ‘I feel connected to my crowd and
friends as well as to my country, where this music is mainly listened to’.
For another interviewee, TF meant ‘a memory of home’. Although the
ex-Yugoslav diaspora might not realise it, they can keep the same
patterns of behaviour in Austria as counterparts in the countries of
origin. Thus, they can conserve a certain kind of national identity
through entertainment (in our case by means of turbofolk), which
applies especially for the first generation of migrants.
‘Turbofashion’, ‘Turbostyle’
There are two obvious patterns visible in the everyday reality of listeners
of turbofolk. Firstly, peer pressure from friends and the ‘crowd’, with
whom the young person spends his/her time with and which plays a
major role in the public consumption of turbofolk (in the manner:
‘everybody who I hang out with listens to it [TF], so I listen to it too’).
Secondly, the younger the person, the more likely this peer pressure will
influence them to start consuming TF. Among Austrian TF parties and
cafés, age ID is often not required (nor checked) and many guests visit
these places at a very young age. It was not an exception for me to meet
young people around 15-years-old in these places during my research.
Using Top Music TV or Okto TV video materials and ethnic magazines
it was possible for me to find and explore places of public consumption of
turbofolk in Austria. As already mentioned, these places are usually
divided into discos and cafés. They usually do not have an obvious ethnic
name and therefore people who go there have to be well-informed to
recognise them. Diaspora members know these places very well and are
informed about the current programme, hosting singers, deals, etc.
In Austria there are many more cafés than discos.
A dress code is needed for some of the TF parties. In most of the
parties, the dress code does not necessarily differ from the one in the
international dance clubs, but sometimes a presumed difference is
highlighted. In this case guidelines suggest that women wear high heels
(fetishism towards high heels even led to a regular ‘štikla night’ event in
one music club in Vienna), sexualised clothes and other recommen-
dations. Explicitly, there are very few rules about how to dress, but
turbofolk fans do have certain conventions and therefore they know what
kind of dress they are expected to wear. According to some interviewees
conventions are also important in order to enjoy the party. One of them
stated: ‘Ridiculous texts and choreography, criminal aesthetics, rgcdgc
TURBOFOLK AS A MEANS OF IDENTIFICATION 139
rhythm and so on, only if you are not too nostalgic for the 1990s and if
you do not know texts of Dr Iggy and the others, I would not
recommend you going to such a party, but if you know what to expect,
you can have good fun’. Besides this, ‘turbofashion’ closely relates
to ‘turbostyle’, which is more complex and, when it comes to the male
consumers, it usually overlaps. Female visitors usually do not wear
clothes for TF parties anywhere else, whereas males do. As it was already
announced, high heels are a must for a turbofolk party. Another
respondent comments this topic:
What is very popular for us are those high heels. If you do not have
high heels when you go to Balkan Palace (a club in Graz), you are
out, you are simply trash for everyone, it is like this, I don’t
understand it, that’s why I don’t like to go to Vanilla in our city,
because if you don’t have high heels there, you failed. For example
I cannot and don’t want to wear heels every weekend . . . that’s why
I go also to Austrian clubs and out with Austrians, instead of our
crowd where you have to be 100 per cent perfect and be getting
ready for five hours . . . last weekend I went to Balkan Palace . . .
there were seven girls at my table and I came as the last one, every
single one had a short skirt or a short dress and stilettos, I had only
those wedges . . . skirt, black tights and a long-sleeve shirt, I wasn’t
so eye-catching and I was left as the last one who wasn’t spoken to
by any body. I thought to myself . . . not a chance, the more you
show . . . yesss!!!
From this comment is apparent that short skirts and tiny dresses are very
important. The situation in a typical turbofolk party is as follows. Sexual
goal-orientation is very common and is usually initiated by male
visitors. Women tend to be placed in the role of a trophy (but not a
victim). Interviewees usually admitted that ‘ . . . girls are almost naked,
made up as hell . . . and they easily go with someone’. Turbofolk stars
were blamed: ‘they simply destroyed the quality, they destroyed the
culture in the music, they produce unbelievably too much negative,
through that energy that . . . girls from 13, 14 years make love on the
streets and become pregnant’. A strong self-eroticism is visible, too.
Visitors do care very much about their looks so that they feel attractive.
