Valentine's day as the 8th March of transitional Serbia: Analysis of a (new?) holiday

Abstract

In this text, I examine the phenomenon of sudden occurrence and spreading of the symbols, products and practices related to St. Valentine's Day, in Belgrade, Serbia. Though this custom had never been a part of Serbian festivities, neither "traditional" nor modern, this year it was aggressively marketed in the capital. In order to understand this phenomenon, I look at a similar holiday from the not-sodistant socialist past: Women's Day, or March 8th. Previous researchers of this holiday have underlined its primarily demagogical or mythical function of obscuring the gender inequalities of socialist society through the celebration of, and emphasis on, the proclaimed social equality on all levels. By juxtaposing dominant characteristics of Women's Day and their corresponding ideological functions with the dominant characteristics of St. Valentine's, I point to the possible ideological functions of the latter. On the one hand, it transmits the message of love, romance and reciprocity, therefore obscuring the persistent gender inequalities; on the other, it serves a far less demagogical function of supporting both the market of partners and the market of goods. In the final conclusion, I state that the occurrence of Valentine's Day celebrations in modern-day Serbia can be primarily tied to the development of the market of goods, and the corresponding desire to achieve the European standard, at least in terms of consumerism. Whether this holiday marks a beginning of transition in the domain of personal, intimate relationships, however, remains yet to be seen.

Keywords

• Valentine's Day
• Women's' Day
• 8th March
• holiday
• transition
• anthropology of consumption