CULTURE OF SERBIA IN THE JAWS OF MODERN LIFE

Abstract

This paper observes the Serbian culture in its last two centuries of existence, first within the context of modernization, and then globalization. Outside this historical context it would be impossible to explain the situation in culture hic et nunc. Since the Serbian culture shares the fate of other Southeast European cultures, its development and postsocialist experience is followed within this geopolitical entity. In the above cultural zone, modernization progresses with a number of difficulties since the Serbian society is burdened by its past, now as before. The Serbian culture responds to the challenges of modernization by closing off and isolating itself from the ”cultures of the world”. With the assistance from the antimodern forces, it exhibits powerful currents of retraditionalization and remythologization.

The paper pays special attention to the transitional prospects of the Serbian culture and Serbian society. The authors provide a critical insight into traditionalism which has found its way as an antibody into the culture of Serbia, hindering it in its modernization and Europeanization (the adoption of European values). Historically speaking, Serbia has skipped several phases in its development, unlike other Western European societies. It did not have the experience of Renaissance, and it lived through a difficult era of ”communist modernization” and totalitarian-authoritarian regime of the 1990s. Today, the Serbian culture is at the crossroads between retraditionalization and (post)modernization.

Finally, the attention is directed toward the current cultural policy in Serbia, and state and prospects of its institutions of culture. On the basis of the legal framework of the cultural policy and numerous examples which illustrate a cultural downfall of the contemporary Serbian society, it is concluded that culture is disregarded in Serbia through the negligence of the state, the absence of political will for cultural changes, the lack of clear awareness of the citizens of Serbia concerning the importance of culture and the misinterpretation of its importance for personal and general social development. The authors emphasize the necessity to encourage the development of cultural needs toward higher aesthetic, spiritual, and moral values, to create conditions for a social development which will be founded on the elite, and not elitist, culture, bearing in mind that modernization and social development of Serbia cannot occur without the understanding of the importance of cultural development and without raising the awareness for the acceptance of cultural diversity.