Paper short abstract:

The paper considers a range of material practices, psychological gestures and rhetorical strategies concerned with the idea of the national psyche, mental wellbeing and hope(lessness) in Serbia at a time of political instability.

Paper long abstract:

Serbia's prosperity and political good fortunes after the wars of 1990s have been taken to hang on how committedly it seeks to foster values of reconciliation, as these might be informed by a deep-lying shift in national consciousness and self-understanding. This paper asks what is involved in this hopeful claim—in the idea that national well-being is dependent not on brute economic or social measures, but on a change of mindset? Its ethnography addresses a particular conjunction between the political imperative placed on the Serbs to reassess their recent past and what my informants in Belgrade and elsewhere call, in a more medicalised register, their 'mental hygiene'. Their 'mental hygiene', further, seems to be at this particular moment described through figures of weariness, doubt, hopelessness, fatigue. The paper asks in what circumstances can people construe their state of mind as a political good or as an economic asset? What are the technologies of mental health, at both an individual and a societal level? The analysis proposes contemporary preoccupation with mental hygiene in Serbia as some sort of active, if inverted, emotional and intellectual strategy against hopelessness and fatigue. The strategy both copes with the past and anticipates the future. This perspective reconfigures social fatigue in Serbia not as a burden, or something necessitating a change of mentality, but a resource for reflection, the ground for a new way of imagining or putting together the inner worlds of each individual, as well as of the country.