Paper short abstract:

The paper explores how certain ways of imagining the self, the collective, the good and time align people to a social world. What are the conditions for and patterns of imaginal practices that demand social transformation?

Paper long abstract:

Anthropologists can be over-hasty in characterising the pace and the mediators of sociohistorical change. This paper suggests that, in documenting change in a society, researchers should tarry with the imaginary and ‘imaginal’, rather than appropriate it too quickly for the language of the factual -- even surplusfactual, and otherwisefactual --, political or economic.

The paper considers a range of people, who in politically and economically volatile Serbia, envision possibilities conducive to deep societal revision. These interlocutors depart from the typical language of precarity, invoking instead notions of 'caring for society', 'the need for clarity' and 'the healing of the collective mind'. Their ideational and visionary projects are oriented towards a supposed renewal of Serbia's moral, spiritual and political fabric (the political valence of these initiatives remains thoroughly indeterminate). The analysis recognises these practices of imagining alternative scenarios as critical because of their unusual distance from mainstream thinking, in which the present figures as a scarce, frayed, exhausted or even threatening category.

The paper asks how do people in Serbia imagine historical change? What seems to be of vital, real-life importance? What characterises individuals and groups who are willing to step out of the common time - a supposedly improbable, exhausted or barren after-time - and adopt longer internal and historical perspectives, projecting both into the imagined past and future? The work is centrally motivated by questions of how ideas are incorporated into an emerging order, and how they gain prominence or priority in a collective psyche or mind.