Detailed preparations of one’s image make for club visitors assuming
140 INFORMAL NATIONALISM AFTER COMMUNISM
Conclusion
Turbofolk can be perceived as a subculture or a post-subcultural
phenomenon in the Balkan diaspora. Nevertheless, if we disregard the
diaspora factor, TF becomes just a part of mainstream culture emanating
from the Balkan countries. Autochthonous turbofolk, produced among
the diaspora, is rare. However, whether it is autochthonous or not, TF is
unbelievably popular.
Young generations of the former Yugoslav diaspora in Austria
culturally identify through music and social contacts. In relation to the
theory of Fox and Miller-Idriss (2008), nationhood through TF can be
expressed consciously while going to ethnic parties, speaking languages
of the countries of origin or singing in them and building relations/
groups with people who share this interest. It can be also practised
subconsciously in the private sphere. Although the basis for
identification process through music of an ethnic minority member
can be definitely connected with national or ethnic belonging, the
national aspect should not be perceived as the only layer. Turbofolk
represents an identification process that might be considered primarily
nationally oriented but individual identification goes far beyond this and
depends on the subjective perception of each person. Practising
turbofolk can take up many forms, from simple enjoyment of erotic body
movements to queer identity contribution or in the relation towards
an imaginary homeland. It is important to stress the strong Balkan
142 INFORMAL NATIONALISM AFTER COMMUNISM
Notes
1. The Balkan area, as related to turbofolk, can include countries from the whole
Balkan peninsula as turbofolk (or pop-folk and other hybrid forms of popular
music) is common in all of them.
2. The terms ‘consumer’ or ‘consumers’ are widely used in this chapter. They
primarily relate to listeners of turbofolk (secondarily also to the listeners of
‘novokomponovana’ or ‘narodna’ music). This terminology is chosen due to the
scope of post-modern consumerism, where I conceptually place turbofolk.
3. In Serbian referred to as novokomponovana narodna muzika, in Croatian as
novokomponirana narodna glazba. For better understanding it should be added
that NkNM is usually also called narodna (national music) or narodnjaci.
To make matters more confusing, the term narodna and narodnjaci can be used
also for turbofolk music by its consumers. Turbofolk (and sometimes NkNM)
can be denominated as cajke (a Croatian term) or džigara or džigera (especially in
Bosnia and Herzegovina).
TURBOFOLK AS A MEANS OF IDENTIFICATION 143
Rayna Gavrilova
Introduction
Scholars have recently widened their interest in the symbolism of
food production and food consumption. Building on the work of scholars
such as Douglas (1966) and Levi-Strauss (1974), scholarship has
examined the role and meaning of food both to the individual and
society in a variety of contexts. Looking at food production through
constructivist lenses and seeing it as cultural and social choices
originating at the individual level (Appadurai 1988; Cwiertka 2006;
Murdoch et al. 2000) has allowed research to go beyond an economistic
or exotically cultural dimension to pay more attention to the symbolics
of food consumption (Cusack 2000; Wilk 1999). This chapter is a
further attempt in this direction. Douglas and Isherwood (1996) and
Miller (1987) have emphasised the significance of choosing and (non)-
consuming certain products for identity production and performance.
By looking at practices of food consumption in the everyday life of
Bulgarians, this study seeks to define the relationship between
performed and declared identities.
Framed in a debate initiated by Billig (1995) on banal nationalism
and continued in literature on everyday production of identities
SOMETHING BULGARIAN FOR DINNER 145
(Edensor 2002, 2006; Fox and Miller-Idriss 2008; Fox 2016; Polese
et al. 2017), this chapter is constructed on the assumption that an
individual’s and groups’ political choices are not always dictated by the
state and may be performed through channels that are spontaneous,
unofficial, informal, invisible or intangible (Antonsich 2015; Edensor
2002; Fox 2016; Pawlusz and Polese 2017; Polese 2009, 2010, 2014;
Skey 2015). This, with particular reference to former socialist spaces,
adds to attempts to reconceptualise the study of national identity in the
region and look at a variety of tools and instruments to do so. This
encompasses politically constructed identities whose meaning is
reshaped by the context (Adams 2010; Isaacs and Polese 2015, 2016;
Polese and Horak 2015) to competition between segments of a
society (Cheskin 2013; Isaacs and Polese 2015, 2016) with particular
attention to the role of the everyday (Knott 2015; Morris 2016; Pawlusz
and Seliverstova 2016; Seliverstova 2016, 2017). Accordingly, this
chapter attempts to provide a further account confirming the
importance of everyday practices to the processes of (national and
local) identity-formation. This chapter explores the influence of micro
on macro processes of national identity-building, through the
production of cultural identity in the hospitality industry. It is based
on a study of the online self-presentation of restaurants offering
national cuisine. It explores the declared new standard and new
consensus among caterers on what is ‘national’ cuisine and national
culinary heritage.
