Traditional music and the anatomy of the festival network between Yugoslavian cultural politics and vernacular values

Abstract

As official policies in the post-war Yugoslavia were oriented towards economy, mainly tied to towns, rural areas were focused on agriculture to a large extent, as it had been before. However, the Party was determined to revive villages, being of the opinion that life in those areas should be purified from “primitivism” so that it could be set to a higher level concerning issues of education, political structure, local organization and cultural life. Since people in villages felt determined to maintain their local culture, customs and music, the State officials had to find ways to articulate uncanny social behaviors. At the time, folklore and vernacular creative impulse in Serbia was sustained as a “hard cultural form” that by accident or on purpose converted into “soft cultural form” through a wide range of festival activities in Yugoslavia. This significant turn permitted “relatively easy separation of embodied performance from meaning and value, and relatively successful transformation at each level” (Appadurai 1996: 90). The discussion of this paper intends to form a dialogue on the transformation of social structure and politics, which gradually led to severe changes in the areas of traditional musical practice.