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The compulsory service for young men in the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) created bonds across ethnic, religious, and social lines. These bonds persisted even after the horrific violence of the 1990s, in which many of these men found themselves on opposite sides of the front lines. In Utopia of the Uniform, Tanja Petrovi¿ draws on memories and material effects of dozens of JNA conscripts to show how their experience of military service points to futures, forms of collectivity, and relations between the state and the individual different from those that prevailed in the post-Yugoslav reality. Petrovi¿ argues that the power of repetitive, ritualized, and performative practices that constituted military service in the JNA provided a framework for drastically different men to live together and befriend each other. While Petrovi¿ and her interlocutors do not idealize the JNA, they acknowledge its capacity to create interpersonal relationships and affective bonds that brought the key political ideas of collectivity, solidarity, egalitarianism, education, and comradeship into being.
List of contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction. A Silent Force That Unsettles Ruins 1
1. History, Stories, and Selves 22
2. A Barbed-Wire Utopia 37
3. The Routine 61
4. The Uniform 76
5. The Ritual 96
6. Dissolution of Form 118
Interlude. The Catastrophe 128
7. The Aftermath 134
8. Form and Life 153
9. Afterlives 173
Epilogue. An Infrastructure for Feelings 185
Notes 195
Bibliography 217
Index 231
About the author
Tanja Petrovic