Ultimately, it is proposed that ‘the past’, ‘the authentic’ and ‘the
Bulgarian’ quality is modelled on the pre-World War II Bulgarian
peasant home. However, the chapter unveils an ongoing and dynamic
process of constructing and naming the structures of the national
cuisine. This process is, essentially, a bricolage, which leaves ample
space for individual contributions. In contrast to popular nationalistic
rhetoric, the national cuisine incorporates freely Turkish names and
products, identifying and accepting them as ‘Bulgarian’.
The flexibility of the vocabulary of national style, open to include new
terms, test new products and, in general experiment, mirrors a tendency
to construct a food identity that is inclusive and ever-expanding. This is
in contrast to or notwithstanding the official narratives on Bulgarian
identity, which evolve in a less dynamic way and tend to be typically less
inclusive and flexible.
146 INFORMAL NATIONALISM AFTER COMMUNISM
Any category is good for reading and analysing but I will focus on the
salads only, which offer particularly rich empirical data. The salads do
not exist either as a concept or as a practice prior to the re-establishment
of a national Bulgarian state in 1878, the growth of the trend-setting
elites and receptive urban middle classes and the emergence of the
instruments of change of the culinary culture (media, cookbooks,
vocational training). The term ‘salad’ was mentioned first in 1870 by
Petko Slaveykov in the recipe ‘beet salad’ (Slaveykov 1870:75); the idea
of serving chopped vegetables with condiments was totally alien. Twenty
years later, the Bulgarian lexicographer Naiden Gerov included the
word in his magisterial five-volume Dictionary of the Bulgarian language
(1978, 5:110), but, interestingly, provides a double gender form – a
masculine and a feminine. Throughout the years the number of salads
included in the cookbook increases steadily: from eight in a cookbook
from 1904 to 47 in a cookbook from 1933.
We see an impressive number and variety of salads on the menus of
Bulgarian cuisine establishments, an average of 20.5 different salads per
restaurant. In 14 out of the 18 restaurants they are placed at the
beginning of the printed menus. Even more impressively, there is an
absolute consensus about The National Salad, with capital letters, and
this is the Shopska salad (named after the same regional group in western
Bulgaria, the Shopi). The salad is present on the menu of every single
restaurant in our group, with the same name. Almost half of the
establishments list the ingredients of the salad and again the uniformity
is noteworthy: the five mandatory elements are tomatoes, cucumbers,
peppers (raw or roasted), onion and Bulgarian white cheese (feta). Two
restaurants find it necessary to embellish by adding a blurb: ‘The taste of
eternal Bulgaria’ (Mehana Chanovete) and ‘The Bulgarian Tradition’
(Magiata na chergite). The mythology surrounding the Shopska salad
has been discussed by researchers (Dechev, 2010) and it is important to
draw attention to the fact that two of its ingredients (tomatoes and
peppers) were adopted by the Bulgarians only after mid-nineteenth
century, a circumstance that throws doubt on the claim of its ‘eternal
taste’. Any attempt to challenge the myth, however, as did Albena
Shkodrova in her book Soc Gourmet (Shkodrova, 2014) provokes
heated debates, revealing the high emotional temperature of the
national food discourse. Second in popularity is the Shepherd’s Salad
(in 14 establishments), where eggs, yellow cheese, salami or ham and
SOMETHING BULGARIAN FOR DINNER 157
Notes
1. The ethnographic literature is summarised in Etnografija na Balgaria, 1983; 2.
For recent publications see Vukov, Ivanova 2010; Dechev, 2010.
2. Suffice it to mention William Robertson Smith (1889), Audry Richard (1939),
Claude Lévi-Strauss (1965), Mary Douglas (1995), Marcel Mauss (2001).
For good review of the anthropological tradition and more recent publications
see Di Giovine, Brulotte (2014).
3. The term is untranslatable; it is an adjective of ‘bit’, in Russian ‘быт’ – that
segment of human life which comprises the satisfaction of material and spiritual
needs.
