Many people in Serbia complain that they are running on empty, exhausted by everything that’s happened to them over the past thirty years. This lassitude is often thought as part of the nation’s 'political and mental ecology', an environment regarded as both stagnant and inescapable. This paper looks at how people with such a notion of past conceive of their future. Personal and collective futures may be understood as inevitable, elusive or recalcitrant. What is particular about these Serbian futures that are struggling into being? My ethnographic focus in seeking to answer this question is on a group of Serbs – social entrepreneurs and visionaries – who often innovatively act on the notion that their times demand a restructuring of people's social, economic and political ways of living. In imagining and attempting to produce a different future, these respondents hope to contribute to collective good. In describing their 'visionary' practices, I ask more generally what deeds are characteristic of visionaries as they paradigmatically conceive and prophesise the future. Who stands for and what practices embody a figure of a visionary in contemporary Serbia?
COBISS.SI-ID: 43775021
This chapter addresses the various meanings of Europe as expressed in people’s daily conversations as well as in the media and political discourses on the EU accession. It discusses the ways in which people define themselves in view of geographically, politically, and historically shifting borders. The chapter observes how people’s feelings of an uncertain and precarious present get replaced with high hopes and expectations for a better future envisioned in Albania’s accession to the EU.
COBISS.SI-ID: 44143917
This ethnographic paper is about “young entrepreneur” as an emerging social agent in contemporary Slovenia. Young entrepreneurs are affected by an ideal sociality of entrepreneurial ecosystems on the one hand and the condition of smallness on the other. The paper argues that while the first is promoted as a tool for strengthening local communities and a way towards their prosperous future, the second prevents its actualisation, but provides security for the young. Generationally conditioned family and other established social relations are of considerable importance for the maintenance of young entrepreneurs’ careers.
COBISS.SI-ID: 68667234
The article analyses visions of the future in relation to social changes in Slovenia. It refers to the metanarrative about entrepreneurship as a generator of social development, to social entrepreneurship as an institutional agent of social changes, and to a variety of social experimentation practices and initiatives. The ethnographic material focuses mostly on the latter. The article understands the visions as hope, steering the activities towards the creation of a different future.
COBISS.SI-ID: 3876468
Clock-time differentiates and systematises in a way rarely endorsed by small-scale societies, where the tendency is to reject hierarchy based on the measurement of time. Taking my lead from the Karawari-speaking Ambonwari of the East Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea, I introduce the concept of egalitarian temporality produced by never ending competition between different individuals and groups. The villagers are themselves responsible for creating periods and ways of being in both their environment and society, and they actively participate in dramatic episodes intended to cut into their existent ways of life. These ‘cuts’ then create desired changes. I argue that time in the Sepik and egalitarian small-scale societies in general is very much agentive and thus possessed, held and seen by individuals and groups, with periods defined by and organized around future oriented projects.
COBISS.SI-ID: 38280237