Description
Book SynopsisYugoslavia was unique among the communist countries of the Cold War era in its openness to mixing cultural elements from both socialism and capitalism. Unlike their counterparts in the nations of the Soviet bloc, ordinary Yugoslavs enjoyed access to a wide range of consumer goods and services, from clothes and appliances to travel agencies and discotheques. From the mid-1950s onward the political climate in Yugoslavia permitted, and at times encouraged, a consumerist lifestyle of shopping, spending, acquiring, and enjoying that engaged the public on a day-to-day basis through modern advertising and sales techniques. In Bought and Sold, Patrick Hyder Patterson reveals the extent to which socialist Yugoslavia embraced a consumer culture usually associated with capitalism and explores the role of consumerism in the federation''s collapse into civil war in 1991.
Based on extraordinary research and featuring remarkable examples of Yugoslav print advertising and mass culture, this
Trade Review
Bought and Sold is a splendid historical achievement that uncovers the lost realities of a lost country, and makes clearly visible a large part of what Yugoslavia was. Beautifully written and produced expertly by Cornell University Press, the book is bound to radically change and improve not just our understanding of the former Yugoslavia's consumer culture, but also our appreciation of the multi-dimensional reality of that vanished country.
-- Gordana P. Crnkovic * Slavic and East European Journal *
In this sophisticated yet readable analysis, Patterson argues that a culture of consumption was utterly central to the socialist experiment in Yugoslavia.... In a nation whose peoples held varied ethnic and religious identities, these consumer-driven aspirations constituted an integral element of cohesion in a society vulnerable to disaggregation.... Having addressed how consumer culture was crucial to the success of the Yugoslav sociopolitical experiment, Patterson ultimately demonstrates the centrality of consumer culture to that state in another way: its demise, when declining economic prospects convinced many Yugoslavs that their 'dream' was no longer attainable. Summing Up: Highly recommended.
* Choice *
Patterson captures the scale and shape of the buying, the power of advertising, and the effect of Yugoslav guest workers returning from capitalist consumer societies. He also chronicles the misgivings about consumer culture felt in some parts of society and their efforts to tame and then fight the values that came with the goods. Nonetheless, consuming held the country together. When the economic crisis hit in the 1980s, the good life dissipated, and Patterson maintains that the loss of that source of legitimacy did as much to sunder the country as the rise of ethnonationalism.
-- Robert Legvold * Foreign Affairs *
Table of ContentsPrologue. The Good Life and the Yugoslav DreamIntroduction. Getting It: Making Sense of Socialist Consumer Culture
1. Living It: Yugoslavia's Economic Miracle
2. Making It: Building a Socialist Brand of Market Culture
3. Selling It: Legitimizing the Appeal of Market Culture
4. Fearing It: The Values of Marxism and the Contradictions of Consumerism
5. Taming It: The Party-State Establishment and the Perils of Pleasure
6. Fighting It: New Left Attacks on the Consumerist Establishment and the Yugoslav Dream
7. Loving It: Ordinary People, Everyday Life, and the Power of Consumption
8. Needing It: The Eclipse of the Dream, the Collapse of Socialism, and the Death of YugoslaviaEpilogue. Missing It: Yugo-Nostalgia and the Good Life LostSelected Bibliography
Index