4. http://zavedenia.com/ (accessed 5 January 2015).
5. The data is from 23 – 25 January 2015. The numbers today may be different
because of the dynamics of the field but the error is from one to five
establishments.
6. The mehana (tavern) is ‘an establishment where alcoholic beverages are sold
and consumed’, according to the Guidelines for cooking laborers (Danailova,
1966:31).
7. The Shopi is are regional group in western Bulgaria.
8. Rhodope mountain is situated in the south-central part of Bulgaria; its southern
slopes are in Greece. The mountain has rich history, interesting regional cuisine
and culture.
9. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were the period of cultural
modernisation and nation-formation among Bulgarians in the Ottoman
Empire, known as ‘National Revival’ (Vazrazhdane).
10. Voivoda. Old Slavic, literally ‘war-leader’ or ‘war-lord’.
11. Gozba is an Old Slavic word for ‘disk’, ‘meal’.
12. My objective is not to discuss the social meaning of this ‘displaced meaning’
(McCracken, 1990:104 ff.) but I have no doubts that the observations I propose
could provide ample food to study the collective psyche.
13. See Ruth Schwartz Cowan (1983) about the increasing volume of domestic
obligations for the housewife in the modern period (Cowan, 1983).
SOMETHING BULGARIAN FOR DINNER 163
14. See for instance ‘Lunches and dinner: what should I cook today?’ (Obedi i
vecheri, 1942: 55)
15. The satch (from the Turkish sac, metal sheet) is a sturdy ceramic disk, used to
bake breads and pancakes on open fire or charcoal.
16. The cookbooks published in Bulgaria before the 1990s mention just a few salads
with names: Shopska, Shephards’, Garden and a few interesting exceptions
(the Work company’s, Spring).
17. A village close to Veliko Tarnovo, medieval capital of Bulgaria.
18. The Turkish word Merakli is used.
19. A word that triggers an emotional response.
20. Neuhaus, Jessamyn (ed.) Manly Meals and Mom’s Home Cooking: Cookbooks and
Gender in Modern America. The Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore,
2003.
21. Greek for ‘shepherd’.
22. A non-representative survey among the Facebook friends of the author as to
whether they find the diminutive designations of dishes appealing or repulsive
generated more than 50 comments (https://www.facebook.com/search/top/?
q¼Rayna%20Gavrilova%20%D1%83%D0%BC%D0%B0%D0%BB%D0%
B8%D1%82%D0%B5%D0%BB%D0%BD%D0%B8 of 22 January 2015),
of which 30 were negative or critical, 10 neutral and only six positive.
An interesting comment was ‘In restaurants with folk taste (sic!) it is OK’.
23. Najden Gerov defines gozba as ‘cooked dish’ (Gerov, 1, 230).
24. The observed restaurants offer pre-prepared ingredients (such as chicken parts,
blanched potatoes, cheeses with seasoning).
25. Sarma (5), kebap (4), comlek (4), roasted stuffed whole lamb (11), stewed shin
(10), kachamak (polenta) (6), cavarma (7), kapama (4).
CHAPTER 8
MAKING MODERN
MONGOLIANS:GENDER ROLES
AND EVERYDAY NATION-
BUILDING IN CONTEMPORARY
MONGOLIA
is still the female purview, while men should remain herders, even if
with varying results in terms of income.
Both reluctance to take up agricultural practices and the tensions
around the gendered tasks around the ger are closely connected to the
narrative that describes Mongolians as nomads that should lead nomadic
lifestyle. Three decades ago, Anatolii Khazanov observed that even those
nomads who had moved to villages and cities often thought of
sedentarisation as an interim stage of their lives and that they would
return to nomadic way of life at the first opportunity (Khazanov
1983:84). In the interviews one of us conducted with an international
development organisation in 2012 it was often mentioned that
Mongolians, men and women, believed that nomadism was ‘in their
bones and blood’ irrespective of the overwhelming numbers of sedentary
Mongolians.
The return to nomadism is often romanticised as being part and
parcel of Mongolian history and tradition. The embeddedness of
nomadism in nature provides a space where the history and tradition can
be practised as uniquely ‘national’. Among others, Tim Edensor proposes
to look at the complex ways that the nation is ‘spatialised’ through
institutional and everyday practices: how elements of national space
constitute symbolic geographies, creating spatial entities out of ‘nations’
(Edensor 2002:65). And the national spaces that lay claims to symbolic
power, are also replicated in local contexts, used by people as part of their
repertoire of everyday practices. This is reflected in the Mongolian
context, where nomadic landscapes and practices around them form the
core of proposed idea of the nation, even if most people are not directly
linked to nature any longer.
