Abstract
In this chapter, I want to address the impact of the specific understanding of choice (in this case “consumer choice”), that is central to “Western” ideologies of “individualism,” on the understanding of consumption in Eastern Europe. The majority of literature on consumption in post-socialist Europe tends to see consumption as a political act in choosing between Western goods and their “less sophisticated” Eastern European versions, which lead some authors to conclude that consumerism in the socialist countries was actually consumption of the images of the West. I argue that the situation in post-socialist Serbia is more complicated than these accounts suggest. I offer an ethnographic study of the specific group of people with whom I worked in the northern Serbian town of Novi Sad, who were relatively young and had a high social status, and whose identification strategies were directed towards “cosmopolitan” practices that also include shopping. Seemingly mundane practices of everyday shopping do not serve as tools for “appropriation” of “Western-ness” (equated with European-ness), but reveal the paradox of location that placed my informants simultaneously in and outside the West.
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Notes
- 1.
I am aware of the difficulty of using the term “transition” (cf. Burawoy and Verdery 1999a, 1999b; Humphrey 1999) for post-socialist transformation in Europe and I use it here as a technical period denoting term. Moreover, for most of the people with whom I worked in Serbia in the last 10 years, this process was not really a “transition,” as the term implies—between imagined socialism and imagined capitalism—but rather “the situation” (situacija)—the state of affairs as it is, which not only applied to the circumstances of the Serbian state (corruption or inefficiency, for example) that people found themselves in, but also denotes a certain “state of mind” and “moral and cultural degradation,” as my informants called it, that developed during the 1990s and continued today in the various guises (Simić 2016: 94).
- 2.
I have concealed the identities of the people I have worked with and all names are pseudonyms.
- 3.
As Cronin writes, following Judith Butler, “‘the individual’ is not an entity formed prior to an engagement in discourse. There is not a preconstituted, core self to be expressed or communicated in acts of consumption and display. The self is constituted performatively in the very action of acting, mediated through discourse” (2005: 36). However, as it will be clear later in the chapter—the practices of shopping that my informants were engaged in did not enable them to emerge from them as individuals they wish to be.
- 4.
I am aware of the possible difficulties in dividing the real and imagined, but that is the distinction which proved to be rather important for my informants as it will be clear in the course of the chapter.
- 5.
On the other hand, in the 1950s Hungarians were going to Romania to buy consumer goods, while in the 1970s and 1980s goods smuggled from Hungary and Yugoslavia had high value in Romania (Chelcea 2002).
- 6.
Instead, most of the anthropological literature on consumption that started to emerge in the 1970s (for an overview see Miller 1995) aimed to focus “upon a relationship between an individual and a larger context understood as ‘society’ or a social space, within which the possibilities for individual expression may derive their meaning and potential” (Miller 1998: 140).
- 7.
Here I refer to de Certeau’s (1988) concept of tactics and strategies, where tactics are understood as everyday activities which people use in order to create a space for themselves in the setting of imposed strategies. In my understanding of de Certeau’s work, it does not mean that in these “acts of creating” people necessarily subvert meanings that are imposed on them from above, but they find different ways of using them (sometimes to their own benefit, but not necessarily).
- 8.
It is important to stress that for people in Serbia these places were part of the collective disgrace—fall from grace that comes with the fall of socialism, while in some other European countries, like Romania, this places denoted broken promises of capitalism and Westernization (Crăciun 2014).
- 9.
There was a clear and well-known hierarchy in “non-Western” garments—those from Turkey were considered of better quality than those from China (cf. Crăciun 2012 for the same situation in Romania) and they were even considered as goods of medium quality.
- 10.
Shop assistants were important part of the shopping experience and my informants paid special attention to them. It is usually assumed that in socialism they were generally considered rude and disinterested (cf. Humphrey 2002), a practice that was supposed to have changed after its fall (cf. Simić 2012).
- 11.
Specific knowledge, required to distinguish between “counterfeits” and “originals,” was especially important during the 1990s and people used to employ very sophisticated techniques in order to do so. Slight differences in the seam of a pocket in a pair of jeans could be used in order to distinguish between “original” and “fake” Levis, for example. In recent years the knowledge necessary for distinguishing between “counterfeit” and “originals” has ceased to be important, but it is still important to be able to distinguish among the goods available in order to be able to “appropriate” available fashion into “style.”
- 12.
In the meantime, Dorothy Perkins closed down and so did some other British shops like Marks and Spencer and Lush that I will mention later in this chapter.
- 13.
These practices included monumental tombstones, excessive weddings (wedding parties/receptions), huge houses, or guest rooms that are actually not used, or clothes which are not worn, but displayed.
- 14.
Following the introduction of the so-called Yugoslav self-management in 1950, the vast majority of the enterprises, factories, firms, and institutions were socially owned, unlike in other East European countries where the state ownership was a dominant model. In the Yugoslav case and self-management theory, the firms were communally owned and controlled by the employees via elected councils and ruling boards (društveno vlasništvo).
- 15.
This is their recognition of their inability to “catch up” with the West that is also an appreciation of their inability to “pass” for Western and “middle class.” And this inability was different from that of the nouveau riche who are also unable to “pass.” The difference is that my informants think that the nouveau riche are not aware of their incapacity.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank my informants for their continued patience with my work and especially Nikolina Nedeljkov for her help and hospitality. I would also like to thank my mother Slavica Simić and my aunt Slobodanka Andrić for taking care of my baby daughter, which enabled me to write this chapter.
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Simić, M. (2018). Consuming “Others”: Post-socialist Realities and Paradoxes of Appropriation in Serbia. In: Krasteva-Blagoeva, E. (eds) Approaching Consumer Culture. International Series on Consumer Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00226-8_5
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