Paper short abstract:

The paper explores the nationalist sentiments of building intimate cultural membership through the consumption of folk music in Serbia after the fall of Yugoslavia.

Paper long abstract:

The fall of the state-socialist set of social and cultural practices opened up the space for new self-expressions and intimacies of everyday life in the late 1980s in Central, Eastern and Southern Europe. The new political and social developments brought about novel sensibilities and economies of cultural communities, and especially, new forms of intimate orientations and self-identifications with regard to post-socialist political and cultural spheres. One of the predominant political turning points was the transformation of socialist, one-party-ruled ideological structures into neo-(ethno)nationalist sentiments. Therefore, new cultural intimacies in relation to the neo-nationalist rebuilding of communities have shaped the everyday economies of life in the early 1990s across this region, both in public and private spheres. In Serbia, dominant cultural intimacies that took place with the early political and cultural disintegrations of Yugoslavia reinforced the production and consumption of the "folk music" genre as a symbol of "genuine", "folk" entertainment, as well as a symbol of cultural "liberation" of allegedly imposed and hypocritical variety of music genres in multiethnic and multicultural Yugoslavia. The paper explores the shapes, implications and ideological loads of the intimacies of neo-nationalisms built through folk music in Serbia. In addition, it discusses the complex and blurred relations between public politics of nationalism and popular cultural reconstructions of intimate cultural nationhood.