Masculinity and mobilised folklore: the image of the hajduk in the creation of the modern Serbian warrior
Date
2017-08-04
Authors
Bozanich, Stevan
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Abstract
Based on Hobsbawm’s notion of “invented traditions,” this thesis argues that the Serbian warrior tradition, the hajduk, was formalised from the folk oral epic tradition into official state practices. Using reports from the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913, military histories of Yugoslavia’s Second World War, and case files from the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), this thesis shows how the hajduk epics were used to articulate war programs and formations, to construct perpetrator and victim identities, and to help encourage and justify the levels of violence during the Yugoslav wars of succession, 1991-1995. The thesis shows how the formalising of the invented hajduk tradition made the epics an important part of political and military mobilisation for at least the last two centuries. During Serbia’s modernisation campaign in the nineteenth century, the epic hajduk traditions were codified by Serbian intellectuals and fashioned into national stories of heroism. While cleansing territories of undesirable populations during the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913, the hajduks were portrayed in the tradition of nation builders by the Kingdom of Serbia. The hajduk tradition was also mobilised as Nazi Germany invaded Yugoslavia in 1941, with both Draža Mihailović’s Četniks and Tito’s Partisans appropriating the historic guerrilla tradition. During the “re-traditionalisation” period under Slobodan Milošević in the 1980s, the invented hajduk tradition was again mobilised in the service of war. As Bosnian Muslim bodies were flung from the Mehmed Sokolović Bridge in Višegrad in 1992, the Serbian perpetrators dreamed of themselves as avenging hajduks thus justifying a modern ethnic cleansing.
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Serbian history, Yugoslavia, Yugoslav history, hajduk, paramilitary, insurgency, Chetnik, Partisan, gusle, oral folk epic, Serbia, mass violence, atrocity, mobilisation, genocide, ethnic cleansing, nationalism, ethnicity, masculinity