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Culture and Identity: Orientalization of Serbia in the Period of Crisis

In Serbia, which was a part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia until 1991, and whose geo-symbolic position responded to the political concept of Non-Aligned, we can see a desire to redefine current identity through self-exalting labels that insist upon cultural, linguistic and even physical kinship with the East, which provides a clear contrast to the previous proximity to Europe that equalled progress and wealth. On the discourse level, the need to redefine reality results in an aspiration to change places between center and periphery, that is, for the countries that were in economic, industrial and cultural crisis to improve their historical and cultural significance. What is interesting is that this is a repeated process that has taken different forms in the course of history, from anti-modernization in the 19th century via anti-European tendencies between the two world wars, when the similarity of Serbia with its neighbors compared to the countries of the East was accentuated, all the way to the nineties, which were marked by self-orientalization colored with an ambivalent attitude towards the East as “first cultural kin” and first “enslaver”. As an independent, internal practice of dealing with social and economic frustrations, self-orientalization has shown its influence in different aspects of social life and left its mark on cultural practice, showing that narratives can become reality itself. Through reconstructing identity it influences everyday life as well as political and spiritual culture. As a peripheral country in the political environment of Europe, Serbia has striven to compensate for its political marginality on the level of discourse, which, instead of bringing it closer to the center of political events, has driven it to the margin of current political processes and to the center of world media attention. Choosing to label this process orientalization is no accident: what we call self-orientalization here should not be mixed up with post-Yugoslavian nationalism as the form of insisting on the rural and primitive that has also been recognized as a possible discourse strategy of distancing oneself from Europe. Although we are probably talking about different dimensions of the same occurrence and not separate phenomena, the former marks closeness to DER DONAURAUM