Khazanov asserts that one of the main characteristics of ‘proper’
nomadism in Mongolia has been the disinclination to undertake
anything other than pastoral activities (Khazanov 1983). The
reluctance to take up agriculture is synonymous for Mongolians with
affirming their belonging to the ‘nomadic stock’ and the fact that plot
holding is not ‘in their bones’.5 It would be more appropriate to see the
return of the view of nomadism as the virtuous lifestyle inside the
parameters of post-socialist, everyday nation-building. It is also more
in line with the re-invigorated view of the virtuous national
characteristics which leave no space for practices traditionally
associated with the settled life.
MAKING MODERN MONGOLIANS 171
‘because separate arrows can be broken more easily’, not only translates
into tactics to be used in battles. It is also widely indicative of an ideal
relationship between members of the same kin, as well as the role and
influence of women as holders of sagacity which they can – and are
expected to – put to use over hot-headed men, helping with making
decisions appropriate for the kin. Weatherford took the task to continue
placing women within the narrative through his later book too: The
Secret History of the Mongol Queens: How the Daughters of Genghis Khan
Rescued His Empire, which the author built around ‘The Secret History of
the Mongols’, claiming that sections referring to the might of women in
the Mongol empire went missing in the book. The book on Mongol
queens; however, is not nearly as widely read and referred to as the
Chenggis Khaan one. And yet, it reflects on the efforts to include women
in the traditional narratives of the nation, even if only through their
relationship with men.
Conclusion
This chapter has examined the unanticipated impact that the view of
men as agents of the Chenggis Khaan tradition has on opportunities for
women to engage with and change the societal and cultural norms
forming the core of Mongolian nation-building. We set this claim in the
context of nation-building in Mongolia but looked specifically at the
role allocated to women in this context; we searched for the space females
could carve out for themselves to pick and choose from the toolbox of
national identities believed to be glorious and predominantly nomadic.
Therefore while it is ultimately women who pick and choose what is
being promoted and passed on to their children in the context of limited
social contacts in the steppe, few take up opportunities to raise children
outside the canon of the acceptable to the ideal-bound Mongolian.
MAKING MODERN MONGOLIANS 181
Notes
1. Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic, Czech Development Cooperation
2012. Available at www.mzv.cz/file/1057324/Czech_development_cooperati
on_web_EN.pdf (Accessed 25 September 2016).
2. During UNAOC Fourth Global Forum, Doha, Qatar, 12 December 2011.
3. Tsolmon Begzsuren & Dolgion Aldar, Gender Overview Mongolia: Desk Study
(2014). Available at https://www.eda.admin.ch/content/dam/countries/
countries-content/mongolia/en/SDC-Gender-%20Overview-Mongolia-%
202014-EN.pdf (Accessed 25 September, 2016).
4. Franck Billé and Christopher Kaplonski, Mongolia: Unravelling the Troubled
Narratives of a Nation. Available at http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/features/m
ongolia-unravelling-the-troubled-narratives-of-a-nation (Accessed 15 October
2016).
5. Jack Weatherford connects this to the heritage of Chenggis Khaan, as he led the
fight of nomads against the ‘civilised’ world – sedentary populations, above all,
the farmers. Though according to Weatherford this fight continues ‘in the minds
of Mongolians,’ (Weatherford 2004, 264).
6. Jackson reflects on this in her work on the role of mining companies in nation-
building in Mongolia and the popular rejection of the vision of modern
Mongolian nation through development via resource-extraction. Mongolians
rather see mineral excavation and harvesting minerals as antithetical to national
customs and rely on traditional narratives about their relationships with the land
to forge perceptions about the ‘space of a nation’. Jackson, ‘Imagining the
mineral nation: contested nation-building in Mongolia’.
7. As Franck Billé notes on his fieldwork, childlessness was often seen as a curse, not
as an informed choice (Billié 2015).
8. Though the radical nationalist groups operating along these interpretations of
national purity exist mainly in Ulaanbaatar, similar actions have been told to
have happened in other cities, too.
CONCLUSION
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