From Cultural Heritage to Modern Society – an anthropological study of Serbia

Cultural and political history of Serbia in the 19th and 20th centuries was marked by a tension between the traditional and the modern. Refracted through symbolic disputes between the rural and the urban, antiquated and progressive, this tension has for a long time kept the concept of “cultural heritage” and its instrumental value as a vehicle of cultural change apart from the concept of modernity, preventing a large section of the Serbian elite from reforming the community from which they distanced themselves precisely through the construction of that dichotomy. The proposed project aims to contextualise this heritage-modernity dichotomy, as one of the general anthropological objects of study, within research of Serbian society in the 19th and 20th centuries. Since this tension has been, and still is, an obstacle to democratic consolidation and economic development and given that the emphasis on it perpetuates social conflicts and forestalls social consensus, the project will tackle its cultural reasons and social transformations, and suggest models for how to overcome it in the future. This anthropological, historical, theoretical, archival and field research will be dedicated to four general themes: 1) historical dimension of so-called traditional society (19th century); 2) processes of urbanisation and modernisation (20th century); 3) uses of “cultural heritage” in “modern society”; and 4) modern Serbian society as a society of prolonged transition.