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TURBAŠI AND ROKERI AS WINDOWS INTO SERBIA'S SOCIAL DIVIDE
Eric D. Gordy*. Article paru dans BALKANOLOGIE en avril 2000.
“Culture is ordinary” argues Raymond Williams , and so certainly is politics. Both, however, face unique - and, perhaps extraordinary - conditions of articulation, signification and association under conditions of authoritarian political rule. The most frequently expressed concerns about culture in liberal states have to do with capacities of information or control, with subcultural and resistant power, and with representation and justification of order. All of these concerns are in a sense reflections of larger political concerns, in which cultural manifestations in a way “stand for” issues which are, elsewhere in the cultural apparatus, issues of political deliberation and debate in a relatively accessible public sphere. Outside of liberal states, the deliberative space of the public sphere may be far more restricted : participation in public life can be more limited, discussion of contemporary issues may be excluded from generally accessible communication media, and sensitive questions may be systematically not recognised as public issues.
Under such conditions, issues which are excluded from the public sphere do not, naturally cease either to exist or to mater. The lack of access to formal expression through the “ordinary” channels of recognized political institutions or news media assures their disappearance only from those particular areas of public life. Political battles, which are exiled from politics, are then fought on another terrain. In this discussion, I propose to demonstrate that while the rural-urban cultural conflict in contemporary Serbian society, which is expressed by the current regime's nationalist policies and ambitions and by the urban and cosmopolitan opposition to the regime, is only weakly articulated in “official” public discourse, this conflict provides much of the force and content of the passionate disputes in the life of popular culture, especially in conflicts over musical taste. Recognized political channels are closed to the deliberation of claims and grievances on the part of peasants, “peasant urbanites” and urban cosmopolitans, but the debate is nonetheless carried out in the field of popular music. While musical channels do not afford all of the techniques and remedies associated with the public sphere, they do possess considerable capacity for the expressive and emotional elaboration of positions in this conflict, and the struggle over cultural space offered a parallel to the political debate which did not and could not take place.
It should be apparent here that the rural-urban divide is not a strictly geographical distinction, but represents one of the ways in which people in Serbia articulate and understand the distinction between nationalist and cosmopolitan orientations. The two musical publics discussed here are both located in Belgrade, indisputably a city. Within that city, cosmopolitan rokeri and “peasant urbanite” turbeši are distinguished by where they look for cultural referents. Consequently this discussion deals with two displacements : the articulation of political issues through conflicts in popular culture, and the articulation of conflicts over national and cosmopolitan outlooks by reference to a mostly imagined geographical difference.
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