Consuming the “Other:” The South-Eastern European Case

Main Article Content

Rozita Dimova

Abstract

This article describes the local and transnational processes that led to ethnic conflict, highlighting the rearticulation of class, ethnicity, and gender which resulted from the 1991 dismemberment of the Yugoslav Federation and the independence of Macedonia. As the entry point for my research, I focused on the domain of consumption and material culture, specifically of interior decorations. I analyzed furniture, decorative objects, and the division of space within the homes of my informants. The central argument of my book is that consumption has redefined and mediated ethnicity in post-1991 Macedonia. My data reveal that material culture and consumption practices both reflect and create ethnic tension between ethnic Macedonians and ethnic Albanians. Theoretically this article links the analytical concepts prevalent in social anthropology such as ethnicity, material culture and consumption with the psychoanalytic concepts of fantasy, desire and loss. This link provides a rigorous terrain for anthropological investigation that grounds individual and collective experiences of people from different ethnic and class background into a larger national and transnational context.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Article Details

Section
Articles / Статии

References

Adorno, T. (1977). Aesthetics and Politics. London, New Left Books.

Appadurai, A., Ed. (1986). The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Social
Perspective. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Bachelard, G. (1994). The Poetics of Space. Boston, Beacon Press.

Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The Dialogical Imagination: Four Chapters by Bakhtin. Austin,
University of Texas Press.

Bakic-Hayden, M. (2002). What's so Byzantine about the Balkans? Balkan as metaphor:
between globalization and fragmentation. D. I. Bjelic and O. Savic. Boston, Thre MIT
Press.

Bakic-Hayden, M. a. R. H. (1992 Spring). “Orientalist Variations on the Theme
'Balkans'" Symbolic Geography in Recent Yugoslav Politics.” Slavic Review 51(1): 1-15.

Benjamin, W. (1999). The Arcades Project. Cambridge, Mass., Belknap Press.

Bhabha, H. (1990). Nation and Narration. London, New York, Routledge.

Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: The Social Construction of Taste. London,
Routledge/Kegen Press.

Bourdieu, P. (1985). “The Social Space and the Genesis of Groups.” Theory and Society
14: 723-744.

Boym, S. (1994). Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia. Cambridge,
MA, Harvard University Press.

Brown, K. (1994). “Seeing stars: Caracter and identity in the landscapes of modern
Macedonia.” Antiquity 68(261): 784-796.

Brown, K. (2003). The Past in Question: Modern Macedonia and the Uncertainites of
Nation. Princeton, Princeton University Press.

Brubaker, R. (1995). “ National -Minorities, Nationalizing States and External National
Homelands in the New Europe.” Daedalus 124 (Spring): 107-132.

Buchli, V. (1999). An Archeology of Socialism. Oxford, Berg.

Chakrabarty, D. (2002). Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern
Studies. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

Danforth, L. (1995). The Macedonian Conflict: Ethnic Nationalism in a Transnational
World. Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press.

Denich, B. S. (1974). Sex and Power in the Balkans. Women, Culture, and Society. M. Z.
R. a. L. Lamphere. Stanford, California, Stanford University Press.

Denitch, B. (1994). Ethnic Nationalism: The Tragic Death Of Yugoslavia. Minneapolis,
University of Minnesota Press.

Derrida, J. (1998). Of Grammatology. Boston, John Hopkins University Press.

Dyker D. A.. and Vejvoda, I., Ed. (1996). Yugoslavia and After: A Study in
Fragmentation, Despair and Rebirth. London and New York, Longman.

Freidman, V. (1997). “Observers Observed.” New Balkan Politics 1(3).

Fuery, P. (1995). The Theory of Absence: Subjectivity, Signification, and Desire.
Westport, Connecticut and London, Greenwood Press.

Glenny, M. (1999). The Balkans: 1804-1999. Nationalism., War and the Great Powers.
London, Granta Books.

Goldswarthy, V. (1998). Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination. New
Haven and London, Yale University Press.

Hammel, E. (1983). Zadruga as a process. Family forms in Historic Europe. R. e. a.
Wall. Cambridge (Cambridgeshire), New York, Cambridge University Press.

Hann, C., Ed. (2002a). Postsocialism: ideals, ideologies and practices in Euroasia.
London, Routledge.

Hann, C. M. (1993). “From Production to Property:Decolectivization and the FamilyLand
Relationship in Contemprary Hungary.” Man 28.

Holbrooke, R. (1998). To End a War. New York, Random House.

Jameson, F. (1992). The Signature of the Visible. New York, Routledge.

Kaneff, D. (1998). “Private Cooperatives and Local Property Relations in Rural
Bulgaria.” Replica 3(Special issue: Central European Histeria (English Edition)): 161-
171.

Kaneff, D. (2004). Who Owns the Past? The Politics of Time in a 'Model' Bulgarian
Village. Oxford, Berghahn.

Kaplan, R. D. (1993). Balkan Ghosts. New York, St. Martin's Press.

Karakasidou, A. N. (1997). Fields of Wheat, Hills of Blood: Passages to Nationhood in
Greek Macedonia. Chicago & London, The University of Chicago Press.

Lacan, J. (1989 (1958)). The Four Fundamental Principals of Psychoanalysis, Norton
Press.

Lampe, J. R. (1996). Yugoslavia as History: Twice There Was a Country. Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press.

Lefebvre, H. (1991). The Production of Space. Cambridge Mass., Blackwell.

Marx, K. (1993). Capital. Provo, Utah, Regal Publications.

Miller, D. (1988). Material Culture and Mass Consumption. London, Routledge.

Miller, D. (1995). Acknowledging consumption : a review of new studies. London ; New
York, Routledge.

Mosely, P. E. (1976). The Peasent Family: The Zadruga, or Communal Joint-Family in
the Balkans, and its recent Evolution.

Muhic, F. (1991). Stitot od Zlato. Skopje, Kultura.

Owen, D. (1995). Balkan Odyssey. London, Victor Gollancz.

Rheubottom, D. B. (1976). Time and Form: temporary Maceodnian households and the
zadruga contraversy. The Zadruga: essays by Phillip E. Moseley and essays in his honor.
H. F. Byrnes. Notre Dame, Ind., University of Notre Damme Press.

Rusinow, D. (1977). The Yugoslav Experiment, 1948-1974. Berkeley, University of
California Press.

Said, E. W. (1979). Orientalism. New York, Vintage Books.

Silverman, K. (1996). The Threshold of the Visible World. New York, Routledge.

Stewart, B. (1994). Broken Lives: A Personal View of the Bosnian Conflict. London,
Harper Collins.

Todorova, M. (1997). Imagining the Balkans. New York, Oxford, Oxford University
Press.

Veblen, T. (1998 [1899]). The Theory of the Leisure Class. Amherst, N.Y., Prometheus
Books.

Winchester, S. (1999). The Fracture Zone: A Return to the Balkans. London, Viking.

Wolff, L. (1994). Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the
Enlightenment. Stanford, California, Stanford University Press.

Woodward, S. (1995). Socialist Unemployment: The Political Economy of Yugoslavia
1945-1990. Princeton, Princeton University Press.

Woodward, S. L. (1995). Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War.
Washington, D.C., The Brookings Institution.

Zizek, S. (1989). The Sublime Object of Ideology. London, Verso.

Zizek, S. (1991). For They Know Not What They Do. London, Verso.

Zizek, S. (1998). The Metastasis od Enjoyment. London, Verso.

Zizek, S. (2003). On Belief. London, Verso.