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Introduction: Getting It
- Cornell University Press
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1 In the past year, our average Yugoslav woman has had a lot of temptations. Every month a new detergent. It’s not easy to take a political stand and choose between Yeti and Mixal. —New Year’s greetings “To the Average Woman in the SFRY [Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia],” Svijet [World], 1 January 1968 This book explains something that was simply not supposed to happen: for all their emphasis on material prosperity and social welfare, socialist states were not supposed to generate “consumer societies” where shoppers’ desires supplanted genuine human needs and where the symbolic, expressive, cultural value of the goods and services purchased became a primary factor of individual and group identity. And yet, as shown here, these things did happen in socialist Yugoslavia, with extraordinary consequences for both the life and the death of the Yugoslav experiment in reformist socialism and multiethnic federalism. Though it is easy enough to forget this fact given the sad fate of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, our subject is a country with a system of government that many once considered to be the best of all possible socialisms: a bold and noble, if flawed, experiment in tolerance and flexibility. Ultimately that experiment failed, it is true, but if we care to understand what Yugoslavia once was, we forget that tolerance and flexibility at our peril. Those virtues are, at any rate, central to the story told here. With regard to consumption , Yugoslav socialism did indeed prove to be open, experimental, and extraordinarily amenable to practices and values that the political leaders and economic managers of other communist states were much more likely to squelch in short order as undesirable ideological deviations. The results were striking and the implications profound. From the mid1950s on the political climate in Yugoslavia permitted, and later even encouraged, the growth of a deep and complicated relationship with shopping, spending, acquiring, and enjoying, a relationship that engaged the public on a day-to-day basis through the enthusiastic and surprisingly Introduction GettingIt Making Sense of Socialist Consumer Culture Source for the epigraph: Zoran Zec, “Novogodišnja pisma Zorana Zeca,” Svijet no. 1, 1 January 1968, 8–9, at 9. 2 冷 Introduction unrestrained use of “rational,” “scientific,” and “modern” styles of commerce and communication. Socialist Yugoslavia thus moved toward the creation of a consumer society: for a growing number of its people, the experience of consumption began to take on a set of meanings that no longer bore a strong relationship to the mere fulfillment of basic material needs. The acquisition of various consumer goods and services, and the consumption of experiences like holiday getaways, moviegoing, dancing and drinking in discotheques, and foreign travel, all gradually became a more central concern of social life in Yugoslavia. At the same time the status, satisfaction, and self-understanding of individuals in the society were increasingly linked to the ways in which they consumed such goods, services, and experiences. By the late 1960s a marked shift toward these characteristic modes of thought and action—that is, toward the way of life that scholars and critics have typically identified as “consumerism”—was well under way. Commercial advertising, for example, had come to play a strikingly more prominent role in the daily lives of Yugoslavs than it did in other European socialist countries, although it did not yet rival the full-scale promotion seen in Britain , for example. (Applying the designation “Yugoslavs” may now trigger objections in parts of what used to be the socialist federation. But the use of the term here and indeed throughout the book is, in fact, justified by the very frames of reference that were assumed and deployed across the country by party and state officials, businesses, advertisers, and indeed most contributors to public discourse, including ordinary citizens: at issue then, as now, were Yugoslav consumers, a Yugoslav market, Yugoslav shopping opportunities , a Yugoslav popular culture.) A fundamental qualitative shift in the modes and messages of advertising compounded the dramatic expansion in the sheer volume of the ads themselves, as they became more difficult to distinguish from the styles and techniques employed in Western Europe and in the United States, which had long been the most important incubator of advertising theory and practice. Alongside the growth of advertising in its strict sense came a parallel expansion of the broader concept of marketing, and with it crept in a new ideology—radically new in the socialist context— of the role of business and the essential nature of the relationship...